Derrida Terror Case Neg

Strat Sheet T – Domestic Surveillance

Aff is pretty untopical if you define US persons and Foreign persons

Terror DA

ThE TeRrOrIsTs aRe CoMiNg!!!!! We MuSt DeFenD!!!

Politics DA

MoRe TeRrOrIsM!!!!

Case stuff

Lots of offense loaded into the 1NC, plus the double bind explained earlier. Probably want to do the explanation here. Lots of typical Security/Psychoanalysis answers apply to this aff.

1NC Shell

T – domestic Def of foreign person

A. Interpretation – Domestic surveillance is info gathering on US persons

IT Law Wiki 15 IT Law Wiki 2015 http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Domestic_surveillanceDefinition EditDomestic surveillance is the acquisition of nonpublic information concerning United States persons.

B. Violation – SURVEILLANCE OF FOREIGN AGENTS IS NOT DOMESTIC SURVEILLANCE, EVEN IF IN THE US

McCarthy 6 Andrew C. McCarthy former assistant U.S. attorney, now contributing editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. May 15, 2006 National Review It’s Not “Domestic Spying”; It’s Foreign Intelligence Collection http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/122556/its-not-domestic-spying-its-foreign-intelligence-collection-andrew-c-mccarthy

Eggen also continues the mainstream media’s propagandistic use of the term “domestic surveillance [or 'spying'] program.” In actuality, the electronic surveillance that the NSA is doing — i.e., eavesdropping on content of conversations — is not “domestic.” A call is not considered “domestic” just because one party to it happens to be inside the U.S., just as an investigation is not “domestic” just because some of the subjects of interest happen to reside inside our country. Mohammed Atta was an agent of a foreign power, al Qaeda. Surveilling him — had we done it — would not have been “domestic spying.” The calls NSA eavesdrops on are “international ,” not “domestic.” If that were not plain enough on its face, the Supreme Court made it explicit in the Keith case (1972). There, even though it held that judicial warrants were required for wiretapping purely domestic terror organizations, the Court excluded investigations of threats posed by foreign organizations and their agents operating both within and without the U.S. That is, the Court understood what most Americans understand but what the media, civil libertarians and many members of Congress refuse to acknowledge: if we are investigating the activities of agents of foreign powers inside the United States, that is not DOMESTIC surveillance. It is FOREIGN counter-intelligence. That, in part, is why the statute regulating wiretaps on foreign powers operating within the U.S. — the one the media has suddenly decided it loves after bad-mouthing it for years as a rubber-stamp — is called the FOREIGN Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The United States has never needed court permission to conduct wiretapping outside U.S. territory; the wiretapping it does inside U.S. territory for national security purposes is FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION, not “domestic surveillance.”

C. Standards

1. Limits – justifies the inclusion of the people of more than 200 other countries—explodes the topic and destroys research and predictability

2. Ground – there is a huge difference in the literature between US persons and non-US persons—robs all predictable ground

3. Extra Topicality – it’s not okay for the Aff to curtail surveillance of both domestic and international persons. If we win that they are distinct then it’s not within the scope of Aff topical fiat

D. Reasonability is arbitrary, prefer competing interps. Depth over breadth, that’s key to detailed debates and sufficient neg ground.

T is a voter for Fairness and Education

2nc

2NC O/V

Our interpretation is that the Domestic Surveillance Only includes info gathering on US persons - that’s our 1NC IT Law evidence

Surveillance of foreign agents – even within the US– is foreign surveillance – That’s our 1NC McCarthy evidence

- The Affirmative is restricting surveillance of non – us agents - Their Haddad 04 card references how most suspected terrorist – what their plan texts mandates stopping - are from “other parts of the world”

Focusing debates on the US citizens is key to topic education – necessitates that we learn about the multitude of domestic surveillance agencies

This allows core Affs including passing section 702, repealing the mann aff, stopping debt surveillance, curtailing domestic mosque surveillance, and restricting prison surveillance.

2NC Extra T Extension

Obviously the Affirmative would involve some domestic surveillance, our argument is that this is the only thing that the plan can include. Their Affirmative goes beyond the scope of the resolution to mandate curtailing surveillance of Non-US citizens – which makes the aff extra topical.

Extra topicality is a reason to vote Negative – allowing the Aff to include portions that aren’t based in the resolution prevents reciprocal access to a shared starting point because debates become centered on issues that we never had the ability to prepare for in the first place.

Not only do they ruin any hope of a shared starting point, but extra topicality makes it so that there is no starting point at all, because there is a limitless number of things the Aff could couple with topical action.

Their Aff is telling in this regard – their advantages make clear that the entire basis and intent of the Affirmative is the curtailment of international surveillance, not domestic.

2NC Limits Extension

The phrase “curtailment” allows the Aff to do potentially anything in the world. The only chance of limiting the topic relies on at least making sure that object of the Aff’s curtailment is domestic surveillance.

Underlimiting is especially dangerous on this topic – allowing them to curtail international surveillance in addition to domestic surveillance explodes the number of Affs to a point where it becomes unmanageable.

Crafting a limited interpretation of “domestic” is necessary to stabilize our resolutional focus and to foster in-depth research on the plan’s mechanism. Only our interpretation facilitates case specific debates which are critical to accurately test the Affirmative’s desirability, whereas shallow and generic debates don’t focus our learning in the same way.

Without the ability to focus our preparation, the Affirmative would never have to defend their arguments against a well-equipped opponent, which prevents us from learning how to effectively advocate for our positions.

2NC Topic Education Extension

We would learn a great deal more about the domestic surveillance if the Affirmative was limited to the domestic sphere itself rather than if they were allowed to shift the focus of debates to international entities.

The central issues regarding the future of surveillance hinges on changes in US domestic policy. Their interpretation changes our focus in the context of the oceans by artificially elevating the importance of international surveillance. This deprives us of the ability to have deep and focused debates about domestic surveillance itself.

AT: C/I General

Their interpretation power-bombs the topic – it literally places no constraints on where the Aff’s curtailment could take place. Because curtailment could mean anything, restricting the Aff to the domestic sphere is the only possible way to limit the resolution.

