1NC VS JESSICAVINIT

K
The only ethical demand is one that calls for the end of the world itself the
system of violent antagonisms means solving for contingent violence only
reifies white supremacy.
Wilderson 10, Frank B Wilderson is a professor at UC Irvine, Red, White, and Black: Cinema
and Structure of US Antagonisms, NN
Leaving aside for the moment their state of mind, it would seem that the

structure, that is to say the rebar, or better still the

their demandsand, by extension, the grammar of their sufferingwas indeed an ethical grammar. Perhaps
their grammars are the only ethical grammars available to modern politics and
modernity writ large, for they draw our attention not to the way in which space and
time are used and abused by enfranchised and violently powerful interests, but to
the violence that underwrites the modern worlds capacity to think,
act, and exist spatially and temporally. The violence that robbed her of her body and him of his
land provided the stage upon which other violent and consensual dramas could be enacted. Thus, they would have to be
crazy, crazy enough to call not merely the actions of the world to account but
to call the world itself to account, and to account for them no less! The woman at Columbia was
not demanding to be a participant in an unethical network of distribution: she was not demanding
a place within capital, a piece of the pie (the demand for her sofa notwithstanding). Rather, she was articulating a
grammar of

triangulation between, on the one hand, the loss of her body, the very dereliction of her corporeal integrity, what Hortense Spillers
charts as the transition from being a being to becoming a being for the captor (206), the drama of value (the stage upon which
surplus value is extracted from labor power through commodity production and sale); and on the other, the corporeal integrity that,
once ripped from her body, fortified and extended the corporeal integrity of everyone else on the street. She gave birth to the
commodity and to the Human, yet she

had neither subjectivity nor a sofa to show for it. In her eyes, the world
and not its myriad discriminatory practices, but the world itselfwas
unethical. And yet, the world passes by her without the slightest inclination to stop and disabuse her
of her claim. Instead, it calls her crazy. And to what does the world attribute the Native American mans insanity? Hes crazy
if he thinks hes getting any money out of us? Surely, that doesnt make him crazy. Rather it is simply an indication that
he does not have a big enough gun. What are we to make of a world that
responds to the most lucid enunciation of ethics with violence? What are
the foundational questions of the ethico-political? Why are these questions so scandalous that they are rarely posed politically,
intellectually, and cinematicallyunless they are posed obliquely and unconsciously, as if by accident? Return Turtle Island to the
Savage. Repair

the demolished subjectivity of the Slave. Two simple sentences, thirteen simple
words, and the structure of U.S. (and perhaps global) antagonisms would be
dismantled. An ethical modernity would no longer sound like an oxymoron. From there we
could busy ourselves with important conflicts that have been promoted to
the level of antagonisms: class struggle, gender conflict, immigrants
rights. When pared down to thirteen words and two sentences, one cannot but wonder why questions that go
to the heart of the ethico-political, questions of political ontology, are so
unspeakable in intellectual meditations, political broadsides, and even socially and politically engaged feature
films. Clearly they can be spoken, even a child could speak those lines, so they would pose no problem for a scholar, an activist, or a
filmmaker. And yet, what is also clearif the filmographies of socially and politically engaged directors, the archive

of
progressive scholars, and the plethora of Left-wing broadsides are anything to go byis that
what can so easily be spoken is now (five hundred years and two hundred fifty million
Settlers/Masters on) so ubiquitously unspoken that these two simple sentences, these thirteen
words not only render their speaker crazy but become themselves impossible to
imagine. Soon it will be forty years since radical politics, Left-leaning scholarship, and socially engaged feature films began to
speak the unspeakable. In the 1960s and early 1970s the questions asked by radical politics and scholarship

were not Should the U.S. be overthrown? or even Would it be overthrown? but rather when
and howand, for some, whatwould come in its wake. Those steadfast in their conviction that there
remained a discernable quantum of ethics in the U.S. writ large (and here I am speaking of everyone from
Martin Luther King, Jr., prior to his 1968 shift, to the Tom Hayden wing of SDS, to the Julian Bond and Marion Barry faction of
SNCC, to Bobbie Kennedy Democrats) were

accountable, in their rhetorical machinations, to the paradigmatic

zeitgeist of the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Weather Underground.
Radicals and progressives could deride, reject, or chastise armed struggle mercilessly and
cavalierly with respect to tactics and the possibility of success, but they could not dismiss
revolution-as-ethic because they could not make a convincing caseby way of a
paradigmatic analysisthat the U.S. was an ethical formation and still hope to maintain credibility as
radicals and progressives. Even Bobby Kennedy (a U.S. attorney general and presidential candidate) mused that
the law and its enforcers had no ethical standing in the presence of Blacks.1 One could (and many did)
acknowledge Americas strength and power. This seldom, however, rose to the level of an ethical assessment,
but rather remained an assessment of the so-called balance of forces. The political discourse of Blacks,
and to a lesser extent Indians, circulated too widely to credibly wed the U.S. and ethics. The raw force of COINTELPRO put an end to
this trajectory toward a possible hegemony of ethical accountability. Consequently, the

power of Blackness and Redness

to pose the questionand the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all
retreated as did White radicals and progressives who retired from
struggle. The questions echo lies buried in the graves of young Black Panthers, AIM
Warriors, and Black Liberation Army soldiers, or in prison cells where so many of them have
been rotting (some in solitary confinement) for ten, twenty, thirty years, and at the gates of the
academy where the crazies shout at passers-by. Gone are not only the
young and vibrant voices that affected a seismic shift on the political
landscape, but also the intellectual protocols of inquiry, and with them a spate of feature films that
became authorized, if not by an unabashed revolutionary polemic, then certainly by a revolutionary zeitgeist. Is
it still possible for a dream of unfettered ethics, a dream of the Settlement and the
Slave estates destruction, to manifest itself at the ethical core of cinematic discourse, when this
dream is no longer a constituent element of political discourse in the streets nor of intellectual discourse in the
academy? The answer is no in the sense that, as history has shown, what cannot be articulated as political discourse in the streets is
doubly foreclosed upon in screenplays and in scholarly prose; but yes in the sense that in even

