About MSDI & Missouri State U..

For twenty years, the Missouri State Debate Institute has offered an excellent
educational experience in the middle of the high school topic. MSDI is distinct from
other camps in six ways. First, our skills focus assures that a typical 2-week debater
gets nearly 80 speeches, including over 20 debates. Second, we emphasize the
largest cases on topic, with students getting both aff and neg rounds on each. Third,
our senior faculty are comparable with top lab leaders in any camp. Fourth, MSDI
students can earn highly transferable college credit in public speaking for a minimal
cost. Fifth, we respect variance in home debate circuits our goal is to improve line
by line debating in ways that will help students no matter who judges in their home
circuit. Finally, our price is below any comparable camp and far below most camps.
Our 2016 information will be available shortly at:
http://debate.missouristate.edu/camp.htm.
Missouri State University is a large comprehensive university (enrollment over 24k),
with nearly any major you might want. The university has excellent academic
scholarship support most debaters combine academic entitlement scholarships
(guaranteed based on GPA/test scores) with debate scholarships. The Spicer Debate
Forum competes in two year-long policy debate formats: NDT and NFA-LD. Weve
national semis or finals in both in the last decade. Our debaters have an average
GPA over 3.5, a 97% graduation rate, and 70% complete law/grad school afterward.
Our program is a high-impact academic experience with an exceptional alumni
network. Please contact Dr. Eric Morris for more information
(EricMorris@MissouriState.edu).
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Neoliberalism K

1NC
Piecemeal reform sanitizes the historical trail of violence that
links domestic surveillance networks to institutionalized
capitalism. This locks politics into an ethos of liberalism, one
which normalizes the underlying conditions for exploitative
domination.
Henry A. Giroux Monday, 10 February 2014Totalitarian Paranoia in the PostOrwellian Surveillance State http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state, Giroux currently holds
the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and
Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson
University.
Totalitarian paranoia runs deep in American society, and it now inhabits the highest
levels of government.61 There is no excuse for intellectuals or any other member of
the American public to address the existence, meaning and purpose of the
surveillance-security state without placing it in the historical structure of the
times. Or what might be called a historical conjuncture in which the legacy of
totalitarianism is once again reasserting itself in new forms. Historical memory is
about more than recovering the past; it is also about imputing history with a sense
of responsibility, treating it with respect rather than with reverence. Historical
memory should always be insurgent, rubbing "taken-for-granted history against the
grain so as to revitalize and rearticulate what one sees as desirable and necessary
for an open, just and life sustaining" democracy and future.62 Historical memory is
a crucial battleground for challenging a corporate-surveillance state that is
motivated by the anti-democratic legal, economic and political interests. But if
memory is to function as a witness to injustice and the practice of criticism and
renewal, it must embrace the pedagogical task of connecting the historical,
personal and social. It is worth repeating that C.W. Mills was right in arguing that
those without power need to connect personal troubles with public issues and that
is as much an educational endeavour and responsibility as it is a political and
cultural task.63 Obama's recent speech on reforms to the NSA serves as a text that
demands not just close reading but also becomes a model illustrating how history
can be manipulated to legitimate the worst violations of privacy and civil rights, if
not state- and corporate-based forms of violence.64 For Obama, the image of Paul
Revere or the Sons of Liberty is referenced to highlight the noble ideals of
surveillance in the interest of freedom and mostly provide a historical rationale for
the emergence of the massive spying behemoths such as the NSA that now
threaten the fabric of US democracy and massive data on everyone, not just
terrorists. Of course, what Obama leaves out is that Paul Revere and his
accomplices acted "to curtail government power as the main threat to freedom."65
Obama provides a sanitized reference to history in order to bleach the surveillance
state of its criminal past and convince the American public that, as Michael Ratner
states, "Orwellian surveillance is somehow patriotic."66 Obama's surveillance state

does just the opposite, and the politicians such as Rep. Mike Ford and Feinstein are
more than willing to label legitimate whistle-blowers - including, most famously,
Snowden, Manning and Hammond - as traitors while keeping silent when highranking government officials, particularly James Clapper Jr., the director of national
security, lied before a Senate Intelligence Committee. Obama's appeal to the
American people to trust those in the highest positions of government and
corporate dominance regarding the use of the mammoth power of the surveillance
state makes a mockery out of the legitimate uses of such power, any vestige of
critical thought and historical memory. The United States has been lying to its
people for more than 50 years, and such lies extend from falsifying the reasons for
going to war with Vietnam and Iraq to selling arms to Iran in order to fund the
reactionary Nicaraguan Contras. Why should anyone trust a government that has
condoned torture, spied on at least 35 world leaders,67 supports indefinite
detention, places bugs in thousands of computers all over the world, kills innocent
people with drone attacks, promotes the post office to log mail for law enforcement
agencies and arbitrarily authorizes targeted assassinations?68 Or, for that matter, a
president that instituted the Insider Threat Program, which was designed to get
government employees to spy on each other and "turn themselves and others in for
failing to report breaches,"69 which includes "any unauthorized disclosure of
anything, not just classified materials."70 The incorrigibility of the politics of
surveillance was on full display when Clapper assailed Snowden before a Senate
intelligence committee hearing in late January 2014, insisting that he had done
grave damage to the country and that his leaks not only damaged national security
but aided terrorists groups. Clapper provided no evidence to support such a charge.
Of course, what he did not mention was that as a result of Snowden's revelations
the American public is now aware that they are being spied upon by the
government, in spite of the fact that they are not suspects in a crime and that
governments around the world have condemned the indiscriminate and illegal
spying of U.S. intelligence agencies. In a rather bizarre comment, Clapper also
accused Snowden "of hypocrisy for choosing to live in Russia while making public
pronouncements about 'what an Orwellian state he thinks this country is."71
Recklessly, Clapper implied that Snowden is a Russian spy and that he had available
to him a wide range of choices regarding where he might flee following his public
revelations of NSA secret illegalities. By suggesting that Snowden's living in Russia
somehow serves to cancel out his critique of the authoritarian practices, polices and
modes of governance, Clapper's comments reveal a lack of self-reflection at the
agency and the lies and innuendo the NSA will engage in to deflect or justify acts of
criminality that are now a matter of public record. More chillingly, the NSA's
scapegoating mechanisms come into full view when Clapper insinuated that
"Snowden is conspiring with journalists, rather then acting as their source."72 This
is a serious accusation designed to ratchet up a climate of fear by suggesting that
reporters such as Greenwald and others working with Snowden were participants in
a crime and thus subject to criminal reprisals. In the end, such arguments, coupled
with the blatant Washington cover-up of the scope and reach of the
Orwellian/Panoptic complex, testify to the degree to which the government will
resort to fear mongering to silence dissent. Under the rubric of battling terrorism,
the US government has waged a war on civil liberties, privacy and democracy while

turning a blind eye to the ways in which the police and intelligence agencies
infiltrate and harass groups engaged in peaceful protests, particularly treating those
groups denouncing banking and corporate institutions as criminal activities.73 They
also have done nothing to restrict those corporate interests that turn a profit by
selling arms, promoting war and investing surveillance apparatuses addicted to the
mad violence of the war industries. Unfortunately, such legal illegalities and deathoriented policies are not an Orwellian fiction but an advancement of the world
Orwell prematurely described regarding surveillance and its integration with
totalitarian regimes. The existence of the post-Orwellian state, where subjects
participate willingly and surveillance connects to global state and corporate
sovereignty, should muster collective outrage among the American public and
generate massive individual resistance and collective struggles aimed at the
development of social movements designed to take back democracy from the
corporate-political-military extremists that now control all the commanding
institutions of American society. Putting trust in a government that makes a
mockery of civil liberties is comparable to throwing away the most basic principles
of our constitutional and democratic order. As Johnathan Schell argues: Government
officials, it is true, assure us that they will never pull the edges of the net tight. They
tell us that although they could know everything about us, they won't decide to.
They'll let the information sit unexamined in the electronic vaults. But history,
whether of our country or others, teaches that only a fool would place faith in such
assurances. What one president refrains from doing the next will do; what is left
undone in peacetime is done when a crisis comes.74 History offers alternative
narratives to those supported by the new authoritarians. Dangerous countermemories have a way of surfacing unexpectedly at times and, in doing so, can
challenge to the normalization of various forms of tyranny, including the
mechanisms of a surveillance state defined by a history of illegal and criminal
behavior. As the mainstream press recently noted, the dark shadow of Orwell's
dystopian fable was so frightening in the early 1970s that a group of young people
broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, stole as many records as possible,
and leaked them to the press. None of the group was ever caught.75 Their actions
were not only deeply rooted in an era when dissent against the Vietnam war, racism
and corporate corruption was running high but also was suggestive of an era in
which the politics of fear was not a general condition of society and large groups of
people were mobilizing in numerous sites to make power accountable on a number
of fronts, extending from college campuses to the shaping of foreign policy. The
1971 burglary made clear that the FBI was engaging in illegal and criminal acts
aimed primarily against anti-war dissenters and the African-American community,
which was giving voice in some cities to the Black Power movement. What the
American people learned as a result of the leaked FBI documents was that many
people were being illegally tapped, bugged, and that anti-war groups were being
infiltrated. Moreover, the leaked files revealed that the FBI was spying on Martin
Luther King Jr. and a number of other prominent politicians and activists. A couple of
years later Carl Stern, an NBC reporter, followed up on the information that had
been leaked and revealed a program called COINTELPRO, which stands for
Counterintelligence Program, that documented how the FBI and CIA not only were
secretly harassing, disrupting, infiltrating and neutralizing leftist organizations but

also were attempting to assassinate those considered domestic and foreign

enemies.76 COINTELPRO was about more than spying, it was an illegally sanctioned
machinery of violence and assassination.77 In one of the most notorious cases, the
FBI worked with the Chicago Police to set up the conditions for the assassination of
Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two members of the Black Panther Party. Noam
Chomsky has called COINTELPRO, which went on from the 1950s to the '70s, when
it was stopped, "the worst systematic and extended violation of basic civil rights by
the federal government," and "compares with Wilson's Red Scare."78 As a result of
these revelations, Sen. Frank Church conducted Senate hearings that exposed the
illegalities the FBI was engaged in and helped to put in place polices that provided
oversight to prevent such illegalities from happening again. Needless to say, over
time these oversights and restrictions were dismantled, especially after the tragic
events of 9/11. What these young people were doing in 1971 is not unlike what
Snowden and other whistle-blowers are doing today by making sure that dissent is
not suppressed by governments who believe that power should reside only in the
hands of government and financial elites and that all attempts to make
authoritarian power accountable should be repressed at almost any cost. Many of
these young protesters were influenced by the ongoing struggles of the civil rights
movement and one of them, John Raines, was heavily influenced by the theologian
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was killed by the Nazis. What is crucial about this incident
is that it not only revealed the long historical reach of government surveillance and
criminal activity designed to squash dissent, it also provides a model of civic
courage by young people who acted on their principles in a nonviolent way to stop
what they considered to be machineries of civil and social death . As
Greenwald argues, COINTELPRO makes clear that governments have no qualms
about "targeting citizens for their disfavored political views and trying to turn them
into criminals through infiltration, entrapment and the like" and that such actions
are "alive and well today in the United States."79 Governments that elevate
lawlessness to one of the highest principles of social order reproduce and legitimate
violence as an acceptable mode of action throughout a society. Violence in
American society has become its heartbeat and nervous system, paralyzing
ideology, policy and governance , if not the very idea of politics. Under such
circumstances, the corporate and surveillance state become symptomatic of a form
of tyranny and authoritarianism that has corrupted and disavowed the ideals and
reality of a substantive democracy.

Capitalism culminates extinction and destroys value to life in

the process.
William I. Robinson 2014 Global Capitalism Is In the Midst of Its Most Severe
Crisis http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13930403001544, Robinson
is a Professor of Sociology, Global and International studies, and Latin American
studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
However, and this is the key point I wish to highlight here, US intervention
around the world clearly entered a qualitatively new period after September

11, 2001. This new period should be seen in the context of emergent 21st century
global capitalism. Global capitalism is in the midst of its most severe crisis in close
to a century, and in many ways the current crisis is much worse than that of the
1930s because we are on the precipice of an ecological holocaust that
threatens the very earth system and the ability to sustain life , ours
included, because the means of violence and social control have never before been
so concentrated within a single powerful state, and because the global means of
communication is also extraordinarily concentrated in the hands of transnational
capital and a few powerful states. On the other hand, global inequalities have
never been as acute and grotesque as they are today. So, in simplified terms,
we need to see the escalation of US interventionism and the untold suffering it
brings about, including what you mention the killing of unarmed civilians, the
destruction of the environment, forced migration and displacement, undermining
democracy as a response by the US-led transnational state and the transnational
capitalist class to contain the explosive contradictions of a global capitalist system
that is out of control and in deep crisis. You ask me who is going to compensate for
these losses. That will depend on how the worlds people respond. There is
currently a global revolt from below underway , but it is spread unevenly
across countries and has not taken any clear form or direction. Can the popular
majority of humanity force the transnational capitalist class and the
US/transnational state to be accountable for its crimes? Mao Zedong once said that
power flows through the barrel of a gun. What he meant by this, in a more
abstract than literal way, I believe, is that in the end it is the correlation of real
forces that will determine outcomes. Because the United States has overwhelming
and full spectrum military dominance, it can capture, execute, or bring to trial
people anywhere around the world it has free license, so to speak, to act as an
international outlaw. We dont even have to take the more recent examples. In
December 1989 the United States undertook an illegal and criminal invasion of
Panama, kidnapped Manuel Noriega whether or not he was a dictator is not the
point, as the United States puts in power and defends dictators that defend US and
transnational elite interests, and brought him back to US territory for trial. What
country in the world now has the naked power flowing through the barrel of a gun
to invade the United States, capture George Bush, Dick Chaney, Donald Rumsfeld,
and other war criminals, and bring them somewhere to stand trial for war crimes
and crimes against humanity? Q: In your writings, youve warned against the
growing gap between the rich and the poor, the slant accumulation of the global
wealth in the hands of an affluent few and the impoverishment of the suppressed
majority. What do you think are the reasons for this stark inequality and the
disturbing dispossession of millions of people in the capitalist societies? You wrote
that the participants of the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos were worried that
the current situation raises the specter of worldwide instability and civil wars. Is it
really so? A: We have never in the history of humanity seen such a sharp
social polarization between the haves and the have-nots , such grotesque

levels of inequality, within and among countries. There have been countless studies
in recent years documenting the escalation of inequalities, among them, the current
bestseller by Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The pattern we
see is that the notorious 1 percent monopolizes a huge portion of the wealth that
humanity produces and transnational corporations and banks are registering record
profits, but as well that some 20 percent of the population in each countries has
integrated into the global economy as middle class and affluent consumers while
the remaining 80 percent has experienced rising levels of insecurity,
impoverishment, and precariousness, increasingly inhabiting what some have called
a planet of slums. The apologists of global capitalism point to the rise of a
middle class in China to claim that the system is successful. But in China, 300-400
million people have entered the ranks of the global middle and consuming class
while the other 800-900 million have faced downward mobility, immiseration,
insecurity, unemployment and extreme levels of exploitation. Such is this
exploitation that a couple years ago, you may remember, Foxcomm workers
preferred to commit suicide by jumping off the roof of their factories than to remain
in their labor camps. This is the Foxcomm that makes your iPads and iPhones. The
80 percent is then subject to all sorts of sophisticated systems of social control and
repression. We are headed in this regard towards a global police state ,
organized by global elites and led by the US state, to contain the real or potential
rebellion of a dispossessed majority. Such structures of inequality and exploitation
cannot be contained over time without both ideological and coercive apparatuses;
conformity to a system of structural violence must be compelled through direct
violence, organized by states and private security forces. Edward Snowden revealed
the extent to which we are now living in a global social control state, a global
panoptical surveillance state. George Orwell wrote about such a state in his famous
novel 1984. The Orwellian society has arrived. Yet it is worse than Orwell
imagined, because at least the members of Orwells society had their basic needs
met in return for their obedience and conformity. How do we explain such stark
inequality? Capitalism is a system that by its very internal dynamic generates
wealth yet polarizes and concentrates that wealth. Historically a de-concentration of
wealth through redistribution has come about by state intervention to offset the
natural tendency for capital accumulation to result in such polarization. States have
turned to an array of redistributive mechanisms both because they have been
pressured from below to do so whether by trade unions, social movements,
socialist struggles, or so on or because states must do so in order to retain
legitimacy and preserve at least enough social peace for the reproduction of the
system. A great variety of redistributive models emerged in the 20th century around
the world, and went by a great many names socialism, communism, social
democracy, New Deal, welfare states, developmental states, populism, the social
wage, and so on. All these models shared two things in common. One was state
intervention in the economy to regulate capital accumulation and thus to bring
under some control the most anarchic and most destructive elements of
unrestrained capitalism. The other was redistribution through numerous policies,
ranging from minimum legal wages and unemployment insurance, to public

enterprises, the social wages of public health, education, transportation, and

housing, welfare programs, land reform in agrarian countries, low cost credit, and so
on. But capital responded to the last major crisis of the system, that of the 1970s,
by going global, by breaking free of nation-state constraints to accumulation and
undermining models of state regulation and redistribution. Neo-liberalism is a set of
policies that facilitate the rise of transnational capital. As transnational capital has
broken free of the confine of the nation-state, the natural tendency for capitalism to
concentrate wealth has been unleashed without any countervailing restraints. The
result has been this dizzying escalation of worldwide inequalities as wealth
concentrates within the transnational capitalist class and, to a much lesser extent,
the better off strata of middle classes and professionals. There are other related
factors that account for the intensification of worldwide inequalities. One is the
defeat of the worldwide left in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which led the ruling
groups to declare that global neo-liberal capitalism was The End of History. A
second is the rise of a globally integrated financial system in which capital in its
liquid, that is money, form can move frictionless across the planet with no controls
whatsoever. Transnational finance capital has become the hegemonic fraction of
capital on a global scale, and it engages in unfathomable levels of speculation,
turning the global economy into one giant casino. Transnational finance capital has
come to control the levers of the global economy, to get around and to undermine
any effort at regulation, and to concentrate wealth in its liquid form in a way that
would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. A third factor is the rise of a
mass of surplus humanity. Hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions, have
been made superfluous, thrown off the land or out of productive employment,
replaced by machines and rising productivity, marginalized and relegated to
migration and to trying to scratch by an existence in the planet of slums. In turn,
this mass of humanity places those that are employed in a very vulnerable
situation, drives down wage levels everywhere, facilitates the flexibilization and
precarious nature of wage labor, and thereby further aggravating inequalities. Q: In
one of your articles, you talked of an ever-expanding military-prison-industrialsecurity-financial complex that generates enormous profits through waging wars,
selling weapons and then taking part in reconstruction activities in the war-torn
countries. How does this complex operate? Is it really reliant on waging wars? A:
We cannot understand intensified militarization and the rise of this
complex outside of the crisis of global capitalism. This crisis is structural, in
the first instance. It is what we call a crisis of over-accumulation. The rise of the
global economy driven by new technologies, especially computer, information, and
communications technologies, but also by the revolution in transportation and
containerization, by robotics, aerospace, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and more
recently, by 3D printing, among other aspects, has allowed the transnational
capitalist class to restructure and reorganize the whole world economy, and to bring
about a huge increase in productivity worldwide and an enormous expansion of the
capacity of the global economy to churn out goods and services. But extreme
inequality and social polarization in the global system means that the global market
cannot absorb the expanding output of the global economy. The result is a

stagnation that is becoming chronic. The gap between what the global
economy can produce and what the global market can absorb is growing and this
leads to a crisis of overproduction : where and how to unload the surplus? How
can transnational capital continue to accumulate and generate profits if this output
is not unloaded, that is, profitably marketed? Unloading the surplus through
financial speculation, which has skyrocketed in recent years, only aggravates the
solution, as we saw with the collapse of 2008. Now, if only 20 percent of humanity
can consume in any significant quantity it is not very profitable to go into the
business of mass, inexpensive public transportation, health and education, or the
production of practical goods that the worlds population needs because very simply
even if people need these things they do not have the income to purchase them. A
global civilian economy geared to the basic needs of humanity is simply not
profitable for the transnational capitalist class. Look at it like this: the mass
production and distribution of vaccines and other medications for communicable
and treatable diseases that affect masses of poor people around the world are
simply not profitable and as a result we even have new pandemics of diseases
tuberculosis, measles, etc. that previously were under control. Yet it is profitable
for the global capitalist medical industry, including the giant pharmaceutical,
biotechnology and related branches to spend billions on developing plastic surgery
and every imaginable treatment for the vanity of a small portion of humanity, or to
develop incredibly expensive treatments for diseases that afflict the affluent. The
lesson here is that capital will seek to accumulate where it is profitable, according to
the structure of the market and of income, which in turn is shaped by the balance of
class and social power and what we call the relations of production and irrespective
of rational use of resources and irrespective of human need. It is in this context that
it becomes quite profitable to turn to wars , conflicts, systems of repression
and social control to generate profit, to produce goods and systems that can repress
that 80 percent of humanity that is not your consumer, not your customer so to say,
because they do not have the purchasing power to sustain your drive to accumulate
by producing goods and services for them that they actually need. Global capitalism
is a perverted and irrational system. Putting aside geo-political considerations, the
surplus that the global economy has been and is producing but that cannot be
absorbed by the world market, has been channeled into wars and conflicts that
involve endless rounds of destruction and reconstruction, and new systems of social
control and repression, independent of geo-political considerations, that is, simply
as a way of sustaining capital accumulation and profit making in the face of
stagnation tendencies. The US invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan
although legitimated in the name of fighting terrorism have generated hundreds
of billions of dollars in contracts and profits for transnational capital. The prisonindustrial and immigrant-detention complexes in the United States and let us
recall that the United States holds some 25-30 percent of the worlds prisoners is
enormously profitable for private corporations that run almost all of the immigrant
detention centers, some of the general prisons, supply everything from guards to
food, build the installations, erect border walls, and so on. Let us recall that the US
National Security Agency and we now know from Edward Snowden just how vast
are its operations subcontracts out its activities to private corporations, as do the

CIA, the Pentagon, and so on. Global security corporations are one of the fastest
growing sectors of the global economy and there are now more private security
guards in the world than police officers. All of this is to say that we are now
living in a global war economy , in which the threat of stagnation is offset in
part by the militarization of global economy and society and the introduction and
spread of systems of mass social control. Of course this involves all kinds of cultural,
ideological, and political dimensions as well. A global war economy based on a
multitude of endless conflicts and the spread of social control systems, from
full-scale wars to the repression of racial minorities and immigrants in
the United States and Europe , must be ideologically legitimated. This is where
bogus and farcical wars on drugs and terrorism come in, where enemies must be
conjured up, in which populations must be led to believe they are threatened, and
so on. So the US public must believe that Iran is a threat, that Putin is now the devil,
and so on. One threat replaces another but the system needs to keep a
population in permanent compliance through the manipulation of emotion and
the senses. This transition into a permanent global war economy has involved some
shifts in the gravitational centers of capital accumulation, towards those global
corporate conglomerates involved in the production of war materials, of security, of
engineering (for example, Bechtel and Halliburton), and other activities that involve
making profit out of conflict and control. Remember by way of example that each
drone that flies, each missile fired, each round of ammunition, each tank deployed,
each soldier equipped and fed, each prison that is constructed, each surveillance
system put into place, each border wall installed, and so on and so forth, is
produced in factories and through production chains by global corporations whose
supply, in turn, of raw materials, machinery and service inputs in turn come from
other global corporations or local firms. So the whole global economy is kept
running through violence and conflict . But the global war economy also
involves the global financial institutions that are at the very heart of the global
economy, together with the petroleum complex that is coming under much pressure
from the environmental movement yet is showing all-time record profits in the past
few years. This is a new transnational power bloc this complex of corporate
interests brought around a global war economy and global systems of repression
and social control, together with elites and state managers brought into or
representing the power bloc. Remember also that the polarization of the world
population into 20 percent affluent and 80 percent immiserated generates new
spatial social relations, so that the privileged occupy gated communities and
those displaced by gentrification must be violently suppressed and carefully
controlled, while surveillance systems and security guards must patrol and protect
that 20 percent. All this and much more are part of the militarization and
securitization of global society by the powers that be. We face new
doctrines, ideologies and political discourse that legitimize the construction of a

global police state fourth generation warfare, humanitarian intervention, the

war on drugs, among others, and above all, the so-called war on terror. I say
so-called because, the US state is the biggest perpetrator of terror in the world. It is
not that Al-Qaida and other groups do not carry out condemnable violence against
innocent civilians. They indeed do. But if we define terrorism as the use of violence
against civilians for political objectives, then the US state is the worlds
leading terrorist. The powers that be in global society and that control the global
political discourse attach the label terrorist to violence that they do not approve
of, and they attach the label of freedom and democracy and security to violence
that they do approve of, or that they commit themselves. Moreover, increasingly
terrorism is used to simply describe political dissent, so that legitimate social
movements and political struggles against global capitalism become labeled as
terrorism in order to justify their suppression.

The alternative is to refuse institutional tinkering in favor of

reinvesting decision-making with care. Our act of criticism is a
prerequisite to challenging the drive to consume and trend
towards individuation that is preventing left from thinking a
challenge to the mis-growth of capitalism.
Stephen Barker 2009 Transformation as an Ontological Imperative: The [Human]
Future According to Bernard Stiegler Transformation Journal Issue No. 17
http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_17/article_01.shtml Barker is a
Professor and Head of Doctoral Studies at The Claire Trevor School of the Arts,
University of California at Irvine.
Meta-transformation means that just as the ego/moi contains and conceals the
id/a, so new modes of individuation resist worse or worst transformations that
they too conceal (i.e. which are not lost as possibilities, since transformation must
always remain radically open); this aspect of critical thinking acts as a kind of
superego (surmoi), perpetually analyzing and judging the results of previous
transformative regional ontologies against current ones. What must be guarded
against, through the programming institutions, as a result of the ascendency of the
programming and cognitive industries, is any sign of the mass mystification
[38] resultant from the occlusion of desire by drives, of deep attention by hyperattention, and of oiko-nomia [39] by consumer capitalism. Meta-transformation is a
cumulative process of innovation, a socio-genesis that is clearly a techno-genesis in
Stieglers sense. The moment knowledge transmutes into the condition of a
set of rules (or rules as mystifications) that cannot subsequently generate new
rules, it is no longer knowledge, but either dogma or marketing (between
which there is no diffrance). This evaluation forms the very core of metatransformation. Insofar as psychic and collective individuation must be defined
always fluidly as projected desire, it is always a matter of either dis- or reenchantment. Enchantment, in the sense in which Stiegler appropriates it from the

MEDEF, is the undoing of cognitive capitalisms seizure and control of techniques

(skills), knowledge, and consumption, a seizure which, as the word suggests, is a
suspension of dynamic development. The forces of transindividuation bring about
the adoption not only of cultural histories and techniques but of the dynamic,
participatory involvement that can re-direct telecracy back into
democracy which in Stieglers participatory sense of it cannot survive the
amnesia resultant from the subversion of long circuits of attention and critical
thinking by programming industries whose strategic goal is attention-capture and
the undermining, if not the destruction, of inter-generational transference. The
forces of control operating in the worst transformative dimension in which we now
find ourselves strive to become adaptive, rather than adoptive , Stiegler
points out; that is, entropic (Renchanter le monde 122). Adaptation to adapt to
environmental circumstance as opposed to adoption to participate in the
genealogical transmission and transformation of knowledge and culture is for
Stiegler not a matter of adjustment but of amnesia , of the mind in thrall to the
spectacle of images and messages designed to short-circuit attention and critique.
Adaptation means the imperatives of production that are secondary to shareholder
expectations, and not producers of alternatives, of models of meta-transformation.
Knowledge is intrinsically contradictory to adaptation, as innovation (Renchanter
le monde 122). In other words, adaptation offers no alternative options to control,
and emerges as the blocking of the obstacle to human development. Stiegler,
[40] sees the ex-teriorization of memory technics as the very ground of human
being as such (original prostheticity); all knowledge, Stiegler says, has its origins in
exteriorization: memory is exteriorization re-interiorized in new intellectual and
motor behaviors (Renchanter le monde 136). The transformative process of
individuation is the process of exteriorization is grammatization. Re-enchantment,
then, the re-enchantment of the world, is beyond all else a gamble indeed,
according to Stiegler, a gamble against all the current odds. As the word
enchantment implies, re-enchantment in a world currently enchanted (in thrall
to) psychotechnologies would be nothing less than magical, resultant from
supernatural forces. But despite seemingly overwhelming evidence, Stiegler is not
pessimistic about this potential renewal; in his most recent work he sees the
possibility of such a re-enchantments occurring as resting on the associative
circuitry of information, knowledge, technology, industry, and society as the fragile
product of an international politics of the transformation of contemporary
capitalism (Renchanter le monde 165; emphasis added). In the battle against
disenchantment whose other names are ennui and care-less-ness [incurie] in the
battle for intelligence and for the perpetual (re)creation of enchantment, the
transformation of psychotechnologies into psychopolitics devoted to the service of
a noopolitics . . . through technologies of the mind (Taking Care 339) is Stieglers
great hope. There is no reason to think that this re-creation is not possible; indeed,
Stiegler insists, we must assume that it is possible (to give Stiegler the last word):
We can certainly go on struggling against care-less-ness and weigh the results. But
we must face the consequences of recent information on the state of the human
mind, on what is destroyed and on the possibilities of reconstructing what has been

destroyed on condition of fundamentally reversing the situation of this power as a

psychopower, and of subjecting it to the controls prescribed by a psychopolitics
placed in the service of a noopolitics, across an industrial politics of the mind.
(Taking Care 339) Only through transindividuation psychic, collective, and
technical can any hope of a future transcending our current thrall to programming,
an ontological future in the most fundamental sense, become a program for a future
of the human in a world of psychotechnological mystifications.

**Alternative Level**

2NC Alt Ext

Perpetually reformulating our ontology on the basis of
incoming information (i.e. the affs cards) allows us to resist
the dissociative tendencies of hypermodern culture and
technology. Reinvesting decision-making with care forces us
to be active participants in the creation of knowledge by
foregrounding the historicization of specific issues. This
collectivizes resistance against neoliberalism by linking us all
back to the same narrative.
Stephen Barker 2009 Transformation as an Ontological Imperative: The [Human]
Future According to Bernard Stiegler Transformation Journal Issue No. 17
http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_17/article_01.shtml Barker is a
Professor and Head of Doctoral Studies at The Claire Trevor School of the Arts,
University of California at Irvine.
Implicit in the need to learn to be responsible and to pay attention, over the longterm, is the development of a (double) sense of individuality. Individuation [28] for
Stiegler, as for Simondon, is a psychic/collective/technical process the result not
the cause of which is the (hypothetical) individual; this vital cause/effect reversal,
the opposite of humanistic doctrine, forms the basis of technics primacy in the
process of the emergence of the human, as the perpetually incomplete process of
individuation, a process that requires the ability to speak for oneself, i.e. to
receive utterances and to respond to them to take responsibility for responding,
thus both participating in and perpetuating the dialogism through which intelligence
develops and which insists on the perpetual transformation of language: as
individuality evolves through dialogue, so does dialogue (i.e. language) itself. The
process of individuation is thus inherently one of transformation: the
transformation of lifestyles is the law of the form of human life of existence. . . .
We ex-sist, and that means that we are transformed (Renchanter le monde 40);
the originary prosthesis accompanies the transformation of maturing humanity
through its own perpetual transformation. [29] Stiegler creates a constellation of
influences in his idea of individuation. In addition to Simondon, Stiegler turns to
Nietzsche and Freud, capturing Nietzsches sense in The Birth of Tragedy of the
Apollonian principium individuationis, as form and harmony, [30] the latter by
considering the ego (in French, moi) grammatologically but also ( la Nietzsche) by
linking ego and id as nested foci: Stiegler shows that the id/unconscious can only
be repressed from within the ego. As the focus of critique, the ego then forms
circuitry with the surmoi in order to bring critical faculties to tertiary retentions. In
Taking Care 1, Stiegler explores Kants What is the Enlightenment to work through
Kants complex notion of individuation as a critical faculty: as the ability to use the
tools that technics provides to critique information coming from the world and
(as Kant insists) to tenaciously critique both the results of that critique and its very
process to critique critique. Tripartite individuation, psychic (I), collective (we),
and technical, is thus associative and elliptical, grounding itself in and
simultaneously orbiting the very process of critique through which individuation

(and trans-individuation or transduction) can take place. [31] Insofar as psychic and
collective individuation, through technics, are psychologically and socially dynamic
and therefore in perpetual transformation, they can be slow and insensitive, as
was the case for millennia, or rapid and obvious, as has been the case since the
Industrial Revolution (i.e. since the rise of industrial capitalism and the launching of
what Stiegler calls light-time rather than light-speed). Through the course of the
last century and a half, human existence has (or should have, had it been
paying attention) witnessed its increasing dissociation , not only with regard to
technology but also, chimerically, with regard to super- and then hypertechnology. Technologys hyper-industrialization, beginning with the Industrial
Revolution, then moving through techno-paranoia [32] to techno-amnesia, is a step
yet further afield in that it privileges a model of individuation in which unlike the
Simondon/Stiegler sense of it, a pseudo-egoistic I (I as in isolation) chimerically
precedes any but the rhetorical we, resulting in ever-increasing separation
and thus susceptibility to control by psychotechnologies , as Foucault has
shown (and as is inherent in Sartrean Existentialism); this reversal is now, according
to Stiegler, rapidly leading to the implosion of the individual into
psychotechnological fragmentation and the onset of the post-humanistic, if not of
the post-human itself. The most pressing 21st century task, then counterintuitively is not global warming but the radical re-thinking of the
relationship between individuality and the human , within the shifts taking
place in Stieglers light-time. [33] Individuality, psychic and collective, is however
a stage on the way to the collective individuation called, after Simondon,
transindividuation. Given the centrality of dynamic transformation, any sense of
collectivity must be both active and prior in order to engage in the battle for
intelligence. This means that only in participating in the critical action of
transindividuation can any sense of collectivity, and thus any sense of culture itself,
be produced: collective individuation is transindividuation or else it is nothing more
than a collective solipsism and not individuation in Stieglers sense. It is at this point
that the phenomenological aspect of individuation, as experience of and in the
world, shifts (through that trans-) to the ontological. The mechanism or technical
component of transindividuation must by definition extend beyond any isolated
locus. It must (indeed, it must always already) be grammatized. Since technics is
the ground for all cultural (i.e. diffrant) identification, its mechanism is always
grammatization and, eo ipso, writing as writing, in the largest sense. As Stiegler
puts it in Technics and Time 2: Writing is an exact formalization of memory, and it is
as such that it brings about transformations of the already-there, and through them
the conditions of anticipation and connection between societies and their futures, of
language (written language is no longer the same language), of knowledge (written
knowledge becomes apodictically cumulative), of power (a written society becomes
political in the strongest sense of isonomia and public law). Writing, whose
science is grammar, thus also gives rise to rules of memory, which had been based

on conditions of functioning and which nonetheless, by the singular fact of finding

itself explicit and exteriorized, is constructed relative to the entirely different
parameters of a renewed synchrony and a new diachrony of language. Writing has
an essential performativity, as formalization of grammar rules. (110) The relation
between the formalization of grammar rules and the trans-formation endemic to
transindividuation receives its force from the establishment of circuits forming
networks of co-individuation that can only emerge through education in both the
narrowest and the broadest sense, as programming institutions. The orchestrated
circuitry of transindividuation is at the very least one of the penultimate, if not one
of the ultimate, pharmaka in the transformative process of re-enchantment.
Transindividuation, because of its grammatological nature, consists of myriad
significations (including the metastabilized idea, and the process, of signification)
transported through time by humans as agents, catalyzers, and products of
technics. On the other hand, the programming industries destroy this circuitry
through which the cross-associations of technical and technological advancement
(or, at least, change) have previously taken place as social integers; as Stiegler
says, transindividuation is short-circuited by service industries: to undergo the
effects of a service industry is in fact to have ones existence trans-formed without
participating in the trans-formation (Renchanter le monde 41). Existence
without participation , as opposed to ex-sistence through participation and
critique, is the very definition of the malaise Stiegler points out to be the
result of disorientation and disenchantment. This malaise, the problem of which
forms the subtitle of Technics and Time 3, is (but is more than) the problem of
consumption, in that it is marked by consumption generated by drives and not by
desire, by stupidity rather than intelligence, and by thought-less passivity rather
than critique. Malaise such as this leads quickly to the (passive) rejection of
transindividuation Stiegler claims is ubiquitous around us now, throwing the very
nature of human experience into crisis. Existence through participation (i.e. real
democracy) as engagement in the dynamic process of transindividuation manifests
itself in adoption. Projecting itself in and through time, adoption is both the effect
and the affect of transindividuation; adoption manifests active participation in the
transindividuation by which cultures and societies are transformed, and which
create the conditions for further transindividuations. Transindividuation, then, is a
process of adoption which adheres to the version of the future that Derrida refers
to as a venir, not futur, [34] manifesting deep attention to strengthen extant
individuation or, even better, to work to (perpetually) construct new processes of
individuation. To adopt a new psychic collectivity is potentially to accept what both
Derrida and Stiegler would call a diffrant identity , through ones own
transformative process; adoption is both an intensification of singularity and
simultaneously what Stiegler refers to as ones neguentropic potential. [35] A
significant element of this potential and therefore of existence through participation
(announced by ex-), is that echo of ex-teriorization lurking in trans-formation:
diffrance as and in technics. If transformation is associative indeed, is association
as such it marks a departure from the blockage or dis-sociation of contemporary
service culture. In the face of the potential destruction or at the very least,

diversion of attention, which would mean losing the battle for intelligence, Stiegler
clearly shows that the pharmacology of transformation can perhaps more easily
result in a worse, or even a worst outcome, rather than to a better or best, all of
which would nonetheless in any case be ephemeral. Working through the stages of
transformation from disenchantment to re-enchantment, from dissociation to
association, individuals, societies, and cultures perpetually re-define not only
lifestyles and modes of existence but the very conditions through which such redefinitions occur. These redefinitions operate through what Husserl calls regional
ontologies, [36] which Stiegler re-maps as spaces for the transformation of
psychotechnics into nootechnics (Taking Care 121), the creation of manifestations
of anamnesia through hypomnesia. [37] Only through adoption can the conditions
of regional ontologies be locally organized and re-defined through the same process
that can transform the deterritorialized flux (Taking Care 68).

Datatariat
In lieu of the 1AC we should adopt the datatariat as our
political subjectivity. Rejecting their approach to domestic
surveillance in this manner allows us to move beyond the
realm of possible solutions by identifying directly with
equality.
Clare Birchall 2014Aesthetics of the Secret New Formations: A Journal of
Culture/Theory/Politics, pg. 25-46, Project MUSE, Birchall is Professor of North
American Studies at Kings College London. She received her first degree in English
from Exeter, from there she went on to study Critical Theory at Sussex.
But when a (re)distribution is compatible with equality, an instantiation of
Rancirean politics occurs. In reorganising the realm of the perceivable to
disrupt limits on who or what can be heard or seen, and therefore on what is
thinkable and possible, real politics affirms equality. [End Page 42] Circumventing
classification and confidentiality protocols, effectively evading the policing of the
sensible and the secret, Snowden revealed details of the NSAs mass surveillance
programmes. In doing so, he not only shifted the horizon of perception with regards
to intelligence operations, but showed the US states surveillance capability to be
more extensive, and classified data more vulnerable than previously thought. The
horizon of visibility was itself made visible. The systemic inequality of access to
information and data (and to knowledge about that access) was challenged by
Snowdens act - for a moment, we all had a share in the secret, able to take part government secrets became a shared or common element of the community. I want
to suggest that when viewed this way, the Snowden event might serve as an
occasion to posit a political subjectivity - what we could name the datatariat - that
is general enough to allow equal access, in a process that Rancire calls
subjectivisation.47 That is, because Snowden reminded us of our status as data
subjects in the eyes of the security state, we can begin to think about the collective
identities data makes possible when imagined outside of the parameters set by
police. For Rancire, political subjectivisation: is the enactment of equality
- or the handling of a wrong - by people who are together to the extent that they are
between. It is a crossing of identities, relying on a crossing of names: names that
link the name of a group or class to the name of no group or no class, a being to a
nonbeing or a not-yet-being (PIS, p61). Proletariat is Rancires prime example
because it was the name given to those who are between several names, statuses,
and identities; between humanity and inhumanity, citizenship and its denial;
between the status of a man of tools and the status of a speaking and thinking
being. The datatariat, too, can be thought of as between humanity and
inhumanity, citizenship and its denial, and, we can add, secrecy and transparency,
the material and immaterial, the quantifiable and the unquantifiable. Datatariat
might enact equality not only in the generality of its name, but also - concerns over
the digital divide aside given that we are dealing with people who produce digital
data - in the fact that the datatariat all have access to horizontal forms of data

exchange and obfuscation (of which more below). Rancire is interested in

impossible identifications that can raise individuals above the identities
bequeathed to them by police. And so, subjectivisation is never just the assertion
of an identity, but the refutation of a given identity - given by the ruling order. The
datatariat would, then, be an identity that refutes two given identities. First, the
citizen as the subject of and subject to dataveillance. Second, the neoliberal citizen
asked to interact with data only when this contributes to the entrepreneurial
economy (come and join our datapalooza!) or responsibilised individualism (look
at our pollution data by area code and make a choice as to where you want to live).
The identity [End Page 43] of the surveilled data object/neoliberal data subject is
not one that is allowed to interact with data in the creation or exploration of radical
collective politics. In contrast, in an endeavour to find names or identities-in-relation
that can allow those without part to take part (PIS, p62) in an equitable distribution
of the visible and sayable, datatariat might very well create political subjects and
redraw the sensible perameters.48 It might constitute a collectivity of
subjects that are together inasmuch as they are between (PIS, p62), capable of
putting forth the demand that data accumulation serve horizontal and communityforming transparency rather than its hierarchical manifestation. Yet, the risk of
containment outlined above, the risk of a redistribution being reduced to a mere
reshuffling of the sensible (a risk that I am arguing has been realised in the case of
the Snowden event) is never far away. Emancipatory potential, the chance of
politics taking place instead of policing, is only potential. If interventions into the
sayable and visible through the open secret or the possibility of communities
coalescing around the collective identity of the datatariat become readily contained,
perhaps the secret as secret might offer itself as an unexpected resource. Both
Paglen and Magid put secrecy rather than privacy in the foreground. In doing so,
they move us away from the perennial debate between privacy and security, which
tends to emphasise individualism rather than collectivity (and which arises
whenever the surveillance powers of the state are revealed), and force us to
consider the secret on its own terms. It may be that the most radical response to
the Snowden event, one which any successful datatariat might need to entertain
as one strategy to adopt on its way to a more equitable distribution, would be a
secrecy to rival that of the state.

2NC Ext
Opaque subjectivities like that of the datatariat are
fundamentally counterpoised to the neoliberalist project. By
recalibrating the aesthetic of secrecy that shrouded
government surveillance for decades we can begin to resist
violent assimilation by grounding our politics in a collective of
egalitarian ideals.
Clare Birchall 2014Aesthetics of the Secret New Formations: A Journal of
Culture/Theory/Politics, pg. 25-46, Project MUSE, Birchall is Professor of North
American Studies at Kings College London. She received her first degree in English
from Exeter, from there she went on to study Critical Theory at Sussex.
Phenomena in this category take the secret seriously in its own right rather than as
a temporary state that precedes revelation. It is the category of the absolute,
unconditional secret: that which cannot and does not present itself. This secret is
an experience that does not make itself available to information.49 We do not
know this secret; moreover, we do not know that we do not know. Given that it is
not waiting in the wings to be revealed, it may not pertain to the category of
knowledge at all. We do not know what genre, mode or form of phenomenon it is
that we do not know. In the context of literature, for Derrida the unconditional secret
stages an encounter with the Other. Such an encounter makes possible (and
impossible) a responsibility of reading. With regards to politics, or more precisely
democracy, Derrida reads the secret as a singularity that must (and at the same
time, cannot) be tolerated if totalitarianism is to be avoided .50 Rather than
material remnants left in the visible spectrum, like the secrets Paglen and Magid
work with, this kind of secret is nothing and therefore leaves nothing but the
aporia it puts in play (for Derrida, the (im)possibility of democracy and the
(im)possibility of responsible reading). This secret is resistant to being [End Page 44]
thought of as an aesthetic object, or addressed through aesthetic judgement,
attitude, encounter or value. We must be careful not to conflate the unconditional
secret that Derrida writes about with a strategic position, but the former can
certainly inspire the latter. In order to explore my earlier proposal of a radical
response to the Snowden event, I want to turn to the late Martiniquan philosopher
douard Glissant for help in recalibrating the politics of the secret and
seeking an alternative to the emphasis on privacy made by many disgruntled
citizens and activists. In his writing, Glissant is concerned with a right to
opacity as a way of resisting being reduced and essentialised by the
demand to be understood and for universal truths to be applied to all.51 While the
idea of difference has facilitated recognition of minorities, it too can still contrive
to reduce things to the Transparent.52 Glissant regards the emphasis on
understanding as the basis of progressive politics to be a Western demand for
transparency. Celia Britton explains that, understanding constructs the Other

as an object of knowledge .53 Glissant advocates instead a model of

relationality that does not rest on the false promise of total
understanding and absolute truths. The opaque is not the obscure It is that
which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation
and confluence.54 Glissants secret interrupts an identity politics that appears open
and progressive but that in fact determines possible social identities, discursive
parameters and modes of relationality. The imperative to be known leaves the
object of knowledge unable to be other. Whereas calls for privacy focus on the
rights of individuals and seem antithetical or irrelevant to collective politics,
Glissants right to opacity allows for relationality not based on sanctioned identities
and ways of understanding. In this relation, we would be able to conceive of the
opacity of the other for us, without reproach for our opacity to the other (p193). As
Jack Bratich writes in a different context, A right to secrecy would change the tenor
of freedom from privacys passive, individualized zone to an interactive exteriority
of relations.55 Opacity might allow for identifications and subjectivities that
circumvent or even refuse visible and knowable spectrums and their ideologies.
Except for very different ideas about the in/visibility of subjectivisation, Glissant
here is not so far from Rancires recognition that processes of
disidentification and declassification are essential to real politics (PIS,
p62). Rancires equitable political name has to take part in a way that will
reshape the politico-aesthetic configuration, whereas Glissants opaque subject is
one that is in retreat from strategies of visibility. The refusal to acquiesce to
knowability and transparency suggests a commitment to opacity that is permanent:
to an unconditional unknown unknown rather than an everyday secret. Instead of
acts of publicity such as legal marches or online petitions, the datatariat might
need to meet the pervasive protocols of inequitable [End Page 45] dataveillance
employed by the securitised state with opacity. A right to opacity in this context
would mean the demand not to be reduced to and understood as data as defined by
the state. Though we have to acknowledge the attendant risks of non-progressive
and criminal activity made possible by the dark web, it is nevertheless here that
the right to opacity might be asserted. In the first instance, this might involve
communication technologies such as encrypted email and instant messaging,
software enabling online anonymity like Tor, search engines that do not aggregate
and store terms like Startpage or DuckDuckGo, decentralised servers and clouds
such as the personal server from FreedomBox or the co-operative storage cloud
offered by Symform, and anonymous forums (like 4Chan). Though previous
commentators have promoted such forms in the name of privacy, the datatariat can
employ them to enact a right to opacity. Art such as that made by Paglen and Magid
constitutes an exploration of, and a provocation to, the distribution of the sensible.
As such, it can help us to hold on to the redistributive qualities and potential of the
Snowden revelations: to configure secrets as a properly political subject. But this
only gets us so far. Because I have viewed these artworks as belonging to one
category in a schema mapping the relationship between secrecy and aesthetics, we
are reminded of other forms of opacity. Artworks that address the play of
contextual, open secrets sit close to the unconditional secret, the unknown

unknown, or undepletable opacity of the Other. This is an opacity that falls beyond
traditional aesthetic concerns and which cannot be redistributed to become part of
the sensible. It is as resistant to aesthetics as it is to knowledge; only a distribution
in an internal sense, drawing on the Latin origin of secret - secretus: separate, set
apart. That is to say, the unconditional secret distributes only itself , destined to
be other than or apart from itself, never self-present and locatable, always a moving
target. In the course of this article, I have explored a turn towards and, latterly,
away from aesthetics (but not back towards knowledge). I have done so in order to
reconceptualise a politics and aesthetics of the secret in the wake of the Snowden
event. Contrary to popular thought, a move towards the secret does not have to be
regressive, totalitarian or statist; this is not a classic defence of secrecy or the
secret to the detriment of personal liberties. Rather, it is a way of thinking the
secret and liberty otherwise as well as recalibrating the political values attached to
visibility and opacity. An equitable distribution of the sensible, as Rancire writes,
may be necessary for politics to occur; but in order to prevent the hegemonic
securitised data-driven distribution from re-solidifying and containing re-distributive
attempts, we need to imagine and enact subjectivisation and relationality
through a right to opacity.