The Aff could do an infinite range of things with an infinite number of locations – curtailing surveillance of different foreign leaders, Curtailing international drone use, curtailing the surveillance of Swiss banks, or curtailing the surveillance of submarines outside of US waters.

Prefer our interpretation.

a. Qualifications – McCarthy 6 cites the ruling of the Supreme Court in the Keith case which explicitly ruled surveillance of Non- US agents w/in the US international surveillance – it’s most predictable for policy discussion because it’s based on US law

b. Intent to define – our evidence has it, theirs doesn’t. Contextual evidence to the contrary doesn’t change the fact that domestic and international are distinct. The lack of a clear delineation for what is and is not domestic undermines effective clash.

c. Intent to exclude – their evidence includes EVERY single portion of surveillance– even the littoral zone. Prefer exclusive interpretations – creates a manageable and predictable limit on the topic.

Spirit of Terrorism K The affirmative’s reconciliation terrorism is a move to incorporate it into the

growing orgy of Otherness. This suspends the defining characteristic of the Other—terror. It reduces the Other to a knowable entity and strips terrorism of its symbolic power.

Baudrillard 06 (Jean, 2006, “The Melodrama of Difference (Or, The Revenge of the Colonized),” translated by James Benedict, rmf) *edited for gendered language

We are engaged in an orgy of discovery , exploration and “invention” of the Other. An orgy of differences. We are procurers of encounter, pimps of interfacing and interactivity. Once we get beyond the mirror of alienation (beyond the mirror stage that was the joy of our childhood), structural differences multiply ad infinitum – in fashion, in mores, in culture. Crude otherness, hard otherness – the otherness of race, of madness, of poverty – are done with. Otherness, like everything else, has fallen under the law of the market, the law of supply and demand. It has become a rare item – hence its immensely high value on the psychological stock exchange, on the structural stock exchange. Hence too the intensity of the ubiquitous simulation of the Other. This is particularly striking in science fiction, where the chief question is always “What is the Other? Where is the Other?” Of course science fiction is merely a reflection of our everyday universe, which is in thrall to a wild speculation on – almost a black market in – otherness and difference. A veritable obsession with ecology extends from Indian reservations to household pets (otherness degree zero!) – not to mention the other of “the other scene”, or the other of the unconscious (our last symbolic capital, and one we had better look after, because reserves are not limitless). Our sources of otherness are indeed running out; we have exhausted the Other as raw material. (According to Claude Gilbert, we are so desperate that we go digging through the rubble of earthquakes and catastrophes.) Consequently the other is all of a sudden no longer there to be extermi nated, hated, rejected or seduced, but instead to be understood, liberated, coddled, recognized. In addition to the Rights of [Hum]an, we now also need the Rights of the Other. In a way we already have these, in the shape of a universal Right to be Different. For the orgy is also an orgy of political and psychological comprehension of the other – even to the point of resurrecting the other in places where the other is no longer to be found. Where the Other was, there has the Same come to be. And where there is no longer anything, there the Other must come to be. We are no longer living the drama of otherness. We are living the psychodrama of otherness, just as we are living the psychodrama of “sociality”, the psychodrama of sexuality, the psychodrama of the body – and the melodrama of all the above, courtesy of analytic metadiscourses. Otherness has become socio-dramatic, semio-dramatic, melodramatic. All we do in psychodrama – the psychodrama of contacts, of psychological tests, of interfacing – is acrobatically simulate and dramatize the absence of the other . Not only is otherness absent everywhere in this artificial drama turgy , but the subject has also quietly become indifferent to his [or her] own subjecti vity, to his [or her] own alienation , just as the modern political animal has become indifferent to his [or her] own political opinions. This subject becomes transparent, spectral (to borrow Marc Guillaume's word) – and hence interactive. For in interactivity the subject is the other to no one. Inasmuch as he is indifferent to himself, it is as though he had been reified alive – but without his double, without his shadow, without his other. Having paid this price, the

subject becomes a candidate for all possible combinations, all possible connections. The interactive being is therefore born not through a new form of exchange but through the disappearance of the social, the disappearance of otherness. This being is the other after the death of the Other – not the same other at all: the other that results from the denial of the Other. The only interaction involved , in reality, belongs to the medium alone: to the machine become invisible. Mechanical automata still played on the difference between [hu]man and machine, and on the charm of this difference – something with which today's interactive and simulating automata are no longer concerned. [Hum]an and machine have become isomorphic and indifferent to each other: neither is other to the other. The computer has no other. That is why the computer is not intelligent. Intelligence comes to us from the other – always. That is why computers perform so well. Champions of mental arithmetic and idiots savants are autistic – minds for which the other does not exist and which, for that very reason, are endowed with strange powers. This is the strength, too, of the integrated circuit (the power of thought-transference might also be considered in this connection). Such is the power of abstraction. Machines work more quickly because they are unlinked to any otherness. Networks connect them up to one another like an immense umbilical cord joining one intelligence and its twin. Homeostasis between one and the same: all otherness has been confiscated by the machine.

Attempts to reconcile difference is what leads to the destruction of otherness and creates the condition for oppression in the first place

Baudrillard, 93 (Jean, Transparency of Evil, 1993)

These days everything is described in terms of difference , but otherness is not the same thing as difference. One might even say that difference is what destroys otherness. When language is broken down into a set of differences, when meaning is reduced to nothing more than differentiation, the radical otherness of language is abolished. The duel that lies at the heart of language the duel between language and meaning, between language and the person who speaks it - is halted. And everything in language that is irreducible to mediation, articulation or meaning is eliminated - everything, that is, which causes language at its most radical level to be other than the subject (and also Other to the subject?). The existence of this level accounts for the play in language, for its

appeal in its materiality, for its susceptibility to chance; and it is what makes language not just a set of trivial differences,

as it is in the eyes of structural analysis, but, symbolically speaking, truly a matter of life and death. What, then, does it mean to say that women are the other for men, that the mad are the other for the sane, or that primitive people are the other for civilized people? One might as well go on forever wondering who is the other for whom. Is the Master the slave's other? Yes, certainly - in terms of class

and power relations. But this account is reductionistic. In reality, things are just not so simple. The way in which beings and things relate to each other is not a matter of structural difference . The symbolic order implies dual and complex forms that are

not dependent on the distinction between ego and other. The Pariah is not the other to the Brahmin: rather, their destinies are different. The two are not differentiated along a single scale of values : rather, they are mutually reinforcing aspects of an immutable order , parts of a reversible cycle like the cycle of day and night . Do we say that the night is the other to the day? No. So why should we say that the masculine is the other to the feminine? For the two are undoubtedly merely reversible moments, like night and day, following upon one other and changing places with one another in an endless process of seduction. One sex is thus never the other for the other sex, except

within the context of a differentialistic theory of sexuality - which is basically nothing but a utopia. For difference is itself a utopia:

the idea that such pairs of terms can be split up is a dream - and the idea of subsequently reuniting them is another. (This also goes for the distinction between Good and Evil : the notion that they might be separated out from one another is pure fantasy, and it is even more utopian to think in terms of reconciling them.) Only in the distinction-based perspective of our culture is it possible to speak of the Other in connection with sex.