the most taciturn

historical moments such as ours, the grammar of Black and Red suffering breaks in on this
foreclosure, albeit like the somatic compliance of hysterical symptomsit registers in both cinema and scholarship as symptoms
of awareness of the structural antagonisms. Between 1967 and 1980, we could think cinematically and intellectually of Blackness and
Redness as having the coherence of full-blown discourses. But from 1980 to the present, Blackness

and Redness
manifests only in the rebar of cinematic and intellectual (political) discourse, that is, as unspoken
grammars. This grammar can be discerned in the cinematic strategies (lighting, camera angles, image
composition, and acoustic strategies/design), even when the script labors for the spectator to imagine social
turmoil through the rubric of conflict (that is, a rubric of problems that can be
posed and conceptually solved) as opposed to the rubric of antagonism (an irreconcilable
struggle between entities, or positionalities, the resolution of which is not dialectical
but entails the obliteration of one of the positions). In other words, even when films narrate a
story in which Blacks or Indians are beleaguered with problems that the script insists are conceptually coherent (usually having to do
with poverty or the absence of family values), the non-narrative, or cinematic, strategies of the film often disrupt this coherence by
posing the irreconcilable questions of Red and Black political ontologyor non-ontology. The

grammar of antagonism

breaks in on the mendacity of conflict. Semiotics and linguistics teach us that when we speak, our
grammar goes unspoken. Our grammar is assumed. It is the structure through which the labor of speech is possible. Likewise, the
grammar of political ethicsthe grammar of assumptions regarding the ontology of sufferingwhich
underwrite Film Theory and political discourse (in this book, discourse elaborated in direct relation to radical action), and
1

which underwrite cinematic speech (in this book, Red, White, and Black films from the mid-1960s to the present) is

also
unspoken. This notwithstanding, film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume an ontological grammar, a
structure of suffering. And the structure of suffering which film theory, political discourse, and cinema assume
crowds out other structures of suffering, regardless of the sentiment of the film
or the spirit of unity mobilized by the political discourse in question.
To put a finer point on it, structures of ontological suffering stand in antagonistic, rather then conflictual,
relation to one another (despite the fact that antagonists themselves may not be aware of the ontological positionality from
which they speak). Though this is perhaps the most controversial and out-of-step claim of this book, it is, nonetheless, the foundation
of the close reading of feature films and political theory that follows.

Blackness is always already hyper visible the affirmative misses the point
some bodies will never have the access to anonymity because of the black
aesthetic the affirmative allows for whiteness to remain invisible and
renders blackness as an attractor to violence
Yancy 13, George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at McAnulty College who focuses primarily on
issues of social justice, Walking While Black in the White Gaze
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/walking-while-black-in-the-white-gaze/?_r=0, NN

My point here is to say that the white gaze is global and historically mobile. And its origins, while
from Europe, are deeply seated in the making of America. Black bodies in America continue to
be reduced to their surfaces and to stereotypes that are constricting and false, that often force
those black bodies to move through social spaces in ways that put white people at ease. We fear
that our black bodies incite an accusation. We move in ways that help us to survive the
procrustean gazes of white people. We dread that those who see us might feel the irrational fear to
stand their ground rather than finding common ground, a reference that was made by Bernice
King as she spoke about the legacy of her father at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The white
gaze is also hegemonic, historically grounded in material relations of white power: it was deemed
disrespectful for a black person to violate the white gaze by looking directly into the eyes of
someone white. The white gaze is also ethically solipsistic: within it only whites have the
capacity of making valid moral judgments. Even with the unprecedented White House briefing,
our national discourse regarding Trayvon Martin and questions of race have failed to produce a
critical and historically conscious discourse that sheds light on what it means to be black in an
anti-black America. If historical precedent says anything, this failure will only continue.
Trayvon Martin, like so many black boys and men, was under
surveillance (etymologically, to keep watch). Little did he know that on Feb. 26, 2012, that
he would enter a space of social control and bodily policing, a kind of Benthamian panoptic
nightmare that would truncate his being as suspicious; a space where he was, paradoxically, both
invisible and yet hypervisible. I am invisible, understand, simply because
people [in this case white people] refuse to see me. Trayvon was
invisible to Zimmerman, he was not seen as the black child that he
was, trying to make it back home with Skittles and an iced tea. He
was not seen as having done nothing wrong, as one who dreams and
hopes. As black, Trayvon was already known and rendered invisible .
His childhood and humanity were already criminalized as part of a white racist narrative about
black male bodies. Trayvon needed no introduction: Look, the black; the
criminal!

Blackness operates on an ontological register it is impossible to make

blackness acceptable within civil society
Yancy 08, George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at McAnulty College who focuses primarily
on issues of social justice, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race
https://books.google.com/books?id=VQAfAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq=%22On+the+elevator,
+my+Black+body+is+ontologically+mapped,
+its+coordinates+lead+to+that+which+is+always+immediately
%22&source=bl&ots=11lq3QEyJG&sig=m116eKlVHrBtPWmV9AOYb9v0fZU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CC
AQ6AEwAGoVChMI7u-OluGUxgIVhz2MCh0F3gf2#v=onepage&q=%22On%20the%20elevator%2C
%20my%20Black%20body%20is%20ontologically%20mapped%2C%20its%20coordinates%20lead%20to
%20that%20which%20is%20always%20immediately%22&f=false, NN

On the elevator, my Black body is ontologically mapped, its cordinates lead to that which is
always immediately visible: the Black surface. The point here is that the Black body in
relation to the white gam appears in the form of a sheer exteriority ,
implying that the Black body "shows up," makes itself known M
terms of its Black surface. There is only the visible, the concrete, the seen, all there, all
at once: a single Black thing, =individuated, threatening, ominous, Black. The white woman
thinks she takes no part in this construction: she acts the name of the serious... She apparently
fails to see how he identity is shot through in terms of how she construe. me. This failure is to be
expected given how white privilege renders invisible, indeed, militates against the recognition of
various whitely ways of being-in-the-world. Sullivan notes that the 'habits of white privilege do
not merely go noticed. They actively thwart the process of conscious reflation on them, which
allows them to seem non-existent even as they continue to function..l.

