Tournament: Athens | Round: 4 | Opponent: North Lamar EP | Judge: Susan Grieg
T
A. Interpretation
Economic engagement is distinct from other forms, like military, political, or cultural engagement.
Haass and O’Sullivan 00
Haass Director of Foreign Policy Studies @ Brookings, and O'Sullivan, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies @ Brookings, 2000 (Richard and Meghan, "Terms of Engagement: Alternatives to Punitive Policies," http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/articles/2000/6/summer20haass/2000survival.pdf Accessed 7/7/13 GAL)
B. Violation
The affirmative plan increases non-economic engagement with their country.
C. Reasons to Prefer
a. Limits – The resolution clearly specified economics. That means that legitimizing other forms of engagements infinitely explodes the topic in the affirmative’s favor.
b. Ground – Other forms of engagement should be negative CP ground. We also lose certain arguments because they don’t have to defend economic engagement. These are core negative ground.
c. Extra Topicality is Illegitimate – At best, the affirmative is extra topical in that they increase economic engagement AND other forms of engagement. But this is illegitimate because now they get to claim extra advantages that do not stem from improving economic ties with a country. This kills our ability to outweigh with our disadvantages.
Voter for fairness and education.
K
Violence is often discussed as the problem of our time. Massive amounts of intellectual energy are spent exploring, explaining, and theorizing violence. Violence is described as the product of particular circumstances, as the result of pathologies, or as a simple fact of life. All these explanations of violence serve one purpose: to hide the fact that violence is the product of the will to be violent. Regardless of circumstances, every act of violence occurs becomes somebody chooses to be violent.
The affirmative’s attempt to explain violence as the ultimate product of a series of internal links asks all the wrong questions. Their inquiry distances us from violence and our own complicity in it, opting instead for an understanding where we witness violence as observers, and act on it from a position of detached, almost scientific, objectivity. This approach can never succeed, as the solutions it inevitably yields only traps us in a cycle of violence and counter-violence.
We have several links to our position:
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First, understanding violence as something that happens “out there,” and is perpetrated by heads of state or armies, is the first step to forgetting our own responsibility for the many expressions of violence in the world. Questions about what the government should do, erase questions about what we should do, and ensure that violence continues while we wallow in our powerlessness.
Susanne Kappeler, Associate Prof @ Al-Akhawayn University, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior, 1995, pg. 10-11
‘We are the war’ does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society—which would be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or, as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of collective irresponsibility1, where people are no longer held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal. 6 On the contrary, the object is precisely to analyze the specific and differential responsibilities of everyone in their diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by those in a position to make them to command such collective action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any collective ‘assumption’ of responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing on the stage where the major dramas of power take place tends to obscure our sight in relation to our own sphere of competence, our own power and our own responsibility—leading to the –well-known illusion of our apparent ‘powerlessness’ and its accompanying phenomenon, our so-called political disillusionment. Single citizens- even more so those of other nations – have come to feel secure in their obvious non-responsibility for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina or Somalia – since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere.
Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us into thinking that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgment, and thus into underrating the respons¬ibility we do have within our own sphere of action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events, or to recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls ‘organized irresponsibility’, upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually or¬ganized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major powermongers. For we tend to think that we cannot ‘do’ anything, say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are not where the major decisions are made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of ‘What would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the minister of defence?’ Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as ‘virtually no possibilities’: what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN — finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like ‘I want to stop this war’, ‘I want military intervention’, ‘I want to stop this backlash’, or ‘I want a moral revolution.’7 ‘We are this war’, however, even if we do not command the troops or participate in so—called peace talks, namely as Drakuli says, in our non-comprehension’: our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these offer. And we ‘are’ the war in our ‘unconscious cruelty towards you’, our tolerance of the ‘fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don’t’ — our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the ‘others’. We share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape ‘our feelings, our relationships, our values’ according to the structures and the values of war and violence.
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Second, attempts to explain violence in abstract and formulaic terms shield individuals from any responsibility for their actions. The 1AC’s argument that () is an example of this. Describing violence as the inevitable result of a chain of events naturalizes it and washes the hands of those who actually decide to commit acts of violence.