Genuine sexuality, for its part, is ' exotic' (in Segalen' s meaning of the term) : it resides in the radical incomparability of the sexes - otherwise seduction would never be possible, and there would be nothing but alienation of one sex by the other. Differences mean regulated exchange. But what is it that introduces disorder into exchange? What is it that cannot be negotiated over? What is it that has no place in the contract, or in the structural interaction of differences? What is founded on the impossibility of exchange?

Wherever exchange is impossible, what we encounter is terror. Any radical otherness at all is thus the epicentre of a terror: the terror that such otherness holds, by virtue of its very existence, for the normal world. And the terror that this world exercises upon that otherness in order to annihilate it . Over recent centuries all forms of violent otherness have been incorporat ed, willingly or under threat of force, into a discourse of difference which simultaneously implies inclusion and exclusion , recognition and discrimination . Childhood, lunacy, death, primitive societies - all have been categorized, integrated and absorbed as parts of a universal harmony. Madness, once its exclusionary status had been revoked, was caught up in the far

subtler toils of psychology. The dead, as soon as they were recognized in their identity as such, were banished to outlying cemeteries - kept at such a distance that the face of death itself was lost. As for Indians, their right to exist was no sooner accorded them than they were confined to reservations . These are the vicissitudes of a logic of difference.

We control the direction of case solvency. The fundamental tenets of universality have been overtaken and undone by globalization. The violence of the global persists in its place, reduces the role of the intellectual to nothing, and promotes exclusion. It has emptied rights, democracy, and freedom of meaning. This will continue absent the singularity of resistance that is terrorism.

Baudrillard 03 (Jean, 5/20/03, “The Violence of the Global,” translated by François Debrix, rmf)

Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization. To identify its main features, it is necessary to perform a brief genealogy of globalization, particularly of its relationship to the singular and the universal. The analogy between the terms "global" [2] and "universal" is misleading. Universalization has to do with human rights, liberty, culture, and democracy. By contrast, globalization is about technology, the market, tourism, and information. Globalization appears to be irreversible whereas universalization is likely to be on its way out. At least, it appears to be retreating as a value system which developed in the context of Western modernity and was unmatched by any other culture. Any culture that becomes universal loses its singularity and dies. That's what happened to all those cultures we destroyed by forcefully assimilating them. But it is also true of our own culture, despite its claim of being universally valid. The only difference is that other cultures died because of their singularity, which is a beautiful death. We are dying because we are losing our own singularity and exterminating all our values. And this is a much more ugly death. We believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become universal. But we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a quest presents. Far from being an uplifting move, it is instead a downward trend toward a zero degree in all values. In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the most minimally common value.

This is precisely the fate of human rights, democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest expression. Universalization is vanishing because of globalization . The globalization of exchanges puts an end to the universalization of values. This marks the triumph of a uniform thought [3] over a universal one. What is globalized is first and foremost the market, the profusion of exchanges and of all sorts of products, the perpetual flow of money. Culturally, globalization gives way to a promiscuity of signs and values, to a form of pornography in fact . Indeed, the global spread of everything and nothing through networks is pornographic. No need for sexual obscenity anymore. All you have is a global interactive copulation. And, as a result of all this, there is no longer any difference between the global and the universal. The universal has become globalized, and human rights circulate exactly like any other global product (oil or capital for example). The passage from the universal to the global has given rise to a constant homogenization, but also to an endless fragmentation. Dislocation, not localization, has replaced centralization. Excentricism, not decentralization, has taken over where concentration once stood. Similarly, discrimination and exclusion are not just accidental consequences of globalization, but rather globalization's own logical outcome s. In fact, the presence of globalization makes us wonder whether universalization has not already been destroyed by its own critical mass. It also makes us wonder whether universality and modernity ever existed outside of some official discourses or some popular moral sentiments. For us today, the mirror of our modern universalization has been broken. But this may actually be an opportunity. In the fragments of this broken mirror, all sorts of singularities reappear. Those singularities we thought were endangered are surviving, and those we thought were lost are revived. As universal values lose their authority and legitimacy, things become more radical. When universal beliefs were introduced as the only possible culturally mediating values, it was fairly easy for such beliefs to incorporate singularities as modes of differentiation in a universal culture that claimed to champion difference. But they cannot do it anymore because the triumphant spread of globalization has eradicated all forms of differentiation and all the universal values that used to advocate difference. In so doing, globalization has given rise to a perfectly indifferent culture. From the moment when the universal disappeared, an omnipotent global techno-structure has been left alone to dominate. But this techno-structure now has to confront new singularities that, without the presence of universalization to cradle them, are able to freely and savagely expand. History gave universalization its chance. Today though, faced with a global order without any alternative on the one hand and with drifting insurrectionary singularities on the other, the concepts of liberty, democracy, and human rights look awful . They remain as the ghosts of universalization past. Universalization used to promote a culture characterized by the concepts of transcendence, subjectivity, conceptualization, reality, and representation. By contrast, today's virtual global culture has replaced universal concepts with screens, networks, immanence, numbers, and a space-time continuum without any depth. [4] In the universal, there was still room for a natural reference to the world, the body, or the past. There was a sort of dialectical tension or critical movement that found its materiality in historical and revolutionary violence. But the expulsion of this critical negativity opened the door to another form of violence, the violence of the global. This new violence is characterized by the supremacy of technical efficiency and positivity, total organization, integral circulation, and the equivalence of all exchanges. Additionally, the violence of the global puts an end to the social role of the intellectual (an idea tied to the Enlightenment and universalization), but also to the role of the activist whose fate used to be tied to the ideas of critical opposition and historical violence.