Reform is just reactionary conservatism their unwillingness to accept that

systemic antagonisms cannot be fixed means their project is permeated with
whiteness and reintrenches white civil society
Haritaworn et al. 14, Haritaworn is an assistant professor of sociology, Queer
Necropolitics, http://www.deanspade.net/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/Necropolitics-Collection-Article-Final.pdf, NN
Critical race theorists have supplied the concept of 'preservation through transformation' to
describe the neat trick that civil rights law performed in this dynamic (Harris 2007: 1539-1582;
Siegel1997: 1111-1148). In the face of significant resistance to conditions of subjection, law
reform tends to provide just enough transfonnation to stabilize and
preserve status quo conditions. In the case of widespread black rebellion against
white supremacy in the US, civil rights law and colourblind constitutionalism have operated as
formal reforms that masked a pe11wtuation of the status quo of violence against and
exploitation of black people. Explicit exclusionary policies and practices
became officially forbidden, yet the disuibution of life chances
remained the same or worsened with the growing racialized
concentration of wealth in the US, the dismantling of social welfare, and the
explosion of criminalization that has developed in the same period as the new logic of race
neutrality has declared fairness and justice achieved. Lesbian and gay rights politics' reproduction
of the Inythology of anti-discrimination law and the non-stop invocation of'equal rights'
frameworks by lesbian and gay rights politics marks an .investment in the legal structures of antiblackness that have emerged in the wake of Brown. The emergence of the demand for LGBT

inclusive hate crime laws and the accomplishment of the Matthew Shepard and james Byrd, Jr.
Hate Crimes Prevention Act as a highly lauded federal legislative 'win' for lesbian and gay
rights offers a particularly blatant site of the anti-blackness central to lesbian and gay rights
-literally an investment in the expansion ofcriminalization as a core claim and desire of this
purported 'frecdom'. 9 In the context of the foundational nature of slavery in US political
formation, it is perhaps not surprising to see a political formation of white 'gay and lesbian
Americans' articulate a demand fOr fi-eedom that is contingent on the literal caging of black
people. The fantasy that fOrmal legal equality is all that is needed to eliminate homophobia and
transphobia is harmfUl not only because it participates in the antiblack US progress narrative
that civil rights law reforms resolved anti-blackness in the US (thus any remaining suffering or
disparity is solely an issue of 'personal responsibility'), 1IJ but also because it constructs an
agenda that is harmful to black queer and trans people and other queer and trans people
experiencing violent systems mobilized by anti-blackness. Formal marriage rights will not help
poor people, people vvhose kids will be stolen by a racially targeted child welfire system
regardless of whether or not they can get married, people who do not have immigration status or
health benefits to share with a spouse if they had one, people who have no property to pass on to
their partners, or people who have no need to be shielded from estate tax. In fact, the current
wave of same-sex marriage advocacy emerges at the same rime as another pro-marriage trend,
the push by the right wing to reverse feminist wins that had made marriage easier to get out of
and the Bushera development of marriage promotion programmes (continued by Obama)
targeted at women on welfare (Adams and Coltrane 2007: 17-34; Alternatives to l\!larriage
Project 2007; Coltrane and Adams 2003: 363-372; Feld, Rosier and Manning 2002: 173-183;
Pear and Kirkpatrick 2007; Rector and Pardue 2004). The explicitly anti-black focus of the
attacks on welfare and the mobilization of racialized-genclered images to do this go hand in hand
with the pro-marriage gay rights frame that similarly invests in notions of 'personal
responsibility', and racializecl--gendered family formation norm enforcement. The articulation of
a desire for legal inclusion in the explicitly anti-black, anti-poor governance regime of marriage,
and the centralization of marriage rights as the most resourced equality claim of gay and lesbian
rights politics, affirms its alliance with anti-blackness. It is easy to imagine other queer political
interventions that would take a different approach to concerns about parental rights, child custody
and other family law problems. Such approaches centre the experiences of queers facing the
worst violence of family law, those whose problems -will not be resolved by samesex marriage parents in prison, parents facing deportation, parents with disabilities, youth in foster care and
juvenile punishment systems, parents whose children have been removed because of 'neglect'
clue to their poverty. The choice of seeking marriage rights, like the choice to pursue hate crime
laws rather than decriminalization, the choice to pursue the Uniting American Families Act 11
rather than opposing immigration enforcement and the war on terror, the choice to pursue
military service rather than demilitarization, is a choice to pursue a place fOr white gay and
lesbian people in constitutively anti-black legal structures.

Our alternative is to enter an unflinching paradigmatic of the black

positionality to render civil society incoherent
Wilderson, 10 [2010, Frank B. Wilderson is an Associate Professor of African-American
Studies at UC Irvine and has a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms,]
STRANGE AS it might seem, this book project began in South Africa.