Radical Democracy
The alternative is to reconceptualize democracy as a starting
point for unique forms of civic engagement. Rejecting the aff's
consumptive scholarship is a pre-requisite to fostering radical
imagination in public spheres
Henry Giroux January 13, 2014"Reclaiming the Radical Imagination: Challenging
Casino Capitalism's Punishing Factories "http://www.truthout.org/opinion/item/21113-disimagination-machines-and-punishing-factories-in-theage-of-casino-capitalism, Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department
and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
In my view, the American public is no longer offered the guidance, opportunities and
modes of civic education that cultivate their capacity for critical thinking and
engaged citizenship. As public values are written out of the vocabulary circulating
within important pedagogical spheres such as public and higher education, for
example, a mode of civic illiteracy and moral irresponsibility emerges in which it
becomes difficult for young people and the broader American public to translate
private troubles into public concerns. When civic literacy declines and the attacks
on civic values intensify, the commanding institutions of society are divorced from
matters of ethics, social responsibility and civic engagement. One consequence is
the emergence of a kind of anti-politics in which the discourses of privatization,
possessive individualism and crass materialism inundate every aspect of social life,
making it easy for people to lose their faith in the critical function of civic education
and the culture of an open and substantive democracy. The very essence of politics
has been emptied of any substantive meaning and is now largely employed as a
form of anti-politics legitimating a range of anti-democratic policies and practices
ranging from attacks on womens reproduction rights and the voting rights act to a
war on unions, public servants, public school teachers, young people immigrants
and poor minorities. As public spaces are transformed into spaces of consumption ,
the formative cultures that provide the preconditions for critical thought and agency
crucial to any viable notion of democracy are eviscerated . The conditions for
encouraging the radical imagination has been transformed into the spectacle of
illiteracy, repression, state violence, massive surveillance, the end of privacy, and
the ruthless consolidation of power by the ultrarich and powerful financial interest.
The imagination is under intense assault and increasingly is relegated to the dead
zone of casino capitalism, where social and civil death has become the norm. Under
such circumstances, civil society along with critical thought cannot be sustained and
become short-lived, fickle and ephemeral. At the same time, it becomes more
difficult for individuals to comprehend what they have in common with others and
what it means to be held together by shared responsibilities rather than shared
fears and competitive struggles. As the dominant culture is emptied out of any
substantive meaning and filled with the spectacles of the entertainment industry,
the banality of celebrity culture, and a winner-take-all consumer mentality, the
American people lose both the languages and the public spheres in which they can

actually "think" politics; can, in Tony Judts words, "respond energetically or

imaginatively to new challenges"; and can collectively organize to influence the
commanding ideologies, social practices, and institutions that bear down daily on
their lives.[19] Numbed into a moral and political stupor, large segments of the
American public and media have not only renounced the political obligation to
question authority but also the moral obligation to care for the fate and well-being
of others. In a market-driven system in which economic and political decisions are
removed from social costs, the flight from responsibility and critical thought is
further accentuated by a toxic fog that resembles a moral coma. In such instances,
as Wendy Brown has noted, depoliticization works its way through the social order,
removing social relations from the configurations of power that shape them and
substituting "emotional and personal vocabularies for political ones in formulating
solutions to political problems." [20] As private interests trump the public good,
public spaces are corroded, and short-term personal advantage replaces any larger
notion of civic engagement and social responsibility. Missing from the neoliberal
market society are those public spheres - from public and higher education to the
mainstream media and digital screen culture - where people can develop what
might be called the civic imagination. In my judgment, for-profit spheres are
increasingly replacing the spaces in which the civic and radical imagination enables
individuals to understand and hold accountable the larger historical, social, political
and economic forces that bear down on their lives. The rules of commerce now
dictate the meaning of what it means to be educated. Yet, spaces that promote a
radical imaginary are crucial in a democracy because they are foundational for
developing those formative cultures necessary for young and old alike to develop
the knowledge, skills and values central to democratic forms of education,
engagement, and agency. What is particularly troubling in American society is the
growing absence of a formative culture necessary to construct questioning agents
who are capable of dissent and collective action in an imperiled democracy. Matters
of justice, equality, and political participation are foundational to any functioning
democracy, but it is important to recognize that they have to be rooted in a vibrant
formative culture in which democracy is understood not just as a political and
economic structure but also as a civic force enabling justice, equality and freedom
to flourish.

2NC Ext
Developing a new political language that posits democracy as
an axiom for collective resistance solves- student intellectuals
are key
Henry Giroux January 13, 2014"Reclaiming the Radical Imagination: Challenging
Casino Capitalism's Punishing Factories "http://www.truthout.org/opinion/item/21113-disimagination-machines-and-punishing-factories-in-theage-of-casino-capitalism, Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department
and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
While the institutions and practices of a civil society are crucial to both imagining
and sustaining the dreamscape of an aspiring democracy, what must also be
present are the principles and modes of civic education and critical engagement
that support the very foundations of democratic culture. Sheldon Wolin makes this
clear in his insistence that, "If democracy is about participating in self-government,
its first requirement is a supportive culture, a complex of beliefs, values and
practices that nurture equality, cooperation and freedom. A rarely discussed but
crucial need of a self-governing society is that the members and those they elect to
office tell the truth." [21] The importance of civic education in the shaping of
democratic values and critical agents cannot be underestimated and functions as
the basis for developing specific modes of resistance and larger social movements.
Cultivating the radical imagination, civic education and engaged and critical modes
of literacy and agency are central to producing an informed citizenry, but even more
so to constituting any viable notion of politics . Education must be considered central
to any viable notion of politics. This suggests that progressives make clear how
cultural apparatuses and media sources work pedagogically to produce marketdriven subjects who are summoned to inhabit the values, dreams and social
relations of an already established repressive social order. As I have often argued,
the educational force of the wider culture, and the sites where it is delivered to the
public, demand a radical rethinking of modes of civic education , if not politics itself.
Democracy begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of
those vital public spheres in which civic values, public scholarship and social
engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of the promise of a future that
takes seriously the demands of justice, equity and civic courage. Democracy should
be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting equity to
excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility
and the public good. The time has come to develop a political language in which
civic values, the radical imagination, social responsibility and the institutions that
support them become central to invigorating and fortifying a new era of civic
courage, a renewed sense of social agency and an impassioned political will. We live
in an age of proliferating political zombies, disimagination machines and punishing
factories. This is an age of full blown authoritarianism parading, ironically, in the
name of freedom and liberty. This type of freedom and liberty is designed for the
walking dead who drain democracy of any substance, who produce misery and
suffering all over the globe. There is more at work here than a new predatory

culture, there is a politics of denial, disposability and avarice. The lights are going
out fast, and democracy is on life support. Individual and collective resistance to
this death machine can no longer be seen as simply necessary, it has become
imperative. [22] Refusing to remain voiceless and powerless in determining the ir
future, the time has come for intellectuals, workers, students, educators and other
members of the American public to organize a broad-based social movement for the
defense of public goods. This is a first but important step designed to create
the conditions for a democracy that refuses to use politics as an act of war and
markets as the measure of democracy. At the very least, it is time to take seriously
the words of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglas, who bravely argued that
freedom is an empty abstraction if people fail to act, and "If there is no struggle,
there is no progress."

Floating PIC
Using domestic surveillance a dialogical starting point for
radical democratic vision solves 100% of the case
Henry A. Giroux Monday, 10 February 2014Totalitarian Paranoia in the PostOrwellian Surveillance State http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state, Giroux currently holds
the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and
Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson
University.
Dissent is crucial to any viable notion of democracy and provides a powerful
counterforce to the dystopian imagination that has descended like a plague on
American society; but dissent is not enough. In a time of surging authoritarianism, it
is crucial for everyone to find the courage to translate critique into the
building of popular movements dedicated to making education central to any
viable notion of politics. This is a politics that does the difficult work of assembling
critical formative cultures by developing alternative media, educational
organizations, cultural apparatuses, infrastructures and new sites through which to
address the range of injustices plaguing the United States and the forces that
reproduce them. The rise of cultures of surveillance along with the defunding of
public and higher education, the attack on the welfare state and the militarization of
everyday life can be addressed in ways that not only allow people to see how such
issues are interrelated to casino capitalism and the racial-security state but also
what it might mean to make such issues meaningful to make them critical and
transformative. As Charlie Derber has written, "How to express possibilities and
convey them authentically and persuasively seems crucially important" if any viable
notion of resistance is to take place.80 Nothing will change unless the left and
progressives take seriously the subjective underpinnings of oppression in the United
States. The power of the imagination, dissent, and the willingness to hold
power accountable constitute a major threat to authoritarian regimes .
Snowden's disclosures made clear that the authoritarian state is deeply fearful of
those intellectuals, critics, journalists and others who dare to question authority,
expose the crimes of corrupt politicians and question the carcinogenic nature of a
corporate state that has hijacked democracy: This is most evident in the insults and
patriotic gore heaped on Manning and Snowden. How else to explain, in light of
Snowden's initial disclosures about the NSA, the concern on the part of government
and intelligence agencies that his "disclosures have renewed a longstanding
concern: that young Internet aficionados whose skills the agencies need for
counterterrorism and cyber defense sometimes bring an anti-authority spirit that
does not fit the security bureaucracy."81 Joel F. Brenner, a former inspector general
of the NSA made it very clear that the real challenge Snowden revealed was to
make sure that a generation of young people were not taught to think critically or
question authority. As Brenner put it, young people who were brought into the
national security apparatus were not only selling their brains but also their

consciences. In other words, they have to "adjust to the culture" by endorsing a

regime of one that just happened to be engaging in a range of illegalities that
threatened the foundations of democracy.82 What is clear is that the corporatesecurity state provides an honorable place for intellectuals who are willing to live in
a culture of conformity. In this case as Arthur Koestler said some years ago,
conformity becomes "a form of betrayal which can be carried out with a
clear conscience." 83 At the same time, it imposes its wrath on those who reject
subordinating their consciences to the dictates of authoritarian rule. If the first task
of resistance is to make dominant power clear by addressing critically and
meaningfully the abuses perpetrated by the corporate surveillance state and how
such transgressions affect the daily lives of people in different ways, the second
step is to move from understanding and critique to the hard work of building
popular movements that integrate rather than get stuck and fixated in singleissue politics . The left has been fragmented for too long, and the time has come
to build national and international movements capable of dismantling the political,
economic and cultural architecture put in place by the new authoritarianism and its
post-Orwellian surveillance industries. This is not a call to reject identity and specialissue politics as much as it is a call to build broad-based alliances and movements,
especially among workers, labor unions, educators, youth groups, artists,
intellectuals, students, the unemployed and others relegated, marginalized and
harassed by the political and financial elite. At best, such groups should form a
vigorous and broad-based third party for the defense of public goods and the
establishment of a radical democracy. This is not a call for a party based on
traditional hierarchical structures but a party consisting of a set of alliances among
different groups that would democratically decide its tactics and strategies. Modern
history is replete with such struggles, and the arch of that history has to be carried
forward before it is too late. In a time of tyranny, thoughtful and organized
resistance is not a choice; it is a necessity. In the struggle to dismantle the
authoritarian state, reform is only partially acceptable. Surely, as Fred Branfman
argues, rolling back the surveillance state can take the form of fighting: to end bulk
collection of information; demand Congressional oversight; indict executive-branch
officials when they commit perjury; give Congress the capacity to genuinely oversee
executive agency; provide strong whistle-blower protection; and restructure the
present system of classification.84 These are important reforms worth fighting for,
but they do not go far enough. What is needed is a radical restructuring of our
understanding of democracy and what it means to bring it into being. The
words of Zygmunt Bauman are useful in understanding what is at stake in such a
struggle. He writes: "Democracy expresses itself in continuous and relentless
critique of institutions; democracy is an anarchic, disruptive element inside the
political system; essential, as a force of dissent and change. One can best recognize
a democratic society by its constant complaints that it is not democratic enough."85
What cannot be emphasized enough is that only through collective struggles can
change take place against modern-day authoritarianism. If the first order of
authoritarianism is unchecked secrecy, the first moment of resistance to such an

order is widespread critical awareness of state and corporate power and its threat to
democracy, coupled with a desire for radical change rather than reformist
corrections. Democracy involves a sharing of political existence, an embrace of the
commons and the demand for a future that cannot arrive quickly enough. In short,
politics needs a jump start, because democracy is much too important to be left to
the whims, secrecy and power of those who have turned the principles of selfgovernment against themselves.

**Framework Level**

2NC Framework
Our interpretation is that the ballot should endorse the
methodologies that are best fit to address the scope of any
given issue.
Prefer critical engagements because they start from the
malleable position of self. Only such an approach is capable of
systematically investigating and learning from a multitude of
perspectives. Yes our own predispositions exist and they
always will, but thats never an excuse to take on additional
biases (especially when they are attached to hierarchical
institutions!). Doing so only further restricts our ability to
translate knowledge into common sense.
Peter Mayo 2014GRAMSCI AND THE POLITICS OF EDUCATION Capital & Class
https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/bitstream/handle/123456789/1631/GRAMSCI-C
%20&%20C-2-2-1.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y, Mayo is a Professor in the
Department of Education Studies at the University of Malta, Malta. He is also a
member of the Collegio Docenti for the doctoral research programme in Educational
Sciences and Continuing Education at the Universit degli Studi di Verona. He
teaches in the areas of sociology of education and adult continuing education, as
well as in comparative and international education and sociology in general.
Engaging critically with work emerges clearly in Gramscis writings that are of
relevance to adult education. It is here, in adult education as an important
component of lifelong learning, where the contemporary hegemonic discourse of
employability prevails, not least in the relevant memorandum and other
communications from the European Union(CEC, 2000). The Factory Council Theory,
which Gramsci juxtaposed against the vision of trade unionism of his time, with its
image of the worker as simply wage earner bargaining within the given framework,
was intended to bring about a transformation in the nature of workers organization
and education. In Gramscis earlier writings on the issue, the councils were
conceived of as an alternative to Unions. (Gramsci, 1977: 76) After the failure of the
revolution (occupation of the factories), Gramsci began to present the factory
councils as the vehicle for transforming trade unions, as both were to work in
tandem (Gramsci, 1978: 21). Engaging critically with work meant learning
according to a broader vision of social relations, the basis of a different
state, a workers state (Gramsci, 1977: 66). It entailed operating in a manner
that was in keeping with an alternative and broader economic and social vision, one
which transcended the capitalist wage relation and therefore capitalist social
relations in general. This is an antidote to the current widespread hegemonic
situation and discourse, concerning HRD and other labour market training. The
discourse is that of learning to work within the given Capitalist framework. One

important aspect of Gramscis work, which resonates with a modern day critical
approach to education, is that of teaching against the grain (Simon, 1992). It is
precisely in the reading of Italian history that Gramsci provides some useful insights
in this regard. His reading of Italian history, and specifically the Risorgimento, with
its implications for the study and teaching of the subject, was a revelation to the
present writer. This writer was exposed to a very conventional standard and
sanitized account of the nature of the Italian unification in his schooling years as
prescribed by syllabuses for a UK based examination (GCE O level). Gramscis
exposure of the process of internal colonization that occurred in Italy through the
Risorgimento is instructive in terms of engaging with history critically and
highlighting subjugated areas of information and knowledge, as Foucault would
say. This approach once again approximates Gramscian work on the subject to that
of Italys leading critical educator, don Lorenzo Milani at the school of Barbiana.
Milani and his students also read history against the grain and echo Gramsci in their
exposure of the role of the ruling Northern bourgeoisie in the rise of fascism and the
process of colonial expansion not only internally (Italy represents a case of
internal colonialism involving North and South) but also externally . These
approaches acquired greater critical resonance in 2010, the year that marked the
150 anniversary of the socalled Italian Unification. This was evident in such works
as those by Pino Aprile (2010, 2011) who arguably provides an even more damning
account than Gramscis regarding the brutal process of Piedmontese colonization
that took place and the massacres in the South it brought about. This reading bears
affinities with Gramscis own account in terms of debunking myths concerning
Italian history. It provides a key signpost for a critical engagement with events that
underline the complexity and different levels of colonial relations, including internal
ones (that is within the same nation state). The debunking of such myths connects
with one other major area of inquiry in Gramsci proposed work fr ewig (for
eternity). viii A rigorous education in schools and various sites of learning, including
adult learning, entails systematic investigation of different social structures and
constructions of reality, as captured in Gramscis notes on the study of philosophy.
Like history, philosophy, or rather systematic investigation and inquiry,
serves as the tool to transform common sense, not to be conceived in
terms of simply false consciousness, into good sense. Common sense is a
fragmented and contradictory form of consciousness, which has its valid elements
since it connects with peoples quotidian experience. Common sense is, according
to Gramsci, a philosophy of non-philosophers (Gramsci, 1975:1396), a worldview
uncritically accepted within the various social and cultural environments that help
develop a persons moral individuality (Ibid; Borg and Mayo, 2002: 90). Gramsci
links it with popular religion and folklore, the latter consisting of beliefs, values and
norms that are uncritical, contradictory and ambiguous (Borg and Mayo, 2002:91).
Through the philosophy of praxis, this common sense can be superseded in that it
would be accorded the sort of elaboration experienced by Lutheranism and
Calvinism (they, according to Gramsci, represent the last great process of
intellectual and moral reform witnessed in Europe). It would, as a result, develop
into a superior culture (Caruso, 1997: 85, 86) or civilt. The task is to render it

coherent. The implication for effective teaching to be derived from this is that, as
with Paulo Freires (1970) pedagogy of praxis, so close in terminology to Gramscis
overarching philosophy of praxis, educators and learners need to start from
their existential situation. They then engage critically through praxis, the
obtaining of critical distance, to uncover the underlying contradictions of ones
reading of the world, history, specific situations etc. This can help a person develop
a more coherent and therefore critical view of things. The Gramscian influence on
education has affected not only people ensconced in academies but also, and
rightly so, those who operate at the grassroots, including the many popular
educators engaged in non formal education in Latin America (Gramsci is very
influential in this part of the world La Belle, 1986, Aric, 1988, Torres, 1990,
Morrow and Torres, 1995; Kane, 2001, Maritegui, 2011) and elsewhere (Latin
American influences have been taken up in other geographical contexts. E.g. The
Jesuit Centre in Toronto, Canada). Popular education has proven palatable to people
clamouring for better education at the World Social Forum or operating in non
formal and informal education within the contexts of community action and
development and social movements. A number of works, notably by Margaret
Ledwith in community development (Ledwith, 2011) and Budd Hall et al (2012) with
social movements, bridge the different domains, those of popular education, social
movements and community activism. Gramscis ideas feature prominently in all
three not only because of his direct influence on popular education but also because
of his being a highly influential figure for education in his own right. His emphasis on
rigour and the inculcation of self-discipline, as well as the acquisition of powerful
knowledge, which includes established knowledge such as the standard language,
will hopefully ensure that those engaged in these projects will keep their feet firmly
on the ground in their attempt to effectively bridge the cultural power divide. On the
other hand, and this is key, Gramsci was under no illusion regarding the ideological
bases of this knowledge. So, for instance, while he harped on needing to learn the
standard language not to remain at the periphery of political life, he constantly
demonstrated that the established Italian language was imposed in a form of
passive revolution (not rooted in popular consciousness). He indicated that there
was work to be carried out to create a national popular language born out of a
synthesis of all other spontaneous grammars quite a tall order in my view. The
inference to be drawn is that one must underscore, in the educational process, the
ideological basis of language. This entails helping the learner become aware of the
political ramifications of this choice of language. The same would hold for other
forms of powerful knowledge. Simply reproducing the dominant forms of
knowledge as if they were a given would be anathema for any form of
critical education.

Aesthetics
Aesthetic theory illuminates the human dimension of intention,
observation, and speech that inherently accompanies political
artifacts. Only such an analytical framework can liberate
subjective interpretation from the polar interface of
representation.
Jacques Rancire 2004 The Distribution of the Sensible The Politics of
Aesthetics, pp. 16-19,
https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/rancic3a8re-jacquespolitics-aesthetics-distribution-sensible-new-scan.pdf, Rancire is a French
philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris (St. Denis) who came to
prominence when he co-authored Reading Capital (1968), with the structuralist
Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser.
It is this relationship that is at stake in the supposed distinction between twodimensional and three-dimensional space as specific to a particular form of art. To
a large extent, the ground was laid for paintings anti-representative revolution by
the flat surface of the page, in the change in how literatures images function or
the change in the discourse on painting, but also in the ways in which typography,
posters, and the decorative arts became interlaced. The type of painting that is
poorly named abstract, and which is supposedly brought back to its own proper
medium, is implicated in an overall vision of a new human being lodged in new
structures, surrounded by different objects. Its flatness is linked to the flatness of
pages, posters, and tapestries. It is the flatness of an interface. Moreover, its
anti-representative purity is inscribed in a context where pure art and decorative
art are intertwined, a context that straight away gives it a political signification. This
context is not the surrounding revolutionary fever that made Malevich at once the
artist who painted Black Square and the revolutionary eulogist of [21] new forms of
life. Furthermore, this is not some theatrical ideal of the new human being that
seals the momentary alliance between revolutionary artists and politics. It is initially
in the interface created between different mediums - in the connections forged
between poems and their typography or their illustrations, between the theatre and
its set designers or poster designers, between decorative objects and poems - that
this newness is formed that links the artist who abolishes figurative representation
to the revolutionary who invents a new form of life. This interface is political in
that it revokes the twofold politics inherent in the logic of
representation. On the one hand, this logic separated the world of artistic
imitations from the world of vital concerns and politicosocial grandeur. On
the other hand, its hierarchical organization - in particular the primacy of living
speech/action over depicted images - formed an analogy with the sociopolitical order. With the triumph of the novels page over the theatrical stage, the

egalitarian intertwining of images and signs on pictorial or typographic surfaces, the

elevation of artisans art to the status of great art, and the new claim to bring art
into the dcor of each and every life, an entire well-ordered distribution of sensory
experience was overturned. [22] This is how the planarity of the surface of
depicted signs, the form of egalitarian distribution of the sensible stigmatized by
Plato, intervened as the principle behind an arts formal revolution at the same
time as the principle behind the political redistribution of shared experience. The
other major forms, among which there are those of the chorus and the theatre that I
mentioned earlier, could be considered in much the same way. A history of aesthetic
politics, understood in this sense, has to take into account the way in which
these major forms stand in opposition to one another or intermingle. I am thinking,
for example, of the way in which this paradigm of the surface of signs/forms entered
into conflict or joined forces with the theatrical paradigm of presence, and with the
diverse forms that this paradigm itself has taken on, from the Symbolist figuration
of a collective legend to the actualized chorus of a new humanity. Politics plays itself
out in the theatrical paradigm as the relationship between the stage and the
audience, as meaning produced by the actors body, as games of proximity or
distance. Mallarms critical prose writings stage, in an exemplary manner, the play
of cross-references, oppositions or assimilations between these forms, from the
intimate theatre of the page or calligraphic choreography to the new service
performed by concerts. [23] In one respect, these forms therefore appear to bring
forth, in very different contexts, figures of community equal to themselves.
However, they are susceptible to being assigned to contradictory political
paradigms. Let us take the example of the tragic stage. It simultaneously carries
with it, according to Plato, the syndrome of democracy and the power of illusion. By
isolating mimesis in its own proper space and by enclosing tragedy within a logic of
genres, Aristotle - even if this was not his intention - redefined its politicity.
Furthermore, in the classical system of representation, the tragic stage would
become the stage of visibility for an orderly world governed by a hierarchy of
subject matter and the adaptation of situations and manners of speaking to this
hierarchy. The democratic paradigm would become a monarchical paradigm . Let
us also consider the long and contradictory history of rhetoric and the model of the
good orator. Throughout the monarchical age, democratic eloquence la
Demosthenes denoted an excellence in speaking, which was itself established as
the imaginary attribute of the supreme power. It was also always receptive,
however, to the recovery of its democratic function by lending its [24] canonical
forms and its consecrated images to the transgressive appearance of unauthorized
speakers on the public stage. Let us consider as well the contradictory destinies of
the choreographic model. Recent research has evoked the metamorphoses
undergone by Labans notation of movement. It was developed in a context
favouring the liberation of bodies and became the model for the large Nazi
demonstrations before regaining, in the anti-establishment context of performance
art, a new subversive virginity. Benjamins explanation via the fatal aestheticization
of politics in the era of the masses overlooks, perhaps, the long-standing
connection between the unanimous consensus of the citizenry and the exaltation of
the free movement of bodies. In a city hostile to the theatre and to written law,

Plato recommended constantly cradling unweaned infants. I have evoked these

three forms because Plato conceptually charted them out and because they
maintain a historical constancy. They obviously do not define all of the ways that
figures of community are aesthetically designed. The important thing is that the
question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics be raised at this level,
the level of the sensible delimitation of what is common to the community, the
forms of its visibility and of its organization. [25] It is from this perspective
that it is possible to reflect on artists political interventions , starting with
the Romantic literary forms that aimed at deciphering society, the Symbolist poetics
of dreams or the Dadaist or Constructivist elimination of art, and continuing up to
the contemporary modes of performance and installation. From this perspective, it
is possible to challenge a good many imaginary stories about artistic modernity
and vain debates over the autonomy of art or its submission to politics. The arts
only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend
to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily
positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and
the invisible. Furthermore, the autonomy they can enjoy or the subversion they can
claim credit for rest on the same foundation.

Discourse
Discursive orderings constitute socio-political mediation
Alfredo Carlos 2014 Mexico Under Siege: Drug Cartels or U.S. Imperialism?
Latin American Perspectives Volume 41 Number 2, Carlos is a PhD Candidate in the
Department of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine focusing on
American Politics and Political Theory as well as an Adjunct Lecturer in Political
Science at California State University, Long Beach.
Michel Foucault (19721977: 120) argues that discourse serves to make possible a
whole series of interventions, tactical and positive interventions of surveillance,
circulation, control and so forth. Discourses generate knowledge and truth,
giving those who speak this truth social, cultural, and even political power. This
power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of
truth (Foucault, 1979: 194). For Foucault (19721977: 119), what makes power
hold good, what makes it accepted, is . . . that it traverses and produces things, it
induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. In essence, power
produces discourse that justifies, legitimates, and increases it. Similarly, Edward
Said (1994: 14), speaking in reference to literary discourse, says that literature as a
cultural form is not just about literature. It is not autonomous; rather, it is about
history and politics. He says that literature supports, elaborates, and
consolidates the practices of empire . Television, newspapers, magazines,
journals, books, advertisements, and the Internet all help construct stories,
creating cultures of us that differentiate us from them (Said, 1994:
xiii). They all elaborate and consolidate the practices of empire in multiple
overlapping discourses from which a dominant discourse emerges. Dominant
discourses are constructed and perpetuated for particular reasons. As Kevin Dunn
(2003: 6) points out, representations have very precise political consequences .
They either legitimize or delegitimize power, depending on what they are and about
whom (Said, 1994: 16). Said asserts that a narrative emerges that separates what is
nonwhite, non-Western, and non-Judeo/Christian from the acceptable Western ethos
as a justification for imperialism and the resulting policies and practices and
argues that discourse is manipulated in the struggle for dominance (36). Discourses
are advanced in the interest of exerting power over others; they tell a story that
provides a justification for action. For Said, there is always an intention or will to use
power and therefore to perpetuate some discourses at the expense of others. It is
this intentionality that makes them dangerous and powerful. As Roxanne Doty
(1996: 2) suggests, through repetition they become regimes of truth and
knowledge . They do not actually constitute truth but become accepted as such
through discursive practices, which put into circulation representations that are
taken as truth. Dominant discourses, meta-narratives (master frames that are often
unquestioned [see Klotz and Lynch, 2007]), and cultural representations are
important because they construct realities that are taken seriously and

acted upon . Cecelia Lynch (1999: 13) asserts that dominant narratives do work
even when they lack sufficient empirical evidence , to the degree that their
conceptual foundations call upon or validate norms that are deemed
intersubjectively legitimate. They establish unquestioned truths and thus provide
justification for those with power to act accordingly. They allow the production of
specific relations of power. Powerful social actors are in a prime position to construct
and perpetuate discourses that legitimize the policies they seek to establish.
Narrative interpretations dont arise out of thin air; they must be constantly
articulated, promoted, legitimized, reproduced, and changed by actual
people (Lynch, 1999). Social actors with this kind of power do this by what Doty
(1996) calls self-definition by the other. Said (1994: 52) suggests that the
formation of cultural identities can only be understood contrapuntallythat an
identity cannot exist without an array of opposites. Western1 powers, including the
United States, have maintained hegemony by establishing the other: North vs.
South, core vs. periphery, white vs. native, and civilized vs. uncivilized are identities
that have provided justifications for the white mans civilizing mission and have
created the myth of a benevolent imperialism (Doty, 1996: 11; Said, 1994: 51). The
historical construction of this other identity produces current events and policies
(Dunn, 2003). Through constant repetition, a racialized identity of the nonAmerican, barbaric other is constructed, along with a U.S. identity considered
civilized and democratic despite its engagement in the oppression, exploitation, and
brutalization of that other. Consequently, dominant discourses and metanarratives provide a veil for imperial encounters , turning them into missions
of salvation rather than conquests or, in Mexicos case, economic control (Doty,
1996). Dunn (2003: 174) suggests that dominant discourses legitimize and
authorize specific political actions, particularly economic ones.

Surveillance literatures digital contextuality riddles it with

linguistic abstractions, making discursive analysis of their
politics necessary and inevitable.
EGEMEN NLFER YUMURTACI 2003 SOCIAL POLITICAL DISCOURSE OF THE
SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY pg.14-16, A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES OF MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY,
http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/2/1001312/index.pdf, Yumurtaci graduated with a
Masters degree in Science and Technology Policy Studies from Middle East Technical
University.
Human beings interact within a set of information hierarchies . In the
hierarchical order of information process, each step can be either data or
information by the same time depending on the position, which it takes in
signification. As the information gets higher it gets more abstract as the language
we use. Computers high-level languages are similar to the daily abstractions of
language , serves for programmers. An advanced system of information process

enables users to make functional structures of relations among different information

levels. As the level of abstraction gets higher details of the data can be lost but at
the same time relevant information is conserved. There is another type of
information hierarchy at cyberspace, which is called metalanguage ; they provide
a standard set for other languages formal description. Specifically HTML (hyper text
markup language) is a subset of SGML (standard generalized markup language)
meta-language. This hypertexts enhancement made it troublesome, for users to
understand and catch what is going on, and where the necessary data located in
the computer. As the networks of information get more complex, people convinced
that there is really a huge shift in the production of information. Here, we will claim
that complex, patterns of information creation helps to persuade people that they
are experiencing a revolution which they cannot involve directly in creating, or
sharing and controlling the explosive growth of information. In fact, we can focus on
the culture at that point, which distinguishes human beings knowledge compared to
other species. Human beings learn how to act, rather than having genetic
establishments. Whenever the societies get more complex and developed,
individuals start to accumulate information, as an external extension part of their
brain, in the form of common culture. The culture is consisted of information about
different subjects established in time, which shapes social structure and at the same
time shaped by it. Language, beliefs, traditions, ideas are all included in that
formation period (Perrolle, 1996).2 The units of cultural information are the
symbols . To understand how we are directed for acceptance of a claim, a truth, we
have to examine the symbols and codes through which we are informed, and
controlled by power. In historical evolution of the society, the power was in the
hands of landlords at the period of agriculture, then the power transferred to the
capital owners. In the age of knowledge owners of information resources use these
codes, though the power is gained by production of information. Derrida (Sarup,
1993) indicated the age we live in, is more symbolic then the ages before, codes
became overwhelmed. The image production is made with generally accepted
codes of popular culture. The realm of culture became an industrial market as
defined by Adorno (Sarup, 1993) and his followers. In postmodern era the coding
and decoding concepts became popular, so that when we deal with information
society codex, discourse analysis becomes inevitable (Sarup, 1993). We will identify
important themes that weave through the literature, and track the changes in our
conceptualization of the surveillance society. After taking stock of the literature on
the information age, we will try to understand when, where, and how the
information society term actually turned into surveillance society and what forces
are behind the societal transformations we are currently witnessing, how we begin
to turn into digital persona (Clarke, 1988) 3 and been accepted as data by power
holders.

Plan Focus
Plan focus is the legalist logic of neutrality that naturalizes
violence.
Shiraz Dossa 1999 Liberal Legalism: Law, Culture and Identity, The European
Legacy, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 73-87,Dossa acquired his B.A. (Hons) in Political Science at
Makerere University. Later he earned both an MA and Ph.D. (Political theory) at the
University of Toronto.
Law's imperial reach, it massive authority, in liberal politics is a brute, recurring fact.
In Law's Empire, Dworkin attests to its scope and power with candour: "We live in
and by the law. It makes us what we are" (vii). But he fails to appreciate that law
equally traduces others, it systematically unmakes them . For Dworkin, a
militant liberal legalist, law is the insiders' domain: legal argument has to be
understood internally from the "judge's point of view"; sociological or historical
readings are irrelevant and "perverse".2 Praising the decencies of liberal law is
necessary in this world: rule of law, judicial integrity, fairness, justice are integral
facets of tolerable human life. Lawfulness is and ought to be part of any decent
regime of politics. But law's rhetoric on its own behalf systematically scants law's
violent, dark underside, it skillfully masks law's commerce with destruction
and death. None of this is visible from the internalist standpoint , and
Dworkin's liberal apologia serves to mystify the gross reality of law's empire. In
liberal political science, law's presumed, Olympian impartiality, is thus not a
contested notion. Liberals still presuppose as a matter of course the juristic
community's impartiality and neutrality, despite empirical evidence to the
contrary.3 One consequence of the assumed sanctity of the judicial torso within
the body politic, has been that law's genealogy, law's chronological disposition
towards political and cultural questions, have simply not been of interest or concern
to most liberal scholars. A further result of this attitude is the political science
community's nearly total ignorance of liberal law's complicity in western
imperialism, and in shaping western attitudes to the lands and cultures of the
conquered natives. Liberal jurisprudence's subterranean life, its invidious
consciousness is, however, not an archaic, intermittent annoyance as sensitive
liberals are inclined to think: indeed law is as potent now as it has been in last two
centuries in articulating a dismissive image of the native Other.

Role-Playing
Role-playing causes passivity, tyranny and denies agency.
Robert Antonio 1995 Nietzsches Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End
of History American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Jul., 1995), pp. 1-43, JS,
Antonio (PhD Notre Dame) specializes in social theory, macroscopic sociology, and
economy and society. His writings have focused on Marx, the Frankfurt School,
Weber, Dewey, Habermas, and others in the classical and continental tradition.
The problem of the actor, Nietzsche said, troubled me for the longest time.12
He considered roles as external, surface, or foreground phenomena and
viewed close personal identification with them as symptomatic of estrangement.
While modern theorists saw differentiated roles and professions as a matrix of
autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that persons (especially male
professionals) in specialized occupations overidentify with their positions and
engage in gross fabrications to obtain advancement. They look hesitantly to
the opinion of others, asking themselves, How ought I feel about this? They are so
thoroughly absorbed in simulating effective role players that they have trouble
being anything but actors-The role has actually become the character. This highly
subjectified social self or simulator suffers devastating inauthenticity . The
powerful authority given the social greatly amplifies Socratic cultures already selfindulgent inwardness. Integrity, decisiveness, spontaneity, and pleasure are
undone by paralyzing over concern about possible causes, meanings, and
consequences of acts and unending internal dialogue about what others might
think, expect, say, or do (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83-86; 1986, pp. 39-40; 1974, pp.
302-4, 316-17). Nervous rotation of socially appropriate masks reduces
persons to hypostatized shadows , abstracts, or simulacra. One adopts
many roles, playing them badly and superficially in the fashion of a stiff puppet
play. Nietzsche asked, Are you genuine? Or only an actor? A representative or that
which is represented? . . . [Or] no more than an imitation of an actor? Simulation is
so pervasive that it is hard to tell the copy from the genuine article; social selves
prefer the copies to the originals (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84-86; 1986, p. 136; 1974,
pp. 232- 33, 259; 1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27). Their inwardness
and aleatory scripts foreclose genuine attachment to others. This type of
actor cannot plan for the long term or participate in enduring net- works of
interdependence; such a person is neither willing nor able to be a stone in the
societal edifice (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94). Superficiality rules
in the arid subjectivized landscape. Neitzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, One thinks
with a watch in ones hand, even as one eats ones midday meal while reading the
latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always might miss out on
something. Rather do anything than nothing: this principle, too, is merely a string
to throttle all culture. . . . Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to
expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching
and anticipating others. Pervasive leveling, improvising, and faking foster an
inflated sense of ability and an oblivious attitude about the fortuitous circumstances

that contribute to role attainment (e.g., class or ethnicity). The most mediocre
people believe they can fill any position, even cultural leadership. Nietzsche
respected the self-mastery of genuine ascetic priests, like Socrates, and praised
their ability to redirect ressentiment creatively and to render the sick harmless.
But he deeply feared the new simulated versions. Lacking the born physicians
capacities, these impostors amplify the worst inclinations of the herd; they
are violent, envious, exploitative , scheming, fawning, cringing, arrogant, all
according to circumstances. Social selves are fodder for the great man of the
masses. Nietzsche held that the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely- a god,
prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. The deadly
combination of desperate conforming and overreaching and untrammeled
ressentiment paves the way for a new type of tyrant (Nietzsche 1986, pp.
137, 168; 1974, pp. 117-18, 213, 288-89, 303-4).

**Impact Level**

2NC Impact Ext

The K outweighs and turns the case
Geopolitical crises are interwoven due to the fundamentality of
mechanistic globalization. This means its try-or-die for the alt.
Nafeez Ahmed 2011 "The international relations of crisis and the crisis of
international relations"
https://www.academia.edu/1608098/The_International_Relations_of_Crisis_and_the_
Crisis_of_International_Relations_From_the_Securitisation_of_Scarcity_to_the_Militari
sation_of_Society Ahmed is the Executive Director of the Institute for Policy
Research and Development IPRD, an independent think tank focused on the study
of violent conflict.
This analysis demonstrates that climate change, energy depletion, food scarcity and
economic instability are not simply separate processes, but are fundamentally
interwoven , in such a way as to feed back into and amplify each others
regressive effects . The simultaneous global food and financial crises of 2008 were
in fact different manifestations of a deeper systemic crisis rooted in civilisational
overshoot.51 The validity of the concept of overshoot has been vindicated in
detailed comparative historical analysis of the life cycles of past civilisations,
illustrating that key factors in civilisational collapse were population growth and
mass consumption relative to available environmental and energy resources. This
perspective calls for greater attention to the limits placed by the environment on
the activities of states and societies,52 including recognition of the inherent
interrelationship of all forms of life in the context of a complex interactive planetary
environment undermining reductionist and mechanistic thinking that reifies
orthodox notions of the abstract primacy of the state.53 Currently, the structure of
global economic activity is driving the depletion of hydrocarbon and other natural
resources, simultaneously escalating greenhouse gas emissions resulting in global
warming. Both global warming and energy shocks are undermining global industrial
food production. Water shortages, floods and erratic weather have already eroded
agricultural productivity in key food-basket regions, and will do so further if global
warming continues. Looming energy shortages could also destabilise the very basis of
fossil fuel-intensive industrial agribusiness, as could rising rates of soil erosion, fresh
water consumption and environmental degradation. Accelerating hydrocarbon
energy depletion is also linked to increasing global financial and economic instability. The
global political economys vulnerability to shocks is greatly exacerbated by an
excessive reliance for growth on unregulated financial services which tend to
systematise debt. This vulnerability translates into a propensity for cyclical,
systemic economic failure in the context of inflationary energy and food price
hikes driven by a confluence of oil, land, water and climate crises. As energy
depletion continues, the destabilising effects of climate change could make the
increasing economic costs of sustaining critical infrastructures and delivering public
goods and services unsustainable.

1NC Circumvention DA
Market forces have thoroughly entrenched domestic
surveillance by liquefying it into a pool of related political
issues like the War on Terror. This means reform will be either
ineffectual, or circumvented in times of crisis.
Daniel R. Williams 2008 AVERTING A LEGITIMATION CRISIS AND THE PARADOX
OF THE WAR ON TERROR Michigan State Journal of International Law, 17 Mich. St. J.
Int'l L. 493, LexisNexis, Williams is an Associate Professor at Northeastern University
of Law in Boston, MA.
To grasp this new form of legitimation within a market state, consider sociologist
Zygmunt Bauman's thesis that we are living in liquid times, by which he means "a
condition in which social forms (structures that limit individual choices, institutions
that guard repetitions of routines, patterns of acceptable behavior) can no longer
(and are not expected to) keep their shape for long, because they melt faster than
the time it takes to cast them, and they are cast for them to set." n167 Liquid times
refer to a condition of life where long-term planning has become illusory,
unrealistic, if not impossible . n168 If Bauman is on to something in this
observation, then the repercussions for sovereignty and legitimation are profound.
Obligations that were once thought to be within the purview of the state are rapidly
being delegated to the private sphere, the market, with all the ups-and-downs
associated with market activity. n169 "The vagaries of the market," Bauman
observes, "[are] notorious for playing havoc with social standings and for sapping
rights to social esteem and personal dignity," and thus exposes a society to a
Habermasian legitimation crisis. n170 "The absence of political control makes the
newly emancipated powers into a source of profound and in principle untameable
uncertainty, while the dearth of power makes the extant political institutions . . .
less and less relevant to the life problems of the nation-state's citizens . . . ." n171
This untameable uncertainty is profound in [*525] what it portends because the
nature of communal life, the solidarity that enriches it and makes change possible,
is threatened. As Bauman puts it, "Individual exposure to the vagaries of
commodity-and-labour markets inspires and promotes division, not unity: it puts a
premium on competitive attitudes, while degrading collaboration and team work to
the rank of temporary stratagems . . . ." n172 Society loses its structure and
becomes more like a network. n173 In a world of market states, the State averts a
legitimation crisis that arises from deep uncertainty by assuring the populace
through acts of sovereignty that it can keep society safe from a plethora of
dangers, terrorism being the most dramatic. n174 This puts a whole different spin
on the sociological observation that the more the State withdraws in favor of the
market, which provokes a mood of precariousness, the greater it hinges its
legitimacy on the providing of security. n175 And the greater the unwillingness or
inability of the State to provide for the material well-being of the populace, the
greater the insistence that society is beset by external threats and dangers. n176 In
this globalization environment, with the rise of market states, where society is "now

exposed to the rapacity of forces it does not control and no longer hopes or intends
to recapture and subdue," the State in these liquid times "can hardly manage to be
anything other than a personal safety state." n177 Bauman's liquid-times thesis
could suggest that terrorism is a gift of sorts, n178 for its very existence promotes
the State's ability to avert a legitimation crisis that itself arises from the [*526]
State's inability to tame the unpredictability of a world dominated by market forces.
n179 Terrorism gives a market state its raison d'etre. The radical nature of this view
of terrorism--the almost unmentionable notion that terrorism actually benefits the
State in these liquid times, where the threat of a legitimation crisis is acute--throws
an entirely different light on the War on Terror. The War on Terror emerges as an
essential facet of the State's legitimation as it takes on the character of a massive
program for risk management, the largest within a larger bundle of programs that
serve to manage a whole host of risks within our risk society. n180 Bobbitt identifies
something akin to this when he says that twenty-first century warfare is unlikely to
involve decisive battles that we associate with conventional wars. n181 Warfare in
the twenty-first century will develop into a mechanism for "prevent[ing] . . .
intolerable situations," n182 which is why military endeavors seem to be taking on
the feel of policing operations where the name of the game is to impose and
preserve law and order. n183 The War on Terror itself, Bobbitt observes, "is coming
into being owing to the market state's requirement that it be able to [*527] prevent
or mitigate certain otherwise unavoidable and intolerable civilian catastrophes."
n184 This clearer understanding of a newly emerging foundation for legitimation of
market states helps clarify what might be signified in the assertion, winning the War
on Terror: "When we are able to appreciate the new basis for legitimation of the
State, we shall also be able to portray the changing nature of victory in the period
ahead." n185 Winning the War on Terror in these liquid times "will be measured in
large part by the prevailing sense of psychological well-being of [market state]
citizens." n186 Winning, in other words, is a function of managing risks. Even
though the trend in the twenty-first century is markedly in the direction away from
the social-welfare state and towards the emergence of market states, the challenge
of averting a legitimation crisis will likely retain a key feature from the twentieth
century--namely, the need to preserve the image of America as free and open,
because freedom and openness are identity-creating attributes of our nation that
enliven American Exceptionalism; and American Exceptionalism is what obscures
the purpose behind and the baleful effects of U.S. militarism and the construction
and management of a particular world order. n187 But preserving the image, let
alone the reality, of America as an open society may prove to be too much for us to
bear, because the essential dichotomies that structure the way we understand
societal openness are crumbling: In the current climate the familiar distinctions
between foreign and domestic, national and international, intelligence gathering
and criminal prosecution, the military and the police, and the public and the private
are increasingly blurred. With increased internationalization and globalization . . .
the meaning of national borders and foreign and domestic actions is less clear . . . .
The emphasis on prevention blurs the line between intelligence and
crime-fighting activities and weakens the tradition of a predicate before
invasive surveillance is undertaken . Government intelligence and security

contracting with the private sector and greater government access to what had
been private and private sector data . . . muddies the line between the public and
the private. n188 [*528] Societal openness has mutated into vulnerability, where
globalization has pried open societies such that they are unable to decide their own
course with any degree of certainty: "Once a precious yet frail product of brave
though stressful self-assertion, the attribute of 'openness' is mostly associated these
days with an irresistible fate . . . ." n189 Secrecy, then, seems to be the only way to
avert a national identity crisis. The historical record suggests as much. Ineluctably
associated with domestic surveillance, infiltration, espionage, and other
governmental abuses against Americans who assemble to raise consciousness and
press for social change is secrecy. That is why the story of U.S. governmental
abuses in the name of national security is necessarily a story of governmental
secrecy. "Underlying all the Cold War abuses and excesses at home and abroad,"
Schwarz and Huq write, "was the assumption that the government's role would
remain forever secret." n190 That assumption emboldened government actors at all
levels to do things that are shameful and revolting to an open society. That
assumption gave comfort to high-level officials in the executive branch who rebelled
against the very notion that anything within the purview of national security ought
to be part of congressional oversight. n191 That assumption permitted the
"submerging in shadow entire programs, sweeping policy changes, important shifts
in law, or acts that subvert the ideals of America." n192 That assumption, Schwarz
and Huq bluntly assert, permitted the creation of a secret police state within the
United States. n193 In sum, sober reflections on U.S. governmental abuses in the
twentieth century reveal a dual impetus for the creation of a shadow government,
Schwarz and Hug's secret police state: on the one hand, to quell social movements
that, primarily through consciousness-raising activities, threaten the status quo
(characterized as threats--most notably, communist threats), and on the other hand,
to preserve the image that we are a nation committed to certain identitycreating values . Ideals and practices cannot be seen to conflict too deeply: how
the government responds to threats (governmental practices) must not be [*529]
understood as actually conflicting with the values we regard as defining who we are
as a nation (ideals). n194 And so a fatuous comment like this one, from former
Assistant Attorney General and now law professor Viet Dinh, is both comforting and
entirely expected: "the tradeoff between security and liberty is a false choice"
because our pursuit of security is defined by a single motivation, the creation of a
secure space for liberty to thrive. n195 Bobbitt helpfully reminds us that we ought
not to confuse secret operations with secret policies. n196 No one disputes that
certain governmental operations require some degree of secrecy--how much is
debatable and varies with the circumstances. "What the American system does not
tolerate is secret policies." n197 Lichtblau's narrative is replete with anecdotes
showing that what the Bush Administration pursued were secret policies--for
example, Bush telling the public that the government was in no way engaging in
warrantless domestic surveillance, despite the fact that he authorized a policy to
bypass the warrant requirement. n198 The entire thrust of Schwarz and Huq's
critique [*530] of the War on Terror is predicated on the secrecy of government
policies in the Bush Administration. n199 Linking secrecy to the idea of a

legitimation crisis reveals that secrecy itself is not the critical phenomenon; it is the
epiphenomenon to the more critical fact that governmental abuses are kept hidden
from the public precisely to conceal the subversion of those values that constitute a
society's identity, and thus to avoid a legitimation crisis. Schwarz and Huq cite
several historical episodes that illuminate this linkage. For example, as we moved
closer to entering World War II, the FBI, under President Roosevelt's direction,
expanded its investigatory reach, searching out subversives (read: political radicals
and anti-war activists) to monitor. J. Edgar Hoover insisted on "the utmost secrecy"
in this expanded domestic surveillance program "in order to avoid criticism or
objections." n200 In 1957, the CIA's Inspector General warned that its activities
must be kept secret not only from "foreign enemies" (for the most part, a legitimate
motivation for secrecy), but "from the American public in general," as "[t]he
knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have
serious repercussions. . . ." n201 The serious repercussions flow from losing the
moral high ground--the moral high ground being foundational to legitimation and
the losing of it in many ways the source of our national paralysis--as Bobbitt
observes: If government is not trusted, its claim to the moral "high ground" will not
be accepted. Without the moral high ground, the difficult problem of relying on
secret intelligence as the basis for profound strategic choices becomes, for the
states of consent, a virtually impossible challenge because the skeptical public--in
the absence of an actual attack--cannot be brought to support the decisions of a
government that it does not trust. n202 Bobbitt's emphasis on trust in formulating
and implementing an effective War on Terror policy illuminates why Lichtblau is
saying something important when he concludes that "[s]ecrecy was both the Bush
administration's rhapsody and its ruin." n203 Officials at the highest levels of
government were kept in the dark about the NSA domestic spying program--Tom
Ridge, former Secretary of Homeland Security, [*531] was kept in the dark, for
example, as was Pentagon counsel responsible for supervising the NSA, Richard
Shiffrin n204 --and for good reason. The program was illegal, and the political
architects of it understood it to be so--hence, President Bush's overt lie to a crowd in
Buffalo, New York, that his Administration has never, and would not, circumvent
FISA. n205 The NSA surveillance program, initiated twenty-three days after the 9/11
attacks, n206 authorized the use of the most sophisticated military technology
available to engage in wiretapping and other surveillance of U.S. citizens outside of
any juridical sanction or review. n207 This was no law enforcement surveillance--the
FBI is the agency that conducts such surveillance in federal investigations, and its
conduct is regulated by, among other things, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution--but rather military surveillance of U.S. citizens within the United States
itself. n208 Lichtblau and his reporting partner James Risen explained that one facet
of the NSA domestic spy program--the full scope of that program, or the actual
existence of all surveillance programs, remains, to this day, unclear n209 --involved
the CIA acquiring names, phone numbers, and addresses through its own counterterrorism operations and then turning that information over to the NSA, which in
turn monitors those individuals tied to those numbers and addresses, and then
individuals linked to these second-layer individuals are monitored to create a third
layer of surveillance targets, and so on. n210 How far out the ripples go--how many
layers of surveillance targets there are--is still secret. n211 But given the likely

audience for this article, it is worth pointing out that "military personnel . . .
attended academic conferences and tracked participants' public statements." n212
One such conference, Schwarz and Huq note, took place at the University of Texas
Law School. n213 Schwarz and Huq supplement Lichtblau's narrative with other
marvelous details about the surveillance programs, and most [*532] importantly,
clarify certain key points. First, they document that surveillance is not only
conducted by the NSA, but by other military-intelligence agencies: "The NSA is
merely one of several military agencies, all under the aegis of the executive branch,
that engage in domestic spying." n214 But precisely what other military-intelligence
agencies are engaged in domestic surveillance remains a mystery, not only to the
public at large, but to most government officials. n215 Second, they rightfully
underscore that the surveillance is conducted primarily by the military wing of our
government, not by a law enforcement agency (though the FBI has also been
actively engaged in domestic surveillance), thus vindicating the fear that the War on
Terror is provoking a militarization of our domestic environment. Third, they explain
that the fruits of military-intelligence surveillance of Americans are not kept within a
single agency, at least until some genuine connection to terrorism can be made, to
ensure that those fruits do not affect non-terrorism-related decision making:
"political appointees with no intelligence responsibilities can access NSA intercepts,"
as happened when John Bolton "circumvented privacy protections" while he was at
the State Department by getting NSA-captured communications involving
Americans, including their names. n216 Citing Newsweek, Schwarz and Huq point
out that "between January 2004 and May 2005, the NSA supplied executive branch
policymakers with the names of about ten thousand American citizens."