The affirmative’s attempt to “embrace terrorism” reinscribes the epistemic logic that the terrorist can be domesticated which nullifies the radical alterity of the terrorist and upholds the same logic of domination they criticize. Vote negative to affirm the spirit of terrorism.

Baudrillard 1

/Jean, “The Spirit of Terrorism,” http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/the-spirit-of-terrorism/

No need for a death wish or desire for self-destruction , not even for perverse effects . It is very logically, and

inexorably, that the (literally: "rise to power of power") exacerbates a will to destroy it. And power is complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, one could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes by their own suicide. It has been said: "God cannot declare war on Itself". Well, It can. The West, in its God-like position (of divine power, and absolute moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and declares war on itself.

Numerous disaster movies are witness to this phantasm, which they obviously exorcise through images and submerge under special effects. But the universal attraction these movies exert, as pornography does, shows how (this phantasm's) realization is always close at hand -- the impulse to deny any system being all the stronger if such system is close to perfection or absolute supremacy.

It is even probable that the terrorists (like the experts!) did not anticipate the collapse of the Twin Towers, which was, far more than (the attack of) the Pentagon, the deepest symbolic shock. The symbolic collapse of a whole system is due to an unforeseen complicity, as if, by collapsing (themselves), by suiciding, the towers had entered the game to complete the event.

In a way, it is the entire system that, by its internal fragility, helps the initial action. The more the system is globally concentrated to constitute ultimately only one network, the more it becomes vulnerable at a single point (already one little Filipino hacker has succeeded, with his laptop, to launch the I love you virus that wrecked entire networks). Here, eighteen (dix-huit in the text) kamikazes, through the absolute arm that is death multiplied by technological efficiency, start a global catastrophic process.

When the situation is thus monopolized by global power, when one deals with this formidable condensation of all functions through technocratic machinery and absolute ideological hegemony (pensee unique), what other way is there, than a terrorist reversal of the situation (literally 'transfer of situation': am I too influenced by early translation as 'reversal'?)? It is the system itself that has created the objective conditions for this brutal distortion.

By taking all the cards to itself, it forces the Other to change the rules of the game . And the new rules are

ferocious, because the stakes are ferocious. To a system whose excess of power creates an unsolvable challenge, terrorists respond by a definitive act that is also unanswerable (in the text: which cannot be part of the exchange

circuit). Terrorism is an act that reintroduces an irreducible singularity in a generalized exchange system.

Any singularity (whether species, individual or culture), which has paid with its death for the setting up of a global circuit dominated by a single power, is avenged today by this terrorist situational transfer.

Terror against terror -- there is no more ideology behind all that. We are now far from ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause, not even an Islamic cause, can account for the energy which feeds terror. It (energy) does not aim anymore to change the world, it aims (as any heresy in its time) to radicalize it through sacrifice, while the system aims to realize (the world) through force.

Terrorism , like virus, is everywhere . Immersed globally, terrorism, like the shadow of any system of domination, is ready everywhere to emerge as a double agent. There is no boundary to define it; it is in the very core of this culture that fights it - and the visible schism (and hatred) that opposes, on a global level, the exploited and

the underdeveloped against the Western world, is secretly linked to the internal fracture of the dominant system. The latter can face any visible antagonism. But with terrorism -- and its viral structure --, as if every domination

apparatus were creating its own antibody , the chemistry of its own disappearance; against this almost automatic reversal of its own puissance, the system is powerless . And terrorism is the shockwave of this silent reversal.

Thus, it is no shock of civilizations, of religions, and it goes much beyond Islam and America, on which one attempts to focus the conflict to give

the illusion of a visible conflict and of an attainable solution (through force). It certainly is a fundamental antagonism, but one which shows, through the spectrum of America (which maybe by itself the epicentre but not the embodiment of

globalization) and through the spectrum of Islam (which is conversely not the embodiment of terrorism), triumphant globalization fighting with itself. In this way it is indeed a World War, not the third one, but the fourth and only truly World War, as it has as stakes globalization itself. The first two World Wars were classic wars. The first ended European supremacy and the colonial era. The second ended Nazism. The third, which did happen, as a dissuasive Cold War, ended communism. From one war to the other, one went further each time toward a unique world order. Today the latter, virtually accomplished, is confronted by antagonistic forces, diffused in the very heart of the global, in all its actual convulsions. Fractal war in which all cells, all singularities revolt as antibodies do. It is a conflict so unfathomable that, from time to time, one must preserve the idea of war through spectacular productions such as the Gulf (production) and today

Afghanistan's. But the fourth World War is elsewhere. It is that which haunts every global order, every hegemonic domination; -if Islam dominated the world, terrorism would fight against it. For it is the world itself which resists domination.

Terrorism is immoral. The event of the World Trade Center, this symbolic challenge is immoral, and it answers a globalization that is immoral.

Then let us be immoral ourselves and, if we want to understand something, let us go somewhat beyond Good and Evil . As we have, for once, an event that challenges not only morals, but every interpretation, let us try to have the intelligence of Evil. The crucial point is precisely there: in this total counter-meaning to Good and Evil in Western philosophy, the philosophy of Enlightenment. We naively believe that the progress of the Good, its rise in all domains (sciences, techniques, democracy, human rights) correspond to a defeat of Evil. Nobody seems to understand that Good and Evil rise simultaneously, and in the same movement. The triumph of the One does not produce the erasure of the Other. Metaphysically, one considers Evil as an accident, but this axiom, embedded in all manichean fights of Good against Evil, is illusory. Good does not reduce Evil, nor vice-versa: there are both irreducible, and inextricable from

each other. In fact, Good could defeat Evil only by renouncing itself, as by appropriating a global power monopoly, it creates a response of proportional violence.