During the last years of

apartheid I worked for revolutionary change in both an underground and above-ground

I
began to see how essential an unflinching paradigmatic analysis is
to a movement dedicated to the complete overthrow of an existing
order. The neoliberal compromises that the radical elements of the Chartist
Movement made with the moderate elements were due, in large part, to our
inability or unwillingness to hold the moderates' feet to the fire of a political
agenda predicated on an unflinching paradigmatic analysis. Instead, we
allowed our energies and points of attention to be displaced by and onto
pragmatic considerations. Simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the
questionand the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. Elsewhere, I
capacity, for the Charterist Movement in general and the ANC in particular. During this period,

have written about this unfortunate turn of events (Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid),
so I'll not rehearse the details here. Suffice it to say, this book germinated in the many political and
academic discussions and debates that I was fortunate enough to be a part of at a historic moment and in
a place where the word revolution was spoken in earnest, free of qualifiers and irony. For their past and
ongoing ideas and interventions, I extend solidarity and appreciation to comrades Amanda Alexander,
Franco Barchiesi, Teresa Barnes, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Nigel Gibson, Steven Greenberg, Allan
Horowitz, Bushy Kelebonye (deceased), Tefu Kelebonye, Ulrike Kistner, Kamogelo Lekubu, Andile
Mngxitama, Prishani Naidoo, John Shai, and S'bu Zulu.

( ) Global econ is resilient

FSB 14
The Financial Stability Board (FSB) is an international body that monitors and makes recommendations about the
global financial system FSB Plenary meets in London 31 March 2014
http://www.financialstabilityboard.org/press/pr_140331.htm

The global economy has been improving, and monetary policy in the US is in the early stages of a
normalisation process, after an extended period of exceptional accommodation. A comprehensive programme of
regulatory reforms and supervisory actions since the crisis has made the global
financial system more resilient. Currently, European authorities are putting in place a comprehensive set
of measures to strengthen further the region's financial system. Emerging markets have coped relatively well to date
with occasional bouts of turbulence, in part reflecting the positive impact of both past and more recent
reforms.

( ) Economic decline doesnt cause war

Barnett 9
(Thomas, Senior Strategic Researcher Naval War College, The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial
Crisis, Asset Protection Network, 8-25, http://www.aprodex.com/the-new-rules--security-remains-stable-amidfinancial-crisis-398-bl.aspx)

When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all sorts of scary
predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression
leading to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and
emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize how globalization's first truly

worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the international security
landscape. None of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly attributed

to the global recession. Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine)
predates the economic crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the
15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia (where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly, the RussiaGeorgia conflict last August was specifically timed, but by most accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most
important external trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in an almost two-decade long struggle
between Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then, we see a most familiar picture: the usual
mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist movements. Besides the recent Russia-Georgia dust-up,

the only two potential state-on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to one side
acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to global economic trends. And with the
U nited S tates effectively tied down by its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistan-bleeding-intoPakistan), our involvement

elsewhere around the planet has been quite modest , both leading up to and following the

onset of the economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts in Latin America, the usual military exercises with allies across Asia,
mixing it up with pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere

else we find serious instability we pretty much let it

burn , occasionally pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa Command, for example, hasn't led
us to anything beyond advising and training local forces. So, to sum up: No significant uptick in mass violence or
unrest (remember the smattering of urban riots last year in places like Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); The usual frequency
maintained in civil conflicts (in all the usual places); Not a single state-on-state war directly caused (and no
great-power-on-great-power crises even triggered); No great improvement or disruption in great-power
cooperation regarding the emergence of new nuclear powers (despite all that diplomacy); A modest scaling back of
international policing efforts by the system's acknowledged Leviathan power (inevitable given the strain); and No serious efforts by
any rising great power to challenge that Leviathan or supplant its role. (The worst things we can cite are Moscow's occasional
deployments of strategic assets to the Western hemisphere and its weak efforts to outbid the United States on basing rights in
Kyrgyzstan; but the best include China and India stepping up their aid and investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Sure, we've finally
seen global defense spending surpass the previous world record set in the late 1980s, but even that's likely to wane given the stress on
public budgets created by all this unprecedented "stimulus" spending. If anything, the friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging
was the most notable great-power dynamic caused by the crisis. Can

we say that the world has suffered a distinct shift

to political radicalism as a result of the economic crisis? Indeed, no. The world's major economies remain governed
by center-left or center-right political factions that remain decidedly friendly to both markets and trade. In the short run,
there were attempts across the board to insulate economies from immediate damage (in effect, as much protectionism as
allowed under current trade rules), but there was no great slide into "trade wars." Instead, the W orld T rade
O rganization is functioning as it was designed to function, and regional efforts toward free-trade agreements have not slowed.
radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis? If it was, that shift was clearly overwhelmed by
the Islamic world's growing disenchantment with the brutality displayed by violent extremist groups such as al-Qaida. And
Can we say Islamic

looking forward, austere economic times are just as likely to breed connecting evangelicalism as disconnecting fundamentalism. At
the end of the day, the economic crisis did not prove to be sufficiently frightening to provoke major economies into establishing global
regulatory schemes, even as it has sparked a spirited -- and much needed, as I argued last week -- discussion of the continuing viability
of the U.S. dollar as the world's primary reserve currency. Naturally, plenty of experts and pundits have attached great significance to
this debate, seeing in it the beginning of "economic warfare" and the like between "fading" America and "rising" China. And yet, in a
world of globally integrated production chains and interconnected financial markets, such "diverging interests" hardly constitute
signposts for wars up ahead. Frankly, I don't welcome a world in which America's fiscal profligacy goes undisciplined, so bring it on -please! Add it all up and it's fair to say that this global financial crisis has proven the great resilience of America's post-World War II
international liberal trade order. Do I expect to read any analyses along those lines in the blogosphere any time soon? Absolutely not. I

expect the fantastic fear-mongering to proceed apace. That's what the Internet is for.