2NC Circumvention DA
Empirics overwhelmingly prove that your 1AC will do nothing
to change the insidious practices of our government. Secrecy
and scope make curtailing domestic surveillance impossible.
Daniel R. Williams 2008 AVERTING A LEGITIMATION CRISIS AND THE PARADOX
OF THE WAR ON TERROR Michigan State Journal of International Law, 17 Mich. St. J.
Int'l L. 493, LexisNexis, Williams is an Associate Professor at Northeastern University
of Law in Boston, MA.
IV. WE'VE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE--AT LEAST THE PREVIEWS The message behind
Lichtblau's story of fear and angst, of lies and secrecy, is ultimately optimistic. It is a
story of the need for courage within the press corps to fight against the cynical
shut-up-or-you'll-have-blood-on-your-hands arguments that the secrecy-loving
governmental architects of the War on Terror cavalierly hurl. n105 With that courage
and with the fortitude to push for openness, journalists can save us from recklessly
sacrificing our identity-creating values and thereby destroying ourselves from
within. n106 Pollyannaish or not, Lichtblau's narrative elides how deeply secrecy is
imbedded in our government and where that penchant for secrecy comes from. In
this crucial sense, Schwarz and Huq's book completes a picture that Lichtblau
leaves incomplete (and that Bobbitt meekly gestures at but never seriously
attempts to present). We need only examine the historical record of the Cold War,
the civil rights and women's rights movement, the anti-war movement, and other
grassroots movements--as Schwarz and Huq do n107 --to see that secret
surveillance has been a mighty temptation for our government, well
before al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism intruded into our cultural
vocabulary. n108 State surveillance routinely is rhetorically justified with [*516]
claims that the populace is endangered by some catastrophic threat--even to the
absurdity of characterizing Martin Luther King, Jr. as a subversive who was an
authentic, imminent threat to our national security. n109 Schwarz and Huq lucidly
present the documentary record of the FBI's attitude towards and fear of King and
the civil rights movement, even to the point of characterizing King and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (King's organization) as a hate group. n110 That
King was an outspoken advocate for nonviolence was irrelevant, since he could at
any moment, according to FBI documents, "abandon his supposed 'obedience' to
white liberal doctrines (nonviolence)." n111 The possibility that this "demagogue,"
this "most dangerous and effective Negro leader," could at some point turn hateful
was enough to launch a clandestine governmental operation to destroy him,
including an effort to drive him to suicide. n112 What is crucial here is the
malleability of the notion of what is a threat. The historical record reveals, quite
unambiguously, that a threat has come to mean virtually any grassroots movement
that might lead to meaningful, deep-seated social change. n113 Nothing else can
explain the FBI's well-documented surveillance of Dr. King and its hyperbolic regard
for him as America's preeminent and most dangerous subversive. n114 The
government's intense effort to derail the civil rights movement and destroy Martin
Luther King was motivated by the obsessive need to squelch even the possibility of

a political consciousness among African-Americans and other minority groups that

arguably undermined American-style capitalism. n115 It was not the prospect of
violence that prompted the secret surveillance and espionage against King and the
civil rights movement; it was the frightening prospect that his oratory and
leadership could incite a collapse of state legitimacy--Habermas's legitimation crisis
n116 --which can be the precursor of meaningful change. n117 FBI documents
speak of King as the [*517] potential messiah with the oratorical skills and charisma
that could "unify and electrify" the "black nationalist movement." n118 It is crucial
to underscore that possibility was enough to trigger action: the FBI concluded that
communist influences on the consciousness of African-Americans "one day could
become decisive." n119 The abuses of COINTELPRO and CIA domestic spying, also
well documented and well known, though largely marginalized as an exceptional
moment of irrational panic brought on by a highly politicized time, n120 were
brought on by the notion that foreigners could and possibly did promote a dissident
consciousness among disaffected persons and groups within this country. n121 The
CIA's Operation CHAOS, a domestic spying operation, was launched because
Presidents Johnson and Nixon suspected foreign influence on the anti-war
movement in America. n122 The more well-known FBI's COINTELPRO, initially
launched in 1956 to disrupt the Communist Party in the U.S., quickly evolved into a
secret and systematic CIA-style covert action program to sabotage progressive
political activity within this country, n123 for fear that authentic social movements
could lead to a heightened political consciousness deemed less-than-congenial to
the status quo of rising corporate capitalism. n124 COINTELPRO went far beyond
surveillance. It involved highly developed tactics of infiltrating peace and social
justice groups--the most prominent, aside from the civil rights, women's rights, and
anti-war movements, was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)--and
fomenting discord within them to corrode their effectiveness. n125 When it came to
disrupting the Black [*518] Panther Party, an organization much feared by the FBI,
the fomenting even took the form of triggering unrest, violence, and even murder.
n126 The FBI's ability to disrupt and destroy movements for social change
depended on its ability to engage in warrantless wiretapping and mail-openings.
n127 And when that ability was impeded by virtue of public awareness and outcry,
those same illegal activities were taken up by our military intelligence agencies,
such as the CIA and the NSA (with the assistance of the major cable companies).
n128 The Bush Administration's insistence on wiretapping Americans without
judicial oversight is not at all a new phenomenon, as Schwarz and Huq assiduously
document: For fifty years, the federal government secretly sought to
preserve its power to wiretap and bug Americans without a warrant from a
court. After the Supreme Court began requiring warrants, presidents and attorneys
general secretly ordered the FBI to continue using electronic surveillance without
warrants, claiming exceptions to the Supreme Court decisions under the usual
elastic terms such as "national security." n129 National security is another thoughtstopping term in this historical narrative. All of the surveillance and espionage
activities directed at social movements and individuals who we might call changeagents were justified on grounds of national security. Much of Schwarz and Huq's
book is devoted to showing just how dangerously elastic that notion is. n130 Some

fruits of the FBI's surveillance efforts, called for by national security advisor Henry
Kissinger (and thus, purportedly justified on national security grounds), were routed
directly to Nixon's political advisor, H.R. Haldeman--hardly a clearer symbol could be
conjured up of the empty gesture that is the national security justification. n131
Perhaps most sobering is the FBI's secret list of 26,000 citizens--including highly
prominent individuals (among them, Martin Luther King)--who were to be seized and
detained in a national emergency, presumably a situation where deep-seated social
change--that [*519] is, change that threatens existing orchestrations of wealth and
privilege--is about to take place. n132 Surrendering to the surveillance
temptation , which spilled into espionage operations, through monarchical power
during the Cold War period and the heady days of the Sixties was itself hardly
something new . The famous Palmer Raids, led by J. Edgar Hoover as head of the
Justice Department's General Intelligence Division, reflected a governmental
enthusiasm for eradicating so-called threats to the status quo by means that betray
what we profess to be our constitutional values. n133 Hoover sounded like John Yoo
and other architects of the current monarchical vision of the Executive, asserting
that bogging down efforts to detain domestic enemies with things like access to
lawyers would, to use the tired shibboleth, "defeat the ends of justice." n134 True,
the unrestrained pursuit of domestic enemies in the Palmer Raids led to handwringing and angst among some notable constitutional heavyweights--Felix
Frankfurter, Roscoe Pound, Zachariah Chafee. n135 But nothing lasting came of
it , if we judge those events by what happened shortly afterward. We know that
Hoover went on to put his stamp onto the newly formed FBI. n136 President Franklin
Roosevelt directed the FBI to engage in surveillance to root out subversives within
our shores, with virtually no public debate or discussion over what exactly
subversion encompasses. n137 Illegal warrantless wiretapping, Roosevelt said, was
no impediment to doing precisely that when "grave matters involving the defense of
the nation" were involved. n138 What the FBI needed to do to carry out Roosevelt's
directive must be kept secret, Hoover insisted. n139 Secret, even with respect to
Congress. n140 Then came the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), formed in the
wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor--which was understood to have occurred due to a
major failure in intelligence gathering--and designed to help in the war effort during
WWII. n141 Disbanding OSS after the [*520] War, President Truman ushered in the
National Security Act, which created the modern-day national security apparatus:
DOD, NSC, and CIA. n142 The overt motivation was a familiar one: we needed a
secret security apparatus to prevent another Pearl Harbor. n143 It soon became
evident that the watchword was national security. If national security is
threatened, intelligence gathering and surveillance would be permitted ,
and these activities would be conducted without meaningful oversight or
democratic control . What developed, in short, was a shadow government, which
Schwarz and Huq call a "secret police state." n144 The upshot of that shadow
government is the perennial threat of a militarized domestic environment. A window

into the mindset of this shadow government is captured in a statement from the socalled Doolittle Commission Report--a secret 1954 report to President Dwight
Eisenhower concerning covert operations--where the Commission spoke of the
"implacable enemy" we faced, an enemy seeking "world domination," and a
struggle that had "no rules" and required, for our very survival, a relaxation of
"acceptable norms of human conduct" so that we could be "more ruthless than [our
enemies]." n145 This language of the Doolittle Commission itself evokes one point
of this article, that the current War on Terror is not properly severable from past
crises.

Epistemology DA
Instrumental rationality homogenizes education into a tool of
neoliberal control. By excluding critical imaginations it subtly
renders evil banal, paving the road towards fascism. Simply
put, THE EPISTEMIC ROOTS OF THEIR POLITICS CANNOT BE
TRUSTED!
Henry A. Giroux 2014 Data Storms and the Tyranny of Manufactured Forgetting
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24550-data-storms-and-the-tyranny-ofmanufactured-forgetting Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department
and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University.
It bears repeating: reality is now shaped by the cultures infatuation with a narrow,
depoliticizing rationality, or what Frankfurt School theorist Max Horkheimer called
instrumental reason . Bruce Feiler, writing in The New York Times, argues that
not only are we awash in data, but words and "unquantifiable arenas like history,
literature, religion, and the arts are receding from public life, replaced by
technology, statistics, science, and math. Even the most elemental form of
communication, the story, is being pushed aside by the list."[19] Historical memory
and public space are indeed the first casualties in this reign of ideological tyranny,
which models agency only on consumerism and value only on exchange value. The
cult of the measurable is enthralled by instant evaluation, and fervently believes
that data hold the key to our collective fate. John Steppling sums up the
authoritarian nature of this ideological colonization and monopoly of the present. He
writes: Today, the erasure of space is linked to the constant hum of data
information, of social networking, and of the compulsive repetition of the same.
There is no space for accumulation in narrative. Emotional or intellectual
accumulation is destroyed by the hyper-branded reality of the Spectacle . So,
the poor are stigmatized for sleep. It is a sign of laziness and sloth. Of lassitude and
torpor. The ideal citizen is one at work all the time. Industrious and attentive to the
screen image or the sound of command. Diligence has come to mean a readiness to
obey. A culture of shaming and reprimand is based on a model of reality in which
there is no history to reflect upon. Todays mass culture only reinforces this. The
"real" is a never changing present. Plots revolve around the idea of disrupting this
present, and then returning to this present. Actual tragedy, Chernobyl or Bhopal or
Katrina, are simply ignored in terms of their material consequences. What matters
are events that disrupt the Empire's carefully constructed present reality.[20] It gets
worse. Within this reality, endlessly hawked by a neoliberal brand of
authoritarianism, people are turned into nothing more than "statistical units."
Individuals and marginalized groups are all but stripped of their humanity, thereby
clearing the way for the growth of a formative culture that allows individuals to
ignore the suffering of others and to "escape from unbearable human
dilemmas . . . . Statistics become more important than real human life."[21]
Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyons have connected the philosophical implications of
experiencing a reality defined by constant measurement to how most people now

allow their private expressions and activities to be monitored by the authoritarian

security-surveillance state.[22] No one is left unscathed. In the current historical
conjuncture, neoliberalisms theater of cruelty joins forces with new
technologies that can easily "colonize the private" even as it holds
sacrosanct the notion that any "refusal to participate in the technological
innovations and social networks (so indispensable for the exercise of social and
political control) . . . becomes sufficient grounds to remove all those who lag behind
in the globalization process (or have disavowed its sanctified idea) to the margins of
society."[23] Inured to data gathering and number crunching, the countrys slide
into authoritarianism has become not only permissible, but participatory - bolstered
by a general ignorance of how a market-driven culture induces all of us to sacrifice
our secrets, private lives and very identities to social media, corporations and the
surveillance state.[24] Ignorance finds an easy ally in various elements of popular
culture, such as the spectacle of reality TV, further encouraging the embrace of a
culture in which it is no longer possible to translate private troubles into public
concerns. On the contrary, reveling in private issues now becomes the grounds for
celebrity status, promoting a new type of confessional in which all that matters is
interviewing oneself endlessly and performing private acts as fodder for public
consumption. Facebook "likes," lists of "friends" and other empty data reduce our
lives to numbers that now define who we are. Technocratic rationality rules
while thoughtful communication , translated into data without feeling, meaning
or vision, withers. Lacking any sense of larger purpose, it is not surprising that
individuals become addicted to outrageous entertainment and increasingly listen to
and invest their hopes in politicians and hatemongers who endlessly lie, trade in
deceit and engage in zombie-like behavior, destroying everything they touch. Of
course, the confessional society does more than produce its own private data storm
and exhibit a narcissistic obsession with performing publicly the most personal and
intimate elements of the self; it also allows one to flee from any sense of moral
responsibility or genuine friendship. Moreover, it is complicit with a surveillance
state in which, as Zygmunt Bauman observes social networks offer a cheaper,
quicker, more thorough and altogether easier way to identify and locate current or
potential dissidents than any of the traditional instruments of surveillance . . . A true
windfall for every dictator and his secret services."[25] The reign of ignorance now
produces a flood of discourse that clouds understanding and offers up disingenuous
politicians and anti-public intellectuals who constantly interview themselves as they
move through diverse media sites. Under such circumstances, evil becomes
banal or commonplace , as Arendt pointed out, setting the stage for fascism
when it becomes difficult "to imagine what the other person is experiencing."[26]
That is, a society of ignorance that idealizes obedience and embraces a culture of
cruelty and oppression has moved dangerously close to the kind of total moral
collapse that gives rise to authoritarian regimes. It does not seem unreasonable to
conclude at this point that critical thinking as a mode of reasoning is
nearing extinction in both the wider society and the sphere of public schooling

and higher education in the United States. Stanley Aronowitz has written that
critical thought has lost its contemplative character and "has been debased to the
level of technical intelligence, subordinate to meeting operational problems."[27]
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the reactionary reforms being pushed on
public schooling. President Obama's educational policies along with the Common
Core curriculum created by Bill Gates-funded consultants are devoid of any critical
content and reduce pedagogy to the dictates of instrumental standards alone.
Education subjected to endless empirical assessment results only in a high-stakes
testing mania - a boon, of course, for the test industries, but a devastating loss for
teacher and student autonomy. In this instance, student achievement and learning
are reduced to data that are completely divorced from "the inequalities of race,
class and educational opportunity reflected in . . . test scores."[28] Under the
auspices of quality control, the cult of data and high-stakes testing becomes a
signpost for empirical madness and number crunching run amok. "Teaching to the
test" more often than not results in miseducating students while undermining any
possibility of expanding their sense of wonder, imagination, critique and social
responsibility. Left unchecked, instrumental rationality parading as educational
reform will homogenize all knowledge and meaning, as it becomes a machine for
proliferating forms of civic and social death, deadening the spirit with the weight of
dead time and a graveyard of useless testing pedagogies.What does this have to do
with the suppression of historical consciousness and the death of politics in the
broader culture? The answer becomes clearer when we analyze the relationships
among critical thinking, historical consciousness, and the notions of social and selfemancipation. If we think of emancipation as both a mode of critical understanding
and a form of action designed to overthrow structures of domination, we can begin
to illuminate the interplay between historical consciousness, critical thinking and
emancipatory behavior. At the level of understanding, critical thinking represents
the ability to step beyond commonsense assumptions and to be able to evaluate
them in terms of their genesis, development and purpose. Such thinking should not
be viewed simply as a form of progressive reasoning; it must be considered in itself
as a fundamental political act. In this perspective, critical thinking becomes a mode
of reasoning that, as Merleau-Ponty points out, is embedded in the realization that "I
am able," meaning that one can use individual capacities and collective
possibilities "to go beyond the created structures in order to create
others." [29] Critical thinking as a political act means that human beings must
emerge from their own submersion and acquire the ability to intervene in reality as
it is unveiled.[30] Not only does this instil a sense that they must work with others
to actively shape history, but it also means that they must "escape" from their own
history - that is, the history which society has designated for them. As Jean Paul
Sartre writes, " you become what you are in the context of what others
have made of you." [31] This is a crucial point, and one that links critical agency
and historical consciousness. For we must turn to history in order to understand the
traditions that have shaped our individual biographies and relationships with other
human beings. This critical attentiveness to one's own history and culture
represents an important element in examining the socially constructed sources

underlying one's formative processes. To become aware of the processes of

historical self-formation initiates an important beginning in breaking apart the
taken-for-granted assumptions that legitimize social injustice and existing
institutional arrangements. Therefore, critical thinking demands a form of
hermeneutic understanding that is historically grounded. Similarly, it must be
stressed that the capacity for a historically grounded critique is inseparable from
those conditions that foster collective communication and critical dialogue. In this
case, such conditions take as a starting point the need to delegitimize the
culture of neoliberalism and the socio-economic structure it supports ,
particularly what might be called a pernicious notion of instrumental rationality,
with its one-sided emphasis on mathematical utility, numbers, data and the cult of
the empirical.

Ethics
Reject on ethics
Slavoj iek and Glynn Daly 2004 Conversations with iek pp. 14-16, iek
is a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University
of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is also the international director of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities and a professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the
European Graduate School. Daly is a Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Arts
and Social Sciences at University College, Northampton.
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern
protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the
constitutive violence of todays global capitalism and its obscene
naturalization / anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it
throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture
with all its pieties concerning multiculturalist etiquette Zizek is arguing for a
politics that might be called radically incorrect in the sense that it break with these
types of positions 7 and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of todays
social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and
subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been bedeviled by an almost fetishistic
economism that has tended towards political morbidity. With the likes of Hilferding
and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffee, crucial theoretical advances
have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this
new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is
almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties
surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with
economic reality and as a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of
existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up
reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e.
the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any
kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizeks point is rather that in rejecting
economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the
lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we
should not overlook Marxs central insight that in order to create a universal global
system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its
construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently
denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the
gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose universalism
fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes
vast sectors of the worlds populations . In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to
naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they
were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral market place.
Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central
capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social
exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global

poverty and degraded life-chances cannot be calculated within the existing

economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and
nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the developing world). And Zizeks
point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalisms profound
capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity : to redirect (or misdirect)
social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation.
Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism
that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. Against
this Zizek argues for a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is to
confront the fact that our forms of social existence are founded on exclusion on a
global scale.g While it is perfectly true that universalism can never become
Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-particular embodiment in order to
have any meaning), what is novel about Zizeks universalism is that it would not
attempt to conceal this fact or reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a
glitch in an otherwise sound matrix.

Root Cause
Neoliberalism is the root cause of global and domestic
surveillance networks
-

Taxes (Sweden, United Kingdom)

Fiscal Crisis (Russia, Australia)
Regulating speculative financial markets (United States)
Policing (Japan, Singapore)

Stephen Gill 1995 The Global Panopticon? The Neoliberal State, Economic Life,
and Democratic Surveillance Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 20, No. 1
(Jan.-Mar. 1995), pp. 1-49, JSTOR, Gill is a Professor of Political Science at York
University in Ontario, Canada.
Panopticon is a Greek composite term that means "sees all." Foucault described the
principle of panopticism as "ensuring a surveillance which would be both global and
individualising whilst at the same time keeping the individuals under observation"
(through the illumination of space) .21 Bentham's blueprint for The Panopticon or
the Inspection House is well known. It was intended to ensure, through the allseeing and dominating eye of the warder from a central watchtower, a transparency
that would also cause the inmates of the prison to exercise self-discipline that is to
act, as it were, as surrogate warders. It depended on the actuality, or possibility of
constant surveillance - a method that made the technology of surveillance
apparently both economical and effective over a large subject population. The
panopticon was never built; it was, like the economics of Adam Smith, more of an
"imaginary machine," designed in the spirit of Newton. As Foucault understood it,
the panopticon made power both visible and unverifiable. However, some
Foucauldians have suggested that things have gone further, to the point where
surveillance is increasingly being built into the labor process as well as the financial
(or actuarial) structures: it has become, in this context, both more visible and more
verifiable.22 The panopticon idea therefore antedates both the development of
modern bureaucratic systems and the use of technical innovations of individual and
mass surveillance and data collection, such as computer data bases, satellites, barcode scanners, and telecommunications intercepts, associated, for example, with
the secret National Security Administration (NSA) of the United States. Some of this
type of surveillance technology may be quite beneficial, for example, in verifying
arms control agreements, in monitoring the ecosphere, in depleting rain forests, in
predicting climate patterns, and so on. Of course, in no society is there - or can
there be - a single all-seeing eye, although some societies seem to approach a
broad surveillance condition with regard to certain aspects of state activity. A
number of concerns are raised here, insofar as a democratic society requires a
certain degree of transparency and accountability in the creation, storage, and use
of a wide range of personal information. Such information would be necessary for
the government to function efficiently as an allocator and user of social resources,
as well as an agency of regulation and planning. For example, in Sweden there is
broad support for the idea that there should be no free riders and that everyone
should pay a fair share of taxes and support social welfare programs. As David
Flaherty has argued, this goes with the ideas of publicly and privately mandated

data collection: In Swedish society . . . there is less privacy available for an

individual to enjoy than in other western societies (outside Scandinavia). ... A
central national data bank, known as SPAR, contains for each person such varied
data as name, PIN [personal identification number], address, citizenship, marital
status, assessed income, taxable capital, and possession of real property. A person's
income and net worth, for example, are regularly published commercially at the
county level from public records; such data have practical applications, such as
checking creditworthiness, but they can also serve to satisfy a large dose of
individual curiosity However, this is not the "1984" type situation Flaherty seems to
imply in his book. This is because. Swedish society is largely democratic, pluralistic,
and tolerant. The Swedish practices noted above rest upon a broad-based social
consensus, which is largely egalitarian in outlook and is premised upon the idea that
no responsible citizen should have anything significant to hide from anyone else.
Not all of the applications of such technologies are as democratic, accountable, and
socially consensual as in the Swedish case. Indeed, the situation seems replete with
ambiguities with regard to constitutional freedoms in the countries of the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In other contexts
- for example, in Singapore and some East Asian societies where political dissent or
variations in life-styles are not tolerated - this type of social transparency and
surveillance is more clearly repressive. Nevertheless, there seems to be a
growing tendency toward the increasing use of surveillance capabilities
by liberal democratic states to regulate the new market society and to
exercise social control in a period of rapid social change.24 One hypothesis that
might help to explain this tendency refers to the interplay between fiscal crisis and
the globalization of financial markets. The rapid globalization of finance from the
1970s onward occurred in the context of short-term elements such as the recycling
of petrodollars in the Euromarkets following the first oil crisis in 1973, and in a more
conjunctural sense to the onset of "stagflation" and a general economic slowdown in
the 1970s. In this context, there was a growing tendency worldwide toward a fiscal
crisis of the state as tax revenues rose more slowly than the cost of government
expenditures such as unemployment and social insurance. This situation was
manifest at all levels of government, from municipal to federal (the first major
instance of the fiscal crisis of the state in the United States was in New York City in
1975). The counterpart to this development in the Third World was the so-called
"debt crisis." Partly because of the growth in the international mobility of capital,
governments were pressured into providing an investment climate judged attractive
by global standards (and the private credit rating agencies were often the arbiters
of government creditworthiness). In the 1980s an emphasis existed on the
restructuring of the state through the tactics of marketization and privatization. The
1980s saw a period of competitive tax-cutting initiated by the supplyside policies of
the Reagan administration asit sought to "reinvent" government. This forced other
states to respond by cutting their taxes or risk losing investment or financial
services business to lower tax jurisdictions. Moreover, as economic stagnation
continued, governments have had to pay increased attention to collecting tax
revenues (and raising cash through privatization) in an age where the ideology (but

not the reality) of the balanced budget (or of "financial stringency" and "prudence")
has come to prevail in economic discourse. Especially in North America, levels of
unemployment as well as household indebtedness rose, particularly in the 1980s.
These developments, along with reforms in social security and tax administration,
had the effect of binding workers to the disciplinary structures of not only
the workplace, but also the finance and credit structures, and the global political
economy, under the general and intensified surveillance of the state. Many
governments have invested heavily in new technologies to create the means to
build and to manipulate data bases for tax collection and, more broadly, for
purposes of social control and criminal enforcement. Indeed, a proposal was mooted
by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to transform
large sections of the former Red Army into tax collectors in crime-ridden Russia. This
type of development is intended to maximize the state's surveillance of the
population, partly for economic reasons and partly for reasons of policing, because
one objective of this type of exercise, as is clear in Russia, is to gain information
about the so called "secondary" or "informal" economy, which is outside of the
scope of official tax collection. Of course, this is not a problem for Russia alone, but
for all governments that experience fiscal crisis and widespread organized crime
and corruption. Much of the work that has gone into the "reform" effort in the
former Soviet Union by the international financial institutions and the Western
governments has been concerned with the construction of more effective data
bases and population profiles. Much of the democratic concern expressed at the
creation of mass data bases has arisen in OECD contexts where the political
conditions are different than those that have prevailed in Scandinavia. For example,
the practice of file-matching (such as comparing social security files with tax files to
check on fraud) is very common in the United States and Canada, and relatively
common in Japan and the United Kingdom, although official secrecy in the UK
means that it is impossible to be sure. Part of the concern is prompted also by the
inaccuracy of data held in these systems throughout the world.25 In Canada, for
example, there is little public concern at these developments, whereas they have
been very important political issues in Germany (where file-matching is more
controlled) because of the legacy of Germany's Nazi past and thus the politicization
of civil society there. There have also been protests in the United States, because of
its anti-statist traditions.20 In Japan, there have been sporadic attempts to
challenge the Japanese state on the use (and abuse) of this type of data
manipulation, and civil libertarians in Japan continue to challenge these practices.
For example, when the emperor and empress of Japan made a controversial visit to
Okinawa in May 1993 there were many complaints from people who had been
detained or arrested on pretexts by the police, and by people who were denied
access to areas adjacent to the route the royal family took to the southernmost
Japanese islands. Okinawa, which was once colonized by Japan, was the site of
ferocious battles when the United States invaded the country (more than 250,000
died in these battles). Many inhabitants felt that Okinawa was sacrificed in the vain
attempt to prevent the victory of the US forces. Since the war, it has been relatively
neglected and impoverished, even after its reversion to Japanese sovereignty in
1971. In effect, the Japanese security agencies carried out a selective detention of
some members of the population. This was ostensibly to prevent terrorism against

the royal couple. The informational basis for the location and activities of individuals
is a highly developed and totally comprehensive local registration system based on
families, linked to local networks of surveillance, which originated about 1000 years
ago - systems of registration that were adapted from those of ancient Imperial
China. These systems were reformed and perfected following the creation of the
Meiji state, after the imperial restoration of 1868. The Japanese case shows the long
lineage of panopticist practices by the state, and the informational base upon which
they rest. A case study of Australia, which is in many ways a typical liberaldemocratic society of the Lockean type (along with Canada, the United Kingdom,
and the United States), illustrates aspects of the general trend I have noted.
Australia has recently experienced fiscal crisis and a change in the political
landscape, especially as political discourse shifted away from social
democracy toward conservatism and neoliberalism . The economy was
liberalized in the last twenty years, and the law enforcement, taxation, and
government benefits agencies gained increased power within the state apparatus.
The social security ministry shifted to more rigorous monitoring of its clients, in a
return to the type of method akin to the reforms that Bentham and other utilitarian
liberal advocated for paupers, premised upon "inspectability" of claims and
obligations. Australia increasingly uses filematching, which is facilitated by
computerization. The Australian system was integrated and linked to the
introduction of the multi-purpose tax-file number (TFN) system, which serves an
identification purpose similar to the Canadian SIN (social insurance number) arid the
US SSN (social security number).27 Similar developments can be observed in the
United Kingdom, where the police, security services, inland revenue (tax), and the
health and welfare administrations are reputed to have integrated data-base
systems. The popular climate encouraging surveillance has accompanied the vast
increases in crime (in this case petty crime, vandalism, and crime against the
person) recorded in most OECD countries during the last two decades. Moreover,
government agencies seek to obtain and to integrate private data bases into their
information structures as a matter of routine - for example, to monitor the
financial system and to pursue tax claims and in some cases to track down
white-collar crime such as fraud and money laundering. Noteworthy here is the fact
that private agencies in various countries also have massive centralized data bases,
many of which contain public information, and thereby make it even more difficult
to separate public and private aspects of data-gathering, coding, and surveillance.
This difficulty has also arisen in the United States as a result of the proliferation of
private security agencies and guards, which now significantly outnumber "public"
police.28 A notable example of such private information corporations is TRW, a USbased credit-rating and marketing organization that claims to have detailed
economic and social data on 170 million US citizens (the US population is about 254
million). Another important example that shows there is a struggle over the
proliferation and potential decentralization of control over data bases arose in 1990
when the Lotus Corporation withdrew its plan to market a product called
Marketplace: Households. This product was withdrawn due to 30,000 protests from
an angry public concerned that such a decentralized system was a grave threat to

personal privacy. The product had detailed information on 80 million US households

(120 million people), including name, address, and significant details on shopping
habits and income (phone numbers and credit-ratings were omitted in anticipation
of privacy complaints).29 Much of the contemporary innovation in
surveillance practice and technology has been driven by, on the one
hand, the bureaucratic state gathering information about populations
(and the willingness of people to acquiesce to this) ,and on the other by
capitalist enterprises seeking to maximize profit and to eliminate risk.
The capacity of telecommunications to centralize data (and with the new twodimensional bar codes and software packages, also to redistribute and decentralize
data) that was previously stored separately, either geographically or functionally,
also lies at the heart of these developments.30 What is at issue is the use of and
access to such information, and the degree to which control of such use is exercised
democratically.

Structural Violence
Structural violence locks in social and environmental tension,
this makes war inevitable
Tams Szentes 2008 Globalisation and prospects of the world society
http://www.eadi.org/fileadmin/Documents/Events/exco/Glob.___prospects_-_jav..pdf
Szentes is a Professor Emeritus at the Corvinus University of Budapest.
It s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting
real peace. Without peace countries cannot develop. Although since 1945 there has
been no world war, but --numerous local wars took place, --terrorism has spread all
over the world, undermining security even in the most developed and powerful
countries, --arms race and militarisation have not ended with the collapse of the
Soviet bloc, but escalated and continued, extending also to weapons of mass
destruction and misusing enormous resources badly needed for development,
--many invisible wars are suffered by the poor and oppressed people,
manifested in mass misery, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, starvation and
malnutrition, epidemics and poor health conditions, exploitation and oppression,
racial and other discrimination, physical terror, organised injustice, disguised forms
of violence, the denial or regular infringement of the democratic rights of citizens,
women, youth, ethnic or religious minorities, etc., and last but not least, in the
degradation of human environment, which means that --the war against Nature,
i.e. the disturbance of ecological balance, wasteful management of natural
resources, and large-scale pollution of our environment, is still going on, causing
also losses and fatal dangers for human life. Behind global terrorism and invisible
wars we find striking international and intrasociety inequities and distorted
development patterns , which tend to generate social as well as international
tensions , thus paving the way for unrest and visible wars. It is a commonplace
now that peace is not merely the absence of war. The prerequisites of a lasting
peace between and within societies involve not only - though, of course, necessarily
- demilitarisation, but also a systematic and gradual elimination of the roots of
violence, of the causes of invisible wars, of the structural and institutional bases
of large-scale international and intra-society inequalities, exploitation and
oppression. Peace requires a process of social and national emancipation, a
progressive, democratic transformation of societies and the world bringing about
equal rights and opportunities for all people, sovereign participation and mutually
advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a pluralistic
democracy on global level with an appropriate system of proportional
representation of the world society, articulation of diverse interests and their
peaceful reconciliation, by non-violent conflict management, and thus also a global
governance with a really global institutional system. Under the contemporary
conditions of accelerating globalisation and deepening global interdependencies in
our world, peace is indivisible in both time and space. It cannot exist if reduced to a
period only after or before war, and cannot be safeguarded in one part of the world
when some others suffer visible or invisible wars. Thus, peace requires, indeed, a
new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide equal

opportunities for sustainable development. Sustainability of development (both on

national and world level) is often interpreted as an issue of environmental
protection only and reduced to the need for preserving the ecological balance and
delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature with overexhausted
resources and polluted environment. However, no ecological balance can be
ensured, unless the deep international development gap and intra-society
inequalities are substantially reduced. Owing to global interdependencies there may
exist hardly any zero-sum-games, in which one can gain at the expense of others,
but, instead, the negative-sum-games tend to predominate, in which everybody
must suffer, later or sooner, directly or indirectly, losses. Therefore, the actual
question is not about sustainability of development but rather about the
sustainability of human life, i.e. survival of mankind because of ecological
imbalance and globalised terrorism. When Professor Louk de la Rive Box was the
president of EADI, one day we had an exchange of views on the state and future of
development studies. We agreed that development studies are not any more
restricted to the case of underdeveloped countries, as the developed ones (as well
as the former socialist countries) are also facing development problems, such as
those of structural and institutional (and even system-) transformation,
requirements of changes in development patterns, and concerns about natural
environment. While all these are true, today I would dare say that besides (or even
instead of) development studies we must speak about and make survival
studies. While the monetary, financial, and debt crises are cyclical, we live in an
almost permanent crisis of the world society, which is multidimensional in nature,
involving not only economic but also socio-psychological, behavioural, cultural and
political aspects. The narrow-minded, election-oriented, selfish behaviour motivated
by thirst for power and wealth, which still characterise the political leadership
almost all over the world, paves the way for the final, last catastrophe. One
cannot doubt, of course, that great many positive historical changes have also
taken place in the world in the last century. Such as decolonisation, transformation
of socio-economic systems, democratisation of political life in some former fascist or
authoritarian states, institutionalisation of welfare policies in several countries, rise
of international organisations and new forums for negotiations, conflict
management and cooperation, institutionalisation of international assistance
programmes by multilateral agencies, codification of human rights, and rights of
sovereignty and democracy also on international level, collapse of the militarised
Soviet bloc and system-change3 in the countries concerned, the end of cold war,
etc., to mention only a few. Nevertheless, the crisis of the world society has
extended and deepened, approaching to a point of bifurcation that necessarily puts
an end to the present tendencies, either by the final catastrophe or a common
solution. Under the circumstances provided by rapidly progressing science and
technological revolutions, human society cannot survive unless such profound intrasociety and international inequalities prevailing today are soon eliminated. Like a
single spacecraft, the Earth can no longer afford to have a 'crew' divided into two
parts: the rich, privileged, wellfed, well-educated, on the one hand, and the poor,
deprived, starving, sick and uneducated, on the other. Dangerous 'zero-sum-games'
(which mostly prove to be negative-sum-games) can hardly be played any more

by visible or invisible wars in the world society. Because of global

interdependencies , the apparent winner becomes also a loser. The real choice
for the world society is between negative- and positive-sum-games: i.e. between, on
the one hand, continuation of visible and invisible wars, as long as this is possible
at all, and, on the other, transformation of the world order by demilitarisation and
democratization. No ideological or terminological camouflage can conceal this real
dilemma any more, which is to be faced not in the distant future, by the next
generations, but in the coming years, because of global terrorism soon having
nuclear and other mass destructive weapons, and also due to irreversible changes
in natural environment.

**Link Level**

1NC Aesthetics Link

Configuring domestic surveillance within a paradigm of
legalistic reform reduces the discussion to one of polarized
perspectives. Such a formulation precludes space for radical
subjectivity by relegating issues of agency and ethics to
background, this ensures that collective resistance against
state violence never emerges.
Clare Birchall 2014Aesthetics of the Secret New Formations: A Journal of
Culture/Theory/Politics, pp. 25-46, Project MUSE, Birchall is Professor of North
American Studies at Kings College London. She received her first degree in English
from Exeter, from there she went on to study Critical Theory at Sussex.
We are now living in the wake of the revelations made by security contractor
Edward Snowden about the reach and capacities of the American National Security
Agency, the UKs Government Communications Headquarters and [End Page 26]
other members of the Five Eyes. The leaked classified material made it clear that
these agencies are able to access the servers of tech giants such as Google,
Microsoft and Apple; monitor social media applications in real time; intercept and,
for a time, store data and metadata relayed over fibre-optic cables; collect the
phone records of American nationals; and work with the telecommunications
industry to undermine Internet encryption. It is not only the content of the files that
is of note; it is also the scale of the leak. The Pentagon announced in early 2014
that Snowden had committed the biggest theft of US secrets in history: intelligence
files numbering as many as 1.7 million.4 It is beyond the scope of this article to
provide a detailed account of the revelations, or of Snowdens search for a state
that would give him safe haven, the role played by journalists such as Glenn
Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Bart Gellman, or the presentation of the story by
established news outlets and its dissemination on social media. However, as my
argument rests on the claim that the revelations were configured as objects of
regulation rather than radical politics, I will give a brief account of the discursive
ground as it developed in the months following the Snowden revelations in June
2013. Very quickly the debate polarised . Champions of civil liberties decried
governments warrantless access to private data; their opponents defended the
necessity of mass surveillance in a post-9/11 security landscape, especially in an
era of digital and mobile communication. To the former, Snowden was a patriotic
whistle-blower in need of protection; to the latter, he was a traitor who should be
punished. Civil rights advocacy groups such as Amnesty International, Transparency
International and Human Rights Watch have all defended Snowden as a champion of
privacy rights, while former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton,5
Australias foreign minister Julie Bishop,6 House Speaker John Boehner7 and Senator
Dianne Feinstein8 are among those who have presented the Snowden leaks as an
act of treason that seriously jeopardised the security of the US. This oppositional
framing of the Snowden event has shaped public discourse. Public opinion polls in
the weeks after the story broke, for example, asked either/or questions that implied

a clear choice between opposing positions.9 And after airing its exclusive interview
with Snowden in May 2014, NBC asked viewers to take a stand: Do you view former
NSA contractor Edward Snowden as a #Patriot or a #Traitor? Post your message on
Twitter using the appropriate hashtag.10 Moral inflection aside, at the heart of all
this is the perennial debate about the trade-off between national security and
individual privacy. In the absence of any way of resolving the issue, political
discourse has focused on questions of definition, regulation and reform. To take one
prominent example, the Obama administration was at great pains to establish a
distinction between data and metadata, as though making clear that the NSA was
interested only in the latter would appease critics. On 7 June 2013, Obama made
the following statement: Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. Thats not what
this programs [End Page 27] about [W]hat the intelligence community is doing is
looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at peoples
names, and theyre not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called
metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage
in terrorism.11 The distinction between data and metadata, and a further distinction
between American and non-American targets, have been central in discussion of the
legal question as to whether or not a warrant is needed for monitoring and
surveillance. These debates treat the Snowden event either in macro conceptual
terms (e.g. privacy versus security) or in terms of micro legal and procedural issues
(such as the data/metadata distinction). Both approaches involve assumptions that
do not lend the Snowden event to radical politics. The opposition between privacy
and security, for example, positions the citizen as an individual first and foremost,
for whom collectivity is envisaged and imagined by the securitised state (as a
nation-in-need-of-protection). Just as limiting, the micro legal and procedural
questions reduce the problem to one of scope rather than ethics or politics.
For example, an Obama administration fact-sheet entitled Proposal for Ending the
Section 215 Bulk Telephony Metadata Program states that the president is
recommending restricting NSA queries regarding metadata to within two hops of
the selection term being used, instead of three.12 (Two hops, as Trevor Timm points
out, still means tens of thousands of people.13 ) There has been much discussion of
how intelligence operations should be regulated and reformed, but beyond the
concern about privacy, little has been said about the effect of dataveillance on
agency and subjectivity and even less regarding ways we might think differently
about the geopolitical value currently ascribed to intelligence. For those interested
in configuring secrets as a properly political subject, it is necessary to sidestep the
debate as constructed by mainstream discourse. It is more productive, I would
argue, to stay with the secret, interrupt the configuration of the secret as a
rhetorical problem subject to legal tweaking, or as an entrenched component of the
security industrial complex. It is the secret, prior to any appropriation by the state,
which can aid the subjectivisation necessary for a radical political response to the
states treatment of its citizens as data objects of only algorithmic import.14 If
secrets are left only to the securitising state, or passed over in favour of privacy, the
Left will have missed an opportunity.