In the traditional universe, there was still a balance of Good and Evil, according to a dialectical relation that more or less insured tension and equilibrium in the moral universe; - a little as in the Cold War, the face-to-face of the two powers insured an equilibrium of terror. Thus, there was no supremacy of one on the other. This symmetry is broken as soon as there is a total extrapolation of the Good (an hegemony of the positive over any form of negativity, an exclusion of death, of any potential adversarial force: the absolute triumph of the Good). From there, the equilibrium is broken, and it is as if Evil regained an invisible autonomy, developing then in exponential fashion.

Keeping everything in proportion, it is more or less what happened in the political order with the erasure of communism and the global triumph of liberal power: a fantastical enemy appeared, diffused over the whole planet, infiltrating everywhere as a virus, surging from every interstice of power. Islam.

But Islam is only the moving front of the crystallization of this antagonism. This antagonism is everywhere and it is in each of us. Thus, terror against terror... But asymmetrical terror... And this asymmetry leaves the global superpower totally disarmed. Fighting itself, it can only founder in its own logic of power relations, without being able to play in the field of symbolic challenge and death , as it has eliminated the latter from its own culture .

Until now this integrating power had mostly succeeded to absorb every crisis, every negativity, creating therefore a deeply hopeless situation (not only for the damned of the earth, but for the rich and the privileged too, in their radical comfort). The fundamental event is that terrorists have finished with empty suicides; they now organize their own death in offensive and efficient ways, according to a strategic intuition, that is

the intuition of the immense fragility of their adversary, this system reaching its quasi perfection and thus vulnerable to the least spark. They succeeded in making their own death the absolute arm against a system that feeds off the exclusion of death, whose ideal is that of zero death. Any system of zero death is a zero sum system . And all the means of dissuasion and destruction are powerless against an enemy who has already made his death

a counter-offensive . "What of American bombings! Our men want to die as much as Americans want to live!" This explains the asymmetry of 7, 000 deaths in one blow against a system of zero death.

Therefore, here, death is the key (to the game) not only the brutal irruption of death in direct, in real time, but also the irruption of a more-than-real death: symbolic and sacrificial death - the absolute, no appeal event.

This is the spirit of terrorism.

Never is it to attack the system through power relations. This belongs to the revolutionary imaginary imposed by the system itself, which survives by ceaselessly bringing those who oppose it to fight in the domain of the real, which is

always its own. But (it) moves the fight into the symbolic domain, where the rule is the rule of challenge, of reversal , of escalation. Thus, death can be answered only though an equal or superior death. (Terrorism) challenges the system by a gift that the latter can reciprocate only through its own death and its own collapse.

The terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself suicides in response to the multiple challenges of death and suicide. Neither the system, nor power, themselves escape symbolic obligation -and in this trap resides the only chance of their demise (catastrophe). In this vertiginous cycle of the impossible exchange of death, the terrorist death is an infinitesimal point that provokes a gigantic aspiration, void and convection. Around this minute point, the whole system of the real and power gains in density, freezes, compresses, and sinks in its own super-efficacy. The tactics of terrorism are to provoke an excess of reality and to make the system collapse under the weight of this excess. The very derision of the situation, as well

as all the piled up violence of power, flips against it, for terrorist actions are both the magnifying mirror of the system's violence, and the model of a symbolic violence that it cannot access, the only violence it cannot exert: that of its own death.

This is why all this visible power cannot react against the minute, but symbolic death of a few individuals.

2NC Spirit Of Terrorism O/V The Affirmative is predicated on the psychodrama of otherness. Otherness has become a hot commodity in a market that has come increasingly scarce. This has led to the artificial construction of the other, making it as an exhaustible object. Forcing the subject to reveal itself in the realm of artificial dramaturgy in order to claim ethical responsibility forces the subject to become interactive and the Other to die.

Turns case - The Affirmatives attempt to reconcile with the other is a process in which all difference is eliminated and the endless process of seduction is violently halted. But it is the radical incompatibility of the other that we find a means of regulated exchange. Whenever this exchange becomes impossible, we experience an intense terror caused by lack of difference in which we attempt to annihilate the other. All forms of otherness become incorporated into the discourse of difference in which creates a dualism that has been the basis for oppression. This turns case.

AT PermYou’re in an impact turn debate. You don’t get a permutation…

Severance – they sever out of their orientation towards their impacts, and towards nature. This is a voter for education because it promotes stagnant debates and makes the neg debate against itself.

Intrinsicness – The permutation provides a new way upon which they calculate and maintain the legitimacy of their harms scenarios. Stick them to their 1AC articulation of ___________.

Their call for reconciliation is complicit with the logic of Western liberalism which attempts to reduce all forms of radical alterity into mere differences that can be exchanged through global networks. This strategy of integration, of the infinite combination of the inside and the outside according to the fluid notions of identity, destroys the radical singularity of thought.

Baudrillard ’96 (Jean, “The Perfect Crime: Radical Thought”, Verso 2008, translated by Chris Turner, pp. 97-99)

All this defines the irresolvable relationship between thought and reality. A certain form of thought is bound to the real. It starts out from the hypothesis that ideas have referents and that there is a possible ideation of reality . A

comforting polarity, which is that of tailor-made dialectical and philosophical solutions. The other form of thought is eccentric to the real, a stranger to dialectics, a stranger even to critical thought. It is not even a disavowal of the concept of reality. It is illusion, power of illusion, or, in other words, a playing with reality, as seduction is a playing with desire, as metaphor is playing with truth. This radical thought does not stem from a philosophical doubt, a utopian

transference, or an ideal transcendence. It is the material illusion , immanent in this so-called ‘real’ world . And thus it

seems to come from elsewhere. It seems to be the extrapolation of this world into another world. At all events, there is incompatibility between thought and the real. There is no sort of necessary or natural transition from the one to the other. Neither alternation, nor alternative: only otherness and distance keep them charged up. This is what ensures the singularity of thought, the insularity by which it constitutes an event, just like the singularity of the world, the singularity by which it too constitutes an event. It has doubtless not always been so. One may dream

of a happy conjunction of idea and reality, cradled by the Enlightenment and modernity, in the heroic age of critical thought. Yet critical thought, the butt of which was a certain illusion - superstitious, religious or ideological - is in substance ended. Even if it had survived its catastrophic secularization in all the political movements of the twentieth century, this ideal and seemingly necessary relationship between the concept and reality would , at all events, be destroyed today . It has broken down under pressure from a gigantic technical and mental simulation , to be replaced by an autonomy of the virtual, henceforth liberated from the real, and a simultaneous autonomy of the real which we see functioning on its own account in a demented - that is, infinitely self-referential - perspective. Having been expelled, so to speak, from its own principle,