Inherency
USA Freedom solves it allows security interests while balancing privacy
concerns.
Stone 14
Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi distinguished service professor of law for The University of Chicago.
President Obama Is Trying to Tame the NSA Daily Beast, 3/27/14 www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/27/president-obama-is-trying-to-tame-the-nsa.html
President Obama announced this morning that he will propose legislation calling for significant changes in the NSAs telephone
metadata program. This is good news, indeed. The enactment

of these proposals would strike a much better

balance between the interests of liberty and security. They would preserve the value of the NSAs
program in terms of protecting the national security, while at the same time providing much greater, and
much needed, protection to individual privacy and civil liberties. The proposals are based on recommendations made by the
presidents five-member Review Group, of which I was a member. To understand why we came up with these suggestions, it is
necessary first to understand how the program operates. Under the telephone metadata program, which was created in 2006, telephone
service companies like Sprint, Verizon and AT&T are required to turn over to the NSA, on an ongoing daily basis, huge quantities of
telephone metadata involving the phone records of millions of Americans, none of whom are themselves suspected of anything. The
metadata at issue includes information about phone numbers (both called and received), but it does not include any information about
the content of the calls or the identities of the participants. Once the NSA has the metadata in its system, it retains it for five years,
before destroying it on a rolling basis. Under

rules governing the program, the NSA is authorized to access

the telephone data whenever its own analysts find that there are facts giving rise to a reasonable ,
articulable suspicion (RAS) that a particular telephone number (usually outside the United States) is associated with
a foreign terrorist organization. In 2012, the last year for which there is complete data, the NSA queried 288 phone
numbers, known as seeds, each of which was certified by NSA analysts to meet the RAS standard. When a seed phone number is
queried, the NSA derives from the database a list of every telephone number that either called or was called by the seed phone number
in the past five years. This is known as the first hop. For example, if the seed phone number was in contact with 100 different phone
numbers in the past five years, the NSA would obtain a list of those 100 phone numbers. The NSA then seeks to determine whether
there is reason to believe that any of those 100 numbers are also associated with a foreign terrorist organization. If so, the query has
uncovered a possible connection to a potential terrorist network that merits further investigation. Conversely, if none of the 100
numbers is believed to be associated with possible terrorist activity, there is less reason to be concerned that the potential terrorist is in
contact with co-conspirators inside the United States. In most cases, the NSA makes a second hop. That is, it queries the database to
obtain a list of every phone number that called or was called by the 100 numbers it obtained in the first hop. Thus, if we assume that
the average telephone number calls or is called by 100 phone numbers over the course of a five-year period, then the second hop will
produce a list of 10,000 phone numbers (100 x 100) that are two steps away from the seed number that is reasonably believed to be
associated with a foreign terrorist organization. If any of those 10,000 phone numbers is also thought to be associated with a terrorist
organization, that too is potentially useful information. In

2012, the NSAs 288 queries resulted in a total of twelve

tips to the FBI that called for further investigation. Although this information has sometimes proved useful, there has been no
instance in which the information obtained through this program has directly prevented a planned terrorist attack. At the same time,
though, it

is certainly possible to imagine a situation in which the program might produce highly
valuable information that would, in fact, help prevent such an attack. Our Review Group was appointed by the
president last August to advise him on these and related issues. I am pleasedindeed, delightedto report that the proposed

three
specific changes in the telephone metadata program are necessary . First, the NSA will no longer itself
hold the vast store of telephone metadata. This is essential, because one of the most serious concerns about
this program is that, in the wrong hands, access to this information can wreak havoc on the
privacy and civil liberties of Americans. Even though the program to-date has functioned properly, history teaches that there is
legislation tracks almost perfectly the Review Groups recommendations. As the presidents proposed legislation suggests,

always the risk of another J. Edgar Hoover or Richard Nixon. It is essential to limit the potential for abuse. As the Review Group
recommended, the proposed legislation would leave all the metadata in the hands of the private telephone companies, rather than
allowing the government itself to collect and store it in bulk. This is a critical safeguard. Second, when the government wants to
access the metadata, the proposed legislation would require the NSA to obtain an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court, rather than being able to access the information whenever NSA analysts decide that RAS exists. It has long been understood
that when government officials who are engaged in the enterprise of ferreting out criminals are given the authority to decide for
themselves when to act, their judgment is likely to be affected by their own priorities. For that reason, it is essential for a neutral and
detached judge to make the decision whether any particular query is warranted. Third, instead of requiring the metadata to be retained
for five years,

the presidents proposed legislation would compel the telephone companies to hold the

data for only 18 months. This makes great sense both because the older data is less likely to be
useful and because, by limiting the amount of data available, the risks of abuse are limited as well.
The president should be applauded for supporting these reforms . I can say that it was not at all obvious or
inevitable that the White House would come to this point. During the course of the Review Groups deliberations with the White
House, serious

opposition was raised to these recommendations. It is to the great credit of President

Obama and to his senior advisers in the White House that we now have the opportunity to take this critical
step forward.
(Note to students: the bill referenced in this article is the USA Freedom Act)

India
Hack wont work Indias cyber-defenses are strong and improving.
Times of India 10
(Internally citing senior military officials - Cyber war: Indian Army gearing up - Times of India - July 19, 2010
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Cyber-war-Indian-Army-gearing-up/articleshow/6187297.cms)

The Indian Army is fighting attacks in the cyber world with electronic warfare capability of the
"highest standard", say officials pointing out that virtual strikes have shot up from hostile quarters in both sophistication and
frequency. "The army is cognisant of the threat to its cyber space from various state and non-state actors. But
our network is well secured in compliance with the highest standards of cyber security," a senior official
in the military headquarters told IANS on condition of anonymity. The official said the army has established an "impenetrable
and secure wide area network exclusively for its functioning". Officials in the 1.3 million force privately admit they are facing "next
generation threats" and are rather worried over the complex world of cyber warfare amid reports of Chinese and Pakistani spies targeting the Indian
military establishment via the internet. Though attacks from hackers - professional or amateur - can come from anywhere in the world, cyber onslaughts
have been more frequent from China and Pakistan, which have reportedly been peeking into India's sensitive business, diplomatic and strategic records.
As per reports from the cyber industry, China and Pakistan hackers steal nearly six million files worldwide every day. A report in the US-based Defence
Systems magazine found that there were 25 million new strains of malware created in 2009. That equals a new strain of malware every 0.79 seconds. The
report underlines how the current cyber threat environment is dramatically changing and becoming more challenging as the clock ticks. Howevever, the
Indian army is confident. Revealing that secret