2NC Aesthetics Link

Procedural attempts to rein in surveillance produce a system
of self-evident facts that set the horizon of political thought.
This reinscribes hegemonic power by rendering structural
violence invisible.
Clare Birchall 2014Aesthetics of the Secret New Formations: A Journal of
Culture/Theory/Politics, pp. 25-46, Project MUSE, Birchall is Professor of North
American Studies at Kings College London. She received her first degree in English
from Exeter, from there she went on to study Critical Theory at Sussex.
Within this distribution of bodies, institutions and capacities, Magid explores the
affective register of the secret: its seductive draw, and the structure of desire it
operates within. She is the one who asks to be subjected to a full vetting procedure.
At one point, she considers becoming an agent herself.39 Such confessions playfully
evoke the link between knowledge and power. Yet, despite the detail amassed about
individual agents and the workings of the AIVD, Magids agency, like Paglens, is
largely aesthetic. Magid sets herself the task of drawing out the beauty of the
secret. What we see at work here is the power to bring aesthetics to bear upon the
secret rather than the power to expose or reveal secrets and give us knowledge in
an uncomplicated manner. The political nature of these works is to be found in their
aesthetic process and choices rather than at the evidentiary level. That is to say,
they reveal more about the act of looking at, our response to, and the limits of open
secrets than they do about individual intelligence operations. For Gustafsson,
writing about Paglens images, the politics of producing the photographs outweighs
the significance of whatever information they contain.40 The same is true of
Magids performative process. Though Gustafsson is referring to a politics of access,
his statement can also [End Page 40] help us to focus on the form rather than
content of secrets as aesthetic objects. Because the art I have discussed is clearly
situated within the contemporary tension between secrecy and transparency (and
the contradictions and compromises embedded within liberal democracies that
stems from this tension), its ability to point towards a different way of thinking
about the relationship between politics and art (or rather aesthetics), its place
within a meta-politics, always risks being overlooked (Politics of Aesthetics, p56).
Pushing secrets at least halfway into the light, the work risks being subsumed and
fixed by the discursive production of the political issues as they are commonly
understood. It always risks, to put it a different way, remaining within a
hermeneutics rather than an aesthetics of the secret. Many commentators are
indeed quick to align this art with an overtly political position, claiming it as art that
challenges the reach of the national security state. Indeed, the artists themselves,
particularly Paglen, are often outspoken critics of surveillance, secrecy and
securitisation. The politicality of the art in this category is therefore in danger of
being decided in advance. In as much as these works present ideas - secrecy is
detrimental to democracy, for example -and in as much as they lean towards
secretion as revelation, perhaps they are not so very different from art to be found
in category A, in which we placed dematerialised conceptual art. We have to

recognise, then, that the explicit and contextual politics of this art puts it at risk of
being contained by existing debates. And yet, though it may begin from and signify
within the same ground as familiar political debate - the kind that has arguably
delimited our reception and analysis of the Snowden revelations - this work can also
trouble its parameters and unsettle procedural responses. Work such as
Paglens and Magids resists treating the secret as a blockage preventing the truth
from coming out - whether in terms of a decision regarding the politics of secrecy or
of the implementation of bureaucratic mechanisms to process secrets. The
proximity of these works to the next category in our schema, D, means that they
are also being drawn in the other direction, away from knowability, revelation,
reduction, containment and the sensible. The hold of the secret as secret, an
unconditional secret as Jacques Derrida would have it,41 is never quite quashed in
these artworks by the hermeneutic drive or routine political debate, so that it
remains possible for them to resonate beyond the empty circulation of content
characteristic of communicative capitalism.42 In their liminal state between
revelation and concealment, the artworks certainly pose questions concerning
regimes of looking, the rights and responsibilities that accompany visibility and
invisibility, and the circulation of sensible matter and knowable knowledge. But
rather than bringing us to knowledge, these concerns, I want to suggest, fit with a
view of secrets as part of a distributive regime. This returns us to Rancires
positioning of aesthetics as, in the words of his translator: [End Page 41] An implicit
law governing the sensible order that parcels out places and forms of participation
in a common world by first establishing the modes of perception within which these
are inscribed. The distribution of the sensible thus produces a system of selfevident facts of perception based on the set horizons and modalities of what is
visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made or done.43 With
Rancires ideas in mind, we should perhaps concern ourselves less with an
aesthetics of the secret and more with an aesthetics that enacts itself through the
limits of the secret. We could, then, re-phrase Rancirean aesthetics as a system of
distribution and organisation of that which is and is not secret, those who are and
are not secret. For Rancire, the key question is whether or not the world defined by
any distribution of the sensible is compatible with equality (with equality, here,
understood not as a value to which one appeals, but a universal that must be
supposed, verified, and demonstrated in each case).44 On the basis of this
primary aesthetics, individual artistic practices (ways of doing and making that
intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the
relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility) can then be
considered (Politics of Aesthetics, p8). The art of Paglen and Magid indicates that
the contemporary distribution shaped in part by the securitised state is not
compatible with equality: it tells us that there are plenty of people who play no part
in establishing the perceptual coordinates of the community.45 Paglens
presentation of military black sites as well as Magids neon allusions to certain
secret agents constitute playful, testing, and teasing articulations of, and
interventions in, a certain distributive regime that reveals who can have a share in
what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and
space in which this activity is performed (Politics of Aesthetics, p8). Moreover, it

forces us to encounter the intensities of the relationships (between animate and

inanimate entities) within that distribution. Inspired by Rancire, the Snowden
event, too, could be considered less a bestowing of knowledge (though it was
certainly that), and more a reminder that, Politics is an intervention in the visible
and the sayable (Dissensus, p37), that it revolves around what is seen and what
can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak,
around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time (Politics of Aesthetics,
p8). Hegemonic structures and discourses, akin to the symbolic constitution of the
social(Dissensus, p36) that Rancire early on names policy (PIS, pp5864) and
later police,46 determine scopic possibilities, limit who is able to take part in what
is common, and prevent the formation of effective political subjectivities.

1NC Discourse Link

Mystifying surveillance technology through rationalist
discourse enables the expansion of global capital.
EGEMEN NLFER YUMURTACI 2003 SOCIAL POLITICAL DISCOURSE OF THE
SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY pp.68-73, A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE
SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES OF MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY,
http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/2/1001312/index.pdf, Yumurtaci graduated with a
Masters degree in Science and Technology Policy Studies from Middle East Technical
University.
For one thing, globalization, as a concept, is as thoroughly contested as the other
concepts, which are covered in the previous chapters. Notwithstanding the
statement in the previous paragraph, there is no agreement on its chronology, as
well as on its definition, explanation, measurement, and normative assessment,
policy implications and even on its global-ness. In terms of chronology, to begin
with, some scholars trace the beginnings of global relations to the first few
hundreds A.D., some to 1500s, to the Age of Discoveries, still others to 19th century.
There are also those that consider globalization as a phenomenon of the second half
of the 20th century, and tie its rise to the advent of modern communication and
transportation technologies. This discussion on chronology is closely related to
another one on the novelty of developments that comprise globalization. For some
students of globalization, what we face is a phenomenon completely new and
unprecedented in history. On the other extreme, scholars spend considerable
energy to empirically show that the cross-border mobility of goods, people and
capital is not peculiar to the age of globalization (Held, 1998). At the heart of abovementioned discussions lie deeper disagreements on the definition of globalization
and on the range of processes that comprise it. While the intricacies of this debate
is beyond the scope of this thesis, it is nevertheless possible to come up with a
descriptive account of globalization drawing on a number of points on which
students of globalization seem to, more or less, agree. In this respect, globalization
will be taken as a process that involves: a stretching and deepening of social
relations and institutions across space and time such that, on the one hand, day-today activities are increasingly influenced by events happening on the other side of
the globe and, on the other, the practices and decisions of local groups or
communities can have significant global reverberations (Held, 1998: 13). Then, in
what areas of social reality can be observed such geographical expansion and
intensification, or the rise of supraterritoriality in Jan Aart Scholtes (2000) words,
can be observed? The most obvious field, one that figures prominently in any
discussion of globalization, is the global economy. International trade has reached
unprecedented levels recently in terms of quantity, as well as in terms of the
number of goods traded and the countries involved. Similarly, the current mobility
of capital in the form of global financial flows is unmatched in any earlier period of
history both in terms total amount as well as rapidity. There is a growing integration
of capital markets around the world as exemplified by the global repercussions of
the 1997 East Asian financial crisis. In the realm of production, production of an
increasing number of goods is organized globally through an international division of

labor. Multinational corporations (MNCs) are the main actors in the global
production process, accounting for a quarter to a third of global output. MNCs are
active not only in production but in the global delivery of a growing number of
services such as insurance, banking and communications. Another area within
which the impact of globalization is strongly felt is culture. Thanks to global
communications and media networks, a considerable number of cultural products
are consumed at a global scale. English language has dominated others in the
global exchange of information and ideas. Every year, more and more people travel
abroad and encounter other cultures as the cost of international traveling
decreases. For some, these developments meant the dawn of a global culture, or a
cultural homogenization process. For others, on the other hand, it is an indicator of
increasing cultural heterogenization, as local identities reassert themselves against
the unifying tendencies of globalization. And not very surprisingly, some opted for a
mid-way in the form of rising hybrid cultural tastes (Scholte, 2000). Leaving aside
these assertions, one thing is clear that it is no longer possible to talk about selfcontained national and/or local cultural practices not influenced by global cultural
forces one way or another (Held, 1998). Environment arguably provides us with
arguably the most powerful and vivid images of the process of globalization. Global
warming, depletion of the ozone layer, nuclear contamination, the loss of
biodiversity and many other ecological problems threaten all the humankind in the
sense that their adverse effects for human populations are experienced globally.
Globalization also has implications on how human communities are governed
around the world and how politics is conducted. One of the developments
associated with globalization, in this respect, is the rise and proliferation of
supraterritorial, as well as sub national, regimes regulating numerous fields of
human activity requiring collective action from postal services to financial
transactions, from disarmament to carbon emissions, from international standards
to transborder aviation. (Rosenau, 1995). In fact, this issue is closely connected to
one of the hottest debates in the globalization literature, namely the fate of the
sovereign statehood. The rise of supraterritorial forms of governance, sponsored
and supported by both governmental and nongovernmental actors, along with
economic and cultural globalization, is said to erode state sovereignty irreversibly.
Again, at the opposite end of the debate are located those who claim that the state
is here to stay with us for the foreseeable future, and even that globalization
consolidated the states prominent position in international politics. Having
delineated the general contours of the globalization debate in a rather sketchy
manner, we can now ask how recent technological developments in general, and
those in information technologies in particular, fit into the context of globalization.
There is no easy answer to this question to say the least. Yet the issue of causation
can be a good starting point. Two general positions on the issue of what causes
globalization can be identified: structural explanations and actor-oriented
explanations. On the structural side, capitalism as an economic structure and
rationalism as a knowledge structure can be pointed out. With regards to actor-level
explanations, technological innovation and enabling regulatory
frameworks are the two main causes of globalization highlighted in the
literature (Scholte, 2000). Preferring one of these explanations to another is largely

a methodological question, and touches upon one of the perennial discussions in

social science, namely structure-agent dichotomy. However, it is also an ideological
question in the sense that individual-level explanations have a strong tendency to
overlook the structural factors, and hence power relations that underlie the current
shape of globalization. After all, Theory is always for someone and for some
purpose (Italics in the original, Cox, 1996: 87). Technological developments in the
area of communications and transportation have indisputably facilitated the
creation of supraterritorial social relations in the form of global flows of goods,
services, capital and ideas, comprising globalization. However, an attitude, which
points out technology as the main cause of globalization, falls within a particular
theoretical mindset known as technological determinism as we mentioned below in
theoretical perspectives for reading new technologies and surveillance. Individuals
do not make choices in a social vacuum. Neither do they find the incentive to invent
and develop new technologies free from structural constraints such as the needs of
capitalism to spread across the borders for further capital accumulation and the
enabling rationalist mindset. What concerns us here is that a technological
determinist approach is typically prone to mystify technological development, in the
sense of attaching an essential goodness, and consequently globalization. In this
respect, an unquestioning attitude towards technology and globalization are closely
related. Here, one moves into the normative terrain in the globalization debate or
whether we approve of the developments associated with globalization that are
briefly mentioned in the previous paragraphs. To begin with, neo-liberals typically
welcome the processes of globalization, and associate it with progress, human
betterment and increased welfare for all humankind. Neoliberalism, which can be
seen as a late 20th century revival of classical liberal ideas, is characterized by a
strong belief in markets as the best mechanism human beings can organize their
societies, and a strong dislike for state intrusion into the workings of the market.
Consequently, trade liberalization, deregulation, the shrinking of the public sector
and the spread of open markets all around are all welcome developments for neoliberals. The alleged erosion of state sovereignty, due to the states increasing
inability to control the forces of globalization capitalizing on new technologies, is
also something about which neo-liberals are extremely content (Gill, 1995). The
globalization of trade, finance and production are seen as the key to human
prosperity, and thanks to new technologies the global hold of the markets is getting
stronger. Information technologies, in this respect, enabled the most efficient
allocation of resources, and production facilities. They help companies to determine
the consumer taste instantly and restructure their production accordingly. The
advent of global consumer preferences through cultural globalization is also a great
help to global companies since it opens up ever-new markets for an increasing
number of products. On the political side, neo-liberals actively support the
replacement of authoritarian regimes with liberal democracies , and believe
that open markets are the key to strong democratic institutions. All these assertions
can be challenged, and in fact are extensively challenged in the literature, from the
perspective of human equity, democracy and freedom. In line with the central
argument of this thesis, the last group of critiques, on the technologys relationship

to human freedom concerns us the most here even though it is nearly

impossible both practically and theoretically to divorce human freedom
from questions of equity and democracy . More particularly, the purpose of
this thesis is to see the power and information relationship from the perspective of
surveillance, especially supervision that society subject to by state or corporations.

2NC Discourse Link

Using technocratic discourse to curtail surveillance legitimates
its proliferation by normalizing its presence.
Stephen Gill 1995 The Global Panopticon? The Neoliberal State, Economic Life,
and Democratic Surveillance Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 20, No. 1
(Jan.-Mar. 1995), pp. 1-49, JSTOR, Gill is a Professor of Political Science at York
University in Ontario, Canada.
In the last two decades there has been a global shift toward a system based upon a
politics of supremacy and subordination, a disciplinary politics that works at micro
and macro levels of everyday life. The public realm, in the narrow sense, is
configured less by the dictates of representative government, or indeed selfgovernment in the classical sense used by Locke, although some elements of civil
society (bound up with global finance) have become self-regulating to the degree
that they threaten to self-destruct. It is a contradictory situation in which the
dominance of capital and the politico-military interests of the world's most powerful
government are more clearly asserted in and across a range of hybrid forms of
state, of which some are more neoliberal than others. Although one could argue
with some justification that the recent extension and deepening of market forces
worldwide is the latest phase of the bourgeois revolution stretching from the
Glorious Revolution of 1688, the question then, as now, is "glorious for whom?"
According to Christopher Hill, the period 1603-1714 was perhaps the most decisive
period in British history, the moment when Britain began to enter the modern
world.78 However, the condition of ordinary people hardly changed at all, and in
some ways it markedly deteriorated. The Glorious Revolution was, according to Hill,
a restoration of power to the traditional ruling and propertied classes, and was, in
effect, a revolution of the strong and the rich against the weak and the poor. It did,
however, create a political space for the expansion of incipient bourgeois power.
Attempts to embed a more systematic form of neoliberal discipline and
surveillance are growing in the spheres of production, credit, and consumption,
as well as in policing and security powers. However, at the very point where the
global political economy is accelerating in terms of the geographical reach of
capitalist restructuring, we see a bankruptcy of conventional political
alternatives , a kind of historical regression in which the changes are
being linked to archaic notions of political economy and constitutionalism
associated with nineteenth-century utilitarianism and liberalism . Such discourses
of power seek to discipline and to legitimate the new competitive
struggle in the streets, in the villages, and in the cities - the points where the
pressures, constraints, and contradictions of the process of globalization are
localized and applied. At the same time, the growth of the forces of reaction
worldwide, the sense of alienation with mainstream politics, and the general
perception that governments have become more and more ineffective shows that

the trajectory of disciplinary neoliberalism is politically unsustainable. The

intensification of surveillance in the workplace and in the streets are signs of a crisis
of motivation, social order, and government legitimacy.

Economy Links (Duh)

Their econ impact justifies imperialist lashout to remake the
world in the image of market liberalization.
Ronnie D. Lipschutz 1995 On Security pp. 15-17, Lipschutz is Professor of
Politics and Provost of College Eight at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He
was a visiting Professor of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway,
University of London during 2009-10, and a Visiting Professor and Fellow in the
Department of International Relations and Politics during 2002. Lipschutz received
his Ph.D. in Energy and Resources from UC-Berkeley in 1987 and an SM in Physics
from MIT in 1978.
Consider, then, the consequences of the intersection of security policy and
economics during and after the Cold War. In order to establish a secure global
system, the United States advocated, and put into place, a global system of
economic liberalism. It then underwrote, with dollars and other aid, the growth of
this system.43 One consequence, of this project was the globalizations of a
particular mode of production and accumulation, which relied on the re-creation,
throughout the world, of the domestic political and economic environment and
preferences of the United States. That such a project cannot be accomplished under
conditions of really-existing capitalism is not important: the idea was that economic
and political liberalism would reproduce the American self around the
world.44 This would make the world safe and secure for the Untited States
inasmuch as it would all be the self, so to speak. The joker in this particular deck
was that efforts to reproduce some version of American society abroad, in order to
make the world more secure for Americans, came to threaten the cultures and
societies of the countries being transformed, making their citizens less secure. The
process thereby transformed them into the very enemies we feared so greatly. In
Iran, for example, the Shahs efforts to create a Westernized society engendered so
much domestic resistance that not only did it bring down his empire but so, for a
time, seemed to pose a mortal threat to the American Empire based on Persian Gulf
oil. Islamic fundamentalism, now characterized by some as the enemy that will
replace Communism, seems to be U.S. policymakers worst nightmares made real, 45
although without the United States to interfere in the Middle East and elsewhere,
the Islamic movements might never have acquired the domestic power they now
have in those countries and regions that seem so essential to American security.
The ways in which the framing of threats is influenced by a changing global
economy is seen nowhere more clearly than in recent debates over
competitiveness and economic security. What does it mean to be
competitive? Is a national industrial policy consistent with global economic
liberalization? How the security component of this issue is socially constructed?
Beverly Crawford (Chapter 6: Hawks, Doves, but no Owls: The New Security
Dilemma Under International Economic Interdependence) shows how strategic
economic interdependence a consequence of the growing liberalization of the
global economic system, the increasing availability of advanced technologies

through commercial markets, and the ever-increasing velocity of the product cycle
undermines the ability of states to control those technologies that, it is often
argued, are critical to economic strength and military might. Not only can others
acquire these technologies, they might also seek to restrict access to them. Both
contingencies could be threatening. (Note, however, that by and large the only such
restrictions that have been imposed in recent years have all come at the behest of
the United States, which is most fearful of its supposed vulnerability in this respect.)
What, then, is the solution to this new security dilemma, as Crawford has stylzed
it? How can a state generate the conditions for legitimizing various forms of
intervention into this process? Clearly, it is not enough to invoke the mantra of
competitiveness; competition with someone is also critical. In Europe,
notwithstanding budgetary stringencies, state sponsorship of cutting-edge
technological R&D retains a certain, albeit declining, legitimacy in the United States,
absent a persuasive threat, this is much less the case (although the discourse of the
Clinton Administration suggests that such ideological restraints could be broken).
Thus, it is the hyperrealism of Clyde Prestowitz, Karel Van Wolferen, and Michael
Crichton, imagining a Japan resurgent and bent anew on (non) Pacific conquest,
that provides the cultural materials for new economic policies. Can new
industrialized enemies be conjured into existence so as to justify new cold wars and
the remobilization of capital , under state direction, that must follow? Or has the
world changed too much for this to happen again?

Causes invisible violence and suffering on the periphery.

Mark Neocleous 2008 Critique of Security Neocleous is a Professor of the
Critique of the Political at Brunel University in London.
In other words, the new international order moved very quickly to reassert the
connection between economic and national security: the commitment to the former
was simultaneously a commitment to the latter, and vice versa. As the doctrine of
national security was being born, the major player on the international
stage would aim to use perhaps its most important power of all its
economic strength in order to re-order the world. And this re-ordering was
conducted through the idea of economic security.99 Despite the fact that econ
omic security would never be formally defined beyond economic order or
economic well-being,100 the significant conceptual consistency between
economic security and liberal order-building also had a strategic
ideological role. By playing on notions of economic well-being, economic
security seemed to emphasise economic and thus human needs over
military ones. The reshaping of global capital, international order and the
exercise of state power could thus look decidedly liberal and
humanitarian. This appearance helped co-opt the liberal Left into the
process and, of course, played on individual desire for personal security by
using notions such as personal freedom andsocial equality.101 Marx and
Engels once highlighted the historical role of the bour geoisie in shaping the world
according to its own interests. The need of a constantly expanding market for its
products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle

everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere . . . It compels all

nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it
compels them . . . to become bourgeois in themselves. In one word, it creates a
world after its own image.102 In the second half of the twentieth century this ability
to batter down all Chinese walls would still rest heavily on the logic of capital, but
would also come about in part under the guise of security. The whole world
became a garden to be cultivated to be recast according to the logic of
security. In the space of fifteen years the concept economic security had moved
from connoting insurance policies for working people to the desire to shape the
world in a capitalist fashion and back again. In fact, it has constantly shifted
between these registers ever since, being used for the constant reshaping of world
order and resulting in a comprehensive level of intervention and policing all over the
globe. Global order has come to be fabricated and administered according to a
security doctrine underpinned by the logic of capital accumulation and a bourgeois
conception of order. By incorporating within it a particular vision of economic order,
the concept of national security implies the interrelatedness of so many different
social, econ omic, political and military factors that more or less any development
anywhere can be said to impact on liberal order in general and Americas core
interests in particular. Not only could bourgeois Europe be recast around the regime
of capital, but so too could the whole international order as capital not only nestled,
settled and established connections, but alsosecured everywhere. Security politics
thereby became the basis of a distinctly liberal philosophy of global intervention,
fusing global issues of economic management with domestic policy formations in an
ambitious and frequently violent strategy. Here lies the Janus-faced character of
American foreign policy.103 One face is the good liberal cop: friendly, prosperous
and democratic, sending money and help around the globe when problems emerge,
so that the worlds nations are shown how they can alleviate their misery and
perhaps even enjoy some prosperity. The other face is the bad liberal cop: should
one of these nations decide, either through parliamentary procedure, demands for
self-determination or violent revolution to address its own social problems in ways
that conflict with the interests of capital and the bourgeois concept of liberty, then
the authoritarian dimension of liberalism shows its face; the liberal moment
becomes the moment of violence. This Janus-faced character has meant that
through the mandate of security the US, as the national security state par
excellence, has seen fit to either overtly or covertly re-order the affairs of myriads of
nations those rogue or outlaw states on the wrong side of history.104
Extrapolating the figures as best we can, one CIA agent commented in 1991,there
have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations
all illegal, and all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other
countries, adding that every covert operation has been rationalized in terms of
U.S. national security.105 These would include interventions in Greece, Italy,
France, Turkey, Macedonia, the Ukraine, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Korea, Burma,
Vietnam, Thailand, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba,
the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Bolivia, Grenada, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El
Salvador, the Philippines, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama, Angola, Ghana,
Congo, South Africa, Albania, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia,

Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and many more, and many of these more than once. Next up
are the 60 or more countries identified as the bases of terror cells by Bush in a
speech on 1 June 2002.106 The methods used have varied: most popular has been
the favoured technique of liberal security making the economy scream via
controls, interventions and the imposition of neo-liberal regulations. But a wide
range of other techniques have been used: terror bombing; subversion; rigging
elections; the use of the CIAs Health Alteration Committee whose mandate was to
incapacitate foreign officials; drug-trafficking;107 and the sponsorship of terror
groups, counterinsurgency agencies, death squads. Unsurprisingly, some plain old
fascist groups and parties have been co-opted into the project, from the attempt at
reviving the remnants of the Nazi collaborationist Vlasov Army for use against the
USSR to the use of fascist forces to undermine democratically elected governments,
such as in Chile; indeed, one of the reasons fascism flowed into Latin America was
because of the ideology of national security.108 Concomitantly, national security
has meant a policy of non-intervention where satisfactory security partnerships
could be established with certain authoritarian and military regimes: Spain under
Franco, the Greek junta, Chile, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Taiwan, South
Vietnam, the Philippines, Turkey, the five Central Asian republics that emerged with
the break-up of the USSR, and China. Either way, the whole world was to be
included in the newsecure global liberal order. The result has been the slaughter of
untold numbers. John Stock well, who was part of a CIA project in Angola which led
to the deaths of over 20,000 people, puts it like this: Coming to grips with these
U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been
killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding
them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed and
this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two
million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in
Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola the operation I was part of and 22,000 killed
in Nicaragua.109 Note that the six million is a minimum figure, that he omits to
mention rather a lot of other interventions, and that he was writing in 1991. This is
security as the slaughter bench of history. All of this has been more than confirmed
by events in the twentyfirst century: in a speech on 1 June 2002, which became the
basis of the official National Security Strategy of the United Statesin September of
that year, President Bush reiterated that the US has a unilateral right to overthrow
any government in the world, and launched a new round of slaughtering to prove it.
While much has been made about the supposedly new doctrine of preemption in
the early twenty-first century, the policy of preemption has a long history as part of
national security doctrine. The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater
the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction and the more compelling the case for
taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves . . . To forestall or prevent such
hostile acts by our adver saries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre
emptively.110 In other words, the security policy of the worlds only superpower in
its current war on terror is still underpinned by a notion of liberal orderbuilding based on a certain vision of economic order . The National Security
Strategy concerns itself with a single sustainable model for national success based
on political and economic liberty, with whole sections devoted to the security

benefits of economic liberty, and the benefits to liberty of the security strategy
proposed.111 Economic security (that is, capitalist accumulation) in the guise of
national security is now used as the justification for all kinds of intervention, still
conducted where necessary in alliance with fascists, gangsters and drug cartels,
and the proliferation of national security type regimes has been the result. So
while the national security state was in one sense a structural bi-product of the USs
place in global capitalism, it was also vital to the fabrication of an international
order founded on the power of capital. National security, in effect, became the
perfect strategic tool for landscaping the human garden.112 This was to also have
huge domestic consequences, as the idea of containment would also come to
reshape the American social order, helping fabricate a security apparatus intimately
bound up with national identity and thus the politics of loyalty.

Privacy Link
Couching responses to domestic surveillance in privacy
rhetoric de-politicizes the issue by deflecting criticism away
from the socio-economic factors that are responsible for
ubiquitous authoritarianism.
Henry A. Giroux Monday, 10 February 2014Totalitarian Paranoia in the PostOrwellian Surveillance State http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state Giroux currently holds
the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and
Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson
University.
Privacy is no longer a principled and cherished civil right. On the contrary, it has
been absorbed and transformed within the purview of a celebrity and
market-driven culture in which people publicize themselves and their innermost
secrets to promote and advance their personal brand. Or it is often a principle
invoked by conservatives who claim their rights to privacy have been trampled
when confronted with ideas or arguments that unsettle their notions of common
sense or their worldviews. It is worth repeating that privacy has mostly become
synonymous with a form of self-generated, nonstop performance - a type of public
relations in which privacy makes possible the unearthing of secrets, a cult of
commodified confessionals and an infusion of narcissistic, self-referencing
narratives, all of which serve to expand the pleasure quotient of surveillance while
normalizing its expanding practices and modes of repression that Orwell could
never have imagined. Where Orwell's characters loathed the intrusion of
surveillance, according to Bauman and Lyons, today we seem to experience no
joy in having secrets , unless they are the kinds of secrets likely to enhance our
egos by attracting the attention of researchers and editors of TV talk shows, tabloid
front pages and the....covers of glossy magazines.Everything private is now done,
potentially, in public - and is potentially available for public consumption; and
remains available for the duration, till the end of time, as the internet 'can't be
made to forget' anything once recorded on any of its innumerable servers. This
erosion of anonymity is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cell
phone cameras, free photo and video Web hosts, and perhaps most important of all,
a change in people's views about what ought to be public and what ought to be
private.13 Orwell's 1984 looks subdued next to the current parameters, intrusions,
technologies and disciplinary apparatuses wielded by the new corporategovernment surveillance state. Surveillance has not only become more pervasive,
intruding into the most private of spaces and activities in order to collect massive
amounts of data, it also permeates and inhabits everyday activities so as to be
taken-for-granted. Surveillance is not simply pervasive, it has become normalized.
Orwell could not have imagined either the intrusive capabilities of the the new highpowered digital technologies of surveillance and display, nor could he have
envisioned the growing web of political, cultural and economic partnerships

between modes of government and corporate sovereignty capable of collecting

almost every form of communication in which human beings engage. What is new in
the post-Orwellian world is not just the emergence of new and powerful
technologies used by governments and corporations to spy on people and assess
personal information as a way to either attract ready-made customers or to sell
information to advertising agencies, but the emergence of a widespread culture of
surveillance. Intelligence networks now inhabit the world of Disney as well
as the secret domains of the NSA and the FBI. I think the renowned intellectual
historian Quentin Skinner is right in insisting that surveillance is about more than
the violation of privacy rights, however important. Under the surveillance state, the
greatest threat one faces is not simply the violation of one's right to privacy, but the
fact that the public is subject to the dictates of arbitrary power it no longer seems
interested in contesting. And it is precisely this existence of unchecked power and
the wider culture of political indifference that puts at risk the broader principles of
liberty and freedom, which are fundamental to democracy itself. According to
Skinner, who is worth quoting at length: The response of those who are worried
about surveillance has so far been too much couched, it seems to me, in terms of
the violation of the right to privacy. Of course it's true that my privacy has been
violated if someone is reading my emails without my knowledge. But my point is
that my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that someone is
reading my emails but also by the fact that someone has the power to do so
should they choose . We have to insist that this in itself takes away liberty
because it leaves us at the mercy of arbitrary power. It's no use those who have
possession of this power promising that they won't necessarily use it, or will use it
only for the common good. What is offensive to liberty is the very existence of such
arbitrary power.14 The dangers of the surveillance state far exceed the attack on
privacy or warrant simply a discussion about balancing security against civil
liberties. The latter argument fails to address how the growth of the surveillance
state is connected to the rise of the punishing state, the militarization of American
society, secret prisons, state-sanctioned torture, a growing culture of violence, the
criminalization of social problems, the depoliticization of public memory, and one of
the largest prison systems in the world, all of which "are only the most concrete,
condensed manifestations of a diffuse security regime in which we are all interned
and enlisted."15 The authoritarian nature of the corporate-state surveillance
apparatus and security system with its "urge to surveill, eavesdrop on, spy on,
monitor, record, and save every communication of any sort on the planet"16 can
only be fully understood when its ubiquitous tentacles are connected to
wider cultures of control and punishment , including security-patrolled
corridors of public schools, the rise in super-max prisons, the hyper-militarization of
local police forces, the rise of the military-industrial-academic complex, and the
increasing labeling of dissent as an act of terrorism in the United States.17

Regulations Link
Curtailing the excess of domestic surveillance through
regulatory frameworks is a prime example of neoliberal
reappropriation. All they are really doing is opening up space
for different forms of social control.
David Murakami Wood 2012 Globalization and Surveillance Routledge
Handbook of Surveillance Studies, Google Books, Woods is an Associate Professor of
Sociology at Queen University specializing in surveillance studies.
What links all of these phenomena is the rescaling of government towards a global
level as the purpose of government has become increasingly identified with
facilitating free competition (Foucault 2008). Thus, building mainly on Arteaga
Botello (2009). Gill (2008) and Mattelart (2008) this chapter has briefly outlined a
broad global political economy of surveillance showing that surveillance is one of
those phenomena being in an era and, at the same time, is intimately involved in
securing that form of economic and political globalization. However along with
surveillance resistance also frequently works through global networks .
Responses to surveillance are generally constructed with recourse to the postSecond World War global governance framework, for example, Article 12 of the
Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and the globalization of the
Western/'Northern concept of "privacy" (but see Bennett, this volume). Reactions
to surveillance are nonetheless deeply embedded within existing social
relations and culture , and that resistance is contingent and contextual,
depending on histories of governance and relations as well as specific national/local
controversies and events that have generated active and informed campaigns.
Resistance to surveillance has arisen in particular places and not just amongst the
relatively privileged activists of the Global North (Arteaga Botello 2009; Wacquant
2009). Just as the globalization of surveillance interacts with and culture, so too
does resistance, which means that there is no single reaction to surveillance
for which researchers should be searching nor a "normal" resistance ,
whose absence must be explained, even in an era when surveillance itself is
becoming more globally homogenous. As a result, there are many different possible
directions for any emerging global politics of surveillance in the twenty first century.
One is of society as a smoothly functioning market place, wherein surveillance
works co ensure that all are able to compete but not challenge this framing of
society as one defined by economic competition. This would see the complete
normalization of surveillance in an increasingly globally homogenous culture, either
as part of personal information economies. Or within several possible frameworks of
regulation and rights that ostensibly offer means of redress for "excesses."
However, the parallel and not always compatible logic of security implies the
possibility of a renewed towards oppressive "security states" either part of a
reconstruction of national or local borders, or at a global scale. This could be seen

as the "Chinese model" were it not that such totalitarianism is potential within any
use of surveillance for security purposes, and there are many examples of actual
totalitarian practice within liberal democratic nation-states. Another different set of
possibilities derive from the movement towards openness and democratization, in
which, rather than commodified or totalitarian surveillance, there is the
development of a transparent society in which either surveillance is and accessible,
or surveillance itself and is felt to be unnecessary (or less necessary) because all life
is lived (more) openly. The 'multiple forms of reaction against surveillance
from and beyond neoliberal capitalism could also generate new and
entirely different possibilities . What is clear is that, if the rescaling of society
towards the global level continues, the globalization of surveillance needs to be met
by a globalization of human values like autonomy dignity, with global and the
transparency and accountability of states and corporations to people rather than
(the other way around). At present, this appears an unlikely direction.

**Answers**

A2 Falsifiability
Falsification is an epistemically bankrupt standard. All theories
of knowledge definitionally require axiomatic tautologies and
then proceed with different methods of verification.
Allen Thiher 1997 The Power of Tautology: The Roots of Literary Theory p. 16
Thiher is the Curator's Professor of French in the Department of Romance
Languages, University of Missouri.
It is not always easy to see if a statement or series of statements functions as a
tautology. Before analysis, circular statements often appear to be empirical
descriptions. Moreover, empirical descriptions can come to function as a priori
tautologies or definitions. Statements can function as definitions that in a sense set
out what we mean by the empirical verification they purport to offer. For example,
in exploring the nature of "language games," Wittgenstein asks the following
question: If under "normal conditions" water boils at 100C, is this statement true
on empirical grounds or does it function as a definition of what water is? Or, in some
sense, as both? Clearly, if under normal conditions, we were to heat a clear liquid
and find that it did not boil at one hundred degrees, we would have good reason to
suspect that it was not water. By definition. But what if we had some water that did
not boil at one hundred degrees, would we be facing a theoretical or an empirical
dilemma? In historical terms, it seems that our statement about water once
functioned as an empirical description: this description was part of the work
undertaken to quantify nature. But today it is more accurate to say that the
statement functions as a definition , or as a tautology that goes to make up our
worldview. It is one of the many definitions that we use to define what we mean by
water and, in turn, to define many relationships involving water, heat, and identities
quantifying the world. Tautologies, or definitions, are tools we use to bring order to
the world and what we find in the world. Definitions are part of knowledge, but
the crucial issue for any theory is to set forth the criteria for how
definitions are used in making models and applying them. Use is
meaningful only if rules can be given that link the definition to a context. Context
imposes the constraints of verification . Science or knowledge in any
meaningful sense demands rules for verification. Verification is an issue, however,
that is rarely brought up by literary theorists. It is a bit as if literary theorists had all
read the philosopher of science Karl Popper and, having found they cannot meet his
demands that they offer criteria for falsifying their models, had decided that
verification is a pseudoissue for the humanities or social sciences. But modern
epistemology hardly makes of falsification the only criterion for verification. Popper
rejected evolution as a scientific theory on the grounds that there are no adequate
grounds for falsifying it. Given this absurdity, it is reasonable to argue that if
everything speaks for a model, there is no need to find something to speak against
it. But something must speak for it. There is no single set of criteria for verification.
Paleontology, neurology, and quantum mechanics cannot have exactly the same

criteria for verification. In some sciences the nature of their models demand,
minimally, for verification the reproduction of the same results by more than one
researcher under the same conditions (recall the recent comedy of trying to
duplicate the low-temperature fusion of hydrogen atoms in several laboratories).
Falsification can play an important role in this type of verification. But disciplines like
astrophysics and paleobiology work in areas in which reproduction of results or
falsification are largely pseudoissues because they are not possible. My point is,
then, that each individual scienceor form of knowledgehas its own
protocols for confirmation or falsification of its results , even if ideally the
universal applicability of procedures is a demand of science. One ideal goal of
science is to formulate a testable hypothesis and therewith confirm a model that
admits of universal application. In practice, each individual discipline must finally
resort to various types of confirmation based on the rationality of their inquiry. They
must content themselves with what the pragmatic philosopher Bas C. Van Fraassen
calls the empirical adequacy of their results and recognize what the logician Willard
Quine calls the possibility that multiple models may offer adequate explanations of
the same empirical phenomena.1

A2 Human Nature
The human nature argument is wrong
Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster 2010 What Every Environmentalist
Needs to Know About Capitalism Monthly Review Vol. 61.10, Magdoff is Professor
Emeritus of plant and social sciences at the University of Vermont. Foster is a
Professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.
Traits fostered by capitalism are commonly viewed as being innate human nature,
thus making a society organized along other goals than the profit motive
unthinkable. But humans are clearly capable of a wide range of characteristics,
extending from great cruelty to great sacrifice for a cause, to caring for non-related
others, to true altruism. The killer instinct that we supposedly inherited from
evolutionary ancestorsthe evidence being chimpanzees killing the babies of
other chimpsis being questioned by reference to the peaceful characteristics of
other hominids such as gorillas and bonobos (as closely related to humans as
chimpanzees).34 Studies of human babies have also shown that, while
selfishness is a human trait, so are cooperation, empathy, altruism, and
helpfulness .35 Regardless of what traits we may have inherited from our hominid
ancestors, research on pre-capitalist societies indicates that very different
norms from those in capitalist societies are encouraged and expressed. As
Karl Polanyi summarized the studies: The outstanding discovery of recent historical
and anthropological research is that mans economy, as a rule, is submerged in his
social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the
possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his
social claims, his social assets.36 In his 1937 article on Human Nature for the
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, John Dewey concludedin terms that have
been verified by all subsequent social sciencethat: The present controversies
between those who assert the essential fixity of human nature and those who
believe in a greater measure of modifiability center chiefly around the future of war
and the future of a competitive economic system motivated by private profit. It is
justifiable to say without dogmatism that both anthropology and history give
support to those who wish to change these institutions. It is demonstrable that
many of the obstacles to change which have been attributed to human nature are in
fact due to the inertia of institutions and to the voluntary desire of powerful
classes to maintain the existing status.37 Capitalism is unique among social
systems in its active, extreme cultivation of individual self-interest or possessiveindividualism.38 Yet the reality is that non-capitalist human societies have thrived
over a long periodfor more than 99 percent of the time since the emergence of
anatomically modern humanswhile encouraging other traits such as sharing and
responsibility to the group. There is no reason to doubt that this can happen
again.39

A2 Perm (Generic)
Group the perms- Theyre either do both or severance/intrinsic
and thats a voting issue because:
1. Fairness- Makes the aff a moving target
2. Education- Renders critical links irrelevant
3. It would also justify the floating PIC
Authenticity DA- Proclamations for radical change have
historically failed because of internal contradictions. Their
reliance on governmentality swamps perm solvency
Laura Sjoberg 13 The paradox of security cosmopolitanism? Critical Studies on
Security, 1:1, 29-34, Sjoberg (BA, University of Chicago; Ph.D., University of
Southern California School of International Relations; J.D. Boston College Law
School) is Associate Professor of Political Science.
At the same time, later in the article, Burke suggests entrenching the current
structure of the state. His practical approach of looking for the solidarity of the
governing with the governed seems to simultaneously interrogate the current
power structures and reify them. Burke says: Such a solidarity of the governed that
engages in a practical interrogation of power ought to be a significant feature of
security cosmopolitanism. At the same time, however, security cosmopolitanism
must be concerned with improving the global governance of security by elites and
experts. (p. 21) This attachment to the improvement of existing structures
of governance seems to be at the heart of what I see as the failure of the
radical potential in the idea of security cosmopolitanism. When discussing how
the power dynamics between the elite and the subordinated might change, Burke
suggests that voluntary renunciation of the privileges and powers of both state and
corporate sovereignty will no doubt be a necessary feature of such an order (p. 25).
Relying on the voluntary renunciation of power by the powerful seems both
unrealistic and not particularly theoretically innovative. This seems to be at the
center of a paradox inherent in security cosmopolitanism : Faith in the Western
liberal state is insidious, but the Western liberal state does not have to be.
Modernity causes insecurity, but need not be discarded fully. Some universalizations
are dangerous, others are benign. Dangerous processes must be stopped, even if by
dangerous processes. Moral entrepreneurship is the key, but ther e is no clear
foundation for what counts as moral. The security cosmopolitanism critique is
inspired by consequentialism, but lacks deontological foundations despite
deontological implications. Burke calls for (and indeed demands) to take
responsibility for it (p. 23) in terms of both formal and moral accountability (p. 24).
In so doing, he endorses (Booths vision of) moral progress (p. 25), despite
understanding the insidious deployment of various notions of moral progress by
others. Security cosmopolitanism, then, is a proclamation for radical change that is

initially stalled by its internal contradictions and further handicapped by its

lack of capacity to enact the very sort of radical change Burke sees it as
fundamental to righting the wrongs he sees in the world. The result seems to be the
(potential) reification of existing governments/governmentality through
what essentially appears to be a non-anthropocentric human security which
cannot be clearly distinguished from current notions of human security (p. 15). It
appears to remain top-down and without clear moral foundation while claiming
significant improvement over existing approaches. This appearance/seduction of
improvement without real promise for change might be more insidious than the
nihilism of which many post-structuralists are accused, as it seductively appears to
solve a problem it does not solve.

Privatization DA- The permutation splinters collective

resistance by acceding to minor demands, this naturalizes
neoliberalism and guarantees extinction
Adrian Parr 2013 THE WRATH OF CAPITAL: Neoliberalism and Climate Change
Politics pp. 5-6, Parr is an Associate Professor of sociology, architecture and interior
design at the University of Cincinatti (PhD, Monash University).
The contradiction of capitalism is that it is an uncompromising structure of
negotiation. It ruthlessly absorbs sociohistorical limits and the challenges these
limits pose to capital, placing them in the service of further capital accumulation.
Neoliberalism is an exclusive system premised upon the logic of property rights and
the expansion of these rights, all the while maintaining that the free market is selfregulating, sufficiently and efficiently working to establish individual and collective
well-being. In reality, however, socioeconomic disparities have become more acute
the world over, and the world's "common wealth, as David Bollier and later Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri note, has been increasingly privatized.12 In 2010, the
financial wealth of the world's high-net-worth individuals (with investable assets of
$1 to $50 million or more [all money amounts are in U.S. dollars] ) surpassed the
2007 pre-financial crisis peak, growing 9.7 percent and reaching $42.7 trillion. Also
in 2010 the global population of high-net worth individuals grew 8.3 percent to 10.9
million.13 In 2010, the global population was 6.9 billion, of whom there were 1,000
billionaires; 80,000 ultra-high-net-worth individuals with average wealth exceeding
$50 mil lion; 3 billion with an average wealth of $10,000, of which 1.1 billion owned
less than $1,000; and 2.5 billion who were reportedly "unbanked'' (without a bank
account and thus living on the margins of the formal financial system) .14 In a world
where financial advantage brings with it political benefits, these figures attest to the
weak position the majority of the world occupies in the arena of environmental and
climate change politics. Neoliberal capitalism ameliorates the threat posed by
environmental change by taking control of the collective call it issues forth ,
splintering the collective into a disparate and confusing array of
individual choices competing with one another over how best to solve the crisis.

Through this process of competition, the collective nature of the crisis is

restructured and privatized, then put to work for the production and
circulation of capital as the average wealth of the world's high-net-worth individuals
grows at the expense of the majority of the world living in abject poverty.
Advocating that the free market can solve debilitating environmental changes and
the climate crisis is not a political response to these problems; it is merely a political
ghost emptied of its collective aspirations.

All of our links are DAs to the perm

A2 Perm (Surveillance Specific)

Legal reforms get circumvented by the inertia of global capital.
The specifics contribute nothing to a socio-economic analysis
of domestic surveillance so theres no net-benefit to the perm.
David H. Price 2014 The New Surveillance Normal: NSA and Corporate
Surveillance in the Age of Global Capitalism Monthly Review Volume 66, Issue 03,
https://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/the-new-surveillance-normal/ Price is an
American anthropologist. He studied anthropology at The Evergreen State College,
the University of Chicago and the University of Florida and is a professor of
anthropology at St. Martin's University in Lacey, Washington.
Notions of privacy and surveillance are always culturally constructed and are
embedded within economic and social formations of the larger society. Some
centralized state-socialist systems, such as the USSR or East Germany, developed
intrusive surveillance systems, an incessant and effective theme of anti-Soviet
propaganda. The democratic-socialist formations, such as those of contemporary
northern Europe, have laws that significantly limit the forms of electronic
surveillance and the collection of metadata, compared to Anglo-U.S. practice.
Despite the significant limitations hindering analysis of the intentionally secret
activities of intelligence agencies operating outside of public accountability and
systems of legal accountability, the documents made available by whistleblowers
like Snowden and WikiLeaks, and knowledge of past intelligence agencies activities,
provide information that can help us develop a useful framework for considering the
uses to which these new invasive electronic surveillance technologies can be put.
We need a theory of surveillance that incorporates the political economy of
the U.S. national security state and the corporate interests which it serves and
protects. Such analysis needs an economic foundation and a view that looks beyond
cultural categories separating commerce and state security systems designed to
protect capital. The metadata, valuable private corporate data, and fruits of
industrial espionage gathered under PRISM and other NSA programs all produce
information of such a high value that it seems likely some of it will be used in a
context of global capital. It matters little what legal restrictions are in place ;
in a global, high-tech, capitalist economy such information is invariably
commodified. It is likely to be used to: facilitate industrial or corporate sabotage
operations of the sort inflicted by the Stuxnet worm; steal either corporate secrets
for NSA use, or foreign corporate secrets for U.S. corporate use; make investments
by intelligence agencies financing their own operations; or secure personal financial
gain by individuals working in the intelligence sector. The rise of new invasive
technologies coincides with the decline of ideological resistance to surveillance and
the compilation of metadata. The speed of Americans adoption of ideologies
embracing previously unthinkable levels of corporate and state surveillance
suggests a continued public acceptance of a new surveillance normal will continue
to develop with little resistance. In a world where the CIA can hack the computers of
Senator Feinsteina leader of the one of the three branches of governmentwith
impunity or lack of public outcry, it is difficult to anticipate a deceleration in the

pace at which NSA and CIA expand their surveillance reach. To live a well-adjusted
life in contemporary U.S. society requires the development of rapid memory
adjustments and shifting acceptance of corporate and state intrusions into what
were once protective spheres of private life. Like all things in our society, we can
expect these intrusions will themselves be increasingly stratified, as electronic
privacy, or illegibility, will increasingly become a commodity available only to elites.
Today, expensive technologies like GeeksPhones Blackphone with enhanced PGP
encryption, or Boeings self-destructing Black Phone, afford special levels of privacy
for those who can pay. While the United States current state of surveillance
acceptance offers little immediate hope of a social movement limiting corporate or
government spying, there are enough historical instances of post-crises limits being
imposed on government surveillance to offer some hope. Following the Second
World War, many European nations reconfigured long-distance billing systems to not
record specific numbers called, instead only recording billing zonesbecause the
Nazis used phone billing records as metadata useful for identifying members of
resistance movements. Following the Arab Spring, Tunisia now reconfigures its
Internet with a new info-packet system known as mesh networks that hinder
governmental monitoringthough USAID support for this project naturally
undermines trust in this system.27 Following the Church and Pike committees
congressional investigations of CIA and FBI wrongdoing in the 1970s, the HughesRyan Act brought significant oversight and limits on these groups, limits which
decayed over time and whose remaining restraints were undone with the
USA PATRIOT Act . Some future crisis may well provide similar opportunities to
regain now lost contours of privacies. Yet hope for immediate change remains
limited. It will be difficult for social reform movements striving to protect individual
privacy to limit state and corporate surveillance. Todays surveillance complex
aligned with an economic base enthralled with the prospects of metadata appears
too strong for meaningful reforms without significant shifts in larger economic
formations. Whatever inherent contradictions exist within the present surveillance
system, and regardless of the objections of privacy advocates of the liberal left and
libertarian right, meaningful restrictions appear presently unlikely with surveillance
formations so closely tied to the current iteration of global capitalism.