extraneized, the real has itself become an extreme phenomenon . In other words, one can no longer think it as real, but as exorbitated, as though seen from another world - in short, as illusion . Imagine the stupefying experience which the discovery of a real world other than our own would represent. The objectivity of our world is a discovery we made, like America - and at almost

the same time. Now what one has discovered, one can never then invent . And so we discovered reality, which

remains to be invented (or: so we invented reality, which remains to be Why might there not be as many real worlds as imaginary

ones? Why a single real world? Why such an exception? Truth to tell, the real world , among all the other possible ones, is unthinkable, except as dangerous superstition . We must break with it as critical thought once bro ke (in

the name of the real!) with religious superstition. Thinkers, one more effort ! 25 In any case, the two orders of thought are irreconcilable . They each follow their course without merging; at best they slide over each other like tectonic plates, and occasionally their collision or subduction creates fault lines into which reality rushes . Fate

is always at the intersection of these two lines of force. Similarly, radical thought is at the violent intersection of meaning and non-meaning, of truth and non-truth , of the continuity of the world and the continuity of the nothing . Unlike the discourse of the real, which gambles on the fact of there being something rather than nothing, and aspires to being founded on the guarantee of an objective and decipherable world, radical thought, for its part,

wagers on the illusion of the world. It aspires to the status of illusion, restoring the non-veracity of facts, the non- signification of the world, proposing the opposite hypothesis that there is nothing rather than something, and going in pursuit of that nothing which runs beneath the apparent continuity of meaning . The radical prediction is always the

prediction of the non-reality of facts, of the illusoriness of the state of fact. It begins only with the presentiment of that illusoriness, and is never confused with the objective state of things.

The Undercommons K The aff’s politics of inclusion gets coopted by the University

Brown 1996 [Wendy Brown, Prof. Political Science, Prof. Rhetoric, Prof. Critical Theory @ UC-Berkeley, 96, “In the ‘folds of our own discourse’: The Pleasures and Freedoms of Silence,” 3 U. Chi. L. Sch. Roundtable, 189-91]

In her lecture at the Swedish Academy on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison also displaces the conventional

antinomy between silence and language, arguing that certain kinds of language are themselves silencing, capable of violence and killing, as well as "susceptible to death, erasure." A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or

written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than to maintain the free range of its own narcotic

narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect, for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language

smitheried to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor, polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight

departed long ago. 4 While Morrison is concerned in this passage primarily with state languages, with bureaucratic and

'official' languages, any language of regulation, including those originally designed on behalf of our emancipation, has the potential to become "official" in the sense she describes. If silence can function as speech in discourse, can be a function of discourse, and can also function as a resistance to regulatory discourse, such practices of silence are hardly unfettered. The complexities of silence and speech in relation to freedom brings us to the second passage of

Foucault's that I want to consider. It is from his "Two Lectures" on power,"5 and occurs in the context of his discussion of discovering or

"disinterring" subjugated knowledges: .. . is it not perhaps the case that these fragments of genealogies are no

sooner brought to light, that the particular elements of the knowledge that one seeks to disinter are no sooner accredited and put into

circulation, than they run the risk of re-codification , recolonisation ? In fact, those unitary discourses, which first disqualified and then ignored them when they made their appearance, are, it seems, quite ready now to annex them, to take them back within the fold of their own discourse and to invest them with everything

this implies in terms of their effects of knowledge and power." Here, Foucault's concern is less with disrupting the conventional modernist equation of power with speech on one side, and oppression with silence on the

other, than with the ways in which insurrectionary discourse borne of exclusion and marginalization can be colonized by that which produced it much as counter-cultural fashion is routinely commodified by the corporate textile industry . While "disqualified" discourses are an effect of domination, they nevertheless potentially function as

oppositional when they are deployed by those who inhabit them. However, when "annexed" by those "unitary" discourses which they

ostensibly oppose, they become a particularly potent source of regulation, carrying as they do intimate and detailed knowledge of their subjects. Thus, Foucault's worry would appear to adhere not simply to the study of but to the overt

political mobilization, of oppositional discourses. Consider the way in which the discourse of multiculturalism has been annexed by mainstream institutions to generate new modalities of essentialized racial discourse ; how "pre-menstrual syndrome" has been rendered a debilitating disease in medical and legal discourses;'7 how "battered women's syndrome" has been deployed in the courtroom to defend women who strike back at their assailants by casting them as sub-rational, egoless victims of

male violence; 8 or how some women's response to some pornography was generalized by the Meese Commission on pornography as the

violence done to all women by all pornography. 9

The University creates social death for the subject represented – Turns the case

Occupied UC Berkeley 09 [“The Necrosocial: Civic Life, Social Death, and the UC. http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-necrosocial/]

In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories—our force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us. Here we are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians,

faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be. That is, we are students,

or students of color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are

custodians, or we are shift leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given meaning. We form teams , clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subcultures —and thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot. Who doesn’t participate in this graveyard? In the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of separation, which in reality translates to a value of domination . We spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves we’re brighter than everyone else. Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than everyone else. We have measured ourselves and we have measured others. It should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It should never feel terrible to diagnose people as an expert, manage them as a bureaucrat,

test them as a professor, extract value from their capital as a businessman. It should feel good, gratifying, completing. It is our private wet dream for the future; everywhere, in everyone this same dream of domination. After all, we are intelligent, studious, young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve this. We are convinced, owned, broken. We know their values better than they do: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. This triumvirate of sacred values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater—the fight between the university and its own students—we have used their words on their stages:

Save public education! When those values are violated by the very institutions which are created to protect them, the veneer

fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice , we get indignant. We demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their

values. What many have learned again and again is that these institutions don’t care for those values , not at all, not for all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own. The values create popular images and

ideals (healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, public education) while they mean in practice the selling of commodified identities, the state’s monopoly on violence , the expansion of markets and

capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class, and domination and

humiliation in general. They sell the practice through the image. We’re taught we’ll live the images once we accept the practice. In this crisis the Chancellors and Presidents, the Regents and the British Petroleums, the politicians and the managers, they all intend to be true to their values and capitalize on the university economically and socially—which is to say, nothing has changed, it is only an escalation, a

provocation. Their most recent attempt to reorganize wealth and capital is called a crisis so that we are more willing to accept their new terms as well as what was always dead in the university, to see just how dead we are willing to play, how non-existent, how compliant, how desirous.