information had been secured with unhackable

electronic passwords, the official said various "cryptographic controls" have been incorporated in the wake of a significant
number of viruses, worms and other forms of malware. To address cyber defence, which is also under threat from terrorist outfits that have their own
trained recruits, officials said the army frequently upgrades its comprehensive cyber security policy to pro-actively deal with and anticipate these threats.
The force has established the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) to respond to attacks targeting the army's critical systems and infrastructure.
Another official said the army has its own cyber audit process conducted by cyber security personnel. "The audit is conducted in accordance with
established security standards such as ISO 27001. Audit of the network is a continuous and active process which helps identification and mitigation of
vulnerabilities in a network to counter latest threats as also check the network for cyber security policy compliance," he said. However, the official
admitted there was no room for complacency in times of rapid technological change. " In

the area of cyber space, the battle

between hackers and defenders is an ongoing process, influenced by latest technological developments. Due to the dynamic
nature of threats, the army is constantly upgrading its network," he said.

( ) Successful hack couldnt create havoc too much of Indias critical

infrastructure is not yet online. Dedicated networks also check risk of an
attack.
Shukla 13
Ajai Shukla is Indian journalist and retired Colonel of Indian Army. He currently works as Consulting Editor with
Business Standard writing articles on strategic affairs, defence and diplomacy. He earlier worked with DD News and
NDTV India's digital battleground - Business Standard - June 21, 2013 - http://www.businessstandard.com/article/current-affairs/india-s-digital-battleground-113062101013_1.html

India has been slow in fixing its attention on cyber security. This may partly be because much of the
country's critical infrastructure - power grids, public transportation, nuclear power plants,
defence systems - is controlled by manual systems, or by standalone computer systems that are not linked
over the internet. In that respect, India's infrastructural backwardness has proved useful
against cyber-attacks. "It is not unusual to find central ministry officials in New Delhi using unsecured email systems,
sometimes even commercial email accounts on public servers. But India's sensitive networks tend to be isolated, with no

point of contact with the Internet that would render them vulnerable to online hacking. Several
agencies have their own dedicated, secure fibre-optic networks, notably the military, Defence R&D
Organisation (DRDO), and police's Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System," says Praveen Swami,
strategic affairs editor of Network18.

( ) CMS surveillance is not a honeypot of privacy. Aff exaggerates how much

content is truly being gathered.
Xynou 13
Maria Xynou is a Policy Associate on the Privacy Project at the Centre for Internet & Society. She has previously
interned with Privacy International and with the Parliament of Greece. Maria holds a Master of Science in Security
Studies from the University College London. India's 'Big Brother': The Central Monitoring System (CMS) April 8 th
- http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indias-big-brother-the-central-monitoring-system

Another cyber security expert argued that the

idea that the privacy of our messages and online activity would be
intercepted is a misconception. The expert stated that: The police are actually looking out for open source
intelligence for which information in public domain on these sites is enough. Through the lab, police can
access what is in the open source and not the message you are sending to your friend. Cyber security experts
also argued that the purpose of the creation of the Mumbai social media lab and the CMS in general is to ensure that
Indian law enforcement agencies are better informed about current public opinion and trends
among the youth, which would enable them to take better decisions on a policy level. It was also argued
that, apparently, there is no harm in the creation of such monitoring centres, especially since other countries, such as the U.S., are conducting the same
type of surveillance, while have enacted stringent privacy regulations. In other words, the

appears to be justified, as long as it is in the name of security.

monitoring of our communications

Global Internet Freedom

( ) Global econ is resilient
FSB 14
The Financial Stability Board (FSB) is an international body that monitors and makes recommendations about the
global financial system FSB Plenary meets in London 31 March 2014
http://www.financialstabilityboard.org/press/pr_140331.htm

The global economy has been improving, and monetary policy in the US is in the early stages of a
normalisation process, after an extended period of exceptional accommodation. A comprehensive programme of
regulatory reforms and supervisory actions since the crisis has made the global
financial system more resilient. Currently, European authorities are putting in place a comprehensive set
of measures to strengthen further the region's financial system. Emerging markets have coped relatively well to date
with occasional bouts of turbulence, in part reflecting the positive impact of both past and more recent
reforms.

( ) Economic decline doesnt cause war

Barnett 9
(Thomas, Senior Strategic Researcher Naval War College, The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial
Crisis, Asset Protection Network, 8-25, http://www.aprodex.com/the-new-rules--security-remains-stable-amidfinancial-crisis-398-bl.aspx)

When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all sorts of scary
predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression
leading to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and
emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize how globalization's first truly

worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the international security
landscape. None of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly attributed
to the global recession. Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine)
predates the economic crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the
15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia (where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly, the RussiaGeorgia conflict last August was specifically timed, but by most accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most
important external trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in an almost two-decade long struggle
between Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then, we see a most familiar picture: the usual
mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist movements. Besides the recent Russia-Georgia dust-up,

the only two potential state-on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to one side
acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to global economic trends. And with the
U nited S tates effectively tied down by its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistan-bleeding-intoPakistan), our involvement

elsewhere around the planet has been quite modest , both leading up to and following the

onset of the economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts in Latin America, the usual military exercises with allies across Asia,
mixing it up with pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere

else we find serious instability we pretty much let it

burn , occasionally pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa Command, for example, hasn't led
us to anything beyond advising and training local forces. So, to sum up: No significant uptick in mass violence or
unrest (remember the smattering of urban riots last year in places like Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); The usual frequency