A2 Predictions
Linear predictions of IR fail
Bernstein et al 2000 God Gave Physics the Easy Problems European Journal
of International Relations 2000; 6; 43, Bernstein is Associate Chair and Graduate
Director, Department of Political Science and Co-Director of the Environmental
Governance Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.
A deep irony is embedded in the history of the scientific study of international
relations. Recent generations of scholars separated policy from theory to gain an
intellectual distance from decision-making, in the belief that this would enhance the
'scientific' quality of their work. But five decades of well-funded efforts to develop
theories of international relations have produced precious little in the way of useful,
high confidence results. Theories abound, but few meet the most relaxed 'scientific'
tests of validity. Even the most robust generalizations or laws we can state - war is
more likely between neighboring states, weaker states are less likely to attack
stronger states - are close to trivial, have important exceptions, and for the most
part stand outside any consistent body of theory. A generation ago, we might have
excused our performance on the grounds that we were a young science still in the
process of defining problems, developing analytical tools and collecting data. This
excuse is neither credible nor sufficient; there is no reason to suppose that another
50 years of well-funded research would result in anything resembling a valid theory
in the Popperian sense. We suggest that the nature, goals and criteria for judging
social science theory should be rethought, if theory is to be more helpful in
understanding the real world. We begin by justifying our pessimism, both
conceptually and empirically, and argue that the quest for predictive theory rests on
a mistaken analogy between physical and social phenomena. Evolutionary biology is
a more productive analogy for social science. We explore the value of this analogy
in its 'hard' and 'soft' versions, and examine the implications of both for theory and
research in international relations.2 We develop the case for forward 'tracking' of
international relations on the basis of local and general knowledge as an alternative
to backward-looking attempts to build deductive, nomothetic theory. We then apply
this strategy to some emerging trends in international relations. This article is not a
nihilistic diatribe against 'modern' conceptions of social science. Rather, it is a plea
for constructive humility in the current context of attraction to deductive logic,
falsifiable hypothesis and large-n statistical 'tests' of narrow propositions. We
propose a practical alternative for social scientists to pursue in addition, and in a
complementary fashion, to 'scientific' theory-testing. Newtonian Physics: A
Misleading Model Physical and chemical laws make two kinds of predictions. Some
phenomena - the trajectories of individual planets - can be predicted with a
reasonable degree of certainty. Only a few variables need to be taken into account
and they can be measured with precision. Other mechanical problems, like the
break of balls on a pool table, while subject to deterministic laws, are inherendy
unpredictable because of their complexity. Small differences in the lay of the
table, the nap of the felt, the curvature of each ball and where they make contact,
amplify the variance of each collision and lead to what appears as a near random

distribution of balls. Most predictions in science are probabilistic, like the freezing
point of liquids, the expansion rate of gases and all chemical reactions. Point
predictions appear possible only because of the large numbers of units involved in
interactions. In the case of nuclear decay or the expansion of gases, we are talking
about trillions of atoms and molecules. In international relations, even more than in
other domains of social science, it is often impossible to assign metrics to
what we think are relevant variables (Coleman, 1964: especially Chapter 2).
The concepts of polarity, relative power and the balance of power are among the
most widely used independent variables, but there are no commonly accepted
definitions or measures for them . Yet without consensus on definition and
measurement, almost every statement or hypothesis will have too much wiggle
room to be 'tested' decisively against evidence. What we take to be dependent
variables fare little better. Unresolved controversies rage over the definition and
evaluation of deterrence outcomes, and about the criteria for democratic
governance and their application to specific countries at different points in their
history. Differences in coding for even a few cases have significant implications for
tests of theories of deterrence or of the democratic peace (Lebow and Stein, 1990;
Chan, 1997). The lack of consensus about terms and their measurement is not
merely the result of intellectual anarchy or sloppiness - although the latter cannot
entirely be dismissed. Fundamentally, it has more to do with the arbitrary nature
of the concepts themselves . Key terms in physics, like mass, temperature and
velocity, refer to aspects of the physical universe that we cannot directly observe.
However, they are embedded in theories with deductive implications that have been
verified through empirical research. Propositions containing these terms are
legitimate assertions about reality because their truth-value can be assessed. Social
science theories are for the most part built on 'idealizations', that is, on concepts
that cannot be anchored to observable phenomena through rules of
correspondence. Most of these terms (e.g. rational actor, balance of power) are not
descriptions of reality but implicit 'theories' about actors and contexts that do not
exist (Hempel, 1952; Rudner, 1966; Gunnell, 1975; Moe, 1979; Searle, 1995: 68-72).
The inevitable differences in interpretation of these concepts lead to different
predictions in some contexts, and these outcomes may eventually produce widely
varying futures (Taylor, 1985: 55). If problems of definition, measurement and
coding could be resolved, we would still find it difficult, if not impossible, to
construct large enough samples of comparable cases to permit statistical analysis.
It is now almost generally accepted that in the analysis of the causes of wars, the
variation across time and the complexity of the interaction among putative
causes make the likelihood of a general theory extraordinarily low.
Multivariate theories run into the problem of negative degrees of freedom, yet
international relations rarely generates data sets in the high double digits. Where
larger samples do exist, they often group together cases that differ from one
another in theoretically important ways.3 Complexity in the form of multiple
causation and equifinality can also make simple statistical comparisons misleading.

But it is hard to elaborate more sophisticated statistical tests until one has a deeper
baseline understanding of the nature of the phenomenon under investigation, as
well as the categories and variables that make up candidate causes (Geddes, 1990:
131-50; Lustick, 1996: 505-18; Jervis, 1997). Wars - to continue with the same
example - are similar to chemical and nuclear reactions in that they have underlying
and immediate causes. Even when all the underlying conditions are present, these
processes generally require a catalyst to begin. Chain reactions are triggered by the
decay of atomic nuclei. Some of the neutrons they emit strike other nuclei
prompting them to fission and emit more neutrons, which strike still more nuclei.
Physicists can calculate how many kilograms of Uranium 235 or Plutonium at given
pressures are necessary to produce a chain reaction. They can take it for granted
that if a 'critical mass' is achieved, a chain reaction will follow. This is because
trillions of atoms are present, and at any given moment enough of them will decay
to provide the neutrons needed to start the reaction. In a large enough sample,
catalysts will be present in a statistical sense. Wars involve relatively few actors.
Unlike the weak force responsible for nuclear decay, their catalysts are probably not
inherent properties of the units. Catalysts may or may not be present, and their
potentially random distribution relative to underlying causes makes it difficult to
predict when or if an appropriate catalyst will occur. If in the course of time
underlying conditions change, reducing basic incentives for one or more parties to
use force, catalysts that would have triggered war will no longer do so. This
uncertain and evolving relationship between underlying and immediate causes
makes point prediction extraordinarily difficult. It also makes more general
statements about the causation of war problematic, since we have no way of
knowing what wars would have occurred in the presence of appropriate catalysts. It
is probably impossible to define the universe of would-be wars or to construct a
representative sample of them. Statistical inference requires knowledge about the
state of independence of cases, but in a practical sense that knowledge is often
impossible to obtain in the analysis of international relations.

A2 Sustainability (Tech Good)

Their authors have an awful method, and even if theyre right
about human progress weve still reached the limits of
ecological sustainability. Only the alternatives focus on the
structural violence of neoliberal market society can avert
extinction.
Albert Abraham Arhin, BSc, MSc, et al. 2014Can post-2015 sustainable
development goals survive neoliberalism? A critical examination of the sustainable
developmentneoliberalism nexus in developing countries Arhin has more than 7
years' cumulative experience in international development consultancy and
research, strategy reviews, projects/policy planning, monitoring and evaluation. He
was the Research and Policy Manager for Oxfam in Ghana prior to his postgraduate
research studies in Cambridge.
Neoliberalism as a hegemonic political and economic discourse has swept the
development arena in developing countries, making it almost impossible for any
country to claim immunity from its influences (Klein 2010). Proponents maintain
that market-based strategies promote efficiency, competition and stabilisation of
the economy (Easterly 2005). Nevertheless, empirical studies on neoliberalism and
market efficiency challenge the arguments of the neoliberals (Harvey 2007 and
Morris and Klesner 2010). Harveys critique lies in the fact that market mechanisms
have become a vehicle for promoting monopoly power rather than competition
especially state-based monopoly in the supply of utility services in Mexico.
Moreover, the increasing consolidation of monopoly is evident in the corporatisation
and privatisation of water services by few private companies in South Africa
(Narsiah and Ahmed 2012). Furthermore, country-specific case studies in Argentina
and Brazil illustrate that corruption has become rampant since the introduction of
privatisation and liberalisation policies (Manzetti and Blake 1996). Adopting a
market-based solution removes the regulatory mechanisms by the state, creating
an avenue for corruption. For example, Rudel (2005) has observed that marketbased solutions of forest protection promote an increase in illegal logging because
government officials who benefit from corrupt practices are unwilling to prevent
illegal loggers. On these account, it could be argued that the implementation of
neoliberal polices in promoting market efficiency in most developing countries has
been far from being effective. 4 Neoliberalism, economic growth and environmental
quality: at loggerheads? A positive correlation has been established between
economic growth and environmental quality. This is mostly seen in the liberalisation
thesis which places emphasis on the increasing role of trade through technological
changes, economic growth and rising income levels in promoting environmental
quality. In a study by Grossman and Kruegar (Grossman and Krueger 1992) on the
environmental benefits of the N orth A merican F ree T rade A greement, they
argue through the use of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) that economic
growth has a positive relationship on the indicators of environmental quality. The
underlying assumption of their argument is that an inverted U-shaped relationship
exists between growth and pollution, meaning a rise in income increases

environmental pollution, but at the threshold level, the quality of environmental

indicators begins to increase. Thus, pollution and environmental degradation
increases at the early stages of economic growth, but this is compensated for
beyond some level of income per capita so that a high-income levels economic
growth leads to environmental improvement (Grossman and Krueger 1992).
Additionally, increased income levels from trade are accompanied by tight
regulations which help in protecting the environment (Lopez 1994). Empirical
studies about EKC in other contexts, however, show mixed results. Some scholars
argue that increased growth and a rise in income level reduce the amount of
pollution in sulphur dioxide (Antweiler et al. 2001). Notwithstanding, other
contradictory outcome has been reported by Stern who argues that EKC does not
reduce sulphur dioxide pollution (Stern 2004). Although, the results of the impact of
the EKC on environmental quality are mixed and uncertain, what seems to be
obvious is that to some extent there exists a positive relationship between
economic growth and environmental quality. However, this cannot necessary be
replicated in all contexts given the diversity in country circumstances. Also a
reduction in sulphur pollution tends to be associated with increase in the level of
income. Notwithstanding these positive assertions, factors other than income such
as environmental regulations and market also influence the degree of
environmental quality, but these are often ignored by the proponents of EKC
(Jenkins 2000). Proponents usually take a narrow perspective by focusing on the
immediate area of an industrys operation without taking into consideration the
environmental impact on the larger ecosystem. For instance, an improvement in
mining technologies often seeks to increase production by reducing pollution in unit
output but not in aggregate terms (Hilson 2003 and Fonturbel et al. 2011). Beyond
the EKC, another assumption underpinning the neoliberal agenda and its
relationship with SD relates to the notion of equitable distribution of wealth and
access to environmental goods and services. Proponents argue the need for the
state or policy makers not to consciously redistribute the worlds resources and
wealth as this will naturally result from the trickle-down processes. Yet, this
assumption has largely failed in practice. At present, through the uneven playing
field resulting from the control and ability of the rich to interact with the markets,
they are able to control basic environmental assets of land, water and forests as the
poor are pushed away from these assets. The recent surge in grabbing of land and
water in many developing countries attests to this fact (Cotula et al. 2009;
Vermeulen and Cotula 2010; Suhardiman 2013 and Veldwisch et al. 2013). Similarly,
environmental costs are unequally distributed as the burdens of air and water
pollution, degraded soils and defoliated lands to a large extent rest
disproportionately on the poor (Altieri and Rojas 1998 and Renfrew 2009). The
recent times have now focused on mechanisms for environmental governance in
what has come to be known as green neoliberalism (Goldman 2005). It is argued
that this will help preserve the environment because of the internalisation of
externalities and private property rights by recognising environmental resources as
economic goods (Bakker 2003). This has given prominence to initiatives such as
payment for ecosystem services (PES), Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and
those on the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation mechanism
(REDD?) within the global environmental governance arena (Boyd et al. 2009;

Holmes 2012 and Arsel and Buscher 2012). In this context, free-market
environmental governance such as certification and private standards has been
fused into natural resource management (Higgins et al. 2008). In a study on
firewood certification in Chile by Conway (2012), he observed that certification
programmes help in preventing air pollution and forest degradation, but the benefits
are not evenly distributed. Poor and small holder companies are often marginalised.
This compels them to rely on the informal sector for their supply which further
exacerbates the problem of deforestation and pollution. 5 Sustainable development:
contested meanings and significance Sustainable development has become a
powerful and controversial theme in development discourse over the past two
decades or so. Following an integrated three-pillar approach (Robinson 2004),
sustainable development is defined as a development that provides a more holistic
consideration of economic, social and environmental needs by ensuring equitable
and sustainable use of resources (Gasparatos et al. 2009). The concept became
more popular after the Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and
Development 1987) and was later assigned with different interpretations including
as an economic development that is complementary to environment and society; as
a process of development that emphasises intergenerational, equity; and as a
process of ensuring environmental services on a very long-term basis (Barrow 1995;
Noman 1996 and Redclift 2005). Sustainable development therefore aims to create
a balance among environmental, social and economic goals. Adopting such an
approach presents a simplistic conception of the inter-relationships between the
components of sustainable development and neoliberalism (Barton 2000). Much of
the writings on sustainable development in developing countries in recent years
have been influenced by neoliberal thinking. Neoliberalism as its critics argue,
undermines the ability of developing countries in achieving sustainable
development because of its emphasis in promoting the interest of the market at the
expense of social and environment development (Haque 1999). The next section
examines the implications of neoliberalism on the environment and social
development. 6 Neoliberal economic agenda and sustainable development:
evidence from developing countries The ideological inclination of neoliberalism is
rooted in strong beliefs in the promotion of the general good by following the
principles of a minimalist state, comparative advantage, free market and open
competition and economic growth. These beliefs are largely expressed through
policy preferences such as privatisation of state enterprises, deregulation of state
controls, trade liberalisations, promotion of foreign direct investment, reduction in
social expenditure and withdrawal of subsidies and safety nets. This section
explores how these policy preferences and policies have affected progress made by
most developing countries towards sustainable development. To begin with, the
principal objective of neoliberal policy has been to enhance economic growth and
productivity based on the principles of market competition. This belief often tends
to overemphasise economic values above social justice goals and environmental
concerns. Growth in GDP per capita is largely used as the overriding determinant of
poverty reduction and general progress of development (Mulok et al. 2012).
Proponents have argued that the number of people living in extreme poverty has
fallen over the past three decades and income distribution of the world has also
become more equal than it used to be over the same period due to the adoption of

the tenets of neoliberalism and the subsequent increase in economic growth (Dollar
and Kraay 2002 and Chen and Ravallion 2004). But, this assertion has been heavily
contested on the grounds of poor methodology and the assumptions
underlying those studies (Reddy and Pogge 2003 and Subramanian 2009).
Consequently, a number of bodies have suggested a contrary conclusion (Wade
2002 and Milanovic 2002). Drawing on UNDP poverty report in 1992, Veltmeyer
(1993) argues that poverty levels increased from 136 to 226 million and 270 to
335 million between 1986 and 1990 for Latin America and Africa , respectively.
Other scholars have also found similar correlation in neoliberal agenda pushing a
number of people into poverty (Amann and Baer 2002). In many cases, wealth
concentrationas has been the focus of neoliberal economic agendais
accumulated by a few sections of the population, while the majority of the people
continue to wallow below the poverty line notably in Mexico and sub-Saharan Africa
(Portes and Hoffman 2003). The increasing levels of poverty and inequality continue
to affect sustainable development because of the poors dependence on the
environment as a major source of livelihood mostly through agriculture. Privatisation
and trade liberalisation, which are some of the policy preferences to promote
sustainable development, can indeed provide pathways to increase employment
opportunities and income for the poor. In principle, such outcomes can naturally
help people move away from traditional sources of sustenance based on natural
resources. Yet, evidence of this in practice is quite fledging. Generally, many of such
employment and income opportunities occur in the urban areas, where direct
reliance on natural resources is very less. Even if such opportunities do occur, only
few segment of the society benefit. Rather, the accompanying reforms embedded in
the neoliberal approaches to development often result in negative consequences
such as unemployment of formal sector workers which could naturally gravitate the
poor to seek livelihood from the environment in which they live, thereby degrading
it. In Argentina for instance, the unemployment rate increased from 6.5 % to over
17 %, while at the same time, the number of poor people soared from 22 to 27 %
between 1991 and 1995 due to the implementation of neoliberal-oriented monetary
policies of the World Bank and IMF in line with attainment of sustainable
development goals of the country (Bosworth and Susan 2003). The conditions
attached to the policy preferences of neoliberalism can also induce environmental
degradation practices in a number of ways (Holden 1997 and Conway 2012). Rudel
and Horowithz (1993) found that reduction in government subsidy for agricultural
inputs in Ecuador forced farmers who could not afford the prices of inputs to expand
production into marginal forested areas thereby accelerating deforestation and soil
degradation. In Ghana, Benhin and Barbier (2004) found that the removal of
subsidies discouraged the use of agricultural inputs such as insecticides and
ammonium sulphate, therefore people expanded land area cultivation to increase
yield. In effect, the neoliberal practices and the pressure to survive competition can
often push poor farmers and other people to adopt unsustainable natural resource
management practices. There is also growing body of research highlighting that the
overwhelming consumption patterns of nonpoor groups (especially high income
groups) and the production and distribution systems driven by neoliberalism and its
associated globalisation are contributing marginally to environmental degradation

(Tamazian et al. 2009 and Saboori et al. 2013). Furthermore, other circumstances of
adjustment such as reduced government spending and excessive downsising
undermine environmental management due to the slashing of budget and reduction
in the number of staff of environmental ministries (Bryant and Bailey 1997). This
process mildly affects the strength and capacity of institutions and general state
regulatory capacity in environment and forestry departments. A study by Reed
(2009) on the environmental impact of adjustment programmes found significant
decline in the capacity of the Venezuelan Ministry of Environment to enforce
environmental regulations as a result of small number of staff. Additionally, he
found out that in Cameroon, budget cuts led to an increase in the rate of
deforestation from timber logging due to lack of supervision by government. The
linkage between neoliberal policies and forest loss is much complex, but as the
evidence in the literature demonstrates, neoliberal policies have largely had a
negative impact on environmental protection through the reduction in government
spending which increases poverty, thereby increasing the poors dependency on
forest resources for agricultural purposes (Holden 1997). Also, cuts in government
spending reduce the capacity of the various environmental departments to
supervise, regulate and protect the environment as illustrated in the above case
studies. Neoliberal economic agenda does not only include the rolling back of the
state but also liberalisation. Liberalisation of trade and the expansion of exports as
argued by the neoliberals promote economic growth. In this regard, governments
have to create the enabling environment by removing barriers to trade and offering
financial incentives such as tax holidays for companies in order to encourage
investment. Providing these incentives makes it more profitable for corporations to
undertake their activities especially in export-led sectors such as mining and
agriculture (McMichael 2008). The liberalisation of trade under the neoliberal regime
has increased incentives for the production of cash crops, timber logging and
mineral extraction. In one study on deforestation and biodiversity in Ghana, Benhin
and Barbier (2004) found that liberalisation has created an increase in returns on
timber logging and therefore provides an incentive for destructive logging. Also, in
an effort to promoting export opportunities and free trade, the expansion of banana
production has been found to have led to deforestation and excessive use of
chemical fertilisers in Costa Rica, while timber production has caused deforestation
and unsustainable exploitation of natural resources in Tanzania and Chile (Reed
2009). Another policy preference pursued in the context of neoliberalism to achieve
development goals relates to privatisation. The dominance of privatisation as part of
the neoliberal agenda is a result of the presumed inefficiencies of the state (Ahlers
2010). Ideologically, neoliberals maintain that governance is best undertaken by the
private sector. In this regard, the World Bank has in recent years become vocal in
the propagation of the DublinRio principles of cost recovery especially in
developing countries such as South Africa (Goldman 2005). Policy recommendations
mostly made are in privitalising conditions of productions resulting in the
establishment of private property rights over common property resources. This is to
prevent the occurrence of the tragedy of the commons because private resource
ownership ensures sustainability (Hardin 1998). The increasing number of private
multinational companies in the provision of water supply in developing countries
such as Peru and Zambia is an attestation (Kazimbaya-Senkwe and Guy 2007 and

Ioris 2012) is an attestation. However, adopting a market-led approach to

environmental resources will result in accumulation by disposition with its
attendant distributive problems (McDonald and Ruiters 2005 and Harvey 2005). For
example, privatisation to a larger extent has failed to provide services to the poor
coupled with incidence of corruption in countries such as South Africa (Budds 2004
and Narsiah and Ahmed 2012). In other cases, the private sector has increased the
level of environmental pollution for water and solid waste. Loftus and McDonald
(2001) have observed that the privatisation of water services in Argentina has led to
water contamination as private companies have failed to invest in sewerage
infrastructure. This has resulted in the contamination of surface water and
groundwater and therefore poses environmental and health treats which in the long
run affect the attainment of sustainable development. Based on the preceding
discussions, it will be premature to argue that privatisation ensures the effective use
of environmental resources. Although some positive linkages have been
established, the social and environmental problems such as unequal access, profit
over people arising from the privatisation of social services and common property
resources provide a platform for some degree of scepticism (Budds 2004 and
Narsiah and Ahmed 2012). The field of environment is further awash with payment
for ecosystem services (PES) and market-based approaches to conservation
(MBCAs), which are all embedded in the ideals of neoliberalism. Global conferences
such as those of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) have had agreements that MBCAs such as the Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM) and REDD? should be implemented in the context of sustainable
development and also be used in facilitating poverty reduction alongside its forest
conservation and carbon enhancement focus (UNFCCC 2011). Marketbased
approaches to conservation such as the emerging REDD? are argued to have a
greater advantage over many other conservation tools as they are efficient
approaches, a source of incentive as well as a conservation financing mechanism
(Pagiola and Platais 2002 and Wunder 2008). Market-based schemes like PES and
REDD? can, if well designed, can provide attractive and compelling solutions for
balancing environmental sustainability with economic development especially in
developing countries. Studies by proponents of PES suggest that such schemes can
provide some livelihood benefits (Landell-Mills and Porras 2006; Porras et al. 2008);
increased income above opportunity costs (Wunder 2008) and increased social
capital (Grieg-Gran et al. 2005). In one extensive review of PES in Latin America,
Pagiola et al. (2005) established the potentials for PES in reducing poverty and
improving environmental protection. Yet, further works have shown that many of the
accrued benefits of the PES schemes go largely with wealthy families with more
diversified incomes and better access to information and social networks, while
poorer, less flexible, and less connected households can be left out in PES schemes
(GriegGran et al. 2005). Other recent studies further challenge the improved
livelihoods and poverty reduction claims of market-based schemes. Some have also
criticised MBCAs, which operate on the ideals of neoliberalism, from a perspective of
governance, demonstrating how many PES initiatives overlook the institutional
setting and the fact that many of the environmental problems require broader
collective action approaches rather than mechanisms based mainly on individual
decision-making (Muradian et al. 2010 and Vatn 2010). Kosoy and Corbera (2010)

have also drawn attention to the limitations that come with the commodification of
ecosystem services, as this process dangerously oversimplifies the complex
underlying social, political and biophysical relationships between humans and the
environment. In several developing countries, weak institutions, unclear tenure
rights and political interests affect effective governance and limit the potentials of
these marketbased conservation approaches in promoting sustainable
development. The next part of the paper draws implications of the preceding
discussions for the post-2015 sustainable development goals agenda. 7 Lessons for
the post-2015 sustainable development goals agenda? Human development might
have progressed over the past 20 years or so. But, the world now faces
increasing gaps and inequality within and between nations. Economic and
financial crisis, climate change, growing unemployment, inequities in health and
education, poverty, hunger and malnutrition are few of the challenges confronting
the world at present. There is growing evidence supporting the notion that the
current pattern of consumption and production cannot continue in raising
standards of living without overstepping planetary boundaries the safe
operating space for humanity (Rockstrom et al. 2009). The ideals of sustainable
development are even more important than it was 20 years ago when it was
launched into the mainstream of development thinking. The decision to frame the
next development goals in the domains of sustainable development is therefore apt.
However, the economic thinking and paradigm under which the realisation of these
goals will be pursued, we argue, are as important as the goals themselves. The
SDGs should appropriately recognise that there exists an inseparable relationship
between the livelihoods of the poor and environmental assets. Sustainable
development is therefore about survival of people and goes beyond just
environment, economic growth and social development. It is therefore almost
impossible to address socio-economic and environmental issues unless the needs
and behaviours of the poor are adequately taken care of. Developing effective
sustainable development strategies to reduce poverty, protect the environment and
enhance global partnership to mention just but few require an understanding of who
the poor are and how they earn their livelihoods. The foregoing discussion highlights
at least three broad issues that should guide operational policies to pursue the
SDGs: a shift from the conventional approach of pro-growth for poor people towards
pro-poor growth; the need to take equity seriously and the need to address power
relations while giving voice to the poor.

A2 Transition Wars
No impact to transition wars
Thomas Love 2008 Anthropology and the fossil fuel era, ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY
Vol 24 No 2, Love is a professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies at
Linfield College, Oregon.
Peak oil pessimists envision a return to harsh preindustrial agrarian conditions.
Some rely on Joseph Trainers (1988) work, which represented collapse of complex
societies as an economizing strategy: the marginal costs of maintaining complexity
simply become no longer worthwhile to bear. Yet the spectre of marauding bands of
starving urbanites need not materialize. Recent research suggests that humans
are genetically predisposed to fairness , even at cost to ourselves: think of the
normative pressure among foragers toward generalized reciprocity (Heinrich et al.
2004, Richerson and Boyd 2005). This would suggest that powerdown could be
managed if the burden of reducing consumption were shared more or less
fairly, as is indeed evident in experiences of scarcity in the industrial countries
during the Great Depression and World War II as well as the daily burden of living on
a low energy budget for the worlds poor majority. Economic contraction would
encourage ethnogenesis and cultural diversification , making use of known
and new cultural materials. But how might emerging local communities protect local
adaptations from the corrosive effects of corporate-driven, mass media-propagated
high consumption?

A2 Violence Declining
The war per capita metric is flawed and Eurocentric. The past
two centuries have been exceptionally violent and the trend is
only increasing.
Bear F. Braumoeller 2013 Is War Disappearing?
http://www.braumoeller.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Is-War-Disappearing.pdf,
Braumoeller (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is Associate Professor and Director of
Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science.
Introduction A spate of recent research strongly suggests, contra popular perception
that war and violence are on the decline and have been for decades or centuries.
Steven Pinker (2011) argues that, as a result of an irregularly overlapping set of
processes pacification, civilization, and the humanitarian revolutionthere has
been an across-the-board decline in the propensity of humans to use violence
against one another, both individually and collectively. Along the same lines, John
Mueller (2004) argues both that ideational changesa growing distaste for the
institution of warfareand political ones, in the form of more capable political
institutions, have resulted in a general decline in warfare. Pinkers book, in
particular, has been heralded in the mainstream press: one fairly typical review
concludes that it is supremely important. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that
there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the
causes of that decline. (Singer, 2011) Exploring these arguments is interesting for
three reasons. First, and most obviously, we wish to know whether war is, in fact,
disappearing. Second, to the conict studies community, this question is a thrown
gauntlet: if we cannot answer this simple question in a compelling manner, how can
we hope to explain the causes of war? Finally, answering the question convincingly
requires us to understand both the nature of war and how it should be measured.
Those issues, I argue, are more complicated than most people realize. In this sketch
of a paper, I offer some preliminary thoughts on how to go about answering these
questions about the nature of war and its proper measurement. I leave aside for the
moment arguments about the changing nature of war, such as Muellers contention
that most modern wars are policing wars that are prompted by bandits and thugs.2 I
also leave aside civil war, which has its own dynamics and merits separate
exploration. I focus more narrowly on the argument that the frequency of interstate
war, whatever the reason for its employment, has gone down. I highlight a primary,
heretofore unaccounted-for driver of changes in warlike behavior, namely, simple
geography: as the world has divided itself into smaller, weaker, and more distant
political units, fewer and fewer of those units are able (or willing) to reach each
other to engage in combat. At the same time, those political units are far more
numerous, so the number of opportunities for conict has increased dramatically.
Existing studies of the decline of war have ignored these two trends. I control for
them and nd, on balance, that no net trend toward a decrease in war is evident. If
anything, the opposite is true. Chance, Peace, and War The decline-of-war thesis
seems implausible on the surface, if for no other reason that the 20th century
was spectacularly bloody by any standard. The response of its proponents,

essentially, is that one or both of the two World Wars in that century was a flukea
statistical anomaly. Mueller (2004, 2), for example, calls World War II a spectacular
anachronism, fabricated almost single-handedly by historys supreme atavism, Adolf
Hitler. Pinker (2011, 208-9) also points to Hitler, as well as to Gavrilo Princip, and
argues that each was a necessary condition for his respective war. The primary
evidence for the decline of war is taken to be, not the anomalous World Wars, but
the nearly seventy-year Long Peace that followed them.3There are two problems
with this argument. The first is that its often possible to point to one person who,
more than others, lit the fuse that led to war: the Napoleonic Wars are called that
for a reason. Thats not the same thing as arguing that that individual was both
necessary and sufficient for the onset of waran extremely ambitious claim that is
unlikely to withstand scrutiny.4 World War II may have been begun by Hitler, but the
ground was made fertile for him by the punitive peace of World War I and the
crushing terms of German reparations. The Allies took these steps knowing full well
that there was a risk of substantial backlash: although no one could have foreseen
Hitler, some hypernationalist response leading to a Great Power war was hardly out
of the question. The second, and more serious, problem with the argument is that it
attributes the occurrence of war to chance without exploring the role of chance in
the occurrence of peace. In fact, most scholars see both processes as irreducibly
probabilistic. One can cite any number of peaceful periods that could just as easily
have exploded into war. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, the United
States conveyed its intention to use practice depth charges to force Soviet
submarines near the quarantine line to surface, but the Soviet Union failed to inform
the four Foxtrot-class submarines in the area of that fact. The Soviets, for their part,
failed to convey the fact that their submarines were armed with nuclear-tipped
torpedoes. On October 27, a trapped Foxtrot submarine very nearly used its nuclear
weapon against the American Navy: doing so required consensus among the
captain, the second in command, and the political officer, and only one of the three
Vasili Arkhipovrefused to endorse a nuclear response (Roberts, 2012). If we give
the role that chance plays the same credit in peace that we give it in war, we can
take a rough stab at assessing which of these two eventsthe two World Wars, or
the long peace that followedwas more anomalous. If we look at the record of
Great Power wars over the past ve centuries (Levy, 1983; Goldstein, 1988, 146),
we nd an average of about two per century prior to the 20th century. Having two
such wars in the 20th century, therefore, is far from anomalous; its more or less
what wed expect given what weve seen in the past. More surprising, perhaps, is
the fact that the seventy years of peace that have passed since the end of World
War II are hardly anomalous either. More formally, lets take the probability of a
systemic war breaking out in any given year, based on historical precedent, to be
0.02.5 We can calculate the probability of seeing k successes (wars) in n trials
(years) given an underlying probability of success p by examining the probability
mass function of a binomial distribution, P r(X = k) = ( n k ) p k (1 p) (nk) Figure 1
uses this function to compare the probability of observing no wars in the 70 years
since World War II with the probabilities of observing one, two, three, or more wars
in the same time period, if nothing has changedthat is, if the probability of
systemic war has not deviated from its historical average of two per century. As we
can see, although the most likely outcome is a single war during that time period,

an absence of wars is far from improbable. Figure 2 takes a look at how these same
probabilities change over the course of 250 years. As the Figure demonstrates, for
nearly 50 years, peace is the most likely outcome. A single war then becomes more
likely, but not much more; and at no point are one or two wars all that much more a
likely outcome than none at all. These Figures answer our question about the
improbability of World Wars I and II, relative to the Long Peace. If there has been no
change in the underlying propensity for systemic war over time, the probability of
seeing two wars in the 20th centurythat is, the probability that two of the 100 oneyear periods contained in the century will see the onset of general waris 27.3%.
By contrast, the probability of observing seven continuous decades of peacezero
wars in fourteen ve-year trials, with a probability of success of 0.02is 24.3%.
The Long Peace is only slightly less likely to have happened by chance than the two
World Wars. How many years of peace would we have to see before we could
conclude that the long-term average no longer applies? We can examine the
condence intervals of the binomial distribution to answer this question. These
intervals delimit the plausible values of p, the probability of Great Power war, given
n years of peace. As Figure 3 shows, although the range of plausible values narrows
quickly for the rst half-century or so, it would still take about 150 years of
uninterrupted peace for us to reject conclusively the hypothesis that the underlying
probability of systemic war remains unchanged.6 Now that Ive addressed a few
points about how much we can, or cant, infer about the long-term probability of
systemic war from the World Wars and the Long Peace, I will turn to a thornier issue
the nature of war and its implications for measurementbefore addressing the
question of whether or not the use of force more generally is in fact in decline. The
(Mis)measure of War World War II was the bloodiest conflict in modern human
history, and subsequent conflicts have been impressively costly, so on its surface
the claim that human violence is on the decline requires qualification. Authors who
make it typically note that the number of people available to be killed in war has
increased considerably, so the appropriate metric is not absolute number of war
deaths, but rather, war deaths per capita. Pinker (2011, 51), for example, notes that
[t]he number of deaths per 100,000 people per year is the standard measure of
homicide rates, and I will use it as the yardstick of violence throughout the book. Is
this a reasonable metric to use when examining the argument that war is
disappearing over time? Not really. War deaths per capita accurately reflects the
average citizens risk from death in war, but its not immediately obvious how that
quantity is related to human war-proneness.7 A decrease in war deaths per capita
means that population is outpacing war deathsnothing more, nothing less. There
may be fewer people exposed to risk of death from war; the individual risk may
have decreased due to other factors (combat medicine, for example); and so on.
Moreover, population growth is exponential, and exponential growth defies human
imagination: more than 1 in 20 people who have ever lived , from 50,000 B.C.
to the present, are alive at this moment (Curtin, 2007). We should hardly be
surprised that deaths from war cannot keep up.

More generally, we cannot infer any direct

relationship between individual-level characteristics and state bellicosity for one simple reason: the logic of individual action in the context of a domestic
political hierarchy does not, in any straightforward manner, map to the logic of state action in the context of international anarchy (Waltz, 1959, 1979). As
Kant argued in Perpetual Peace, the problem of achieving order can be solved even by a race of intelligent devils; similarly, Jervis (1978) shows that war
may occur even between states that desire peace. The behavior of states does not, in any uncomplicated way, reect the nature of individual humans: to
argue that it does is to commit logical as well as ecological fallacies. Therefore, we cannot point to a change in the rate of death from war (or even the

number of deaths from war) as evidence that people are becoming more peaceful. How, then, can we understand whether states are becoming more
peaceful? In order to understand whether something is changing, we must rst understand how to measure it; in order to measure it, we must understand
what it is. To answer this question, therefore, we need to begin by exploring the fundamental nature of war. What Is War? If our goal is to understand war,
we should start with the writings of Carl von Clausewitz (1832/1976). Clausewitz described two different understandings of war absolute war, which he
likened to a duel on a larger scale (75), and real war, or the sort of war that we actually observe, which he described as a continuation of political
intercourse, with the addition of other means. (605) The distinction is puzzling at rst, especially given Clausewitzs claim that absolute wars rarely if ever
occur. The logic of Clausewitzs models of war, and their relationship to one another, have been usefully eshed out by modern theorists. First, Fearon
(1995) asked the question of why a rational state would ght at all, given the inevitable costs of doing so and the availability of a costless negotiated
settlement. In Fearons model of warfare, the process that leads to war is a process of negotiation. When actors cannot credibly commit to a settlement or
one actor has private information (about its capabilities or resolve, say) and an incentive to misrepresent that information, then war occurs; otherwise,
rational actors should be able to reach a negotiated settlement. Wagner (2000) pushes this logic further by arguing that negotiation continues during war
that, in fact, war is a form of costly negotiation, Clausewitzs continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means. War begins due to
a lack of information, and ghting reveals the information needed to arrive at a settlement. In a simple example, a state with an incentive to bluff, or
pretend to be stronger than it is, will soon have its weakness revealed on the battleeld and be forced to accept a settlement that reects its weakness.
Wagner also addresses the question of how Clausewitzs real war is related to absolute war. Absolute war comprises a process, not of ghting to reveal
information, but of ghting to defeat the opponents military and hold its civilian population hostage.8 The outcome of absolute war, war to the bitter end,
is the hypothetical about which real war provides information. In order for absolute war to play that role, though, there must be some chance that it will be
realizedthat is, some possibility that war will change relative capabilities more rapidly, or more effectively, than it provides information about them. This
intuition is captured well by Smith and Stam (2004), who describe a bargaining game in which states ght in order to conquer forts (analogous to
territory or strategic assets). If one side captures all of the assets, the other is left defenseless and must yield. The act of ghting over such assets both
tilts the balance this way and that and, in the process, gives the players more information about their relative capabilities. A settlement can occur either
as the result of increased information or as a result of military defeat. From this perspective, decision makers terminate wars when their estimates of one
anothers capabilities converge.9 Those estimates are inuenced by the efficacy of their military forces: a side that loses ve, ten, or fteen battles in a
row should begin to suspect that it has made a mistake. Implications What empirical implications can we glean from this account of war that can help us to
answer the question of whether war is on the decline? First, information, not attrition, is the goal of conflict. This fact drives a stake into the heart of the
wardeaths-per-capita metric, since there is no direct or obvious connection between changes in estimates of relative capabilities and size of total
population. Decision makers glean information as a result of the outcome of a series of battles; their relative losses influence those estimates. Although an
informative loss might be more costly in modern warfare than it was 200 years ago, that change is likely due to changes in technology, not to changes in
the size of the civilian population. Simply put, the outcomes of ten tank battles are probably costlier than the outcomes of ten equally informative cavalry
battles; but either should be as informative to the leader of a country of a million as it is to the leader of a country of ten million. Second, conflict initiation,
and even the bargaining that might lead to initiation, is a gamble. Leaders cannot know whether their opponents will fold or stand firm until they do one
or the other. If they stand rm, leaders cannot know whether their divergent beliefs will be resolved by the outcome of a few skirmishes, a weekslong
conict, or a major war. As Pinker (2011, 192) himself puts it, When the iron dice begin to roll (as the German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg
put it on the eve of World War I), the unlucky outcomes can be far worse than our primitive imaginations foresee. Indeed, Tuchman (1962, ch. 9)
documents the fact that political elites in the capitols of the Great Powers believed nearly unanimously that the conict begun in 1914 would last no more
than a few weeks, or possibly a couple of months at the outside. This fact, too, undercuts the war-deaths-per-capita metric: if the scale of a war is
uncontrollable, except by surrender, and therefore unknowable a priori, it cannot reect the magnitude of the human propensity for violence that led to
war. When the first bullets fly, no decision maker can know how many people will die; so their intent cannot be measured by the number of people who
actually do die, whether a thousand or a million. The only reasonable metric is the willingness to roll the dice in the first place. These two conclusions
help us to resolve the dilemma that Pinker (2011, 210) outlines: [W]arlike can refer to two different things. It can refer to how likely people are to go to
war, or it can refer to how many people are killed when they do. Imagine two rural counties with the same size population. One of them has a hundred
teenage arsonists who delight in setting forest res. But the forests are in isolated patches, so each re dies out before doing much damage. The other
county has just two arsonists, but its forests are connected, so that a small blaze is likely to spread, as they say, like wildre. Which county has the worse
forest re problem? One could argue it either way. As far as the amount of reckless depravity is concerned, the rst county is worse; as far as the risk of
serious damage is concerned, the second is. Given the fact that that states ght in order to gain information, not to produce attrition of one anothers
general populations, and given that the intentions of leaders who risk war cannot be inferred from the magnitude of the war that results, we are in a
situation in which, to continue Pinkers analogy, when forests are randomly distributed in each village and the arsonists set res without knowing how far

Accordingly, the best way to gauge

the warlikeness of nations would be to measure the frequency with which they run
the risk of war. Initiating a war, or issuing a threat that creates the risk of war, is
indicative of the willingness, in the worst case, to spill quite a bit of blood; that
willingness is the best indicator of the propensity of the state to engage in violent
conflict; and the individual conict incident, or militarized dispute, is the most
reliable objective indicator of that willingness.10 War and Numbers The preceding
they will spread, the village with more arsonists is the village with the worse problem.

discussion leads to the conclusion that trends in conflicts of any kind are
probably the most reliable indicator of the propensity of states to fight wars. The
question then becomes, what can we discern from trends in conict? At first glance,
trends in conict would seem to support the disappearance-ofwar thesis. In his
Figure 5.17, reproduced here as Figure 4, Pinker (2011, 222-231) uses data on the
number of conicts per year from Peter Breckes conict catalog11 to
demonstrate that war among European powers is on the decline. An earlier Figure
(5.13, not presented here) does the same for Great Power wars. Nevertheless,
Pinker offers little justifcation for examining only Great Powers and European states,
save that they offer a circumscribed but consequential theater in which we can
look at historical trends in war. None of the proponents of the decline-in-warfare
thesis suggests that it should be an exclusively European or Great-Power
phenomenon. Indeed, quite the opposite. Pinker (2011, ch. 4, esp. at 134) explicitly
makes reference to his humanitarian revolution as a worldwide phenomenon,

while Mueller (2004), who largely focuses on war between developed states,
explicitly (6; 83) notes that the same trends are evident in less-developed parts of
the world. To begin, then, we should examine Breckes data in order to see what the
the long-term trends in warfare look like in the international system as a whole. To
do so, we need look no farther than the working paper that Pinker cites (Brecke,
1999), which does just this. Breckes graph of trends in the international system
reproduced here as Figure 5suggest that conflict in the last two centuries
has been more prevalent than ever before . More fine-grained data from the
industry-standard Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) dataset lead
us to a similar conclusion. In Figure 6, I calculate the number of uses of force12 per
year and graph them against time. Given the volatility of the series, I also add a
lowess line through the center of the data to capture the central tendency of the
data. The result is precisely the opposite of what one would expect if war were on
the decline: uses of force held more or less steady through the rst World War but
then increased steadily thereafter. The problem with this graph, and the previous
ones, is straightforward: no correction is made for the number of interaction
opportunities in the international system. Especially during the rst two thirds of the
twentieth century, the number of independent states in the system grew
dramatically, and the number of opportunities for conict rose accordingly: in a
world of two states, only one pair of states can go to war; in a world of four states,
there are six possible axes of conict; and so on. To correct for this issue, in Figure 7
I divide the number of uses of force in a given year by the number of pairs of states
(or dyads) present in the international system. In this graph, we can see precisely
the sort of relationship that we would expect to see if war were dwindling: a steady
decline through both centuries, interrupted by brief surges around the time of the
two World Wars.13 Although Figure 7 would seem to be an improvement on Figure
6, it is not without its own problems. Counting every pair of states in the
international system as a potential conict dyad is ambitious, to say the least. The
overwhelming majority of the states in the international system lack the ability to
project power beyond their own region, at best; most, in the absence of outside
assistance, are limited to conict with their neighbors. Moreover, the scope of
states political interests tends roughly to correspond to the scope of their inuence.
A clash between Bolivia and Botswana is highly unlikely, both because they are
distant and weak and because the politics of each is largely irrelevant to the other.
In short, as Maoz and Russett (1993) memorably put it, many states in the
international system are not politically relevant to one another: conflict between
them is unlikely for purely geographic reasons, and we should account for that fact
when attempting to draw inferences about the onset of war and its causes.
Unfortunately, as of this writing there is little consensus in the literature regarding
how exactly to measure, or control for, political relevance (Braumoeller and Carson,
2011, 292-293). The simplest rule to apply is contiguity: Only neighboring pairs of
states, or states separated by less than 150 miles of water, are treated as potential
combatants. If we apply this rule and reexamine the use of force over time (Figure
8), the downward trend has clearly reversed itself: though there is a fair bit of noise,
the overall trend is slightly upward and has held steady at a higher rate
during the Cold War than in previous periods. Clearly, assuming that conict can

only occur between neighboring states is overcompensating for political relevance.