We must not attempt to redeem this world but refuse the demand for redemption, of ourselves or this world. Instead we need to tear shit down. Do not ask what will come next. The world beyond cannot be access except through a refusal to be held hostage to this one.

Halberstam 13 [Jack Halberstam, Prof. English @ USC, 2013, “The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, p. 5-6]

It ends with love, exchange, fellowship. It ends as it begins, in motion, in between various modes of being and belonging, and on the way to new economies of giving, taking, being with and for and it ends with a ride in a Buick Skylark on the way to another place altogether. Surprising, perhaps, after we have engaged dispossession, debt, dislocation

and violence. But not surprising when you have understood that the projects of “fugitive planning and black study” are

mostly about reaching out to find connection; they are about making common cause with the brokenness of being, a brokenness, I would venture to say, that is also blackness, that remains blackness, and will , despite all, remain broken because this book is not a prescription for repair. If we do not seek to fix what has been broken, then

what? How do we resolve to live with brokenness , with being broke, which is also what Moten and Harney call

“debt.” Well, given that debt is sometimes a history of giving, at other times a history of taking, at all times a history of capitalism and given

that debt also signifies a promise of ownership but never delivers on that promise, we have to understand that debt is something that cannot be paid off. Debt , as Harney puts it, presumes a kind of individualized relation to a naturalized economy that is predicated upon exploitation. Can we have, he asks, another sense of what is owed that does not presume a nexus of activities like recognition and acknowledgement, payment and gratitude. Can debt “become a principle of elaboration”? Moten links economic debt to the brokenness of being in the interview with

Stevphen Shukaitis; he acknowledges that some debts should be paid, and that much is owed especially to black people by white people, and yet , he says: “I also know that what it is that is supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It can’t be repaired. The only thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something new.” The undercommons do not come to pay their debts, to repair what has been broken, to fix what has come undone. If you want to know what the undercommons wants , what Moten and Harney

want, what black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people want, what we (the “we” who cohabit in the space of the undercommons ) want, it is this – we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that

we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that , right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and

to access the places that we know lie outside its walls. We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet , because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want after “the break” will be different from what we think we want before the break and both are necessarily different from the desire that issues from being in the break.

Refusal is the first step to the undercommons

Halberstam 13 [Jack Halberstam, Prof. English @ USC, 2013, “The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, p. 8]

The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal. In The Undercommons if we begin anywhere, we begin with the right to refuse what has been refused to you. Citing Gayatri Spivak, Moten and Harney call this refusal the “first right” and it is a game-changing kind of refusal in that it signals the refusal of the choices as offered . We can

understand this refusal in terms that Chandan Reddy lays out in Freedom With Violence (2011) – for Reddy, gay marriage is the option that cannot be opposed in the ballot box. While we can circulate multiple critiques of gay marriage in

terms of its institutionalization of intimacy, when you arrive at the ballot box, pen in hand, you only get to check “yes” or “ no” and the no , in this case, could be more damning than the yes. And so, you must refuse the choice as offered .

Terror DA Isis is mobilizing now and ready to take action.

Randy DeSoto May 7, 2015

http://www.westernjournalism.com/isis-claims-to-have-71-trained-soldiers-in-targeted-u-s-states/ (Randy DeSoto is a writer for Western Journalism, which consistently ranks in the top 5 most popular conservative online news outlets in the country)

Purported ISIS jihadists issued threats against the U nited S tates Tuesday, i ndicating the group has trained soldiers positioned throughout the country, ready to attack “any target we desire.” The online post singles out controversial blogger Pamela Geller, one of the organizers of the “Draw the Prophet” Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, calling for

her death to “heal the hearts of our brothers and disperse the ones behind her.” ISIS also claimed responsibility for the shooting, which marked the first time the terror group claimed responsibility for an attack on U.S. soil , according to the New York Daily News. “The attack by the Islamic State in America is only the beginning of our efforts to establish a wiliyah [authority or governance] in the heart of our enemy,” the ISIS post reads. As for Geller, the jihadists state: “To those who protect her: this will be your only warning of housing this woman and her circus show. Everyone who houses her events, gives her a platform to spill her filth are

legitimate targets. We have been watching closely who was present at this event and the shooter of our brothers.” ISIS further claims to have known that the Muhammad cartoon contest venue would be heavily guarded, but conducted the attack to demonstrate the willingness of its followers to die for the “Sake of Allah.” The FBI and the Department

of Homeland Security, in fact, issued a bulletin on April 20 indicating the event would be a likely terror target. ISIS drew its message to a close with an ominous threat: We have 71 trained soldiers in 15 different states ready at our word to attack any target we desire . Out of the 71 trained soldiers 23 have signed up for missions like Sunday, We are increasing in number bithnillah [if God wills]. Of the 15 states , 5 we will name … Virginia, Maryland, Illinois, California, and Michigan…The next six months will be interesting. Fox News reports that “the U.S. intelligence community was assessing the threat and trying to determine if the source is directly related to ISIS leadership or an opportunist such as a low-level militant seeking to further capitalize on the Garland incidyubent.” Former Navy Seal Rob O’Neill told Fox News he believes the ISIS threat is credible, and the U.S. must be prepared. He added that the incident in Garland “is a prime example of the difference between a gun free zone and Texas. They showed up at Charlie Hebdo, and it was a massacre. If these two guys had gotten into that building it would have been Charlie Hebdo times ten. But these two guys showed up because they were offended by something protected by the First Amendment, and were quickly introduced to the Second Amendment.” Geller issued a statement regarding the ISIS posting: “This threat illustrates the savagery and barbarism of the Islamic State. They want me dead for violating Sharia blasphemy laws. What remains to be seen is whether the free world will finally wake up and stand for the freedom of speech, or instead kowtow to this evil and continue to denounce me.”