Susanne Kappeler, Associate Prof @ Al-Akhawayn University, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior, 1995, pg 14
Scientific discourse, too, which is one of the major instruments of cultural and ideological power, certainly is no longer the prerogative of those who rules and administer society according to their will and interests. A comparable pseudo-scientific standpoint, abstracted from any specificity of the actual situation, increasingly characterizes the discourse of individuals—including that of a critical opposition—who then regard the ‘problems of the world’ from a similarly lofty and lordly view, arriving at similar solutions. So-called standpointlessness, the objectifying look from ‘above’ and ‘outside,’ and its concomitant subjectless speech are the trademark of any discursively constructed authority. And since it is a speciality of scientific discourse to abstract action from its agents, representing it as (agentless) acts, it is only logical that this action too, this production of knowledgeable scientific speech, is presented as an act without an agent, a discourse without an author, a monological speech product without a producer. Just as public discourse is the market-place of industrially published discursive products, so-called private communication increasingly takes the form of an exchange of personal speech products, with individuals fighting each other by means of rivaling representations in preference to reaching a common understanding. Many a political meeting, seminar or conversation among several people bears testimony to the fact that, however small this public arena, it is seen and used as an opportunity for putting one’s own products on offer and achieving a victory for one’s own representation—over any reality to be analyzed and any people involved in analyzing it.
Science is less concerned with the question of people’s responsible action in the world than professedly with the principle of cause and effect in the reality which is the object of its study- ‘nature’ in the case of the original natural sciences, long since joined by ‘culture’ and ‘society’ as the objects of the social sciences. Cause are the objectified impetuses of actions (‘events’ or ‘processes’), presented without regard to these as actions, while effects are the objectified consequences of these. The changing continuity of action (or a process or event) is separated into its apparent beginning and end, a point of departure and a final outcome, between which a connection, a casual relationship, is then inferred. A rational morality, if any, derives from the evaluation of effects, which are judges as good or bad, useful or harmful, desirable or undesirable, -- leaving aside for the moment by whom and in whose interests.
A political morality could also be derived from the consequences of action, in terms of the agents’ responsibility for the consequences of their actions. However, the scientific representation of the consequences of action as mere states of affairs—as factual effects—serves to evade such responsibility as effectively as once did mythological representations of destiny as preordained. For if we detach the act from the person acting and regard its consequences as an effect, personal responsibility is no longer an issue. On the contrary, this effect now calls for the scientific investigation of its cause. The cause, as we have already seen and shall see again and again, is never found in the responsibility of consciously acting people, but in an array of correlating factors and contributing circumstances which make identifying any personal responsibility virtually impossible. What is of advantage to the ruling interests of society, however, also has its attraction for individuals, who thus similarly seek to evade their personal responsibility by means of a scientific representation of their own actions as the effect of a most complicated set of causes.
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Third, the solutions the affirmative proposes rely on imagining an ordered world, united under the banner of American leadership and security. This project of ordering the world is inherently violent. It requires that the architects of the world be given the freedom to use violence and to determine when violence ought to be used. The empirical record demonstrates that this freedom can only result in suffering.
Jayan Nayar, Law Student at the University of Warwick, Re-Framing International Law for the 21st Century: Orders of Inhumanity, 9 Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 599, Fall 1999, ln
The period since 1945 may be regarded as a long peace only in the restricted sense that there has been no war between major powers. In other respects, and for much of the world, it has been a period of frequent wars. . . . By one estimate, between 1945 and 1989 there were 138 wars, resulting in some 23 million deaths. . . . All 138 wars were fought in the Third World, and many were fuelled by weapons provided by the two major powers the United States and the Soviet Union or their allies. n31
The twentieth-century is a period of history which, in the words of anthropologist Marvin Harris, has seen "a war to end all wars followed by a war to make the world safe for *614 democracy, followed by a world full of military dictatorships." We were then promised a New World-order as the reward for agreeing to the Gulf War, as the end of the Cold War gave way to a seemingly endless series of intra-state wars which the international community is unwilling or unable to bring to order. n32
Once again, from the perspective of the ordered, the order of security has proved to be the ideological weapon for the systematic infliction of violence. It is not so much the order of security that is of interest here, but rather, the ordering which takes place in its guise.
And with the passing of history, so has the legitimizing claim for the necessity of violent ordering for "security" purposes--fascism, colonialism, communism, capitalism (depending on the ideological orientation of the claimant), terrorism (particularly of the Islamic bent). There is always an enemy, sometimes internal, sometimes external, threatening the well-being of the people. The languages of nationalism and sovereignty, of peace and collective security, constructed to suit whichever threat happens to be in fashion, are passionately employed; the anarchy that is a Hobbesian state of nature is always the prophesied consequence of the lack of order that is impending. And the price that the "ordered" has to pay for all this "security" in the post-colonial, new world-order?: is the freedom of those who order to be violent!
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There are two distinct impacts to our position:
The first is that the affirmative’s explanations of violence can never produce positive change. Understanding violence as an aberration, or as an event that occurs outside of the sphere of our personal influence, guarantees our complicity with continued violent world orderings.