Even if we add another conditionthat any dyad containing a Great Power is
politically relevantwe still find that around a quarter of all militarized disputes in
the postwar period occurred between politically irrelevant states. Other assumptionsincluding
pairs of states that are separated by up to 400 miles, for exampledo not solve the problem, though they do reduce the percentage of excluded disputes
by a bit (Benson, 2005, 115-116). At this point, we face a serious dilemma. Controlling for the number of pairs of states in the international system
tentatively suggests that war is indeed on the decline, but controlling for the number of contiguous states leads to the opposite conclusion. Neither answer
is satisfactory, because neither controls for the correct number of states. What we need is a theoretically motivated measure of political relevance that
allows for shades of greythat is, for situations in which distance and weakness renders conict improbable, not impossible. In the next section, I describe
a statistical model of the use of force that allows me to estimate, empirically, the political relevance of any pair of states in the international system. The
measure is not perfect, but I argue that it represents the state of the art at present. I also include in the model two sets of variables designed to allow me
to capture the main arguments implicated in the decline-of-war literaturethe humanitarian revolution, and the trend toward better and more coherent
governanceso that I can examine the contribution of each to changes, if any, in the average propensity of states to ght over time. Modeling War and
Peace My main goal in constructing a statistical model of war and peace is to generate an estimate of political relevance that I can then use to construct a
reasonable metric of the warlikeness of statesconict incidents per politically relevant dyad. That, in turn, will help us to answer the question of whether
international war is disappearing. As a side benet, we can use the statistical model to measure the contributions of a variety of factors to the probability
of conict initiation. To preview, the model will have three main components. The rst will be a model of the warlikeness of statesthat is, their general
propensity to use force to settle disputes. The theoretical model of war outlined above gives us some general expectations about the sorts of situations in
which we should expect to see states resort to violencenamely, those in which there is a fair bit of uncertainty about relative capabilities and, therefore,
about the outcome. If the decline-of-war theorists are correct, we should nd that the propensity to ght based on such calculations is in decline. More
than that, however: We should nd that the propensity to use force to settle disputes is in decline even when controlling for other factors that are known
to blunt it. Two of theseregime type and political irrelevanceare the second and third components of the model. Democratic political regimes are
known to be peaceful in their dealings with one another; their inuence should be controlled for because both Pinker and Mueller point to a change in
ideas, not institutions, as the source of pacication. Political irrelevancegreater distances between weaker statesmakes war less possible, not less
desirable: its effects are not unlike those of putting bellicose siblings in different rooms for a time out. Distance decreases the opportunity to ght,
whether or not states are willing to do so. If the decline-of-war theorists are correct and humans desire less conict than they had in previous decades,
warlikeness should decrease even when distance is controlled for. Warlikeness The rst thing that we need is a measure of warlikeness, or the conict
propensity of states. The most obvious culprit, given the theoretical explanation of war that we use above, is uncertainty. The bargaining model of war
described above leads us to expect that war will be more likely when states are more uncertain about the balance of power. Regardless of the issue at
stake, uncertainty can cause a challenger to the status quo to demand too much, or cause a defender to underestimate the challengers willingness to
ght. As uncertainty increases, so does the potential for misunderstandings like these to lead to war. Unfortunately, there is no good measure of the
uncertainty in states calculations about one anothers capabilities. However, as intuition suggests (and Reed (2003) demonstrates), uncertainty is highest
when states capabilities are relatively evenly matched. When capabilities are mismatched, by contrast, the likely outcome of a conict is clear enough to
forestall it. Therefore, we can use the difference in capabilities of states as a proxy for the propensity of states to engage in conict as a result of
uncertainty about the likely outcome of that conict. The advantages of this model of warlikeness are twofold: it follows cleanly from the bargaining model
of war described above, and the logic applies to any impetus toward conictterritorial issues, ideology, hegemony, or what have you. H1a: Uncertainty,
as captured by similarity of capabilities, increases the propensity of states to engage in conict. Using this baseline model of warlikeness, we can ascertain
both whether increased uncertainty leads to an increase in the propensity to use force and whether that propensity has become less prevalent over time.
What we cant do is ascertain whether, as decline-of-war theorists argue, the propensity to ght has declined over time despite unchanging levels of
uncertainty. To do that, we need to include a second variable: Time. H1b: Over time, the propensity of states to initiate conict has declined. Including time
in the equation ensures that we can capture secular declines in warlikeness over time, for whatever reason. Any variable implicated in the decline-ofwar
literature must, of necessity, be highly correlated with the passage of time. Time is, therefore, a useful proxy, even if it fails to capture the precise quantity
of interest.14 Governance, Good and Bad These hypotheses are subject to a caveat. Over the last three decades, scholars have arrived at a nearconsensus that relations among democratic states are largely if not entirely exempt from the pressures that lead most states to war (Doyle, 1983a,b;
Russett, 1993). While these ndings do suggest that the impetus to go to war has been substantially reduced in the case of a subset of states, they cannot
speak to the overall proclivity of states to ght: if democracies are substantially more likely to ght nondemocracies than nondemocracies are to ght one
another, the systemic implication of low-to-intermediate levels of democratization might be more war, not less. Nevertheless, among democracies the
relationship between uncertainty and war should be substantially mitigated. H2a: Joint democracy decreases the impact of the similarity of capabilities on
the probability of conict. Along the same lines, Mueller (2004), who argues that democracy is more likely to be a result of peace than the cause of it (2,
167-169), suggests that capable governmentis ultimately the most promising method for the long-term control, and even potentially for the
eradication, of most of the remnants of war. (3) This is so because of the decrease it produces in organized criminality, which Mueller sees as a primary
source of the policing wars that dominate organized international uses of force today. H2b: Capable governance decreases the impact of the similarity of
capabilities on the probability of conict. Political Relevance Finally, these generalizations only hold among states that are politically relevant to one
another: in the Botswana-Bolivia dyad, for example, relative capabilities and regime type are largely immaterial. We therefore need to specify a nal
condition: H3: Political irrelevance decreases the impact of the similarity of capabilities and of regime type on the probability of conict. Measurement To
test these hypotheses, I utilize a range of variables from the Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) project,15 aggregated by EUGene
(Bennett and Stam, 2000), as well as more up-to-date data from the Polity project. To measure the difference in capabilities between state i and state j, I
begin with the standard Correlates of War capabilities measure, cap, and create the index Capability Difference = jcapi capjj capi + capj (1) For time, I
measure the number of years since 1815. For regime type, I use the standard Polity measures of democracy (i.e., democracy-anocracy) for states i and j,
as well as their product. In addition, I create a new variable, Anocracyi or j, that equals one if the democracy score of either state lies between 3 and -3
and zero otherwise. This variable captures the argument that poor governance, rather than governance of a particular sort, creates an impetus to war. To
capture the concept of political relevance, I include three variables: the Correlates of War capability score of the strongest state; the log of the inter-capital
distance between states i and j; and a dummy variable indicating whether the dyad contains at least one major power, as dened by the COW project.
Analysis Given the fundamentally interactive nature of the hypothesespolitical relevance and regime type moderate the impact of uncertainty on the
use of forceI utilize Boolean logit (Braumoeller, 2003) to test the hypotheses. In a nutshell, in contrast to standard logit analysis, in which Pr(y = 1) =
(X ); (2) Boolean logit posits the existence of three latent dependent variablesy u , or the dyads propensity to use force; y r , the pacifying effects of
regime type; and y pr, the degree to which political relevance permits states to use force in the rst place. It then assigns separate vectors of
independent variables to each latent dependent variable: Pr(y u = 1) = (X ) (3) Pr(y r = 1) = (Z ) (4) Pr(y pr = 1) = (W ) (5) Finally, it species the
interactive manner in which the combination of latent dependent variables contributes to the observed dependent variable, the use of force: Pr(y = 1) =
Pr(y u = 1) Pr(y r = 1) Pr(y pr = 1) (6) In this case, because the theory species a conjunctural relationship among the latent variables, the result
resembles a standard multiplicative interaction, except that vectors of independent variables rather than individual variables are interacting with one
another. The technique has two advantages from the point of view of this study. First, we can use it to create predictions, or estimates, of the unmeasured
latent dependent variables. In particular, we can simply compute (W ) in order to produce a continuous metric of political relevancea function of
distance, capabilities, and Great Power status that is bounded at 0 and 1. This variable will provide a much richer and more nuanced measure of political
relevance than simple measures of contiguity.Put another way: Most measures of political relevance assume a strict relationship between Great Power
status and/or contiguity, on the one hand, and political relevance, on the other. Rather than assuming such a relationship, this technique allows us to
estimate it. The second advantage is that we can use the results to capture three distinct quantities that reect conict propensity, regime type, and
political relevance, and chart those separate quantities over time. To do so, we average the value of the latent dependent variable across all units in the
system in each year. Changes in those averages over time are indicative of how much or how little the propensity for conict and the pacifying effects of
regime type and political irrelevance have changed across the system over time. Table 1 contains the results of the Boolean logit analysis.16 As
anticipated, simi- larity of capabilitiesour indicator of uncertaintyincreases the probability of conict, as does the absence of coherent government on
the part of at least one of the states in the dyad, while joint democracy decreases it. As one might anticipate, political relevance increases with the
capabilities of the strongest actor and with the presence of a major power in the dyad, and decreases with distance. Most surprising, though, is the

coefficient on the time variable, which reects a modest but signicant increase in the propensity to ght over time. These results allow us to break apart
the different components of conict initiation to see whether, on average, any of them has declined over time. Figure 9 does exactly this by charting the
mean within-sample predicted value for each of the y over time. While there is little change in the pacifying effects of regime type,17 there is a
signicant increase over time in warlikeness, or the propensity to use force to resolve disputes. This propensity dips a bit during the long and relatively
peaceful 19th century, but it increases steadily through the 20th. At the same time, we can see a clear and dramatic decrease in average political
relevance across the entire period, as the world is increasingly divided up into states that are smaller, weaker, and farther apart. Discussion The goal of
the above analysis was to separate three trends over time: the propensity to initiate conict in situations of uncertainty, as the bargaining model of war
suggests states will do; the pacifying effects of political regime type; and the pseudo-pacifying effects of the trend toward smaller, weaker, and more

Having done so, we are faced with a surprisingly stark result: not only does
the inclination to fight not decrease, it actually increases, slowly but steadily. What
does decrease, quite dramatically, is the ability of potential combatants to reach
each other. No model of conflict initiation is perfect, of course, and this one is surely
far from it: the macro-level variables make inference particularly challenging. Even
so, the trends are far from what one would expect if the decline-of-war thesis could
hold water. More important, the model gives us an important metrica measure of
political relevancethat we can use to draw conclusions about the raw data. Recall
that, in Figure 8, we looked at uses of force per politically relevant dyad, but the
measure of political relevance that we used was a very imperfect one. A much
improved measure of political relevance can be had by calculating the predicted
value of y pr using the above variables W and coefficients. As a quick check of
surface validity, I plot political relevance from the perspective of four countriesthe
United States, the United Kingdom, Egypt, and Chilein the year 1993 in Figure 10.
The plots correspond roughly to intuition: to the United States, most of the world is
mostly relevant, with only the most distant parts slightly less so, while the United
Kingdom displays a more regional pattern. Egypts politically relevant neighborhood
is more constrained still, extending through much of the Middle East and including
the more powerful states of Europe, while Chile primarily sees neighbors and Great
Powers as its politically relevant cohort. There is room to quibble, of course, but the
results represent a considerable improvement over the standard way of doing
things, which suggests that all states are equally relevant to Great Powers and nonGreat Powers are only relevant to their neighbors. With this more nuanced measure
of political relevance, we can get a much better sense of trends in the use of force
controlling for capabilities and distance. I turn to this task in the next section. War
and Political Relevance The final step in this exercise is to measure the frequency of
conict initiation controlling for the political relevance of dyads. Our measure of
conicts per dyad was simply the number of uses of force in a given year, divided
by the number of extant dyads in that year. Conicts per contiguous dyad was equal
to the number of uses of force divided by the number of contiguous (directly or
within 150 miles by water) dyads. In order to create a measure of systemic
warlikeness, I divide the number of uses of force in the system in a given year by
the sum of the political-relevance scores for all dyads in the system. This measure
assumes, rst, that the political-relevance measure is reasonably accurate, and
second, that we should on average expect half as many conicts from a dyad with a
political relevance score of 0.5 as we would expect from a dyad with a political
relevance score of 1. Given that the estimator that was used to derive the measure
incorporates exactly this assumption, it would seem not to be too unrealistic. Figure
11 illustrates the resultthe nal overall metric of warlikeness from 1816 2001.
Although the period from the 1960s to the present does exhibit a decline in conflict,
the drop is fairly modest, and the result is a rate of conflict not too different from
the average across the past two centuries. There is certainly no suggestion of a
general downward trend in rates of conflict initiation; a more reasonable
distant states.

characterization would be a cyclical alternation of more-warlike (1850s, 1910s,

1940-90) and less-warlike periods. Of course, thats not to say that an upswing will
inevitably follow the current lull: indeed, the general trend more closely resembles a
random walk than a steady decline. We might be tempted to derive meaning from
the postCold War cluster of lower-conict years, and in time we may conclude that
theyre more than a uke; but as Pinker himself puts it, events that occur at
random seem to come in clusters, because it would take a nonrandom process to
space them out. (Pinker, 2011, 203) Conclusion In this paper, I set out to explore
the claim that there has been an overall decline in the propensity of states to use
violence against one another in international relations. Ive argued that per-capita
deaths from war is a misleading and irrelevant statistic to use in answering this
question, because it has no foundation in a coherent account of how wars actually
happen. I argue instead that we should be examining uses of force that have the
potential to become wars, because such actions are indicative of a willingness to
use considerable violence even if that willingness is not realized. An initial glance at
uses of force per year suggested that the propensity to use force is going up
rather than down. This trend is plausibly an artifact of the division of the world
into a larger number of political units with a larger number of conict opportunities.
At the same time, those units are on average smaller, weaker, and more distant. I
therefore examine a new metricuses of force per relevant dyad that controls for
both trends simultaneously. The results bear little resemblance to a decline in
violence over time. A more reasonable characterization might be a semi-random
oscillation, with more and less conictual periods alternating across irregular
periods. A pattern of that nature offers little basis to conclude that war is on the
declineor indeed, to conclude much of anything at all about its likely future
direction.

A2 Utilitarianism
Their conception of utilitarianism is mired in the individualism
of market forces. It has been reappropriated by neoliberalism
to privilege the pleasure of those in power, instead of the
commons.
Kirill Kovalenko 2014 Liberalism, Neoliberalism and Corruption: a Critical
Genealogy http://www.e-ir.info/2014/10/01/liberalism-neoliberalism-and-corruptiona-critical-genealogy/ Kovalenko received his Masters degree in International
Relations from the University of Melbourne.
When thinking about corruption in this way, it is worth breaking down the ethical
aspect of how the infringement of the private interest upon the public obligation is
necessarily something which is morally wrong. As we have seen, within classical
liberal thought the private/public distinction is not necessarily straightforward.
Conventional liberal discourse on the proper ethical aims of government generally
stems from the thought of another important liberal thinker: John Stuart Mill and his
ideas on Utilitarianism. This theory of utility, in the words of Mill, holds that
actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they
tend to produce the reverse of happiness (Mill 1993, p. 7) and, as is evident in his
Remarks on Benthams Philosophy (p. 429) he considers it more than just
Benthams technical phraseology, but a genuine ethical system of governance
that can be integrated with humanitys natural freedom and the limits of the state
that he deliberates on in On Liberty (Mill 1993, p. 69). It is clear that the majority of
contemporary framing of the problem of corruption is done through a Utilitarian
approach. The issues that are most notably brought up such as misallocation of
resources, poor governance, distortion of public policy which ultimately tie in
to questions of development, living standards and prosperity, implying that the
outcome of fighting corruption would be more and better distributed wealth and, as
such, the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people (IMF
2012) (TIA 2012). There are many valid criticisms of Utilitarianism, the one most
relevant to this critique is the notion that Mill had not given sufficient thought to
how distributive justice could be upheld (Kenny 2007, p. 928). In neoliberal
literature, problems of distributive justice are negotiated through the Smithean idea
that self-interest , driven by a desire for happiness, is best channelled through
free market mechanisms to produce a system of wealth creation that will more
organically satisfy the needs of the population. This policy direction in terms of
corruption is elaborated as a set of axioms: H1: Market-oriented, neoliberal
economic policies help reduce political corruption. H1a: Openness to foreign trade
and investment promotes lower levels of political corruption. H1b: Lower and more
market-friendly regulations inhibit political corruption. H1c: Smaller public sectors
lead to less corruption than larger ones. (Gerring & Thacker 2005) Wealth (and the
freedom to acquire wealth) is implicitly granted a moral status, since it is the vehicle
by which the ethical ends of Utilitarianism are achieved. Thus, neoliberalisms
approach to social justice is a cherry-picked assortment of classical liberal axioms:
the marketized state of natural freedom wherein an ethical end is the unhindered

flow of wealth which will permit the self-realization of needs. In effect, with this
amalgam of Utilitarianism and Smithean economics, what is morally problematic
about corruption is the fact that it does not permit the function of the economy as
well as a perfectly free market would. Hypothetically, within this discourse of
development and self-determining happiness, corrupt practice within state
institutions would not be morally condemnable if it promoted greater flows of
commerce and allowed people a greater chance of exercising their market freedom.
What has been pursued in this essay is the history of classical liberal thought which
remains as an undercurrent of modern neoliberal anticorruption policy. In closing, it
is worth briefly covering some further contemporary criticisms of these
assumptions. Bertrand Russell intimately connects the philosophy of Locke to the
emancipation of free trade with the rise of Protestantism and Puritanism, which
overturned the pre-existing Church natural law against usury (Russell 1945, p.
623). Max Weber develops an extensive sociological analysis of the linkage between
these two concepts. The vital point of his work that bears relevance to this critique
is that it views Puritanism and its derivative market values, not as a
fundamental ontology or human nature, but a product of developing
historical and social forces (Weber 2002). Russell speculates that fanciful
notions of natural freedom and personal interest are a coupling of Protestant
individualism alongside longstanding human traditions which recognise a historic
Eden or golden age at the very beginnings of society. One of the great critics of
this natural-state tradition is Karl Polanyi, whose work complements Webers in
providing an account of the rise of economic man that is outside the conventional
Protestant paradigm and generally avoids making ontological presuppositions of
freedom. In The Great Transformation he questions Smiths assumption that
individual self-interest underlies all of society and thereby serves as a basis for
understanding individual liberty: The outstanding discovery of recent historical and
anthropological research is that mans economy, as a rule, is submerged in his
social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the
possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his
social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve
this end. (Polanyi 1957) When one replaces the homo-economicus of neoliberalism
with Polanyis homo-juridicus, for whom freedom and exchange are a highly
complex, inherent structure of social institutions, customs and laws; the sense in
which economic corruption and social problems can be solved merely by expanding
freedom to pursue interest (viz. the market) would appear to be misguided. Yet, by
the trajectory of neoliberal ontology, Homo-economicus, becomes not an ideal, but
a reality; human nature (Read 2009). Foucault emphasises this by posing it as a
problem of power, stating that neoliberalism: is not just a matter of governing
states or economies, but is intimately tied to the government of the individual, to a
particular manner of living (Read 2009, p. 27). Critical analyses of neoliberalism
also state that, while it is to some extent built upon the classical ideas of freedom
and economics that this essay has covered, it has to some extent rebuilt them from
scratch to accommodate its own agendas (Peck 2008). This notion that
neoliberalism is somehow more malign than its classical counterpart is seen in the
emphasis of the ethos of zero-sum competition which was alien to the bond of

union and friendship which Smith suggested (Pettman 2010, p. 93). In this light,
these notions of extreme liberalism (libertarianism) suggest that there is not only an
unnatural disconnect between the individual and the state, but between individuals
themselves. Foucault states that the homo-economicus of neoliberalism deemphasizes the market of mutual exchange in favour of recreating the individual as
the entrepreneur of himself, wherein ones goal is to provide as much of an
investment into ones human capital capacity as possible, which aims towards
one single goal, the production of self-satisfaction (Foucault 2008, p. 226). As
such, we can see how neoliberalism comes to bastardise conventional Utilitarianism
to become isolated from the traditional liberal social and political constraints
(Trigilia 2002, p. 19) in order to deal with purely an individualistic calculus of
pleasure. In this respect, the concept of state corruption can be seen as one of
two things, as an investment on the part of the consumer, no different to any
other market element, or a commodification of public goods or services on behalf
of the supplier, who is merely maximising his self-interest and endowment, in line
with the dynamics of the self-centred market. As such, to conclude, this essay has
attempted to, very briefly, trace a conceptual genealogy of classical liberal thought
to displace the presuppositions and assumptions which underlie neoliberalism. This
has been tied in to neoliberal approaches to corruption and the problems associated
with an uncritical use of concepts like freedom and the market and the
corruption of the terms of liberalism themselves in order to produce an
understanding of the market as stripped of its traditional social, political and
cultural connotation. To reiterate what was stated in the introduction, this essay has
purposely avoided a quantitative empirical analysis, primarily because of the glut of
empirical studies within corruption studies as well as the problems of establishing
causation, especially within transitional economies. Critical Theory as well as
Foucauldian discourse analysis continue to offer useful conceptual critiques that
should not be discounted.

Extinction!
Eitan Diamond 2010 BEFORE THE ABYSS: RESHAPING INTERNATIONAL
HUMANITARIAN LAW TO SUIT THE ENDS OF POWER Israel Law Review, Vol. 43, pp.
414-456, Diamond is a legal adviser for the International Committee of the Red
Cross (ICRC) Delegation in Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Contemporary armed conflicts, particularly asymmetric confrontations between
States and non-State armed groups, wage on well beyond the battlefield. Subjected
to intense and relentless scrutiny by their own nationals, by their allies and by
influential third parties (background elites),137 much of the warring parties
efforts are invested in a struggle for legitimacy . As a result, humanitarian
concerns no longer function merely as rival considerations to be balanced against
military necessity. To the contrary, since ignoring them might well doom a campaign
to failure, they can almost be seen as a military necessity in themselves. The
humanitarian project obviously stands much to gain from these developments, but
there are also dangers that must be guarded against. This is particularly apparent in
relation to humanitarian law. Seen as a yardstick for legitimacy, IHL has been

gaining greater clout and is becoming an integral and ever more central part of
military strategy. There is reason to hope that by thus internalizing the law military
forces will become more attentive to its requirements and that as a consequence
human dignity will be better protected and human suffering reduced. However,
there are also grounds for concern that as belligerents come to master IHL they will
not necessarily be more inclined to act justly, but will instead become more adept at
justifying their actions and that as a consequence more, rather than less,
violence will be carried out. LEA provides particularly striking illustration of how
embracing IHL might enable belligerent States to perpetrate acts of violence they
would otherwise avoid. Accepting that no state or individual may violate the laws
of war in the name of military necessityi.e., in the name of promoting the
effectiveness of the military operationsince that necessity has already been
incorporated into the balance struck by the legal rules,138 LEA seeks to justify
violations by appealing not to military considerations but to the laws underlying
humanitarian drive. By placing humanitarian considerations alongside
considerations for using force, LEA proposes to tip the balance in a way which
purely military considerations could never accomplish. To deliberately kill hundreds
of thousands of civilians for the sake of military advantage is clearly indefensible,
but when such killing is said to have been perpetrated for humanitarian
reasons , to avoid a greater evil, it is less plainly so. LEA asserts that in such
circumstances an acteven one violating the most fundamental humanitarian
values and causing devastating humanitarian consequencesshould not only be
deemed forgivable, but ought to be considered lawful as well. As this Article has
shown, there are pressing reasons to reject such argument. It would replace clear
cut rules of law with a utilitarian cost benefit analysis, opening space for discretion
and thereby undermining the laws objectivity and rendering it less determinate.
Placing misguided faith on the judgment of belligerent parties and failing duly to
consider possibilities of abuse and misuse, it is likely to lead to the greater
rather than lesser evil and therefore falls flat even on its own utilitarian
logic . Moreover, it rests on a mistaken account of IHL, failing to recognize that
alongside the goal of minimizing human suffering IHLs core purpose is to safeguard
human dignity. Thus, despite its advocates claims that it would advance the laws
humanitarian purpose, LEA in fact threatens to disrupt IHLs structural principles
and to flout the humanitarian project. It would free belligerents from crucial
constraints and unleash violence perfidiously assuming the guise of legitimacy.
Those who wish to guard humanity must deny warring powers any such
guise.

**Aff Answers**

Alternatives

Human Nature
Capitalism is natural - alternative will fail and voids life of
meaning.
Paul Bowles. (London School of Economics). Capitalism. 2007. p. 25-6.
The act of market exchange was, for Smith, "natural" in the sense that it was based
upon a propensity which was found in all humans and, more strongly, only in humans. That is, for Smith,
market exchange was a central defining characteristic of our own humanness . The
question "what distinguishes humans as humans?" was a well-debated topic at the end of the eighteenth century. For some, the answer to this
lay in the ability of humans to communicate and to develop language. For Smith, the answer was to be found in humans' ability to enter into
exchange. Smith (1976: 25) refers to this as "the

propensity to truck, barter and exchange", in other words,

to trade. This propensity, Smith (1976: 25-26) tells us, "is common to all [people] men, and to be found
in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contracts. Two greyhounds, in
running down the same hare, have sometimes the appearance of acting in some sort of concert. Each turns her towards his companion, or
endeavors to intercept her when his companion turns her towards himself. This, however, is not the effect of any contract, but of the accidental

Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and

deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by
concurrence of their passions in the same object at that particular time.

its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that." From this view, important
implications arise. Firstly, market exchange, being based on a natural propensity, is common to all people and all places .

The
"market" is a universal institution arising from an innate "propensity" within human
beings. Attempts to limit exchange are regarded as both futile and oppressive. They are futile in
that they attempt to deny human nature and, as such, will ultimately fail. Thus, attempts
to limit the operations of the market in many countries, such as those which occurred in the countries
of the former communist bloc, simply resulted in the rise of "black" or "grey" market activity; that is, in
market exchange which was not officially sanctioned by the state. Attempts to suppress the
market in any significant degree could not work in the long run, since human
nature would always find an avenue to escape the shackles of any state-imposed
restrictions. The contemporary relevance of this view is lot only that economic systems which seek to
radically limit the operations of the market are doomed to failure because I nan ingenuity, propelled by the
"propensity to truck, barter, J exchange", will overcome such limitations. This position o implies that the transition to a market system can be
iieved reasonably quickly, since markets will "naturally" and ontaneously develop. For example, the "transition to
capit- sm" in the former Soviet bloc could possibly be a short one if supportive enabling environment was quickly established. The second
implication of Smith's argument is that limits on arket exchange are limits on human freedom. If our humanity expressed and defined by our
ability to enter into exchange 4ationships with others, then

attempts to limit our humanity.

any attempts to limit these exchanges are

therefore

Inevitability
Neolibs inevitable and movements are getting smothered out
of existenceno alternative economic system
Jones 11Owen, Masters at Oxford, named one of the Daily Telegraph's 'Top
100 Most Influential People on the Left' for 2011, author of "Chavs: The
Demonization of the Working Class", The Independent, UK, "Owen Jones: Protest
without politics will change nothing", 2011,
www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-protest-withoutpolitics-will-change-nothing-2373612.html
My first experience of police kettling was aged 16. It was May Day 2001, and the anti-globalisation movement was at its peak. The turn-of-the-century
anti-capitalist movement feels largely forgotten today, but it was a big deal at the time. To a left-wing teenager growing up in an age of unchallenged
neo-liberal triumphalism, just to have "anti-capitalism" flash up in the headlines was thrilling. Thousands of apparently unstoppable protesters chased

Today, as
protesters in nearly a thousand cities across the world follow the example set by
the Occupy Wall Street protests, it's worth pondering what happened to the anti-globalisation
movement. Its activists did not lack passion or determination. But they did lack a
coherent alternative to the neo-liberal project. With no clear political direction,
the movement was easily swept away by the jingoism and turmoil that followed
9/11, just two months after Genoa. Don't get me wrong: the Occupy movement is a glimmer of sanity amid today's economic madness. By
the world's rulers from IMF to World Bank summits from Seattle to Prague to Genoa and the authorities were rattled.

descending on the West's financial epicentres, it reminds us of how a crisis caused by the banks (a sentence that needs to be repeated until it
becomes a clich) has been cynically transformed into a crisis of public spending. The founding statement of Occupy London puts it succinctly: "We
refuse to pay for the banks' crisis." The Occupiers direct their fire at the top 1 per cent, and rightly so as US billionaire Warren Buffett confessed:
"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." The Occupy movement has provoked fury
from senior US Republicans such as Presidential contender Herman Cain who predictably labelled it "anti-American". They're right to be worried:

But a coherent
alternative to the tottering global economic order remains, it seems, as distant as
ever. Neo-liberalism crashes around, half-dead, with no-one to administer the
killer blow. There's always a presumption that a crisis of capitalism is good news for the left. Yet in the Great Depression, fascism consumed
those camping outside banks threaten to refocus attention on the real villains, and to act as a catalyst for wider dissent.

much of Europe. The economic crisis of the 1970s did lead to a resurgence of radicalism on both left and right. But, spearheaded by Thatcherism and

This time round, there d oesn't even

seem to be an alternative for the right to defeat . That's not the fault of the protesters. In truth, the left
has never recovered from being virtually smothered out of existence . It was the
victim of a perfect storm: the rise of the New Right; neo-liberal globalisation; and
the repeated defeats suffered by the trade union movement. But, above all, it was the aftermath of the
collapse of Communism that did for the left. As US neo-conservative Midge Decter triumphantly put it:
"It's time to say: We've won. Goodbye." From the British Labour Party to the African National Congress, left-wing
movements across the world hurtled to the right in an almost synchronised fashion. It was as though the left wing of the
global political spectrum had been sliced off. That's why , although we live in an
age of revolt, there remains no left to give it direction and purpose.
Reaganism, the New Right definitively crushed its opposition in the 1980s.

Resilience
Capitalisms resilient and the alt fails
Gideon Rose, January/February 2012 issue, "Making Modernity Work," Foreign
Affairs, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136776/gideon-rose/makingmodernity-workThe central question of modernity has been how to reconcile
capitalism and mass democracy, and since the postwar order came up with a good
answer, it has managed to weather all subsequent challenges . The upheavals of the
late 1960s seemed poised to disrupt it. But despite what activists at the time
thought, they had little to offer in terms of politics or economics, and so their lasting
impact was on social life instead. This had the ironic effect of stabilizing the system
rather than overturning it, helping it live up to its full potential by bringing
previously subordinated or disenfranchised groups inside the castle walls. The
neoliberal revolutionaries of the 1980s also had little luck, never managing to turn
the clock back all that far. All potential alternatives in the developing world,
meanwhile, have proved to be either dead ends or temporary detours from the
beaten path. The much-ballyhooed "rise of the rest" has involved not the
discrediting of the postwar order of Western political economy but its reinforcement:
the countries that have risen have done so by embracing global capitalism while
keeping some of its destabilizing attributes in check, and have liberalized their
polities and societies along the way (and will founder unless they continue to do so).
Although the structure still stands, however, it has seen better days. Poor
management of public spending and fiscal policy has resulted in unsustainable
levels of debt across the advanced industrial world, even as mature economies have
found it difficult to generate dynamic growth and full employment in an ever more
globalized environment. Lax regulation and oversight allowed reckless and
predatory financial practices to drive leading economies to the brink of collapse.
Economic inequality has increased as social mobility has declined. And a loss of
broad-based social solidarity on both sides of the Atlantic has eroded public support
for the active remedies needed to address these and other problems. Renovating
the structure will be a slow and difficult project, the cost and duration of which
remain unclear, as do the contractors involved. Still, at root, this is not an
ideological issue. The question is not what to do but how to do it--how, under
twenty-first-century conditions, to rise to the challenge Laski described, making the
modern political economy provide enough solid benefit to the mass of men that
they see its continuation as a matter of urgency to themselves. The old and new
articles that follow trace this story from the totalitarian challenge of the interwar
years, through the crisis of liberalism and the emergence of the postwar order, to
that order's present difficulties and future prospects. Some of our authors are
distinctly gloomy, and one need only glance at a newspaper to see why. But
remembering the far greater obstacles that have been overcome in the past,
optimism would seem the better long-term bet.

A2 Radical Democracy
The alt fails and locks in the status quo approach to drug
policy that views addiction as a matter of individual
responsibility---the embrace of <contingency, radical
democracy, alterity> discounts the role of political institutions
in modern life and reduces politics to an individualistic project
of ethical self-improvement and becoming
Chad Lavin 6, teaches political theory at Tulane University, Fear, Radical
Democracy, and Ontological Methadone, Polity (2006) 38, 254-275
radical democracy
suggests revealing this identity for the reification that it is so that we can move beyond a tolerant modus vivendi and toward
While liberalism exhorts us to take comfort in the promises and assurances of a fixed identity,

an ethical comportment of generosity and meaningful democracy. They prescribe, as a cure for postmodern agency panic, an
enthusiastic embrace of the contingency of everyday life, a series of practices of the self that force an examination of the existential

The
problem of fear, they suggest, resides in a dogmatic clinging to an untenable and
disintegrating myth of subjectivity with an unrealizable promise of control. Their response
resentment felt by subjects of liberal capitalism: Don't adhere to a manufactured map! Learn to be at home in homelessness!

to the fear of homelessness runs directly counter to the conspiracy theorist: with a model of contingency rather than conspiracy,
there are no villains, thus no reservoir for depositing and segregating one's fear. Rather than depositing this fear at the feet of a
scapegoat, face it; overcome it. While challenging the liberal fetish for reifying a historical production and thus closing the door on
possibilities for alternative subjects to emerge, radical democrats also acknowledge the work done by liberalism to remove
metaphysical obstacles to the expression of agency. As such, their claim is not antiliberal so much as it is postliberal, interrogating
the limits of the liberal subject in pursuit of a more open approach to identity and difference. For the identities and attachments that
have been forged through liberalism are anything but fetters to the unhindered exercise of democracy and production of difference.
They are not only productive of many of the freedoms that we enjoy today in the liberal world (e.g., civil rights and liberties, relative
government accountability), they also offer valuable solace from a hostile and increasingly unpredictable existence. But because the
prescription for those suffering from agency panic tends to be found in the capitalist myths of merit, autonomy, and authenticity,

we might look at liberalism as the opiate of the people, easing our pain , but preventing us
from doing the work necessary to attend to the source of our ills. Perhaps liberalism, then, for all its value and appeal, is a habit we
need to kick.

Radical democrats recommend sobering up and facing our fears

head-on. But where's the Betty Ford Center for radical democracy?

If the

fundamentalist drive to reify assumptions and the democratic drive to challenge them are two responses to the same panic that

the question remains: why do some

subjects flee from this fear (through fundamentalism), while others draw from it
strength and forbearance (through radical democracy)? What resources allow some
subjects to respond to revealed inadequacies of their foundational beliefs with a
gracious humility while others respond by desperately clinging to and
fundamentalizing the contested position? The short answer is that the democratic move is
not an easy one to make. While liberal cognitive maps respond to the complexity of contemporary power networks
with a promise of predictability and stability through the claims to fixed identity, rational control, and market efficiency, radical
democracy promises precisely what subjects of liberalism fear: enduring instability.
results from social pluralization (as Connolly convincingly claims),

The ethos of forbearance asks subjects not only to accept social and political instability today, but ontological instability forever

By introducing
contingency into the very substance of being, this approach leaves us in
indeterminacy without even a promise of finding answers; it is "tentative,
experimental," emphasizing the need for perpetual work of "cultivation" without the
promise of attaining a stable system;41 it is "a risky and ambiguous enterprise" always threatening to destroy
after (whereas the fundamentalizing moves promise order not only in the future, but now).

self-confidence as soon as it is built;42 it offers "no necessary political consequences," but only possible gains in freedom.43 Going

radical democrats suggest that we should embrace rather than run from
or even merely tolerate the very conditions we fear: unknowability, instability, and
back to Hobbes,

discord. Further, Connolly and Butler insinuate unmistakably that liberal authenticity has been
thoroughly debunked, still adhered to only by potential or actual fascists who (at best) have been thoroughly colonized
by the culture industry and the ideological apparatuses of the state or (at worst) have no sympathy for the contemporary

They thus imply

that it is the social critic who bears the mantle of democracy , and that it is not fear
but a stubborn authoritarian desire that obliges resistors to slap the table to illustrate its nondiscursiveness and pound their chests to prove their individuated, corporeal, nonporous existence. (A
spectre is haunting criticismthe spectre of Leninism.) We can almost hear radical democrats
responding that liberal individualists have nothing to lose but their chains. But if the
reigning paradigms of identity and order offer solace from an increasingly
indeterminate and unpredictable world (complete with massive layoffs,
abandonment of traditional gender norms, declining national sovereignty, and other
existential disintegrations), then by what standard can radical democrats call upon
the subjects of liberal capitalism to reject the myths that make lives livable? These
calls might be the ontological counterpart of ham-fisted approaches to drug abuse,
exhorting addicts to take responsibility for themselves and quit cold turkey, with
little attention to the social and psychological dynamics that lead millions of users
to abuse narcotics, hallucinogens, opiates, and amphetaminesbe they consumers of heroin, religious fervor, Xanax, or
extreme corn chips and suburban assault vehicles. The sales pitch for radical democracy rarely
accounts for the degree to which citizens are interpellated as subjects of fear . Connolly
movements interested in expanding the democratic web to include currently disenfranchised populations.

is more than aware of the interpellations that subjects of capitalism receive; large sections of The Ethos of Pluralization are
dedicated to the relationship between economic anxiety and the drive to fundamentalism, and Why I Am Not a Secularist is largely
an indictment of secularism (and much of American liberalism) for failing to account for the habits inscribed on the body that
rational argumentation cannot erase.44 His attention to what he calls "the visceral register," and his recommendation that the left
take a lesson from William Bennett on how to appeal to this register is both compelling and timely.45

Unfortunately,

Connolly's intellectual trajectory has shifted away from the social and
political apparatuses which inculcate these habits and toward the level
of neurology to explain the inward mechanisms of habits and ethics ;46
while he never denies the relevance of social and political institutions (he merely argues that
"too many cultural theorists" ignore the biological components of thinking and ethics), his trajectory has led him to
speak more about what practices of the self might lead to more democracy and
less about the institutional production of subjects who actually fear
democracy .47 As White convincingly argued well before this latest turn toward biological studies, Connolly takes
attitudes to have primacy over issues of justice, leading him to prematurely curtail
pursuit of the obviously compatible institutional dimension of criticism. 48 The common
scoundrel in such critiques of liberalism, the prototypical antidemocratic citizen, is typified by Archie Bunker and his white workingclass buddies. Resentful, socially and economically conservative, and easily seduced by reactionary propagandists, this was the face
of fundamentalism before 9/11. Notably, this is a population whose economic viability and (therefore) ability to live up to
conventional norms of masculinity have been taking it in the gut in recent decades. Identifying the threats that have constituted this

Connolly notes the familiar targets: civil rights, Vietnam, feminism, dismantling
of the welfare state, environmentalism, and a decline in the availability of industrial
jobs.49 Along with these transformations in established relations of power, we can
also add to this list (which Connolly may or may not have intended to be
exhaustive) the supposed death of grand narratives declared by critical
intellectuals. Traditional cognitive maps are not only becoming obsolete in the wake
of shifting terrain, but they are being criticized for being defective from the get-go .
subject,

Given this, is the rise in public fear a surprise? As Jameson's, Melley's, and Furedi's attention to the paucity of concepts suggests,
isn't the declining availability of cognitive maps to those threatened by shifting networks of power a prime candidate for Connolly's
list?50 If

fundamentalisms feed on the anxieties endemic to late capitalist (dis)order;

if market ideology, conspiracy theories, and aggressive nostalgia are degraded attempts to construct
cognitive maps that might provide threatened subjects with a sense of agency;
what does radical democracy offer in their stead? Traditional fundamentalisms are popular precisely
because they treat the agency panic and existential angst accelerated by global capitalism and postmodern culture. Again, Connolly
recognizes the absence of viable democratic supplements to the decline of grand narratives, and he laments that the world's most
zealous moralizers have effectively filled that void. But claims that rethinking liberalism's ontological commitments cannot be an
afterthought of political emancipation (but must be coterminous with or preliminary to it), betray an inattention to how a
postmodern ethos is intimately tied to the various psychological, economic, and political securities that cognitive maps often

While Connolly's diagnosis of fundamentalist epidemics clearly highlights their

social and economic roots, he presents a postmodern sensibility as a treatment for
the anxieties of identity without considering the role that this move may have
played in actually producing those anxieties by threatening the cherished existence
of those perhaps most in need of their help.51 My concern is not the diagnosis, but
the prescription, as it is for a regimen that few have any interest in adopting.
Radical democracy is premised on the idea that its ontology and ethics are
necessary to an enactment of the pluralism that liberalism purports to offer,
transcending mere tolerance toward a generous fostering of otherness and a
meaningfully democratic way of life. At the same time, however, it is insensitive to the
profound threat that genealogy poses to those who receive their only respite from a
truly tenuous existence from their myths. While its pitch suggests that it is ontologically more defensible,
provide.

ethically more admirable, and practically more conducive to a generous ethical-political comportment (contentions with which I
agree, incidentally),

it does not consider the sheer difficulty (and often terror) in adopting
such a position. Certainly, it does not speak to the members of society who are the
most economically, politically, and/or socially disadvantaged, whose daily survival is
so tenuous as to not provide the luxury for the practices of self-cultivation which it
advocates. I am far from the first to call attention to the dangers of and aversions to genealogy. The aristocratic baggage of
Nietzscheanism, from which radical democrats have vigorously sought to distance themselves, stems largely from Nietzsche's
acknowledgement of the difficulties of abandoning foundations. No friend of pity, Nietzsche nevertheless prescribes revaluing our
constitutive values only to a privileged class, maintaining that we cannot ask lambs to be birds of prey.52 Similarly, William James
discusses the differential capacities of modern subjects to be at home in homelessness, expressing concern for those who might not

the "healthy" has a

responsibility to attend to the "sick" soul, and that some are not ready, willing, or
able to abandon their most cherished myths : "Some constitutions need them too much."53 Returning to
be ready or able to make such a move. He argues (with unfortunate terminology) that

our liberal fundamentalist, Rorty emphasizes that "most people" are not interested in facing the contingency of their identities, and
that "there is something very cruel about" revealing their contestability and groundlessness.54 While these arguably elitist
arguments might sit uncomfortably with the radically democratic impulses of Connolly and Butler, which is more democratic:
Throwing everybody into the same pool? Or realizing that not everybody knows how to swim? Or realizing that some citizens, having
seen their parents devoured by sharks, might think the waters unsafe? Connolly reads Rorty's courteous capitulation to fear as an
abandonment of irony precisely where it is most important. Whereas Rorty coddles subjects of fear, Connolly scolds them for their
cowardice.55 I

do not mean to suggest that consistency would oblige radical democrats

to respect discourses hostile to pluralization (Connolly addresses this issue repeatedly). Nor do I
want to imply that we should refrain from attacking the antidemocratic
presumptions of various fundamentalisms. But I am concerned that the approach to
fundamentalism in this literature is something much closer to hostility than
sympathy (to say nothing of empathy). For all of its talk of generosity, radical democracy
remains quite stingy with regard to this issue. Accepting that there remains a
compatibility between foundational thought and undemocratic or authoritarian
politics, the apparent expectation that the articulation of this compatibility might
convince any lingering fundamentalists of their error is distressing . In fact,
Connolly effectively labels those lacking in the material, philosophical, or
psychological resources necessary for the move he recommends latent brownshirts,
thus betraying not only a commitment to liberal voluntarism, but also a striking lack

of generosity toward those still in need of comforting maps .56 Radical democrats clearly
recognize the material conditions that may not provide the comfort necessary to develop an ethos of generosity. As
diagnosticians, they are certainly attuned to the tactics applied by institutions
(markets, ideologies, militaries) to subjects and the constant interpellation of
subjects of fear. Nevertheless, the prescribed micropolitics of desire summons a
heroic capacity to respond generously to the myriad threats we encounter.
Recommending that subjects abandon the cognitive maps (Christianity, conspiracy theories, market fundamentalism) that allow

they ultimately reduce liberal

fundamentalism to a problem of individual priorities and ethical failures rather than
them to find their bearings in increasingly complicated and vast networks of power,

a medical condition requiring professional treatment or (better) a public health

issue not easily or appropriately tied to any individual's preferences. As in
contemporary U.S. drug policy rhetoric, the addiction is all-too-easily
reduced to an issue of personal responsibility, taking focus away from
the institutions responsible for the daily interpellation of subjects of fear. Conclusion
Despite a relatively mature Constitution, Americans are no strangers to instability . In
recent decades, the assurances of job security and the welfare state have fallen victim to a vicious market ideology; traditional
codes of masculinity and femininity have become increasingly unrealizable with Martha Stewart and J. Lo doing their best to
humiliate the ladies, Bill Gates and Vin Diesel the gentlemen; and illusions of effective agency have been ravaged by unprecedented

though radical democrats denounce the

comforting liberal myth of the autonomous individual as a ruse of antidemocratic
power, its ideology of identity, authenticity, and responsibility provides relief from
the ontological homelessness endemic to a world with ever fewer uncontested
narratives. Liberalism allows us to personalize and segregate various anonymous hostilities, facilitating displacements of
technological and geopolitical transformations. In this condition,

general anxieties onto welfare moms, homosexual teachers, professional women, non-white street criminals, Zionist Occupied
Governments, and Islamic fundamentalists. While the reactionary grasp at liberal fundamentalism certainly constitutes an obstacle
to a democratic politics of difference, it is also the case that subjects of late capitalism are interpellated as subjects of fear, reared to
understand every component of society with suspicion. Navigating the breathtaking and impersonal forces of bureaucratic
capitalism with categories which emphasize (indeed, almost exclusively mention) the powers of isolated individuals, we are led to an
ever more hopeless situation. As history moves on and our cognitive maps seem less and less relevant for helping us chart networks
of power, we feel an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. The ideology of autonomy, authenticity, and responsibility seems an
entirely logical aid for coping with this agency panic. Indeed, liberalism both creates and then assuages the fears of late capitalism.
In this age of Panic, in which our surroundings appear at least comparably if not more alive and efficacious than our selves,

radical democrats trenchantly reveal liberal ideology as an addictive and distorting

source of relief. But in prescribing a micropolitics of desire to kickstart the stalled
project of democratization, they locate the work of politics in the contested site of
the individual and discount the degree to which these individuals actually fear the
unpredictable and radically democratic order being promised. Contesting the validity of the
cognitive maps most commonly used to steer a course through institutions of social and political power, they ask subjects
to abandon the anesthetizing components of liberal fundamentalism for a world
composed of unstable identities and provisional reconciliations that are grounded in a set of ontological
commitments that are weak at best.

But as all but the most steadfast purveyors of

simplification in the so-called war on drugs realize, addiction is inscribed

on the body, and requires both desire and treatment to be overcome.
Radical democrats realize why we are identity junkies. But where , oh
where, are the ontological treatment centers and methadone clinics?

A2 Ontology First
Ontology first is logically bankrupt
Jackson 2010 (Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Associate Professor of International
Relations in the School of International Service at the American University in
Washington, DC, 2010, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations:
Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics, ebook)
However, I do not think that putting ontology first is the panacea that many seem to
think it is. For one thing, if one puts ontology first then one is, at least provisionally,
committed to a particular (if revisable) account of what the world is made up of: coconstituted agents and structures, states interacting under conditions of anarchy,
global class relations, or what have you. This is a rather large leap to make on
anyones authority, let alone that of a philosopher of science. Along these lines, it is
unclear what if any warrant we could provide for most ontological claims if
ontology in this sense were to always come first. If someone makes an ontological
claim about something existing in the world, then we are faced with an intriguing
epistemological problem of how possibly to know whether that claim is true, and the
equally intriguing problem of selecting the proper methods to use in evaluating the
claim (Chernoff 2009b, 391). But if epistemology and method are supposed to be
fitted to ontology, then we are stuck with techniques and standards designed to
respond to the specificity of the object under investigation. This problem is
roughly akin to using state-centric measurements of cross-border transactions to
determine whether globalization is eroding state borders, because the very object
under investigationstate bordersis presupposed by the procedures of datacollection, meaning that the answer will always, and necessarily, assert the
persistence of the state.

Competition

Perm do both
Surveillance technology is the lynchpin of neoliberalisms
military-financial-digital-complex. Its used to suppress
dissidence and collective resistance like the alt which is why
combining it with the plan action is net better.
John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney 2014 Surveillance
Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the
Digital Age Monthly Review Volume 66, Issue 03 (July-August)
http://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/surveillance-capitalism/ Foster is a professor of
sociology at the University of Oregon and also editor of Monthly Review. McChesney
is an American professor at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign as the
Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication.
The NSA has access to more than 80 percent of international telephone calls, for
which it pays the U.S. telecom monopolies hundreds of millions of dollars a year . And
it has broken into Internet data abroad.84 By these means it has spied even on the heads of state of its allies. The
government and the corporate media sought to brand Snowden as a traitor. Two leading figures seeking to discredit
Snowden in the media circuit are Clark, who invariably fails to disclose his own role in surveillance capitalism
(having left Acxiom he is now on the advisory board of the cyber-intelligence corporation Tiversa), and McConnell
(who downplays the continuous revolving door that has allowed him to move back and forth between the U.S.
intelligence establishment and Booz Allen). Both have claimed that Snowden has compromised the security of the
United States, by letting the population of the country and the world know the extent to which their every move is

The Snowden revelations bewildered a U.S. population already

struggling with numerous intrusions into their private lives, and ubiquitous
surveillance. Dissident hackers associated with Anonymous and Wikileaks, and
courageous whistle-blowers, like Snowden and Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manningthe twentyfive-year-old soldier who released hundreds of thousands of classified documents have been fighting the
secret government-corporate security state. 86 Numerous organizations have been
struggling for free speech and privacy rights in the new surveillance capitalism. 87
The population as a whole, however, has yet to perceive the dangers to democracy
in an environment already dominated by a political system best characterized as a
under surveillance.85

dollarocracy, and now facing a military-financial-digital complex of

unbelievable dimensions, data mining every aspect of life and already using
these new technological tools for repression of dissident groups .88 So far the
Snowden revelations have mainly disturbed the elites, making it clear that monopolistic corporations, and
particularly the intelligence community, are able to penetrate into the deepest secrets at every level of society.
Employees in some private corporations working for the NSA have the ability to hack into most corporate data. The
most likely result of all of this is a coming together of giant firms with the security apparatus of government, at the
expense of the larger population. Meanwhile the likelihood of cyberwar increases, threatening the entire capitalist
system, and the U.S. Empire itself. Ironically, the very structure of imperialism has increased security threats. (And,
of course, the threat of cyberwar will be used as a justification for reducing individual rights and noncommercial

The global labor arbitrage, by means of which multinational

corporations based in the United States and elsewhere take advantage of low wages
in other countries, means that most production of computer hardware, including
chips, is now done abroad, primarily in Asia.89 A critical concern of the U.S. Defense Department
values online ever more.)

(which purchases 1 percent of the worlds integrated circuit production) has become the hacking of digital malware
into the circuits of chips and computer devices themselves, leading to the possibility that critical weapons could be
programmed to malfunction at a certain time or for weapons to arm or disarm. Hacked circuits could be used to
bring down financial as well as defense systems. DARPA has nine contracts out to private corporations seeking to

such vulnerabilities are truly

inescapable in todays hyper-imperialist system growing out of the contradictions of
monopoly-finance capital. Its very economic exploitation of the world population, as
well as its own, has left the U.S. imperial system open to attack, producing ever
greater attempts at control. These are signs of a dying empire. To prevent total
human and planetary disaster it is necessary that the vox populi be heard once
again and for the empire to go. The digital revolution must be demilitarized and
develop the means for dealing with these vulnerabilities.90 Nevertheless,

subjected to democratic values and governance, with all that entails.

