Tournament: Sequoyah | Round: 1 | Opponent: Johns Creek | Judge:
Contention 1: Economic Terrorism
The embargo is a relic of Cold War policy that serves to oppress citizens and uses the Cuban people as a means to an end.
Lesser, Financial Director at the George Washington Pre-Law Student Association, 10(Max, November 9th 2010, Penn Political Review, “The End of the Embargo Era,” http://pennpoliticalreview.org/2010/11/the-end-of-the-embargo-era/, accessed 7/12/13, AS)
It has now been five long decades since the American embargo on Cuba was first implemented
AND
Clearly, the for-mula must be recalculated
Specifically, sanctions and dual-use restrictions prevent importation of critical medical supplies.
Bolender, Council on Hemispheric Affairs 13
Keith, 4-22-13, , “The Terrorist List, and Terrorism as Practiced Against Cuba,” http://www.coha.org/22355/, accessed 6-25-13, YGS
Of all the components to the United States hostile strategy against Cuba
AND
For Cuba, these restrictions are additionally damaging as the island continues to suffer from the comprehensive embargo the United States has imposed since the early 1960s.
This direct violence against the Cuban people is a form of economic terrorism, but is concealed by an ethically bankrupt form of consequentialism that excuses this violence in the name of national security.
Kauzlarich, professor of sociology @ Southern Illinois, et al, 01
David, Rick A. Matthews, Ohio University, William J. Miller, professor @ Carthage College, 2001, Critical Criminology, “Toward A Victimology of State Crime”, http://jthomasniu.org/class/781/Assigs/kauzvictimology.pdf, accessed 7-1-13, GSK
Propositions about the victimology of state crime can be developed from this review to help shed light on the larger phenomenon of state crime victimization,
AND
The state, therefore, may be instrumental in creating and sustaining the conditions that account for the persistence of institutional harms caused by its agencies.
Sanctions take entire civilian populations hostage--The sacrifice of whole people for strategic interests is ethically indefensible and instrumentalizes security
Kochler, Professor of Philosophy, 94Dr. Hans, International Press Organization, “Ethical Aspects of Sanctions in International Law The Practice of the Sanctions Policy and Human Rights”, http://i-p-o.org/sanctp.htm#I, accessed 7/8/13, VJ *Paraphrased for Ableist language within brackets
Comprehensive economic sanctions, then – continuing with the comparison above – have the ethical quality of terror bombings
AND
28 Measures such as those which explicitly intend to harm the population are to be judged as amoral,29 for "one cannot intentionally weaken cripple an economy without intentionally affecting the people whose working and consuming lives are partially constitutive of that economy."30
This is a form of genocide on Cuban citizens
Simons, chief editor at the National Computing Centre, 1999Geoff, “Imposing Economic Sanctions”, Pluto Press, 12-13, chip
The years-long US attempt to deny Cuba access to food, medicine and drinkable water represents a clear case of genocide
AND
Such an embargo appears to violate the most basic international charters and conventions governing human rights, including the United Nations charter, the charter of the Organization of American States, and the Articles of the Geneva Convention governing the treatment of civilians in wartime.
Thus the plan: The United States federal government should remove food, potable water, and dual-use medical sanctions against Cuba
Contention Two is Framing
Our internal links control scale of violence – structural violence is necessary to psychologically prime people for macro-level conflict
Scheper-Hughes, Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely, and Bourgois Professors of Anthropology @ UPenn, ‘4(Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22)
This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis.
AND
the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization).
You should never commit a sure evil to avoid a possible one—consequentialist logic can be manipulated, and other actions can be taken to mitigate or avoid their disads.
Gewirth 84 Alan, Absolutism and its Consequentialist Critics, ed. Haber, p. 138-139)
There is, however, another side to this story. What of the thousands of innocent persons in the distant city whose lives are
AND
Thus the absolutist can accommodate at least part of the consequentialist's substantive concerns within the limits of his own principle.
Sole focus on survival destroys value to life and is always used to justify the worst atrocities.
Callahan, Fellow at the Institute of Society and Ethics, 1973(Daniel, The Tyranny of Survival, Pages 91-93)
The value of survival could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power.
AND
if the price of survival is human degradation, then there is no moral reason why an effort should be make to ensure that survival. It would be the Pyrrhic victory to end all Pyrrhic victories.
Purely conjoining together link and internal link claims only makes predictions less likely and misdirects resources---policy analysis suffers from conjunctive fallacy that relies on a flawed methodology
Berube, 2k. (David M Berube, PhD, and Associate Professor of Speech Communication and Director of Debate at the Univ of South Carolina. “Debunking Mini-Max Reasoning: The Limits of Extended Causal Chains in Contest Debating” Contemporary Argumentation and Debate. 21(2000). Online PDF.)
What was a knotty piece of evidence in the 1980s kick-started a practice in contest debating which currently is evident in the ubiquitous political capital disadvantage code-named "Clinton."
AND
The stringing together of out-of-context statements from multiple sources, each unaware of the new context into which their statements have been positioned, literally begs the question of equivocation.
Scenario planning fails---it ties us to an ideology that believes that we can map out and completely explain the world
Tetlock and Gardner 11 Philip Tetlock is a professor of organizational behavior at the Haas Business School at the University of California-Berkeley, AND Dan Gardner is a columnist and senior writer for the Ottawa Citizen and the author of The Science of Fear, received numerous awards for his writing, including the Michener Award, M.A. History from York, "OVERCOMING OUR AVERSION TO ACKNOWLEDGING OUR IGNORANCE" July 11 www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/11/dan-gardner-and-philip-tetlock/overcoming-our-aversion-to-acknowledging-our-ignorance/
Each December, The Economist forecasts the coming year in a special issue called The World in Whatever-The-Next-Year-Is. It’s avidly read around the world
AND
And the average expert performed slightly worse than a still more mindless competition: simple extrapolation algorithms that automatically predicted more of the same.
And---existential risk methodology makes any calculations impossible
Kessler, 2k8. (Oliver Kessler, Prof Sociology @ Univ of Bielefield. “From Insecurity to Uncertainty: Risk and the Paradox of Security Politics” Alternatives. 33(2008).)
The problem of the second method is that it is very difficult to "calculate" politically unacceptable losses.
AND
." This sentence indicates that under the condition of genuine uncertainty, different evidence criteria prevail than in situations where security problems can be assessed with relative certainty.
Subsequently, low probability should be no probability – try or die logic promotes serial policy failure
Sunstein 2 (Cass, Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, Law School and Department of Political Science, Probability Neglect: Emotions, Worst Cases, and Law, http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/112-1/SunsteinFINAL.pdf)
If someone is predisposed to be worried, degrees of unlikeliness
AND
Simply because the small difference would not matter when each risk is taken in isolation.
Reform only masks civilian suffering—sanctions are inherently unethical
Gordon, professor at Fairfield University, 99Joy, March, Ethics and International Affairs, Volume 13, Issue 1, “A Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The Ethics of Economic Sanctions”, page 141-142, Wiley Library, accessed 7/7/13, VJ
Many of those who defend sanctions do not argue that damage to innocents is morally acceptable,
AND
It is disingenuous to be surprised or apologetic when sanctions turn out to do no harm to a ruling elite, to achieve none of the ostensible goals of the sanctions regarding “unacceptable behavior” or “punishment of international outlaws, ” and to be generally ineffectual for much of anything besides rhetorical posturing and the psychological gratification of having done something.