Susanne Kappeler, Associate Prof @ Al-Akhawayn University, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior, 1995, pg 8-9
Violence – what we usually recognize as such – is no exception to the rules, no deviation from the normal and nothing out of the ordinary, in a society in which exploitation and oppression are the norm, the ordinary and the rule. It is no misbehaviour of a minority amid good behaviour by the majority, nor the deeds of inhuman monsters amid humane humans, in a society in which there is no equality, in which people divide others according to race, class, sex and many other factors in order to rule, exploit, use, objectify, enslave, sell, torture and kill them, in which millions of animals are tortured, genetically manipulated, enslaved and slaughtered daily for ‘harmless’ consump¬tion by humans. It is no error of iudgement, no moral lapse and no transgression against the customs of a culture which is thoroughly steeped in the values of profit and desire, of self—realization, expansion and progress. Violence as we usually perceive it is ‘simply’ a specific —and to us still visible — form of violence, the consistent and logical application of the principles of our culture and everyday life.
War does not suddenly break out in a peaceful society; sexual violence is not the disturbance of otherwise equal gender relations. Racist attacks do not shoot like lightning out of a non-racist sky, and the sexual exploitation of children is no solitary problem in a world otherwise just to children. The violence of our most commonsense everyday thinking, and especially our personal will to violence, constitute the conceptual preparation, the ideological armament and the intellectual mobilization which make the ‘outbreak’ of war, of sexual violence, of racist attacks, of murder and destruction possible at all. Continues ‘We are the war’ – and we also ‘are’ the sexual violence, the racist violence, the exploitation and the will to violence in all its manifestations in a society in so-called ‘peacetime’, for we make them possible and we permit them to happen.
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Second, the affirmative’s depictions of violence are not simply inadequate; they are in and of themselves violent. By overshadowing individual responsibility for violence, the affirmative enacts a form of ideological violence that weaves violence into the very fabric of our society and consciousness.
Susanne Kappeler, Associate Prof @ Al-Akhawayn University, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior, 1995, pg. 6-7
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Violence can never constitute an effective act of resistance to violence. Rather, acts of violence, however well-meaning, reaffirm the principle of violence and make us directly complicit with the violence we seek to prevent.
Susanne Kappeler, Associate Prof @ Al-Akhawayn University, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior, 1995, pg. 258
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We have an alternative. The text to it is that we should begin our interrogations of violence with a local refusal to endorse the violence of the affirmative. We should become peace by refusing the affirmative.
Our alternative of local analysis is the only way to understand our own complicity in the production of violent world orders. It politicizes the way we think, and hence opens a space for understanding the will to violence that traditional analyses of what we ought to do cannot.
Susanne Kappeler, Associate Prof @ Al-Akhawayn University, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior, 1995, pg. 258
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Additionally, our criticism is a prerequisite to the types of interrogations initiate by the affirmative. Seeking out the ways that we are connected to violence must precede discussions of global transformation.
Jayan Nayar, Law Student at the University of Warwick, Re-Framing International Law for the 21st Century: Orders of Inhumanity, 9 Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 599, Fall 1999, ln
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The constant search to propose good ideas, to act in the world, and to do something is exactly how we prevent ourselves from accepting our responsibility for the world. Refusal of the affirmative is the first step towards articulating a new emancipatory imagination, actually capable of dealing with their case harms.
Jayan Nayar, Law Student at the University of Warwick, Re-Framing International Law for the 21st Century: Orders of Inhumanity, 9 Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems 599, Fall 1999, ln
CASE - POVERTY
Focus on poverty dis-empowers people to overcome their condition.
Sheldon and Kasser 08 Professor of Psychology University of Missouri and Professor of Psychology Knox College Kennon M. and Tim, “Psychological threat and extrinsic goal striving” Motivation and Emotion 32 March 4, 2008 http://www.springerlink.com/content/t120x5549jrp76um/fulltext.pdf
The constant conversation about poverty cause people to ignore their ability to seek positive outcomes in society
Heylighen and Bernheim 2000 HEYLIGHEN and BERNHEIM, 00, PhD. @ University of Brussels’ Department of Philosophy and Professor of Medicine @ University of Brussels, Human Ecology Department
FRANCIS HEYLIGHEN and JAN BERNHEIM, “GLOBAL PROGRESS II: EVOLUTIONARY MECHANISMS AND THEIR SIDE-EFFECTS” in the Journal of Happiness Studies (2000), pgs. 361-363
Most of the poor are relatively well off
Rector 08 Senior Research Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation (Robert, CQ Congressional Testimony, “REDUCING THE NUMBER OF FAMILIES LIVING IN POVERTY” 9/25, lexis