Not a single state-on-state war directly caused (and no

great-power-on-great-power crises even triggered); No great improvement or disruption in great-power
cooperation regarding the emergence of new nuclear powers (despite all that diplomacy); A modest scaling back of
maintained in civil conflicts (in all the usual places);

international policing efforts by the system's acknowledged Leviathan power (inevitable given the strain); and No serious efforts by
any rising great power to challenge that Leviathan or supplant its role. (The worst things we can cite are Moscow's occasional
deployments of strategic assets to the Western hemisphere and its weak efforts to outbid the United States on basing rights in
Kyrgyzstan; but the best include China and India stepping up their aid and investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Sure, we've finally
seen global defense spending surpass the previous world record set in the late 1980s, but even that's likely to wane given the stress on
public budgets created by all this unprecedented "stimulus" spending. If anything, the friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging
was the most notable great-power dynamic caused by the crisis. Can

we say that the world has suffered a distinct shift

to political radicalism as a result of the economic crisis? Indeed, no. The world's major economies remain governed
by center-left or center-right political factions that remain decidedly friendly to both markets and trade. In the short run,
there were attempts across the board to insulate economies from immediate damage (in effect, as much protectionism as
allowed under current trade rules), but there was no great slide into "trade wars." Instead, the W orld T rade
O rganization is functioning as it was designed to function, and regional efforts toward free-trade agreements have not slowed.
Can we say Islamic radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis? If it was, that shift was clearly overwhelmed by
the Islamic world's growing disenchantment with the brutality displayed by violent extremist groups such as al-Qaida. And
looking forward, austere economic times are just as likely to breed connecting evangelicalism as disconnecting fundamentalism. At
the end of the day, the economic crisis did not prove to be sufficiently frightening to provoke major economies into establishing global
regulatory schemes, even as it has sparked a spirited -- and much needed, as I argued last week -- discussion of the continuing viability
of the U.S. dollar as the world's primary reserve currency. Naturally, plenty of experts and pundits have attached great significance to
this debate, seeing in it the beginning of "economic warfare" and the like between "fading" America and "rising" China. And yet, in a
world of globally integrated production chains and interconnected financial markets, such "diverging interests" hardly constitute
signposts for wars up ahead. Frankly, I don't welcome a world in which America's fiscal profligacy goes undisciplined, so bring it on -please! Add it all up and it's fair to say that this global financial crisis has proven the great resilience of America's post-World War II
international liberal trade order. Do I expect to read any analyses along those lines in the blogosphere any time soon? Absolutely not. I

expect the fantastic fear-mongering to proceed apace. That's what the Internet is for.

Privacy
( ) Rights cant be absolute as they sometimes conflict with other rights.
If some rights were absolute, privacy wouldnt be one of them.
Himma 7
Kenneth - Associate Professor of Philosophy, Seattle Pacific University. The author holds JD and PhD and was
formerly a Lecturer at the University of Washington in Department of Philosophy, the Information School, and the
Law School. Privacy vs. Security: Why Privacy is Not an Absolute Value or Right. San Diego Law Review, Vol. 44,
p. 859, 2007. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=994458
It is perhaps worth noting that absolutist conceptions are not limited to privacy rights. Some people take the position that
the moral right to life is absolute; on an absolutist conception of the right to life, it is never justified to take the life of a personand this rules out not
only the death penalty, but the use of deadly force in defense of the lives of innocent others from a culpable attack. Many people take an absolutist view
with respect to something they call a right to information, holding that there should be no restrictions of any kind, including legal protection of
intellectual property rights, on the free flow of information. As this view has most famously, and idiosyncratically, been put by John Perry Barlow,
information wants to be free.5 When it comes to rights, absolutist talk among theorists, lawyers, and ordinary folk is not at all uncommon these days.

Indeed, some people seem to think that rights are, by nature, absolute and hence that it is a conceptual truth that all rights are
absolute. Consider the following quote from Patrick Murphy, a Democrat who ran for Congress in 2006: I am also very concerned about the erosion
of constitutional rights and civil liberties over the past few years. I taught Constitutional Law at West Point, and it makes me so angry to see our elected
leaders in Washingtonspecifically the White House and the Republican leadership in Congresspushing policies that erode the foundation of this
country. The equal protection clause of the constitution is absolute. The right to privacy is absolute. The right to assemble is absolute. Yet time and time
again, the administration has supported, and the Congressional leadership has supported nominees and policies that do not follow the constitution. With
my background, I can add to this debate. And Im not afraid to take a stand for whats right.6 As Murphy explains it, every right in the Constitution is
absolute and hence utterly without exception. As there is nothing in the Constitution or any legal instrument or norm that suggests or entails that
constitutional rights are absolute, it is reasonable to think that Murphy believes, as many people do, that it is part of the very meaning of having a right
that it can never justifiably be infringed. This is why debates about political issues are frequently framed in terms of whether there is some right that
protects the relevant interests; rights provide the strongest level of moral or legal protection of the relevant interests. It is certainly true that rights provide
a higher level of protection than any other considerations that are morally relevant, but it is not because rights are, by nature, absolute. Rights provide
robust protection of the relevant interests because it is a conceptual truth that the infringement of any right cannot be justified by an appeal of the
desirable consequences of doing so. No matter how many people it might make happy, it would be wrong to intentionally kill an innocent person because
her right to life takes precedence over the interests of other people in their own happiness. As Ronald Dworkin famously puts this conceptual point, rights
trump consequences.7 But this conceptual truth about rights does not imply rights are, by nature, absolute. The claim that rights trump consequences
implies only that some stronger consideration than the desirable consequences of infringing a right can justify doing so. This latter claim leaves open the

there is some such consideration that would justify infringing some rights. One such
candidate, of course, is the existence of other more important rights. It is commonly thought that at least some rights are
possibility that

commensurable and can be ranked in a hierarchy that expresses the relative weight each right in the hierarchy has with respect to other rights. For
example, one