There is no other way.

Perm do the plan and all non-competitive parts of

the alternative
We can apply infinite perspectives to reach the best solution
dont throw out expertism without evaluating its usefulness
Kathleen Higgins Winter 2013 "Post-Truth Pluralism: The Unlikely Political Wisdom
of Friedrich Nietzche" Higgins has been a Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller
Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center and a Visiting Fellow at the
Australian National University Philosophy Department and Canberra School of Music.
She is a frequent Visiting Professor at the University of Auckland.
we live increasingly in a post-truth era, but rather than rejecting
it and pining nostalgically for a return to a more truthful time, we should learn to
better navigate it. Where the New York Times and Walter Cronkite were once viewed as arbiters of public
truths, today the Times competes with the Wall Street Journal, and CBS News with FOX
News and MSNBC, in describing reality. The Internet multiplies the perspectives and
truths available for public consumption. The diversity of viewpoints opened up by
new media is not going away and is likely to intensify . This diversity of interpretations of reality
Progressives are right that

is part of a longstanding trend. Democracy and modernization have brought a proliferation of worldviews and
declining authority of traditional institutions to meanings. Citizens have more freedom to create new interpretations

This proliferation of viewpoints makes the challenge of democratically

addressing contemporary problems more complex. One consequence of all this is that our
of facts.

problems become more wicked and more subject to conflicting meanings and agendas. We cant agree on the

In
attempting to reduce political disagreement to black and white categories of fact
and fiction, progressives themselves uniquely ill-equipped to address our current
difficulties, or to advance liberal values in the culture. A new progressive politics
should have a different understanding of the truth than the one suggested by the
critics of conservative dishonesty. We should understand that human beings make
meaning and apprehend truth from radically different standpoints and worldviews ,
nature of problems or their solutions because of fundamentally unbridgeable values and worldviews.

and that our great wealth and freedom will likely lead to more, not fewer, disagreements about the world.

Nietzsche was no democrat, but the pluralism he offers can be encouragement to

todays political class, as well as the rest of us, to become more self-aware of, and
honest about, how our standpoint, values, and power affect our determinations of
what is true and what is false. In the post truth era, we should be able to articulate
not one but many different perspectives . Progressives seeking to govern and change society
cannot be free of bias, interests, and passions, but they should strive to be aware of
them so that they can adopt different eyes to see the world from the standpoint of
their fiercest opponents. Taking multiple perspectives into account might alert us to
more sites of possible intervention and prime us for creative formulations of
alternative possibilities for concerted responses to our problems . Our era, in short,
need not be an obstacle to taking common action . We might see todays divided expert class and
fractions public not as temporary problems to be solved by more reason, science, and truth, but rather as

We might even see this proliferation of belief

systems and worldviews as an opportunity for human development. We can agree
to disagree and still engage in pragmatic action in the World.
permanent features of our developed democracy.

Framework

RoB
Role of the ballot is to evaluate effects of the plan- other
interps arbitrarily exclude 9 min of aff offense- judge should
choose justifications that best test plan desirability- debate
dialectic sufficient filter for knowledge production and
epistemology- prefer specific warrants over vague buzzwordserr aff on presumption
Prior questions will never be fully settledmust take action
even under conditions of uncertainty
Molly Cochran 99, Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Georgia Institute
for Technology, Normative Theory in International Relations, 1999, pg. 272
To conclude this chapter, while modernist and postmodernist debates continue,
while we are still unsure as to what we can legitimately identify as a feminist
ethical/political concern, while we still are unclear about the relationship between
discourse and experience, it is particularly important for feminists that we
proceed with analysis of both the material (institutional and structural) as
well as the discursive. This holds not only for feminists, but for all theorists oriented
towards the goal of extending further moral inclusion in the present social sciences
climate of epistemological uncertainty. Important ethical/ political concerns
hang in the balance. We cannot afford to wait for the meta-theoretical
questions to be conclusively answered . Those answers may be unavailable.
Nor can we wait for a credible vision of an alternative institutional order to appear
before an emancipatory agenda can be kicked into gear. Nor do we have before us a
chicken and egg question of which comes first: sorting out the metatheoretical
issues or working out which practices contribute to a credible institutional vision.
The two questions can and should be pursued together, and can be via moral
imagination. Imagination can help us think beyond discursive and material
conditions which limit us, by pushing the boundaries of those limitations in thought
and examining what yields. In this respect, I believe international ethics as
pragmatic critique can be a useful ally to feminist and normative theorists generally.

Simulation Good (A2 Role-Playing Bad)

Simulation influences state policy and activates agency
Eijkman 2012 (Dr. Henk Eijkman, currently an independent consultant as well as
visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force
Academy and is Visiting Professor of Academic Development, The role of
simulations in the authentic learning for national security policy development:
Implications for Practice,
http://nsc.anu.edu.au/test/documents/Sims_in_authentic_learning_report.pdf)
However, whether as an approach to learning, innovation, persuasion or culture
shift, policy simulations derive their power from two central features: their
combination of simulation and gaming (Geurts et al. 2007). 1. The simulation
element: the unique combination of simulation with role-playing. The unique
simulation/role-play mix enables participants to create possible futures relevant to
the topic being studied. This is diametrically opposed to the more traditional,
teacher-centric approaches in which a future is produced for them. In policy
simulations, possible futures are much more than an object of tabletop discussion
and verbal speculation. No other technique allows a group of participants to
engage in collective action in a safe environment to create and analyse the futures
they want to explore (Geurts et al. 2007: 536). 2. The game element: the
interactive and tailor-made modelling and design of the policy game. The actual run
of the policy simulation is only one step, though a most important and visible one,
in a collective process of investigation, communication, and evaluation of
performance. In the context of a post-graduate course in public policy development,
for example, a policy simulation is a dedicated game constructed in collaboration
with practitioners to achieve a high level of proficiency in relevant aspects of the
policy development process. To drill down to a level of finer detail, policy
development simulations as forms of interactive or participatory modelling
are particularly effective in developing participant knowledge and skills in the five
key areas of the policy development process (and success criteria), namely:
Complexity, Communication, Creativity, Consensus, and Commitment to action (the
five Cs). The capacity to provide effective learning support in these five categories
has proved to be particularly helpful in strategic decision-making (Geurts et al.
2007). Annexure 2.5 contains a detailed description, in table format, of the synopsis
below.

A2 Pedagogy
Their insistence on pedagogy being first reifies extremism
and fragmentation in the academy only the perm avoids
scholarship shutdown
David Lake 11 "Why "isms" Are Evil: Theory, Epistemology, and Academic Sects
as Impediments to Understanding and Progress" International Studies Quarterly
(2011) 55, 465-480 Lake is a Professor of Political Science at UC-San Diego.
My critique of our profession is a common one, but one worth repeating. Most
generally, we organize ourselves into academic "sects" that engage in self-affirming
research and then wage theological debates between academic religions. This
occurs at both the level of theory and epistemology . In turn, we reward those who
stake out extreme positions within each sect. Unfortunately, this academic
sectarianism, a product of our own internal political struggles, produces less
understanding rather than more. Some reasonably fear intellectual "monocultures ,"
as McNamara (2009) has called the possible hegemony of rationalism. But the
current cacophony is not a sign of productive intellectual ferment in the pursuit of
meaningful knowledge." Rather, we have produced a clash of competing theologies
each claiming its own explanatory "miracles" and asserting its universal truth and
virtue. Instead, a large measure of intellectual humility Is in order. Theoretically, we
are far from the holy grail of a universal theory of international politicsif indeed
such a grail even exists. We should focus instead on developing contingent, midlevel theories of specific phenomena. This analytical eclecticism is likely to be more
productive (Sil and Katzenstein 2010). But we aLso need a lexicon for translating
otherwise incommensurable theories and making them mutually intelligible. In the
following section, I outline the problems with theoretical sects and affirm the case
for analytic eclecticism. I then end with one possible "Rosetta stone" that aims to
facilitate conversation across research traditions by suggesting that all theories of
international studies can be disaggregated into the basic and common concepts of
interests, interactions, and institutions. Epistemologically, there is perhaps an even
deeper divide that is, unfortunately, not so easily bridged. The nomothetic vs
narrative divide cuts through all of the social sciences and possibly beyond. This
divide endures because scholarseither innately or through socializationfind one
form of explanation more intellectually satisfying than the other. Yet, in international
studies, we have reified this divide and, as with our theories, have formed mutually
exclusive churches. Rather than claiming one or the other epistemology Is always
and everywhere superior, we should recognize that both are valid and perhaps even
complementary paths to understanding. The question is not which approach is
inherently superior, but which yieIds greater insights under what circumstances.
The second major section below takes up epistemology and its consequences for
professional practice and knowledge.

A2 Language First
Language focus creates a prison house- prevents solutions to
problems
McNally, 1997 (David McNally, professor of political science at York University,
in defense of history p. 26-7)
We are witnessing today a new idealism, infecting large sections of the intellectual
left, which has turned language not merely into an independent realm, but into an
all pervasive realm, a sphere so omnipresent, so dominant, as virtually to
extinguish human agency. Everything is discourse, you see and discourse is
everything. Because human beings are linguistic creatures, because the world in
which we act is a world we know and describe through language, it allegedly
follows that there is nothing outsides language. Our language, or discourse, or
text the jargon varies but not the message define and limits what we know,
what we can imagine, what we can do. There is a political theory here too.
Oppression is said to be rooted ultimately in the way in the way in which we are and
others are defined linguistically, the way in which we are positioned by words in
relation to other words, or by codes which are said to be structured like a
language. Our very being, our identities and subjectivites, are constituted through
language. As one trendy literary theorist puts it in David Lodges novel Nice Work, it
is not merely that you are what you speak; no, according to the new idealism, you
are what speaks of you, Language is thus the final prison-house. Our confinement
there is beyond resistance: It is impossible to escape from that which makes us what we
are. This new idealism corresponds to a profound collapse of political horizons. It is the
pseudoradicalism of a period of retreat for the left, a verbal radicalism of the world
without deed, or, rather, of the word as deed. In response to actual structures and
practices of oppression and exploitation, it offers the rhetorical gesture, the ironic
turn of phrase. It comes as little surprise, then, when on of the chief philosophers
of the new idealism, Jacques Derrida, tells us that he would hesitate to use such
terms as liberation Imprisoned within language, we may play with words; but we
can never hope to liberate ourselves from immutable structures of oppression
rooted in language itself. The new idealism and the politics it entails are not simply
harmless curiosities; they are an abdication of political responsibility, especially at a
time of ferocious capitalist restructuring, of widening gaps between rich and poor,
of ruling class offensives against social programs. They are also an obstacle to the
rebuilding of mass movements of protest and resistance.

Impacts

2AC Utilitarianism
Discussion of truth and consequences are key to progressive
politics preventing the most violent forms of control and
oppression.
Alan Sokal. (Professor of Mathematics @ University College London and Professor
of Physics @ NYU). "A Plea for Reason, Evidence and Logic." New Politics. 6:2 Winter
1997. Online.
This affair has brought up an incredible number of issues, and I can't dream of
addressing them all in 10 minutes, so let me start by circumscribing my talk. I don't
want to belabor Social Text's failings either before or after the publication of my
parody: Social Text is not my enemy, nor is it my main intellectual target. I won't go
here into the ethical issues related to the propriety of hoaxing (although in the
question period I'd be glad to defend my ethics). I won't address the obscurantist
prose and the uncritical celebrity-worship that have infected certain trendy sectors
of the American academic humanities (though these are important questions that I
hope other panelists will address). I won't enter into technical issues of the
philosophy of science (although again I'd be glad to do that in the question period). I
won't discuss the social role of science and technology (though these are important
issues). Indeed, I want to emphasize that this affair is in my view not primarily about
science -- though that was the excuse that I used in constructing my parody -- nor is
it a disciplinary conflict between scientists and humanists, who are in fact
represented on all sides of the debate. What I believe this debate is principally
about -- and what I want to focus on tonight -- is the nature of truth, reason and
objectivity: issues that I believe are crucial to the future of left politics. I didn't write
the parody for the reasons you might at first think. My aim wasn't to defend science
from the barbarian hordes of lit crit or sociology. I know perfectly well that the main
threats to science nowadays come from budget-cutting politicians and corporate
executives, not from a handful of postmodernist academics. Rather, my goal is to
defend what one might call a scientific worldview -- defined broadly as a respect for
evidence and logic, and for the incessant confrontation of theories with the real
world; in short, for reasoned argument over wishful thinking, superstition and
demagoguery. And my motives for trying to defend these old-fashioned ideas are
basically political. I'm worried about trends in the American Left -- particularly here
in academia -- that at a minimum divert us from the task of formulating a
progressive social critique, by leading smart and committed people into trendy but
ultimately empty intellectual fashions, and that can in fact undermine the prospects
for such a critique, by promoting subjectivist and relativist philosophies that in my
view are inconsistent with producing a realistic analysis of society that we and our
fellow citizens will find compelling. David Whiteis, in a recent article, said it well:
Too many academics, secure in their ivory towers and insulated from the real-world
consequences of the ideas they espouse, seem blind to the fact that non-rationality
has historically been among the most powerful weapons in the ideological arsenals
of oppressors. The hypersubjectivity that characterizes postmodernism is a perfect
case in point: far from being a legacy of leftist iconoclasm, as some of its advocates
so disingenuously claim, it in fact ... plays perfectly into the anti-rationalist -- really,

anti-thinking -- bias that currently infects "mainstream" U.S. culture. Along similar
lines, the philosopher of science Larry Laudan observed caustically that
the
displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything
boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American
political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of antiintellectualism in our time. (And these days, being nearly as anti-intellectual as
American political campaigns is really quite a feat.) Now of course, no one will
admit to being against reason, evidence and logic -- that's like being against
Motherhood and Apple Pie. Rather, our postmodernist and poststructuralist friends
will claim to be in favor of some new and deeper kind of reason, such as the
celebration of "local knowledges" and "alternative ways of knowing " as an antidote
to the so-called "Eurocentric scientific methodology" (you know, things like
systematic experiment, controls, replication, and so forth). You find this magic
phrase "local knowledges" in, for example, the articles of Andrew Ross and Sandra
Harding in the "Science Wars" issue of Social Text. But are "local knowledges" all
that great? And when local knowledges conflict, which local knowledges should we
believe? In many parts of the Midwest, the "local knowledges" say that you should
spray more herbicides to get bigger crops. It's old-fashioned objective science that
can tell us which herbicides are poisonous to farm workers and to people
downstream. Here in New York City, lots of "local knowledges" hold that there's a
wave of teenage motherhood that's destroying our moral fiber. It's those boring
data that show that the birth rate to teenage mothers has been essentially constant
since 1975, and is about half of what it was in the good old 1950's. Another word for
"local knowledges" is prejudice. I'm sorry to say it, but under the influence of
postmodernism some very smart people can fall into some incredibly sloppy
thinking, and I want to give two examples. The first comes from a front-page article
in last Tuesday's New York Times (10/22/96) about the conflict between
archaeologists and some Native American creationists. I don't want to address here
the ethical and legal aspects of this controversy -- who should control the use of
10,000-year-old human remains -- but only the epistemic issue. There are at least
two competing views on where Native American populations come from. The
scientific consensus, based on extensive archaeological evidence, is that humans
first entered the Americas from Asia about 10-20,000 years ago, crossing the Bering
Strait. Many Native American creation accounts hold, on the other hand, that native
peoples have always lived in the Americas, ever since their ancestors emerged onto
the surface of the earth from a subterranean world of spirits. And the Times article
observed that many archaeologists, "pulled between their scientific temperaments
and their appreciation for native culture, ... have been driven close to a postmodern
relativism in which science is just one more belief system." For example, Roger
Anyon, a British archaeologist who has worked for the Zuni people, was quoted as
saying that "Science is just one of many ways of knowing the world. ... [The Zunis'
world view is] just as valid as the archeological viewpoint of what prehistory is
about." Now, perhaps Dr. Anyon was misquoted, but we all have repeatedly heard
assertions of this kind, and I'd like to ask what such assertions could possibly mean.
We have here two mutually incompatible theories. They can't both be right; they
can't both even be approximately right. They could, of course, both be wrong, but I
don't imagine that that's what Dr. Anyon means by "just as valid". It seems to me

that Anyon has quite simply allowed his political and cultural sympathies to cloud
his reasoning. And there's no justification for that: We can perfectly well remember
the victims of a horrible genocide, and support their descendants' valid political
goals, without endorsing uncritically (or hypocritically) their societies' traditional
creation myths. Moreover, the relativists' stance is extremely condescending: it
treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its
most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole. My second example of
sloppy thinking comes from Social Text co-editor Bruce Robbins' article in the
September/October 1996 Tikkun magazine, in which he tries to defend -- albeit halfheartedly -- the postmodernist/poststructuralist subversion of conventional notions
of truth. "Is it in the interests of women, African Americans, and other superexploited people," Robbins asks, "to insist that truth and identity are social
constructions? Yes and no," he asserts. "No, you can't talk about exploitation
without respect for empirical evidence" -- exactly my point. "But yes," Robbins
continues, "truth can be another source of oppression." Huh??? How can truth
oppress anyone? Well, Robbins' very next sentence explains what he means: "It was
not so long ago," he says, "that scientists gave their full authority to explanations of
why women and African Americans ... were inherently inferior." But is Robbins
claiming that that is truth? I should hope not! Sure, lots of people say things about
women and African-Americans that are not true; and yes, those falsehoods have
sometimes been asserted in the name of "science", "reason" and all the rest. But
claiming something doesn't make it true, and the fact that people -- including
scientists -- sometimes make false claims doesn't mean that we should reject or
revise the concept of truth. Quite the contrary: it means that we should examine
with the utmost care the evidence underlying people's truth claims, and we should
reject assertions that in our best rational judgment are false. This error is,
unfortunately, repeated throughout Robbins' essay: he systematically confuses truth
with claims of truth, fact with assertions of fact, and knowledge with pretensions to
knowledge. These elisions underlie much of the sloppy thinking about "social
construction" that is prevalent nowadays in the academy, and it's something that
progressives ought to resist. Sure, let's show which economic, political and
ideological interests are served by our opponents' accounts of "reality"; but first
let's demonstrate, by marshalling evidence and logic, why those accounts are
objectively false (or in some cases true but incomplete). A bit later in his article,
Robbins admits candidly that "those of us who do cultural politics sometimes act as
if ... truth were always and everywhere a weapon of the right." Now, that's an
astoundingly self-defeating attitude for an avowed leftist. If truth were on the side of
the right, shouldn't we all -- at least the honest ones among us -- become rightwingers? For my own part, I'm a leftist and a feminist because of evidence and logic
(combined with elementary ethics), not in spite of it. This plea of mine for reason,
evidence and logic is hardly original; dozens of progressive humanists, social
scientists and natural scientists have been saying the same thing for years. But if
my parody in Social Text has helped just a little bit to amplify their voices and to
provoke a much-needed debate on the American Left, then it will have served its
purpose.

A2 Epistemology
Prefer our studiesour authors use a testable empirical
method
Weede, 04 professor of sociology at the University of Bonn, Germany, In Winter
1986-87, he was Visiting Professor of International Relations at the Bologna Center
of The Johns Hopkins University. (Erich, BALANCE OF POWER, GLOBALIZATION, AND
THE CAPITALIST PEACE, http://www.fnf.org.ph/downloadables/Balance%20of
%20Power,%20Globalization%20and%20Capitalist%20Peace.pdf)
If one does research or summarize the research of others of course, most of the ideas, theories, and evidence discussed below have been produced by

In the social sciences the fundamental choice is

whether to pursue an ideographic or a nomothetic approach . Almost all historians choose the
others one cannot avoid some epistemological commitments.

ideographic approach and focus on the description of structures or events, whereas most economists and psychologists choose the nomothetic approach
and focus on the search for law-like general statements. Sociologists and political scientists are still divided sometimes even by the Atlantic Ocean. In
American political science the nomothetic approach dominates the flagship journal of the profession, the American Political Science Review, as well as
more specialized journals, such as International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, or World Politics. In German political science, however,
the nomothetic approach has advanced little beyond electoral studies. My own approach is definitely nomothetic. This is related to my training in
psychology at one of the first German universities focusing on quantitative research methods in the early 1960s, the University of Hamburg. This
epistemological orientation has been reinforced by graduate training in international politics at one of the first American universities emphasizing
quantitative research in the late 1960s, Northwestern University, which is located in a suburb of Chicago. Nomothetic research focuses on hypothesizing,
testing and establishing law-like general statements or nomological propositions. Examples of such propositions are: The higher average incomes in a
nation are, the more likely is democratic government. Or, the more economic freedom in a nation prevails, the less frequently it is involved in war. One
characteristic of such propositions is that they say something about observable reality. Whenever you say something about reality, you risk that others
find out that you are wrong. If we observed that most poor countries were democracies, but most rich countries were autocracies, then we should reject

Nomothetic researchers look for

refutations. They try to falsify their propositions or theories (Popper 1934/1959). If the
empirical evidence is compatible with one's theory, then one keeps the hypothetical
propositions and regards them as supported until negative evidence turns up.
or, at least, modify the proposition about prosperity and democracy mentioned above.1

Although certitude about possession of the truth is beyond the capabilities of human inquiry, growth of knowledge is conceivable by the successive
elimination of errors. This epistemological approach borrowed from Popper were easily applicable, if most of our propositions were deterministic, if they
claimed to be valid without exceptions. Then, finding a single exception to a general statement say, about prosperity and democracy would suffice to
falsify the proposition. Looking at poor India nevertheless being democratic, or at fairly rich Kuwait nevertheless being autocratic, would suffice to reject
the theory.2 Unfortunately, almost no theory in macroeconomics, macrosociology, or international relations delivers deterministic propositions. Instead we
have only probabilistic statements of the type that more prosperous countries are more likely to be democratic than others, or that economically freer
countries are more likely to avoid war involvement than others. Probabilistic assertions never can be falsified by pointing to single events which do not fit
with theoretical expectations. Instead we have to look at relative frequencies, at correlations or regression coefficients. We need statistical tools to
evaluate such propositions. We typically ask the question whether a hypothesized relationship is so strong that it could only rarely occur because of
random measurement or sampling error. Probabilistic propositions are regarded as supported only if they jump certain thresholds of significance which are
ultimately defined by mere conventions. Researchers are interested in causal propositions, that is, in statements about causes and effects, or

We need to know
more than the mere existence of some association or correlation between, say,
prosperity and democracy, or economic freedom and the avoidance of military
conflict. We need to know whether prosperity promotes democracy, or whether
democracy promotes growth, or whether, possibly, both statements might be defensible or, for the time being, taken
determinants and consequences. Such statements can be used for explanation, forecasting, or policy interventions .

for 'true'. While a correlation between two variables, like prosperity and democracy, is equally compatible with the simple alternative causal propositions
that prosperity causes democracy, and that democracy causes prosperity, this ambiguity no longer necessarily applies in more complex theoretical
models. There, we tend to explain a single effect by a number of causes. For example, one may contend that democracy is promoted by prosperity as well
as by a capitalist economic order (or economic freedom). We can take such a theoretical contention which may be true or false, compatible with the data
or not as a starting point for specifying a regression equation.3 If both theoretical statements about the democratizing effects of prosperity and
capitalism were true, then the regression coefficients of both variables should be positive and significant. If this is what we find in empirical research,
then we regard the two propositions as provisionally supported. But final proofs remain impossible in empirical research. It is conceivable that some
nonbeliever in the two propositions suggests a third measurable determinant of democracy. Before it actually is included in the regression equation, one
never knows what its inclusion results in. Possibly, the previously significant and positive regression coefficients of prosperity and capitalism might be
reduced to insignificance or even change signs. Then a previously supported causal proposition would have to be overturned and rejected. The claim of

If one wants to
test the causal proposition that prosperity contributes to democratic government, or
that economic freedom contributes to the avoidance of military conflict, then one
should measure prosperity or economic freedom before their hypothesized effects
occur
causality implies more than observable association or correlation. It also implies temporal precedence of causes before effects .

certainly not later. If there is doubt about the direction of causality, as there frequently is, one might also look at the relationships between, say, earlier prosperity and later democracy as well as between earlier

democracy and later prosperity. Although such investigations may become technically complicated, it might suffice here to keep the general principles in mind. From causal propositions we derive expectations about correlation or
regression coefficients. But conclusions from correlations to causal propositions are not justified. One simply can never 'verify' causal statements by correlations. From causal propositions we also derive expectations about temporal
precedence. As long as empirical evidence fits one's theoretical expectations, one regards the propositions or theory as provisionally supported and works with them. There is another complication. As illustrated by the debate about
the effects of trade and economic interdependence on the avoidance of military conflict below, full accordance of empirical studies and verdicts with theories is the exception rather than the rule if it ever happens at all. That is why
some philosophers of science (for example, Kuhn 1962; Lakatos 1968-69) have been critical of the idea of falsification and warned against premature rejection of propositions. If 'anomalies' or 'falsification' are more or less ubiquitous,
then our task is no longer so easy as to choose between theories which have been falsified and therefore deserve rejection and those which are compatible with the facts and therefore deserve to be accepted until negative evidence

So, the
claim advanced in this review of the literature cannot be that the empirical evidence
fits the capitalist peace idea perfectly, but merely that the evidence fits it much
better than competing explanations of military conflict and notions about the
negative impact of capitalism on the avoidance of conflict and war or the
irrelevance of democracy do. The epistemological discussion above could provide no more than a crude 'feel' for
empirical research in the social sciences and its pitfalls. Although certitude is beyond reach, it is better
to rely on testable, tested and so far supported propositions than on a hodgepodge
of ambiguous hunches, contradictory thinking, and unsystematically evaluated
empirical evidence.
turns up. Then our task becomes to choose between competing theories, for example about the conflict reinforcing or pacifying impact of trade, and to pick those which fit the data relatively better than others.

A2 Ethics
Capitalism is ethical they misunderstand capitalism. It is a
system of ethics which best accounts for responsibility. The
alternative is unethical.
Francois-Rene Rideau. (Phd. University of Nice). "Capitalsim is the Instituion of
Ethics: A Speech prepared for the Libertarian International Convention." 2005.
http://fare.tunes.org/liberty/sofia2005.html
Capitalism is Ethics: a paradigm of individual choice. Behaving according to the rules of Capitalism
Violating the rules of Capitalism is denying
the ethical nature of oneself and other persons. 2 Ethics: a Paradigm of Individual Choice Let's start by examining the
nature of Ethics. Ethics is the process of distinguishing between good and bad. Like any process, it is
I In a strong sense,

is being an ethical agent respectful of the ethical nature of oneself and other persons.

relevant only in as much as it affects human behaviour. And it affects human behaviour, because an individual, when confronted with many opportunities, and in as much as he's able
to make the difference, will naturally be inclined to choose the opportunity that's best. Best according to him, that is. No, not best according to the criteria that he is ready to publicly
admit he applies; best according to what he really thinks matters; this means best for himself first, though that self includes the persons and causes he identifies with. I therefore

Ethics is about Choice. Without a choice, good and bad have no relevant
meaning. And within a choice, it's actually the comparison ``better and ``worse between opportunities that matters, it isn't an absolute ``good outside of context.
insist that

insist on Individual Choice: every decision is necessarily made by an individual person. Any so-called ``collective phenomenon is the emerging result of individual actions; there are
no social forces that act outside and above of individuals; every decision or action that may or may not participate of a collective phenomenon is actually made by a single individual
[2]. I also insist on the subjective nature of ethical judgments: moral judgements are necessarily based upon individual criteria, due to personal knowledge and subjective
preferences [3]. Enjoyment is individual, and so is suffering individual. All preferences are individual: good is good for someone, or more precisely according to someone. And good or
bad only directly matters if it's good or bad for the extended self of the individual making the decision. There is no good without someone to benefit: there is no possible ``collective
good that benefits a murky ``collective unless it's a good that benefits all the members of said collective. A ``collective judgment may objectively compare preferences and
results over each individuals; in some cases, it may then conclude that everyone is better off in some situation than in some other. Hence the concept of Pareto optimality, but more
importantly, hence the principle that mutually voluntary exchanges benefit all involved parties. On the other hand, there is no objective way to reconcile conflicts when someone loses
and someone else wins; there is no objective common scale on which to project individual preferences and deduce a collective aggregate value [4]. 3 Responsibility: The Dynamic
Feedback of Ethics Up to now, we have seen that Ethics is a paradigm of individual choice. According to what rules will individuals make decisions? How may we acquire correct rules
of behaviour that benefit us, rather than incorrect rules of behaviour that actually harm us? What can make our ethical theories to actually be good? In cybernetical terms, we speak
of the structural coupling between two structures. The two structures concerned are the real world and each of our mental models of it. What ensures the relevance of our models and
its ethical rules with respect to the real world and the laws of nature, so that our decisions actually benefit us? As always, the answer, in cybernetical terms, is feedback. You may
have heard of experiments where a man is cut from his sensorial feedback, eyes and ears shut, plunged into a bath at body temperature, with artificial breathing and feeding. After a
long enough time in such a situation, the man goes crazy. His mind has been disconnected from reality. Cut a man from his sensorial feedback, and after some time, he'll go raving
mad, without sensorial direction. Well, the same is true for man as moral being: cut him from his moral feedback, and after some time, he'll behave in a morally crazy way, without
moral compass. In the realm of morality, the feedback is named responsibility. Responsibility is when someone suffers the consequences of some decisions. And this means both the
positive consequences and the negative consequences. When responsibility coincides with liberty, when the person who takes some decision suffers the full consequences of these

,
experience is the best teacher; but it is an expensive teacher, that always gives the lesson after it gives the examination. However ,
intelligent people learn from other people's experience, not just their own so they may
decisions, then there is a feedback loop; then people benefit from their good choices and lose from their bad choices; and so they may learn from experience. As you may know

learn the lesson and succeed at future examinations without having to fail at first. When it matches liberty of choice, responsibility before the consequences of one's own choice is

Responsibility is
what keeps human action relevant to human fate. Without responsibility, we lose
track of how to behave; worse, with misplaced responsibility, where those who decide are not those who suffer the consequences of decisions, then we
the one principle of progress in human history. It is the feedback from reality that makes us stick to reality and improve ourselves within it.

get on the wrong track, and we run into disasters. To avoid confusion, note the distinction between (1) responsibility in fact, that falls upon whoever actually suffers the
consequences of action, (2) the feeling of responsibility, that some people may or may not have, whether or not they actually suffer the direct consequences of given actions. It is
through the feeling of responsibility that some people may adjust their actions; but it is actual responsibility that creates a dynamics whereby people learn to feel the right kind of
responsibility rather than a wrong one. We may also distinguish (3) responsibility in law, which is about the praise or blame that people get, but I'll get to that later. Some people may
try to equate Responsibility in Fact with some kind of immanent justice. However, it must be understood that conscious human action is part of the feedback that constitutes
Responsibility. If humans don't consciously create feedback, then responsibility may fail to exist. In other words, in this matter as in others, We can't ``let nature decide we are
part of nature; we can't ``let god enforce his will we are among god's agents; we can't ``let authority tell us we are the makers of the authority that determines things; it
isn't above us, it is us. And we'll see that this is what Law is about. To summarize what Ethics is, Ethics is a paradigm of individual choice between opportunities, which choices are

That is why Capitalism is precisely the

Institution of Ethics: Capitalism is the formal recognition of Human Action as a
Paradigm of Individual Choice between Opportunities. 4 Capitalism: the Institution of Ethics Indeed, what is
kept relevant to the meaning of human life through the feedback of responsibility.

Capitalism? Capitalism is a Theory of Law. It is a Theory of Law that consists in the definition of individual property rights. A Theory of Law gives means to resolve and prevent

Capitalism
is a Theory of Law based upon the recognition that human action is made of
individual decisions, that are kept relevant through responsibility. Because a resource may be spent
conflicts. Conflicts arise when individuals make incompatible decisions about some resources that may be used in only one of the proposed ways at most.

but by individual decision, whoever ultimately gets to decide the use or fate of a resource in fact possesses that resource. The only way to prevent future conflicts about resources is
thus to determine whose decision is to prevail about said resources, who may legitimately possess it. Capitalism is thus based upon acknowledging to each potentially disputed
resource a proprietor, an owner. The owner may decide how this resource is preserved or spent. But under Capitalism, the way that ownership of resources is distributed is not
arbitrary. Capitalism recognizes that possession in fact [5], without any previous conflicting claim from anyone else, makes for valid property rights [6]. Hence, the personal liberties
by which each individual owns his own body, mind, and activity. Hence also the homesteading rule by which individuals appropriate natural resources by being the first to put them to
actual use.

Capitalism

also

recognizes the necessity of responsibility.

Thus, it seeks to match the liberty of making

a decision with the responsibility for the consequences of making said decision. Hence, creators get to own whatever they create, whether it's good or bad. Hence, destroyers get to
be responsible for what they destroy, whether it's good or bad. If during a transformation, one both creates and destroys things, one gets both the praise and the blame accordingly.
And blame means that the culprit must compensate the victim for encroachment to the victim's property. Finally, Capitalism recognizes the goodness of mutually volontary
exchanges. Hence, not only is a property individual: all decisions concerning it are ultimately borne by a one person, the owner. A property is also transferable: the owner may give or
exchange his property with any other willing individual, at mutually agreed conditions. Finally, a property is divisible: either through physical division, time sharing or any agreed upon
arrangement, the owner may split his property so as to exchange part of it with another individual, through contract. These are the principles of Capitalism. 5 Law and Facts But

what relationship does Capitalism have to reality? Indeed, what does any Theory of Law have to do with reality? What binds Fact to Law? The choice between actions, good and bad,
legitimate or illegitimate, still resides upon individual choice. Just because some action has been identified as legitimate or illegitimate doesn't magically drive individuals towards or
away from this action. Once again, there is one distinction that may drive an individual's behaviour, when said individual is able to make this distinction: it is the distinction between
what is good for said person and what is bad for said person. But unless you can somehow tie legitimacy to individual good, then it remains an irrelevant distinction as far as human
action goes. That's where the domain of Law comes into play. Widely held opinions about what is legitimate, bind individual interest, through the implementation and expectation of
enforcement. Because people expect punishment for their deeds that are generally found to be bad, they will refrain from indulging such deeds or suffer the wrath of society, and
eventually be removed from society, should they persist. Ideas have consequences. Ideas about legitimacy have consequences in terms of what rules of behaviour people adopt. Law
is part of what makes fact. A wide feeling of legitimacy breeds force. Right makes Might. Certainly, force gives means to do massive propaganda so as to cultivate a feeling of
legitimacy. Might gives the means to make Right. And it has to, if it is to survive without yielding to a revolt. That is why, for instance, you mustn't imagine slaves as being on the
constant brink of revolt. Those who could revolt did so before they were conquered, and died; thereafter the few who revolt are destroyed before the majority rises. And so the vast
majority of living slaves find that their fate, if not deserved, is by all means normal, a necessary burden in the natural order of society. And I mean not only slaves, but all oppressed
people, by all kinds of oppression, including whichever you can observe around you. But this is also why you shouldn't confuse Law, as the mighty ones want it to be, Law, as their
lawyers write it, Law, as their uniform-wearing thugs enforce it, and Law, as established by the population at large, whether through official or unofficial means. 6 The Enforcement of
Property Rights If Law in general gets its power from enforcement, how are property rights to be enforced within Capitalism? Well, under a system of Capitalism, the owner of some
resource may defend his property against trespassers, intruders, robbers; and the owner of destroyed or altered property may require tort reparation from intentional or unintentional
borrowers, thieves, vandals, destroyers. Defense and reparation of property may require the use of force; the enforcement of property rights thus imply a sphere for the legitimate
use of force. Now, force itself requires the use of resources; thus, the paradigm of property rights implies that the owners of said resources be responsible for deciding whether and
how to use resources for property enforcement. Under a regime of property rights, property owners will spend the resources they desire to defend the properties they consider
deserve a defense; they may start with defending their own property, and that of those they care for; but they may also help prevent and prosecute any property encroachment that
is repugnant to them, whoever the victim may be. And they may organize in the most efficient ways they find, on a free market. A monopoly on the use of force, taking some
resources by force from people to organize defense, and forbidding them to use other resources to defend themselves, is thus in itself a violation of property rights. A monopolist
Government, a State, is thus a negation of Capitalism, and actually the biggest negation there is of Capitalism. 7 Capitalism as a Phenomenon Now, you'll tell me, such unrestricted
Capitalism doesn't exist at least yet. Its opponents call it ``wild capitalism, the law of the jungle. But it doesn't exist because it's actually much more civilized than our societies
currently are. Whatever the case may be, in absence of such complete Capitalism, universally recognized as valid Law, what is the relevance of Capitalism in society? That's where I
would like to say a few things about Capitalism as a phenomenon. Capitalism is a word coined by Marx. I don't mean the great philosopher, Groucho Marx, I mean the bad humorist,
Karl Marx. Marx defined ``Capitalism as the private ownership of means of production, as opposed to government ownership of those means of production in the name of the
``collective. He actually made up the term from the word ``capitalist, which designates someone who earns his living out of the proceeds of his capital investments. What is
capital? Capital is any resource that has to be reserved in advance, so that production may take place that will only bear fruits later. It includes any tools and machinery, but also the
resources needed to sustain the lives of the workers until production is successful assuming it is successful, eventually. If we are to understand capital as productive material
machinery, then the first capitalist man was the first tool owner, the first person to foresee the future utility of a tool and keep that solid stick or hard stone for a future use. The first
capitalist was the first human, the first homo abilis. What distinguishes man from animal is precisely this ability to use, keep and develop tools. And capitalism is humanity. Everyone
is a capitalist in as much as one owns anything that is for use at a latter date. But those who distinguish as are more capitalist than others, are those who see further than other
people, and keeps things for future use that other people fail to prepare or neglect to keep. If capital is to be understood in a broader sense, as any material thing that one may
possess, that will enable future production, then first capitalist was the first animal to keep food for next year, or even for next day. And if these possessions are to include absorbed
chemicals as well as chemicals stored outside one's body, then the first capitalist was the first living cell, that kept chemicals inside a membrane. Capitalism, as a phenomenon, is life

Those who fight Capitalism, the phenomenon, are actually seeking to destroy
mankind, they are seeking to destroy life itself. They want to put an end to
civilization and return to brutish animality. They want to put an end to animality and return to vegetation. They want to put an end
to vegetation, to change, to life itself , and return to the purity and stability of death.
itself.

Capitalism encourages ethical behavior.

Richard E. Hattwick. (a PhD. in economic at Vanderbilt University who was
previously the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research and the
founder of the Journal of Socio-Economics and the American National Business Hall
of Fame). "The Ethics of Capitalism." Journal of Business Leadership. 2001.
http://www.anbhf.org/pdf/hattwick.pdf
***from the conclusion of a study which produced a statistical model mapping the
relationships between economic behavior and ethical behavior***
The preceding analysis suggests that competitive market situations encourage the reasonably high standard
of business ethics called the ethic of justice. The financial incentives of the market exact a price from business leaders trying to be more ethical
or less ethical. Saints and sinners can exist, and indeed they do. But in most cases they could improve their profit by adhering to the middle-

ethic of justice. This conclusion is based on the long run view and the
assumption of accountability. Business leaders intent on maximizing long run profit
will find the justice ethic in their long run best interests if their past ethical
performance is known to prospective customers, employees, investors, suppliers,
competitors and localcommunities. A record of poor ethical performance in the
past will cut off cooperation from others in the present and future. A good record
will encourage cooperation and, with it, improved profit. The conclusion does not apply to situations
ofthe- road

where the business leader can misrepresent the ethical standards to be practiced, can capture the profit before the other economic agents realize
that they are being exploited, and can leave the relationship with no fear of retaliation by the unsuspecting victims. One-time business
transactions and short-lived business relationships thus represent a natural habitat for the unscrupulous businessperson. The analysis also

economic development should tend to raise the minimal standards of

ethical behavior over time. Not only should material well being improve but the
relationships between economic agents in their daily dealings should exhibit
greater degrees of honesty, loyalty, friendliness, courtesy and fairness. But that
suggests that

improvement will be arrested far short of the ethical ideal of altruism. Competitive market systems will reach stable levels of business ethics
falling short of the altruistic ideal. Hence, there would appear to be a permanent conflict between idealists who hunger for universal altruism

and pragmatists who through study or experience realize that an efficient economic organization will have to be satisfied with a level of ethics
that reaches the border of altruism but is unable to pass into that promised land.

A2 Structural Violence
Neoliberalism not oppressive or exploitive empirically proven
Bhagvati 4 (University Professor at Columbia University and Senior Fellow in
International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations [JagdishBhagwati, In
Defense of Globalization. 2004. Overview,
http://www.cfr.org/publication/6769/in_defense_of_globalization.html]
Jagdish Bhagwati takes conventional wisdomthat globalization is the cause of
several social illsand turns it on its head. Properly regulated, globalization,
he says, is the most powerful force for social good in the world. Drawing on
his unparalleled knowledge of international economics, Bhagwati dismantles the
antiglobalization case. He persuasively argues that globalization often leads to
greater general prosperity in an underdeveloped nation: it can reduce
child labor, increase literacy, and enhance the economic and social
standing of women. And to counter charges that globalization leads to cultural
hegemony, to a bland McWorld, Bhagwati points to several examples, from
literature to movies, in which globalization has led to a spicy hybrid of
cultures. Often controversial and always compelling, Bhagwati cuts through the
noise on this most contentious issue, showing that globalization is part of the
solution, not part of the problem. Anyone who wants to understand whats at stake
in the globalization wars will want to read In Defense of Globalization. The first
edition of In Defense of Globalization addressed the critiques that concerned the
social implications of economic globalization. Thus, it addressed questions such
as the impact on womens rights and equality, child labor, poverty in the
poor countries, democracy, mainstream and indigenous culture, and the
environment. Professor Bhagwati concluded that globalization was, on
balance, a force for advancing these agendas as well. Thus, whereas the
critics assumed that globalization lacked a human face, it actually had a human
face. He also examined in depth the ways in which policy and institutional
design could further advance these social agendas, adding more glow to
the human face.

Sustainability (A2 Extinction)

Technological innovation solves the impact
Matt Ridley 2014 The World's Resources Aren't Running Out Ridley is a visiting
professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, former science editor of The Economist,
and award-winning science writer.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB100014240527023042799045795178626122
87156?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle
%2FSB10001424052702304279904579517862612287156.html
"We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and
unless we change course, that number will grow fastby 2030, even two planets
will not be enough," says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for
Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund). But here's a peculiar feature
of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi
oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this
"niche construction"that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new
opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way.
Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on
nature's bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty. Economists
call the same phenomenon innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the
latter's tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can't seem to see that
when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered , or that when farm yields
flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for
copper falls. That frustration is heartily reciprocated. Ecologists think that
economists espouse a sort of superstitious magic called "markets" or "prices" to
avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth. The easiest way to raise a cheer in
a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists. I have lived
among both tribes. I studied various forms of ecology in an academic setting for
seven years and then worked at the Economist magazine for eight years. When I
was an ecologist (in the academic sense of the word, not the political one, though I
also had antinuclear stickers on my car), I very much espoused the carryingcapacity viewpointthat there were limits to growth. I nowadays lean to the view
that there are no limits because we can invent new ways of doing more with less.
This disagreement goes to the heart of many current political issues and explains
much about why people disagree about environmental policy. In the climate debate,
for example, pessimists see a limit to the atmosphere's capacity to cope with extra
carbon dioxide without rapid warming. So a continuing increase in emissions if
economic growth continues will eventually accelerate warming to dangerous rates.
But optimists see economic growth leading to technological change that would
result in the use of lower-carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long
before it does much harm. It is striking, for example, that the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change's recent forecast that temperatures would rise by 3.7 to
4.8 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels by 2100 was based on
several assumptions: little technological change, an end to the 50-year fall in
population growth rates, a tripling (only) of per capita income and not much
improvement in the energy efficiency of the economy. Basically, that would mean a

world much like today's but with lots more people burning lots more coal and oil,
leading to an increase in emissions. Most economists expect a five- or tenfold
increase in income, huge changes in technology and an end to population growth by
2100: not so many more people needing much less carbon. In 1679, Antonie van
Leeuwenhoek, the great Dutch microscopist, estimated that the planet could hold
13.4 billion people, a number that most demographers think we may never reach.
Since then, estimates have bounced around between 1 billion and 100 billion, with
no sign of converging on an agreed figure. Economists point out that we keep
improving the productivity of each acre of land by applying fertilizer, mechanization,
pesticides and irrigation. Further innovation is bound to shift the ceiling upward.
Jesse Ausubel at Rockefeller University calculates that the amount of land required
to grow a given quantity of food has fallen by 65% over the past 50 years, worldwide. Ecologists object that these innovations rely on nonrenewable resources, such
as oil and gas, or renewable ones that are being used up faster than they are
replenished, such as aquifers. So current yields cannot be maintained, let alone
improved. In his recent book "The View from Lazy Point," the ecologist Carl Safina
estimates that if everybody had the living standards of Americans, we would need
2.5 Earths because the world's agricultural land just couldn't grow enough food for
more than 2.5 billion people at that level of consumption. Harvard emeritus
professor E.O. Wilson, one of ecology's patriarchs, reckoned that only if we all
turned vegetarian could the world's farms grow enough food to support 10 billion
people. Economists respond by saying that since large parts of the world, especially
in Africa, have yet to gain access to fertilizer and modern farming techniques, there
is no reason to think that the global land requirements for a given amount of food
will cease shrinking any time soon. Indeed, Mr. Ausubel, together with his
colleagues Iddo Wernick and Paul Waggoner, came to the startling conclusion that,
even with generous assumptions about population growth and growing affluence
leading to greater demand for meat and other luxuries, and with ungenerous
assumptions about future global yield improvements, we will need less farmland in
2050 than we needed in 2000. (So long, that is, as we don't grow more biofuels on
land that could be growing food.) But surely intensification of yields depends on
inputs that may run out? Take water, a commodity that limits the production of food
in many places. Estimates made in the 1960s and 1970s of water demand by the
year 2000 proved grossly overestimated: The world used half as much water as
experts had projected 30 years before. The reason was greater economy in the use
of water by new irrigation techniques. Some countries, such as Israel and Cyprus,
have cut water use for irrigation through the use of drip irrigation. Combine these
improvements with solar-driven desalination of seawater world-wide, and it is highly
unlikely that fresh water will limit human population . The best-selling book "Limits
to Growth," published in 1972 by the Club of Rome (an influential global think tank),
argued that we would have bumped our heads against all sorts of ceilings by now,
running short of various metals, fuels, minerals and space. Why did it not happen?
In a word, technology: better mining techniques, more frugal use of materials , and if
scarcity causes price increases, substitution by cheaper material. We use 100 times
thinner gold plating on computer connectors than we did 40 years ago. The steel
content of cars and buildings keeps on falling . Until about 10 years ago, it was
reasonable to expect that natural gas might run out in a few short decades and oil

soon thereafter. If that were to happen, agricultural yields would plummet, and the
world would be faced with a stark dilemma: Plow up all the remaining rain forest to
grow food, or starve. But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and
gas have been postponed. They will run out one day, but only in the sense that you
will run out of Atlantic Ocean one day if you take a rowboat west out of a harbor in
Ireland. Just as you are likely to stop rowing long before you bump into
Newfoundland, so we may well find cheap substitutes for fossil fuels long before
they run out.