might think that the right to life is at the top of the hierarchy of commensurable rights, and that
would explain the common intuition that one may use deadly
force when necessary to defend innocent lives from culpable attack , but not when necessary only to defend
property rights are in this hierarchy also. This

property rights from violation. If, as seems clear from this example, it is possible for two rights to conflict and for one to outweigh the other, it follows
that rights are not, by nature, absolute. What may explain the mistaken view that rights are necessarily absolute is confusion about the relationship of
various terms that flesh out the status, origin, and contours of moral rights and obligations. For example, rights

are frequently described

as inviolable, meaning that a right can never be justifiably violated. This, of course, is a conceptual truth; to say that a right is violated is to say
that its infringement is without justification. But this does not imply that rights can never be justifiably infringed;
a persons right to life can be justifiably infringed if he (they) culpably shoots at an innocent person
and there is no other way to save that persons life except through use of lethal force in defense of his life.
Rights are also thought, by nature, to be supreme, relative to some system of normsmoral, social, or legalin the sense that they cannot be defeated by

But this
does not imply that rights are absolute because it says nothing about the relative importance of
one right to another; it simply asserts that, by nature, rights outweigh all other relevant considerations.
other kinds of protections; moral rights are thought to be supreme over all other kinds of considerations, including social and legal rights.

Supremacy and inviolability are part of the very nature of a right, but these properties do not entail that rights are, by nature, absolute. Of course, the
negation of the claim that all rights are absolute does not imply that no rights are absolute. The possibility of conflicts between any two rights does not
preclude there being one right that wins every conflict because it is absolute, and hence, without exception. A moral pacifist, for example, takes this view
of the moral right to life and holds that intentional killing of a human being is always wrong. Moreover, if there are two rights that do not come into
conflict with each other and win in conflicts with all other rights, those two rights might be absolute. One might think, for example, that the rights to
privacy and life can never conflict and that both are absolute. I

am somewhat skeptical that any right is absolute in this strong sense,

but if there are any, it will not be privacy. As we will see in more detail, privacy is commensurable with other rights,
like the right to life, which figures into the right to security. It seems clear that privacy rights and the right to life can come into conflict. For

example, a psychologist might be justified in protecting a patients privacy interests even though
doing so includes information that might prevent that person from committing a minor property
crime of some kind, but she would not be justified in protecting that information if the psychologist knows
its disclosure is necessary to prevent a murder. In any event, I will discuss these kinds of examples in more detail below.

( ) Why does the Debate community treat security interests as callous or

mean ?Security interests are competing rights claims that impact serous
moral questions.
Himma 7
Kenneth - Associate Professor of Philosophy, Seattle Pacific University. The author holds JD and PhD and was
formerly a Lecturer at the University of Washington in Department of Philosophy, the Information School, and the
Law School. Privacy vs. Security: Why Privacy is Not an Absolute Value or Right. San Diego Law Review, Vol. 44,
p. 859, 2007. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=994458

At the outset, it is important to stress that security interests do not embrace interests not immediately
related to the survival and minimal physiological well-being of the individual. My interest in security
encompasses my interest in continuing life, my interest in being free from the kind of physical injury that
threatens my ability to provide for myself, my interest in being free from the kind of financial injury that puts me in conditions of health- or lifethreatening poverty, and my interest

in being free from psychological trauma inflicted by others that renders me

in security is a negative one in the sense that it is protected by a moral right constituted, in part, by
moral obligations owed to me by other people to refrain from committing acts of violence or theft capable of
causing serious threats to my health, well-being, and life. While it is difficult to draw the line between a serious harm and a
unable to care for myself. My interest

nonserious harm, it will have to suffice for my purposes to say that a serious harm is one that interferes significantly with the daily activities that not only
give my life meaning, but make it possible for me to continue to survive. Significant

trauma to the brain not only interferes with many

with my ability to make a living

activities that constitute what Don Marquis calls the goodness of life,19 but also interferes

teaching and writing philosophywhile a mildly bruised arm does not. Where exactly to draw the line is not entirely clear, but for my
purposes I do not think much turns on it as long as it is understood that security interests do not include minor injuries of any kind. I imagine the
boundaries of the relevant notion of seriousness are likely to be contested in any event, but all would agree that the interest in security, by nature, protects
only against threats of serious injuries. It

should be abundantly clear that morality

protects these interests in the strongest terms available to it. Unless one is a
complete skeptic about morality and moral objectivity, little argument is needed to show that we have a moral right to
be free from acts that pose a high risk of causing either our death or grievous injuries to our bodies. Moreover, I
would hazard that non-skeptics about morality would also accept that the moral right to physical security is sufficiently important that a state is, as a
matter of political morality, obligated to protect it, by criminalizing attacks on it, as a condition of its legitimacy. No state authority

that
failed to protect this right could be morally legitimate ; at the very least no state authority that failed to do so could be
justified in claiming a legitimate monopoly over the use of force. Security interests are not , however, just about our own
well-being; they encompass the well-being of other persons whose activities conduce to our own physical
security. We are social beings who live in societies in which there is a pronounced division of labor that makes the security of one person dependent upon
the security of other persons in a variety of wayssome more abstract, some less abstract.

( ) Assessing Utilitarian consequences are good. Putting ethics in a vacuum is

morally irresponsible.
Issac, 2

(Jeffery, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Dissent, Vol. 49 No. 2, Spring)
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish anything in the political world one must
attend to the means that are necessary to bring it about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is
not to say that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli,
Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding

concern with moral goodness undercuts

political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three
fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of ones intentions does not ensure the achievement of
what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally comprised parties may seem like the right
thing, but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good
beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence
and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness, it is often a form of complicity in injustice.
This is why, from the standpoint of politics-as opposed to religion-pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically
repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3 )

it fails to see that

politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of
action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with good may engender
impotence, it is often the pursuit of good that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in
the twentieth century: it is not enough that ones goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally
important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in
pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who
are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.