A2 VTL
Capitalism is key to value to life.
Sigmund, Carl and Alfred. "When Human Evolution Fails." 1 April 2008.
http://sigcarlfred.blogspot.com/2008/04/when-human-evolution-fails.html
Capitalism does not obviate human nature- it redirects it. Societies that reject
capitalism seek to control human nature. Some of those regimes may be authoritarian in nature, seeking only to
control behavior. More often, they are totalitarian innature and seek to control what you think. Human beings want what they want, when they
want it. We are all tempted to take what we want, consequences be damned. In a capitalist society, the opportunities exist for everyone to

In societies that reject capitalism, only the elites have access to a real future
for themselves and their children- and even then, they have to agree to play by a very specific set of rules. In a
society where violence is a part of everyday life, inflicting pain on others is not a
huge leap. Where life has little value and hope is non existent, there is no reason
that the 'other' should not share and be subjected to your misery. This is especially
true if the 'other' is better off than you are. This kind of thinking is more easily understood in context. Recall
succeed.

the subdued delight Iraqis took in the power failure that impacted the northeast a few years ago. They had no electricity for months and they
laughed at the New Yorkers who 'suffered' without power for a few hours. Imagine how they would delight in the travails of their adversaries.

Capitalist societies are different. We assign great value to life. We build hospitals and medical
research centers so that our lives might be prolonged and the quality of our life might be improved . Capitalist morality
places a very high value on human life because capitalism places a high value on
the potential of every life. In a capitalist society, it is the hope that the
contributions of each individual might elevate and serve all of society and not just
the elites.

Capitalism does not reduce everything to monetary value.

Johan Norberg. (Senior Fellow CATO Institute). In Defense of Global Capitalism.
2003. p. 17-8.
we
believe in is

What I really believe in, first and foremost, isn't capitalism or globalization. It isn't the systems or regulatory codes that achieve all
around us in the way of prosperity, innovation, community, and culture. Those things are created by people. What I

see

man's capacity for achieving great things,

and the combined force that results from our interaction and
exchanges. I plead for greater liberty and more open world, not because I believe one system happens to be more efficient than another, but
because those things provide a setting that unleashes individual creativity as no other system can. They spur dynamism that has led to human,
economic, scientific, and technical advances.

Believing in capitalism does not mean believing in

growth, the economy, or efficiency. Desirable as they may be, those are only the result. At its core, belief in
capitalism is belief in mankind. Like most other liberals, I can endorse the opinion of French socialism
prime minister Lionel Jospin that we must have a "market economy, not a market society." My aim is not for economic transactions to supplant

freedom and voluntary relations in all fields. In the cultural arena, that
In social life, it means the
right to live according to one's own values and to choose one's own company. An in the
economy, it means capitalism and free markets. It is not my intention that we should put
price tags on everything. The important things in life - love, family, friendship, one's
own way of life - cannot be assigned a dollar value. Thos who believe that, to the
liberal mind, people always act with the aim of maximizing their income know
nothing about liberals, and any liberal who doe think that way knows nothing of human nature. It is not a desire for better
all other human relations. My aim is

means freedom of expression and of the press. In politics, it means democracy and the rule of law.

payment that moves me to writ a book about the value of globalization instead of becoming an accountant or a fisherman. I am writing about

believe in, something that matters. And I wish to live in a liberal society
because such a society gives people the right to choose what matters to them.
something I

Links

A2 Discourse Link
Language doesnt create reality only describes it
Michelle Fram-Cohen, pub. date: 1985, translator and interpreter between
Hebrew and English, translation philosopher, Reality, Language, Translation What
Makes Translation Possible,
http://enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/text/michelleframcohen//possibility
oftranslation.html
The idea that language is created inside one's mind independently of outside experience eliminates the possibility that the external world is the common source of all languages. But a
common source of all languages underlies any attempt to explain the possibility of translation. Chomsky suggests that the common basis of all languages is universal phonetics and

certain objects of human thoughts and mentality are essentially

invariable across languages." (13) To the best of my knowledge Chomsky did not develop this idea in
the direction of explaining the possibility of translation. In contrast, linguist Eugene Nida insists that outside
experience is the common basis of all languages when he writes that "each language is different from all other languages in
semantics, with the result that "

the ways in which the sets of verbal symbol classify the various elements of experience." (14) Nida did not provide the philosophical basis of the view that the external world is the
common source of all languages. Such a basis can be found in the philosophy of Objectivism, originated by Ayn Rand. Objectivism, as its name implies, upholds the objectivity of reality.

reality is independent of consciousness, consciousness being the means of

perceiving reality, not of creating it. Rand defines language as "a code of visual-auditory symbols
This means that

that denote concepts." (15) These symbols are the written or spoken words of any language. Concepts are defined
as the "mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their
particular measurements omitted." (16) This means that concepts are abstractions of units perceived in reality .

Since words denote concepts, words are the symbols of such abstractions; words are the
means of representing concepts in a language. Since reality provides the data from
which we abstract and form concepts, reality is the source of all words--and of all
languages. The very existence of translation demonstrates this fact. If there was no objective
reality, there could be no similar concepts expressed in different verbal symbols.
There could be no similarity between the content of different languages, and so, no translation. Translation is the
transfer of conceptual knowledge from one language into another. It is the transfer of one set of symbols denoting
concepts into another set of symbols denoting the same concepts. This process is possible because

concepts have specific referents in reality. Even if a certain word and the concept it
designates exist in one language but not in another, the referent this word and
concept stand for nevertheless exists in reality, and can be referred to in translation by a
descriptive phrase or neologism. Language is a means describing reality, and as such can and
should expand to include newly discovered or innovated objects in reality. The revival of the ancient
Hebrew language in the late 19th Century demonstrated the dependence of language on
outward reality. Those who wanted to use Hebrew had to innovate an enormous number of
words in order to describe the new objects that did not confront the ancient Hebrew
speakers. On the other hand, those objects that existed 2000 years ago could be referred to by the same words.
Ancient Hebrew could not by itself provide a sufficient image of modern reality for modern users.

A2 Giroux Link
Giroux fails essentializes violence
Gur-Zeev 98 (Ilan, (Haifa University) Toward a non-repressive critical
pedagogy. No date. Accessed 1/19/11.
http://construct.haifa.ac.il/~ilangz/Critpe39.html)
The postmodern and the multicultural discourses that influenced Giroux took a
one-dimensional attitude towards power. They denoted the importance of
deconstructing cultural reproduction and the centrality of relations of dominance to
the voices of groups whose collective memory, knowledge, and identity were
threatened or manipulated by power relations and knowledge conceptions that
reflect and serve the hegemonic groups. Freire is not aware that this manipulation
has two sides, negative and a positive. The negative side allows the
realization of violence by guaranteeing possibilities for the successful
functioning of a normalized human being and creating possibilities for
men and women to become more productive in their realm of selfevidence. Their normality reflects and serves this self-evidence by partly
constituting the human subject as well as the thinking self. Giroux easily
extracted from Freires Critical Pedagogy the elements denoting the importance of
acknowledging and respecting the knowledge and identity of marginalized groups
and individuals. In fact, this orientation and its telos are in contrast to the central
concepts of postmodern educators on the one hand and Critical Theories of Adorno,
Horkheimer, and even Habermas on the other. But many similar conceptions and
attitudes are present as well.The aim of Freires Critical Pedagogy is to restore to
marginalized groups their stolen voice, to enable them to recognize
identify, and give their name the things in the world. The similarity to
postmodern critiques is already evident in his acknowledgment that to correctly
coin a word is nothing less than to change the world .(10) However, to identify this
conception with the postmodern stand is a over-hasty because the centrality of
language in Freires thought relates to his concept of truth and a class struggle
that will allow the marginalized and repressed an authentic voice,(11) as if their
self-evident knowledge is less false than that which their oppressors hold as valid.
Implicitly, Freire contends that the interests of all oppressed people are the
same, and that one general theory exists for deciphering repressive
reality and for developing the potentials absorbed in their collective
memory. An alternative critique of language which does not claim to empower the
marginalized and the controlled to conceive and articulate their knowledge and
needs on the one hand, and is not devoted to their emancipation on the other, is
mere verbalism, according to Freire.(12)

A2 Ranciere Link (Aesthetics)

Aesthetic politics results in elitist conservatism.
Russ Castronovo, Jean Wall Bennet Professor of English and American Studies,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Geo-Aesthetics: Fascism, Globalism, and Frank
Norris, BOUNDARY 2, v 30 n 3, 2003.CR
Although formalist criteria of aesthetics promise mass involvement any person
can fill the capacious shoes of a universal political formthe capacity to realize
perfect freedom is as limited as the select few invited to become citizens of the
aesthetic republic. In this way, the radical impulse of Aesthetic Education is also its
most conservative effect. While the beauty of freedom is theoretically available to
everyone, ultimately, however, most subjects fail to qualify as generic enough to
stand in for the individual that Schiller has in mind. The desire for aesthetic form
exists in every finely tuned soul (AE, 140), but how many such souls can a
discordant populace boast? Not too many, fears Schiller. Only in a few select
circles where it is not the spiritless imitation of foreign manners [fremde Sitten] but
peoples own lovely nature that governs conduct, where mankind passes through
the most complex situations with eager simplicity and tranquil innocence, can we
hope to encounter freedom in its purest form (AE, 139).26 Freedom is a work of art,
but are the people cultivated enough to appreciateor createit?

The mere wish for democratic art is not enough to bring it into
existence. Without a paradigm for evaluating political
aesthetics, the two collapse into the fascist tactics of National
Socialism.
Russ Castronovo, Jean Wall Bennet Professor of English and American Studies,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Geo-Aesthetics: Fascism, Globalism, and Frank
Norris, BOUNDARY 2, v 30 n 3, 2003.CR
With this history supposedly behind us, we may safely wish for democratic art,
but Benjamin reminds us to be careful about what we wish for. What has
all the trappings of democratization can devolve into fascist spectacle. In
seeking popular aesthetics, we may instead get democracy as a
mechanically reproduced art form in which the people become monolithic ,
their heterogeneity standardized. Even if we create democratic art, how do we
then evaluate iton political or aesthetic terms? Speaking at the Institute for
the Study of Fascism in 1934, Benjamin wondered if progressive or emancipatory
writing could also be literarily correct.14 Can art and politics usefully share
the same criteria without, on the one hand, dispensing with aesthetic
questions altogether, or, on the other, submerging political content under
formalist considerations? Benjamin views this line of questioning as misguided,
built on false oppositions between literary and political criteria; instead, he fuses the
two in the conviction that the more correct . . . the political tendency of a work,
then, by necessity, the higher [its] technical quality.15 But this implosion of
aesthetic merit and political evaluation also recalls the rise of National
Socialismand it is this history of mass deception and popular unfreedom

that troubles contemporary cultural theory, especially in its treatment of

the pressures that globalization places on literary studies.

A2 State Link
The nation-state is a malleable tool we can use to advance
ethical goals its not a Platonic entity the effects of which are
always pre-determined
Rogers Brubaker 2004 "In the Name of the Nation: Reflections on Nationalism
and Patriotism" Citizenship Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2,
www.sailorstraining.eu/admin/download/b28.pdf Brubaker is an American
sociologist, and professor at University of California, Los Angeles.
This, then, is the basic work done by the category nation in the context of
nationalist movementsmovements to create a polity for a putative nation. In other
contexts, the category nation is used in a very different way. It is used not to
challenge the existing territorial and political order, but to create a sense of national
unity for a given polity. This is the sort of work that is often called nation-building, of
which we have heard much of late. It is this sort of work that was evoked by the
Italian statesman Massimo DAzeglio, when he famously said, we have made Italy,
now we have to make Italians. It is this sort of work that was (and still is)
undertakenwith varying but on the whole not particularly impressive degrees of
successby leaders of post-colonial states, who had won independence, but whose
populations were and remain deeply divided along regional, ethnic, linguistic, and
religious lines. It is this sort of work that the category nation could, in principle, be
mobilized to do in contemporary Iraqto cultivate solidarity and appeal to loyalty in
a way that cuts across divisions between Shiites and Sunnis, Kurds and Arabs,
North and South.2 In contexts like this, the category nation can also be used in
another way, not to appeal to a national identity transcending ethnolinguistic,
ethnoreligious, or ethnoregional distinctions, but rather to assert ownership of the
polity on behalf of a core ethnocultural nation distinct from the citizenry of the
state as a whole, and thereby to define or redefine the state as the state of and for
that core nation (Brubaker, 1996, p. 83ff). This is the way nation is used, for
example, by Hindu nationalists in India, who seek to redefine India as a state
founded on Hindutva or Hinduness, a state of and for the Hindu ethnoreligious
nation (Van der Veer, 1994). Needless to say, this use of nation excludes Muslims
from membership of the nation, just as similar claims to ownership of the state in
the name of an ethnocultural core nation exclude other ethnoreligious,
ethnolinguistic, or ethnoracial groups in other settings. In the United States and
other relatively settled, longstanding nation-states, nation can work in this
exclusionary way, as in nativist movements in America or in the rhetoric of the
contemporary European far right (la France oux Francais, Deutschland den
Deutshchen). Yet it can also work in a very different and fundamentally inclusive
way.3 It can work to mobilize mutual solidarity among members of the nation,
inclusively defined to include all citizensand perhaps all long-term residentsof
the state. To invoke nationhood, in this sense, is to attempt to transcend or at least
relativize internal differences and distinctions . It is an attempt to get people to think
of themselves to formulate their identities and their interestsas members of that
nation, rather than as members of some other collectivity. To appeal to the nation
can be a powerful rhetorical resource, though it is not automatically so. Academics

in the social sciences and humanities in the United States are generally skeptical of
or even hostile to such invocations of nationhood. They are often seen as depasse
, parochial, naive, regressive, or even dangerous. For many scholars in the social
sciences and humanities, nation is a suspect category. Few American scholars
wave flags, and many of us are suspicious of those who do. And often with good
reason, since flag-waving has been associated with intolerance, xenophobia, and
militarism, with exaggerated national pride and aggressive foreign policy.
Unspeakable horrorsand a wide range of lesser evilshave been perpetrated in
the name of the nation, and not just in the name of ethnic nations, but in the name
of putatively civic nations as well (Mann, 2004). But this is not sufficient to account
for the prevailingly negative stance towards the nation. Unspeakable horrors, and
an equally wide range of lesser evils, have been committed in the name of many
other sorts of imagined communities as wellin the name of the state, the race, the
ethnic group, the class, the party, the faith. In addition to the sense that nationalism
is dangerous, and closely connected to some of the great evils of our timethe
sense that, as John Dunn (1979, p. 55) put it, nationalism is the starkest political
shame of the 20th-century there is a much broader suspicion of invocations of
nationhood. This derives from the widespread diagnosis that we live in a postnational age. It comes from the sense that, however well fitted the category nation
was to economic, political, and cultural realities in the nineteenth century, it is
increasingly ill-fitted to those realities today. On this account, nation is
fundamentally an anachronistic category, and invocations of nationhood, even if not
dangerous, are out of sync with the basic principles that structure social life today.4
The post-nationalist stance combines an empirical claim, a methodological critique,
and a normative argument. I will say a few words about each in turn. The empirical
claim asserts the declining capacity and diminishing relevance of the nation-state.
Buffeted by the unprecedented circulation of people, goods, messages, images,
ideas, and cultural products, the nation-state is said to have progressively lost its
ability to cage (Mann, 1993, p. 61), frame, and govern social, economic, cultural,
and political life. It is said to have lost its ability to control its borders, regulate its
economy, shape its culture, address a variety of border-spanning problems, and
engage the hearts and minds of its citizens. I believe this thesis is greatly
overstated, and not just because the September 11 attacks have prompted an
aggressively resurgent statism.5 Even the European Union, central to a good deal of
writing on post-nationalism, does not represent a linear or unambiguous move
beyond the nation-state. As Milward (1992) has argued, the initially limited moves
toward supranational authority in Europe workedand were intendedto restore
and strengthen the authority of the nation-state. And the massive reconfiguration of
political space along national lines in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the
Cold War suggests that far from moving beyond the nation-state, large parts of
Europe were moving back to the nation-state.6 The short twentieth century
concluded much as it had begun, with Central and Eastern Europe entering not a
post-national but a post-multinational era through the large-scale nationalization of
previously multinational political space. Certainly nationhood remains the universal
formula for legitimating statehood. Can one speak of an unprecedented porosity
of borders, as one recent book has put it (Sheffer, 2003, p. 22)? In some respects,
perhaps; but in other respectsespecially with regard to the movement of people

social technologies of border control have continued to develop. One cannot speak
of a generalized loss of control by states over their borders; in fact, during the last
century, the opposite trend has prevailed, as states have deployed increasingly
sophisticated technologies of identification, surveillance, and control, from
passports and visas through integrated databases and biometric devices. The
worlds poor who seek to better their estate through international migration face a
tighter mesh of state regulation than they did a century ago (Hirst and Thompson,
1999, pp. 301, 267). Is migration today unprecedented in volume and velocity, as
is often asserted? Actually, it is not: on a per capita basis, the overseas flows of a
century ago to the United States were considerably larger than those of recent
decades, while global migration flows are today on balance slightly less intensive
than those of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century (Held et al., 1999, p.
326). Do migrants today sustain ties with their countries of origin? Of course they
do; but they managed to do so without e-mail and inexpensive telephone
connections a century ago, and it is not clearcontrary to what theorists of postnationalism suggestthat the manner in which they do so today represents a basic
transcendence of the nation-state.7 Has a globalizing capitalism reduced the
capacity of the state to regulate the economy? Undoubtedly. Yet in other domains
such as the regulation of what had previously been considered private behavior
the regulatory grip of the state has become tighter rather than looser (Mann, 1997,
pp. 4912). The methodological critique is that the social sciences have long
suffered from methodological nationalism (Centre for the Study of Global
Governance, 2002; Wimmer and Glick-Schiller, 2002)the tendency to take the
nation-state as equivalent to society, and to focus on internal structures and
processes at the expense of global or otherwise border-transcending processes and
structures. There is obviously a good deal of truth in this critique, even if it tends to
be overstated, and neglects the work that some historians and social scientists have
long been doing on border-spanning flows and networks. But what follows from this
critique? If it serves to encourage the study of social processes organized on
multiple levels in addition to the level of the nation-state, so much the better. But if
the methodological critique is coupled as it often iswith the empirical claim
about the diminishing relevance of the nation-state, and if it serves therefore to
channel attention away from state-level processes and structures, there is a risk
that academic fashion will lead us to neglect what remains, for better or worse, a
fundamental level of organization and fundamental locus of power. The normative
critique of the nation-state comes from two directions. From above, the
cosmopolitan argument is that humanity as a whole, not the nation- state, should
define the primary horizon of our moral imagination and political engagement
(Nussbaum, 1996). From below, muticulturalism and identity politics celebrate
group identities and privilege them over wider, more encompassing affiliations. One
can distinguish stronger and weaker versions of the cosmopolitan argument. The
strong cosmopolitan argument is that there is no good reason to privilege the
nation-state as a focus of solidarity, a domain of mutual responsibility, and a locus
of citizenship.8 The nation-state is a morally arbitrary community, since
membership in it is determined, for the most part, by the lottery of birth, by morally
arbitrary facts of birthplace or parentage. The weaker version of the cosmopolitan
argument is that the boundaries of the nation-state should not set limits to our

moral responsibility and political commitments. It is hard to disagree with this point.
No matter how open and joinable a nation isa point to which I will return below
it is always imagined, as Benedict Anderson (1991) observed, as a limited
community. It is intrinsically parochial and irredeemably particular. Even the most
adamant critics of universalism will surely agree that those beyond the boundaries
of the nation-state have some claim, as fellow human beings, on our moral
imagination, our political energy, even perhaps our economic resources.9 The
second strand of the normative critique of the nation-statethe multiculturalist
critiqueitself takes various forms. Some criticize the nation-state for a
homogenizing logic that inexorably suppresses cultural differences. Others claim
that most putative nation-states (including the United States) are not in fact nationstates at all, but multinational states whose citizens may share a common loyalty to
the state, but not a common national identity (Kymlicka, 1995, p. 11). But the main
challenge to the nation-state from multiculturalism and identity politics comes less
from specific arguments than from a general disposition to cultivate and celebrate
group identities and loyalties at the expense of state-wide identities and loyalties. In
the face of this twofold cosmopolitan and multiculturalist critique, I would like to
sketch a qualified defense of nationalism and patriotism in the contemporary
American context.10 Observers have long noted the Janus-faced character of
nationalism and patriotism, and I am well aware of their dark side. As someone who
has studied nationalism in Eastern Europe, I am perhaps especially aware of that
dark side, and I am aware that nationalism and patriotism have a dark side not only
there but here. Yet the prevailing anti-national, post-national, and trans-national
stances in the social sciences and humanities risk obscuring the good reasonsat
least in the American contextfor cultivating solidarity, mutual responsibility, and
citizenship at the level of the nation-state. Some of those who defend patriotism do
so by distinguishing it from nationalism.11 I do not want to take this tack, for I think
that attempts to distinguish good patriotism from bad nationalism neglect the
intrinsic ambivalence and polymorphism of both. Patriotism and nationalism are not
things with fixed natures; they are highly flexible political languages, ways of
framing political arguments by appealing to the patria, the fatherland, the country,
the nation. These terms have somewhat different connotations and resonances, and
the political languages of patriotism and nationalism are therefore not fully
overlapping. But they do overlap a great deal, and an enormous variety of work can
be done with both languages. I therefore want to consider them together here. I
want to suggest that patriotism and nationalism can be valuable in four respects.
They can help develop more robust forms of citizenship, provide support for
redistributive social policies, foster the integration of immigrants, and even serve as
a check on the development of an aggressively unilateralist foreign policy. First,
nationalism and patriotism can motivate and sustain civic engagement. It is
sometimes argued that liberal democratic states need committed and active
citizens, and therefore need patriotism to generate and motivate such citizens. This
argument shares the general weakness of functionalist arguments about what
states or societies allegedly need; in fact, liberal democratic states seem to be
able to muddle through with largely passive and uncommitted citizenries. But the
argument need not be cast in functionalist form. A committed and engaged
citizenry may not be necessary, but that does not make it any less desirable. And

patriotism can help nourish civic engagement. It can help generate feelings of
solidarity and mutual responsibility across the boundaries of identity groups. As
Benedict Anderson (1991, p. 7) put it, the nation is conceived as a deep horizontal
comradeship. Identification with fellow members of this imagined community can
nourish the sense that their problems are on some level my problems, for which I
have a special responsibility.12 Patriotic identification with ones countrythe
feeling that this is my country, and my governmentcan help ground a sense of
responsibility for, rather than disengagement from, actions taken by the national
government. A feeling of responsibility for such actions does not, of course, imply
agreement with them; it may even generate powerful emotions such as shame,
outrage, and anger that underlie and motivate opposition to government policies.
Patriotic commitments are likely to intensify rather than attenuate such emotions.
As Richard Rorty (1994) observed, you can feel shame over your countrys behavior
only to the extent to which you feel it is your country.13 Patriotic commitments can
furnish the energies and passions that motivate and sustain civic engagement.

Offense

2AC Neolib Good (Tech)

The impact is backwards --- neolib has increased every
measure of progress
Yevgeniy Feyman 14, Manhattan Institute Fellow, "The Golden Age Is Now", May
23, www.city-journal.org/2014/bc0523yf.html Feyman is a fellow and deputy director
of the Center for Medical Progress.
Bjrn Lomborg is well-known as a climate skeptic. He has frequently voiced concerns that money spent battling climate change
could shift scarce resources away from more urgent global problems, such as malaria and HIV/AIDS. But the most recent book by the
self-proclaimed skeptical environmentalist does more than just voice concern; it attempts to evaluate the damage caused by a
variety of problemsfrom climate change to malnutrition to warand project future costs related to these same issues.

In How

Much Have Global Problems Cost the World?, Lomborg and a group of economists
conclude that , with a few exceptions, the world is richer, freer, healthier, and
smarter than its ever been . These gains have coincided with the near-universal
rejection of statism and the flourishing of capitalist principles. At a time when political figures
such as New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and religious leaders such as Pope Francis frequently remind us about the evils of

The doubling of human life expectancy is one of

the most remarkable achievements of the past century. Consider, Lomborg writes, that the
twentieth century saw life expectancy rise by about 3 months for every calendar
year. The average child in 1900 could expect to live to just 32 years old; now that same child should make it to 70. This increase
unfettered capitalism, this is a worthwhile message.

came during a century when worldwide economic output, driven by the spread of capitalism and freedom, grew by more than 4,000
percent. These gains occurred in developed and developing countries alike; among men and women; and even in a sense among

Why are we living so much longer? Massive improvements

in public health certainly played an important role. The World Health Organizations global vaccination
efforts essentially eradicated smallpox. But this would have been impossible without the innovative methods of
children, as child mortality plummeted.

vaccine preservation developed in the private sector by British scientist Leslie Collier. Oral rehydration therapies and antibiotics
have also been instrumental in reducing child mortality. Simply put,

technological progress is the key

to these gains and market economies have liberated, and rewarded,

technological innovation. People are not just living longer, but bettersometimes with
governments help, and sometimes despite it. Even people in the developing countries of Africa and
Latin America are better educated and better fed than ever before. Hundreds of
thousands of children who would have died during previous eras due to malnutrition
are alive today. Here, we can thank massive advancements in agricultural
production unleashed by the free market . In the 1960s, privately funded
agricultural researchers bred new, high-yield strains of corn, wheat, and various
other crops thanks to advances in molecular genetics. Globalization helped spread
these technologies to developing countries, which used them not only to feed their
people, but also to become export powerhouses . This so-called green revolution reinforced both the
educational progress (properly nourished children tend to learn more) and the life-expectancy gains (better nutrition leads to better
health) of the twentieth century. These children live in a world with fewer armed conflicts, netting what the authors call a peace
dividend.

Globalization and trade liberalization have surely contributed to

this more peaceful world (on aggregate). An interdependent global economy

makes war costly. Of course, problems remain. As Lomborg points out, most foreign aid likely does little to
boost economic welfare, yet hundreds of billions of dollars in development assistance continue to flow every year from developed
countries to the developing world. Moreover, climate change is widely projected to intensify in the second half of the twenty-first
century, and will carry with it a significant economic cost.

But those familiar with the prior work of the skeptical environmentalist

understand that ameliorating these effects over time could prove wasteful. Lomborg notes that the latest research on climate
change estimates a net cost of 0.2 to 2 percent of GDP from 2055 to 2080. The same report points out that in 2030, mitigation costs
may be as high as 4 percent of GDP. Perhaps directing mitigation funding to other prioritiescuring AIDS for instancewould be a
better use of the resources. Lomborgs main message?

Ignore those pining for the good old days.

Thanks to the immense gains of the past century, there has never been a
better time to be alive.

Environment
Neolib solves the environment
Zey 1997 (Michael Zey, Professor of Management at Montclair State University,
The Futurist, The Macroindustrial Era: A New Age of Abundance and
Prosperity, March/April, http://www.zey.com/Featured_2.htm)
1997,

This brings me to one of my major points about the necessity of growth. A recurring
criticism of growth - be it industrial, economic, or technological - centers around its
negative consequences. A good example of this is the tendency of economic and industrial
growth to generate pollution. However, I contend that growth invariably provides solutions to
any problems it introduces. The following examples will illustrate my point. Although
economic growth can initially lead to such problems as pollution and waste, studies show

that, after a country achieves a certain level of prosperity, the pendulum begins to swing back
toward cleaner air and water. In fact, once a nation's per capita income rises to about $4,000
(in 1993 dollars), it produces less of some pollutants per capita. The reason for this is quite
simple: Such a nation can now afford technologies such as catalytic converters and sewage
systems that treat and eliminate a variety of wastes. According to Norio Yamamoto,
research director of the Mitsubishi Research Institute, "We consider any kind of
environmental damage to result from mismanagement of the economy." He claims
that the pollution problems of poorer regions such as eastern Europe can be traced largely to
their economic woes. Hence he concludes that, in order to ensure environmental safety, "we
need a sound economy on a global basis." Thus, the answer to pollution, the supposed
outgrowth of progress, ought to be more economic growth. Such economic growth can
be accelerated by any number of actions: the transfer of technology, the sharing of
scientific know-how, and economic investment. The World Bank estimates that
every dollar invested in developing countries will grow to $100 in 50 years. As their

wealth increases, these countries can take all the necessary steps to invest in pollution-free cars,
catalytic converters, and other pollution-free technologies, such as the cleanest of all current
large-scale energy sources, nuclear power. They can also afford to invest in
bioremediation - the utilization of viruses to literally eat such impurities as oil spills
and toxic waste. Russia is actively growing and exporting microorganisms that eat
radioactive and metallic wastes from such sources as uranium, plutonium,
magnesium, and silver.

2AC Space Turn

Capitalism is key to space colonization
Blundell, director general of the Institute for Economic Affairs, 20 04 (John,
Mission to Mars must go private to succeed, February 2,
http://www.iea.org.uk/record.jsp?type=news&ID=166)
Bush is not finding the billions himself. Rather the tab will be picked up by US
taxpayers in perhaps 20 years time. What arrests me is the unchallenged
assumption that space exploration must be a nationalised infdustry. The Soviet
effort may be stalled but the Chinese seem committed to joining the race. The
European Space Agency is a strange combination of nationalised bodies. NASA is a
pure old-fashioned nationalised entity. I argue we should relinquish the expectation
that space has to be limited to vast quangos. The mindset we all share is an echo of
the rivalry between the evaporated USSR and the still dynamic US. The first bleeps
of the Sputnik galvanised the US into accelerating its space effort. What we need
is capitalists in space . Capitalism needs property rights, enforcement of
contracts and the rule of law. The ideological tussle does not cease once we are
beyond the ionosphere. With the exception of Arthur C Clarke, none of us imagined
the entertainment potential from satellites. Geostationary lumps of electronic
gadgetry beam us our BSkyB television pictures. I remain in awe that Rupert
Murdoch can place a device in the skies above Brazil that sends a signal to every
home in each hemisphere. Who could have foreseen that mobile phones could keep
us chattering without any wiring, or that global position techniques could plot where
we all are to within a metre? These are business applications. Business is already in
space. Markets detect and apply opportunities that are not envisaged by even the
most accomplished technicians. Im not saying Murdoch has special competences. I
imagine he is as baffled by digital miracles as I am. The point is that companies
define and refine what public bodies cannot achieve. Lift the veil of course and all
those satellite firms are an intricate web of experts supplying ideas and services.
We have an infant space market. What use will the Moon be? Is there value on Mars
other than the TV rights? The answer is nobody can know. We can only make some
guesses. The Spanish ships that set off for the US thought they would get to India.
The Portuguese knew theyd reach China. The English followed them westwards
seeking gold. In fact, they got tobacco. Events always confound expectations. The
arguments for putting men on Mars are expressly vague from President Bush.
Perhaps he was really bidding for votes. From my reading the best results may be
medical. Zero, or low, gravity techniques may allow therapies of which we are
ignorant. It seems facetious to suggest tourism may be a big part of space
opportunity but as both the North and South poles are over-populated and there is a
queue at the top of Mount Everest, a trip to the Sea of Tranquility may prove a
magnet for the wealthy. Instead of NASAs grotesque bureaucracy it may be
Thomas Cook will be a greater force for exploration. NASA could be a procurement
body. It need not design and run all space ventures. It could sub-contract far more
extensively. Without specialised engineering expertise it is not easy to criticise
projects such as the shuttle. It seems to be excessively costly and far too fragile.

There are private space entrepreneurs already. They are tiddlers up against the
mighty NASA. Yet Dan Goldin, the NASA leader, says he favours the privatisation of
space: "We cant afford to do solar system exploration until we turn these activities
over to the cutting edge private sector..."Some may say that commercialising
portions of NASAs functions is heresy. Others may think we are taking a path that
will ruin the wonders of space. I believe that when NASA can creatively partner, all
of humankind will reap the benefits of access to open space". Is it possible the
Moon has a more noble future than merely a branch office of NASA? Is it tolerable
that Mars could be a subsidiary of the USA? Could it be nominally a further state of
the union? These are not silly questions. In time space will be defined by lawyers
and accountants as property rights will need to be deliberated. One possibility may
be that both environments are so hostile that Mars and the Moon will never be more
than token pockets for humanity. On the evidence so far it is the orbiting satellites
that have made us see the Earth through new eyes. We can survey and explore the
planet better from 200 miles up than stomping on the surface. The emerging
commercial body of space law is derived from telecommunications law. It is
perplexing and contrary to our immediate senses. How can you own or exchange
something as intangible as digital messages bouncing off satellites? Yet we all pay
our mobile phone bills. Many of the business results of space exploration are
unintended consequences of NASAs early adventures. Computer development
would probably have been slower but for the need for instrumentation for Apollo.
Are there prospects for Scottish firms in space? The prizes will not go to only the
mega corporations. Perhaps Dobbies, the Edinburgh garden centre group, can
create new roses by placing pots beyond gravity. Edinburgh University laboratories,
or rather their commercial spin offs, could patent new medicines. Is it possible the
genetic magicians at the Bush could hitch a ride into space and extend their
discoveries? NASA is a monopolist. All monopolies are bad for business. They only
stunt opportunities. They blunt alternatives. By opening space to entrepreneurship
we will be starting on what FA Hayek memorably describes as "a discovery
procedure". Science is an open system. So is capitalism.

Space is necessary to solve multiple scenarios for extinction

Stephen Hawking, Worlds Smartest Person. Stephen Hawking: Humans Must
Colonize Space Or Risk Extinction, Pleasant Morning Buzz. June 14, 20 06
http://www.pleasantmorningbuzz.com/blog/614061
Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says that the future of the human race depends on
our going out into space. The survival of the human race depends on its ability to
find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a
disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said
Tuesday. Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a
colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference.
"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system,"
added Hawking, who arrived in Hong Kong to a rock star's welcome Monday. Tickets
for his lecture planned for Wednesday were sold out. He added that if humans can
avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements
that can continue without support from Earth. "It is important for the human race to
spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is

at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global
warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not
yet thought of."

1AR Space Turn

Commercial space key to colonize and solve resource wars checks their reasons why cap is bad
Collins and Autino, 10 - * Life & Environmental Science, Azabu University
AND ** Andromeda Inc., Italy (Patrick and Adriano, What the growth of a space
tourism industry could contribute to employment, economic growth, environmental
protection, education, culture and world peace, Acta Astronautica 66 (2010) 1553
1562, science direct)
The major source of social friction, including international friction, has surely
always been unequal access to resources. People - fight to control the
valuable resources on and under the land, and in and under the sea. The natural
resources of Earth are limited in quantity, and economically accessible
resources even more so. As the population grows, and demand grows for a
higher material standard of living, industrial activity grows exponentially. The
threat of resources becoming scarce has led to the concept of Resource
Wars. Having begun long ago with wars to control the gold and diamonds of Africa
and South America, and oil in the Middle East, the current phase is at centre stage
of world events today [37]. A particular danger of resource wars is that, if
the general public can be persuaded to support them, they may become
impossible to stop as resources become increasingly scarce. Many
commentators have noted the similarity of the language of US and UK
government advocates of war on terror to the language of the novel 1984
which describes. a dystopian future of endless, fraudulent war in which
citizens are reduced to slaves. 7.1. Expansion into near-Earth space is the only
alternative to endless resource wars As an alternative to the resource
wars already devastating many countries today, opening access to the
unlimited resources of near-Earth space could clearly facilitate world
peace and security. The US National Security Space Office, at the start of its
report on the potential of space-based solar power (SSP) published in early 2007,
stated: Expanding human populations and declining natural resources are
potential sources of local and strategic conflict in the 21st Century, and many
see energy as the foremost threat to national security [38]. The report ended
by encouraging urgent research on the feasibility of SSP: Considering the
timescales that are involved, and the exponential growth of population
and resource pressures within that same strategic period, it is imperative
that this work for drilling up vs. drilling down for energy security begins
immediately [38]. Although the use of extra-terrestrial resources on a substantial
scale may still be some decades away, it is important to recognize that simply
acknowledging its feasibility using known technology is the surest way of
ending the threat of resource wars .That is, if it is assumed that the resources
available for human use are limited to those on Earth, then it can be argued that
resource wars are inescapable [22,37]. If, by contrast, it is assumed that the
resources of space are economically accessible, this not only eliminates the
need for resource wars, it can also preserve the benefits of civilization which are
being eroded today by resource war-mongers, most notably the governments of

the Anglo-Saxon countries and their neo-con advisers. It is also worth noting
that the $1trillion that these have already committed to wars in the Middle-East in
the 21st century is orders of magnitude more than the public investment needed to
aid companies sufficiently to start the commercial use of space resources.
Industrial and financial groups which profit from monopolistic control of
terrestrial supplies of various natural resources, like those which profit from wars,
have an economic interest in protecting their profitable situation. However, these
groups continuing profits are justified neither by capitalism nor by democracy:
they could be preserved only by maintaining the pretence that use of space
resources is not feasible, and by preventing the development of low-cost space
travel. Once the feasibility of low-cost space travel is understood, resource
wars are clearly foolish as well as tragic. A visiting extra-terrestrial would be
pityingly amused at the foolish antics of homo sapiens using long- range rockets to
fight each other over dwindling terrestrial resourcesrather than using the same
rockets to travel in space and have the use of all the resources they need! Pg. 1560156

Transition Wars
Transition will cause endless resource wars innovation driven
growth solves
Barnhizer 2006 David Barnhizer (Professor of Law at Ohio State University,
Articles Editor of the Ohio State Law Journal and then served as a Reginald Heber
Smith Community Lawyer Fellow in Colorado Springs Legal Services Office, a Ford
Urban Law Fellow, and a Clinical Teaching Fellow at the Harvard Law School, Senior
Advisor to the International Program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a
Senior Fellow for Earth Summit Watch, and General Counsel for the Shrimp Tribunal.
He has served as Executive Director of The Year 2000 Committee) 2006 waking
from sustainabilitys impossible dream Georgetown environmental law review

The scale of social needs, including the need for expanded productive activity,
has grown so large that it cannot be shut off at all, and certainly not abruptly. It
cannot even be ratcheted down in any significant fashion without producing
serious harms to human societies and hundreds of millions of people. Even if it
were possible to shift back to systems of local self-sufficiency, the consequences
of the transition process would be catastrophic for many people and even
deadly to the point of continual conflict, resource wars, increased poverty,
and strife. What are needed are concrete, workable, and pragmatic
strategies that produce effective and intelligently designed economic activity
in specific contexts and, while seeking efficiency and conservation, place
economic and social justice high on a list of priorities.

Elites will backlash in devastating civil wars

Roger Terry (senior editor at the Ensign magazine) Economic Insanity. 1995. pp.
137-138
Given the fact that capitalism as we know it is both corrupt and rapidly deteriorating, we are faced with the dilemma of how to get from our
present system to one that is both more equitable and more workable.

This will not be an easy transition,

for it will

involve the conversion of our present authoritarian organizations into democratic institutions . Unfortunately, recognizing that we need to make
this transition is much easier than actually making it. How do you convert ftom a system of either narrow, unlimited ownership or widely
dispersed absentee ownership to a system of limited, universal ownership? A good argument can be built for making this transition gradually,
over a long period of time.

If we were to try to make this shift overnight, the consequences would

be as horrible as they are predictable. Suddenly abolishing our present system of
ownership would create a crisis far more perilous even than the Civil War, which arose from
abolishing a different, although related, form of ownership. It would be naive to think that those who have
accumulated vast amounts of money, property, and power would simply yield to
reason (or even newly enacted laws) and give up these possessions without a fight . And I mean a
literal fight, one in which the odds would be stacked against change and democracy. It is not
difficult to imagine an actual civil war far more devastating than the one fought over
slavery.
likely

These wars go nuclear.

Mead 92 (Walter Russel, fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, New perspectives
quarterly, summer pp. 28)

if the global economy stagnates - or even shrinks? In that case, we will face a
new period of international conflict: South against North, rich against poor. Russia, China, India - these
countries with their billions of people and their nuclear weapons will pose a much
greater danger to world order than Germany and Japan did in the '30s.
But what if it can't? What

War
Neolib Solves War
Hillebrand 2010 Evan E. Hillebrand (Professor of Diplomacy at University of
Kentucky and a Senior Economist for the Central Intelligence Agency) 2010
Deglobalization Scenarios: Who Wins? Who Loses? Global Economy Journal,
Volume 10, Issue 2 2010
A long line of writers from Cruce (1623) to Kant (1797) to Angell (1907) to Gartzke
(2003) have theorized that economic interdependence can lower the likelihood
of war. Cruce thought that free trade enriched a society in general and so made
people more peaceable; Kant thought that trade shifted political power away
from the more warlike aristocracy, and Angell thought that economic
interdependence shifted cost/benefit calculations in a peace-promoting direction.
Gartzke contends that trade relations enhance transparency among nations and
thus help avoid bargaining miscalculations. There has also been a tremendous
amount of empirical research that mostly supports the idea of an inverse
relationship between trade and war. Jack Levy said that, While there are
extensive debates over the proper research designs for investigating this
question, and while some empirical studies find that trade is associated with

international conflict, most studies conclude that trade is associated with

peace, both at the dyadic and systemic levels (Levy, 2003, p. 127). There is
another important line of theoretical and empirical work called Power Transition
Theory that focuses on the relative power of states and warns that when rising
powers approach the power level of their regional or global leader the chances of
war increase (Tammen, Lemke, et al, 2000). Jacek Kugler (2006) warns that the
rising power of China relative to the United States greatly increases the chances of
great power war some time in the next few decades. The IFs model combines the
theoretical and empirical work of the peacethrough trade tradition with the work of
the power transition scholars in an attempt to forecast the probability of interstate
war. Hughes (2004) explains how he, after consulting with scholars in both camps,
particularly Edward Mansfield and Douglas Lemke, estimated the starting
probabilities for each dyad based on the historical record, and then forecast future
probabilities for dyadic militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and wars based on the
calibrated relationships he derived from the empirical literature. The probability
of a MID, much less a war, between any random day in any given year is very
low, if not zero . Paraguay and Tanzania, for example, have never fought and are
very unlikely to do so. But there have been thousands of MIDs in the past and
hundreds of wars and many of the 16,653 dyads have nonzero probabilities. In 2005
the mean probability of a country being involved in at least one war was

estimated to be 0.8% , with 104 countries having a probability of at least 1 war

approaching zero. A dozen countries12, however, have initial probabilities over 3%.
model predicts four great power wars in the deglobalization scenario vs. 2 in the
globalization scenario.16 The globalization scenario projects that the

probability for war will gradually decrease through 2035 for every country
but not every dyad--that had a significant (greater than 0.5% chance of war) in
2005 (Table 6). The decline in prospects for war stems from the scenarios
projections of rising levels of democracy, rising incomes, and rising trade
interdependenceall of these factors figure in the algorithm that calculates the
probabilities. Not all dyadic war probabilities decrease, however, because of the
power transition mechanism that is also included in the IFs model. The probability
for war between China and the US, for example rises as Chinas power13 rises
gradually toward the US level but in these calculations the probability of a China/US
war never gets very high.14 Deglobalization raises the risks of war
substantially. In a world with much lower average incomes, less democracy, and
less trade interdependence, the average probability of a country having at least one
war in 2035 rises from 0.6% in the globalization scenario to 3.7% in the
deglobalization scenario. Among the top-20 war-prone countries, the average

probability rises from 3.9% in the globalization scenario to 7.1% in the

deglobalization scenario. The model estimates that in the deglobalization scenario
there will be about 10 wars in 2035, vs. only 2 in the globalization scenario15. Over
the whole period, 2005-2035, the IV. Winners and Losers Deglobalization in the

form of reduced trade interdependence, reduced capital flows, and reduced

migration has few positive effects, based on this analysis with the International
Futures Model. Economic growth is cut in all but a handful of countries, and is cut
more in the non-OECD countries than in the OECD countries. Deglobalization has a
mixed impact on equality. In many non-OECD countries, the cut in imports from the
rest of the world increases the share of manufacturing and in 61 countries raises the
share of income going to the poor. But since average productivity goes down in
almost all countries, this gain in equality comes at the expense of reduced incomes
and increased poverty in almost all countries. The only winners are a small

number of countries that were small and poor and not well integrated in the
global economy to begin withand the gains from deglobalization even for them
are very small. Politically, deglobalization makes for less stab le domestic politics
and a greater likelihood of war. The likelihood of state failure through internal
war, projected to diminish through 2035 with increasing globalization, rises in the
deglobalization scenario particularly among the non-OECD democracies.
Similarly, deglobalization makes for more fractious relations among states
and the probability for interstate war rises.

Best studies
Hegre et al 2009 (Hvard Hegre, Professor of Political Science @University of
Oslo, , John R. Oneal, Professor of Political Science @ The University of Alabama,
Bruce Russett, Professor of Political Science @ Yale University) August 25, 2009
Trade Does Promote Peace: New Simultaneous Estimates of the Reciprocal Effects
of Trade and Conflict http://www.yaleuniversity.com/leitner/resources/docs/HORJune09.pdf
Liberals expect economically important trade to reduce conflict because interstate
violence adversely affects commerce, prospectively or contemporaneously. Keshk,

Reuveny, & Pollins (2004) and Kim & Rousseau (2005) report on the basis of
simultaneous analyses of these reciprocal relations that conflict impedes trade but
trade does not deter conflict. Using refined measures of geographic proximity
and sizethe key elements in the gravity model of international interactions
reestablishes support for the liberal peace, however. Without careful specification,
trade becomes a proxy for these fundamental exogenous factors, which are also
important influences on dyadic conflict. KPRs and KRs results are spurious. Large,
proximate states fight more and trade more. Our re-analyses show that, as
liberals would expect, commerce reduces the risk of interstate conflict when
proximity and size are properly modeled in both the conflict and trade equations.
We provided new simultaneous estimates of liberal theory using Oneal &
Russetts (2005) data and conflict equation and a trade model derived from Long
(2008). These tests confirm the pacific benefit of trade. Trade reduces the
likelihood of a fatal militarized dispute, 19502000 in our most
comprehensive analysis, as it does in the years 1984-97 when additional
measures of traders expectations of domestic and interstate conflict are
incorporated (Long, 2008) and in the period 1885-2000. This strong support for
liberal theory is consistent with Kims (1998) early simultaneous estimates, Oneal,
Russett & Berbaums (2003) Granger-style causality tests, and recent research by
Robst, Polachek & Chang (2007). Reuveny & Kang (1998) and Reuveny (2001)
report mixed results. It is particularly encouraging that, when simultaneously
estimated, the coefficient of trade in the conflict equation is larger in absolute value
than the corresponding value in a simple probit analysis. Thus, the dozens of
published articles that have addressed the endogeneity of trade by controlling
for the years of peaceas virtually all have done since 1999have not
overstated the benefit of interdependence. Admittedly, our instrumental
variables are not optimal. In some cases, for example, in violation of the
identification rule, the creation or end of a PTA may be a casus belli. More
importantly, neither of our instruments explains a large amount of variance. Thus,
future research should be directed to identifying better instruments. Our confidence
in the commercial peace does not depend entirely on the empirical evidence,
however; it also rests on the logic of liberal theory. Our new simultaneous estimates
as well as our re-analyses of KPR and KRindicate that fatal disputes reduce
trade. Even with extensive controls for on-going domestic conflict, militarized
disputes with third parties, and expert estimates of the risks of such violence,
interstate conflict has an adverse contemporaneous effect on bilateral trade. This is
hardly surprising (Anderton & Carter, 2001; Reuveny, 2001; Li & Sacko, 2002;
Oneal, Russett & Berbaum, 2003; Glick & Taylor, 2005; Kastner, 2007; Long, 2008;
Findlay & ORourke, 2007; cf. Barbieri & Levy, 1999; Blomberg & Hess, 2006; and
Ward & Hoff, 2007). If conflict did not impede trade, economic agents would be
indifferent to risk and the maximization of profit. Because conflict is costly, trade
should reduce interstate violence. Otherwise, national leaders would be insensitive
to economic loss and the preferences of powerful domestic actors. Whether paid
prospectively or contemporaneously, the economic cost of conflict should
reduce the likelihood of military conflict , ceteris paribus, if national leaders are
rational.