Prohibiting NSA data collection under FISA prevents extensive analysis of data, k2 prevent terrorism

Bradbury 15 ( Steven. G, “BALANCING PRIVACY AND SECURITY”, HARVARD JOURNAL OF LAW AND PUBLIC POLICY, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2011&q=FISA+approvals&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5)

Responding to public opposition to the NSA’s telephone metadata program, Congress is currently considering legislation that would prohibit the collection of bulk metadata under FISA. In my view, such a restriction is a bad idea. Under this legislation, the NSA would be unable to collect data from multiple companies where necessary to assemble a single, efficiently searchable database.31 This restriction would also mean that the NSA would be prevented from collecting and storing data in bulk where doing so is the only way to preserve important business records that may be useful for a counterterrorism investigation.32 Without the ability for U.S. intelligence agencies to acquire the data in bulk under FISA ,

these important business records would only exist for as long as the private companies happen to retain the data for their own business purposes or as required by regulatory agencies for reasons unrelated to

national security.33 For example, telephone companies typically retain their metadata calling records for only 18 months , as specified by the Federal Communications Commission for purposes of resolving customer billing disputes.34 Under its metadata program, on the other hand, the NSA was storing the data for five years, so that it could conduct more extensive historical analyses of calling connections involving suspected terrorist numbers—historical analyses that can often provide very important new leads for FBI investigations.

Terrorists will use bioweapons- guarantees extinction

Cooper 13

(Joshua, 1/23/13, University of South Carolina, “Bioterrorism and the Fermi Paradox,” http://people.math.sc.edu/cooper/fermi.pdf, 7/15/15, SM)

We may conclude that, when a civilization reaches its space-faring age, it∂ will more or less at the same moment (1) contain many individuals who seek to cause large-scale destruction, and (2) acquire the capacity to tinker with its own genetic chemistry. This is a perfect recipe for bioterrorism, and, given the many very natural pathways for its development and the overwhelming∂ evidence that precisely this course has been taken by humanity, it is hard to∂ see how bioterrorism does not provide a neat, if profoundly unsettling, solution∂ to Fermi’s paradox. One might

object that, if omnicidal individuals are ∂ successful in releasing highly virulent and deadly genetic malware into

the∂ wild, they are still unlikely to succeed in killing everyone. However, even if∂ every such mass death event results only in a high (i.e., not total) kill rate and∂ there is a large gap between each such event (so that individuals can build up∂ the requisite scientific infrastructure again ), extinction would be inevitable ∂ regardless. Some of

the engineered bioweapons will be more successful than∂ others; the inter-apocalyptic eras will vary in length; and post-apocalyptic∂ environments may be so war-torn, disease-stricken, and impoverished of genetic variation that they may culminate in true extinction events even if the initial cataclysm ‘only’ results in 90% death rates , since they may cause the∂ effective population size to dip below the so-called “minimum viable population.”∂ This author ran a Monte Carlo simulation using as (admittedly very∂ crude and poorly informed, though arguably conservative) estimates the following∂ Earth-like parameters: bioterrorism event mean death rate 50% and∂ standard deviation 25% (beta distribution), initial population 1010, minimum∂ viable population 4000, individual omnicidal act probability 10−7 per annum,∂ and population growth rate 2% per annum. One thousand trials yielded an∂ average post-space-age time until extinction of less than 8000 years. This is∂ essentially instantaneous on a cosmological scale, and varying the parameters∂ by quite a bit does nothing to make the survival period comparable with the∂ age of the universe.

2NCImpact O/W

Magnitude – Terrorism causes extinction – -prefer because it effects the most people also bostrom indicates hat extinction should be an apriri impact because it would end any chances to improve social conditions.

Timeframe –

Turns Case –terrorist attacks create huge amounts of paranoia and racial profiling meaning it would multiply their impact 9/11 proves this – massive backlash spurred nearly all domestic surveillance policy means we don’t have 2 win the framing

Separately turns case – even if we don’t win that terrorism escalates a singular terrorist attack would trigger the impact of the aff – even a small singular attack such as the boston bombing would tirn the case because it causes justifications for massive public hype – tuns both their impacts – the key i/l is surveillance

2NC Existential Risk Analysis Good Existential Risks should be weighed first – extinction forecloses the chance to

improve society

Bostrom 13 (Nick, “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority” In Global Policy Volume 4 . Issue 1 . February 2013)

I believe a better basis for ethical theory in this area can be found i n quite a different direction—in a commitment to the future of humanity as a vast project, or network of overlapping projects, that is generally shared by the human race. The aspiration for a better society—more just, more rewarding, and more peaceful—is a part of this project. So are the potentially endless quests for scientific knowledge and philosophical understanding, and the development of artistic and other cultural traditions. This includes the particular cultural traditions to which we belong, in all their accidental historic and ethnic diversity. I t also includes our interest in the lives of our children and grandchildren, and the hope that they will be able, in turn, to have the lives of their children and grandchildren as projects. To the extent that a policy or practice seems likely to be favorable or unfavorable to the carrying out of this complex of projects in the nearer or further future, we have reason to pursue or avoid it. … Continuity is as important to our commitment to the project of the future of humanity as it is to our commitment to the projects of our own personal futures . Just as the shape of my whole life, and its connection with my present and past, have an interest that goes beyond that of any isolated experience, so too the shape of human history over an extended period of the future, and its connection with the human present and past, have an interest that goes beyond that of the (total or average) quality of life of a population-at-a-time, considered in isolation from how it got that way. We owe, I think, some loyalty to this project of the human future. We also owe it a respect that we would owe it even if we were not of the human race ourselves, but beings from another planet who had some understanding of it. Since an existential catastrophe would either put an end to the project of the future of humanity or drastically curtail its scope for development, we would seem to have a strong prima facie reason to avoid it, in Adams’ view. We also note that an existential catastrophe would entail the frustration of many strong preferences, suggesting that from a preference-satisfactionist perspective it would be a bad thing. In a similar vein, an ethical view emphasising that public policy should be determined through informed democratic deliberation by all stakeholders would favour existential-risk mitigation if we suppose, as is plausible, that a majority of the world’s population would come to favour such policies upon reasonable deliberation (even if hypothetical future people are not included as stakeholders). We might also have custodial duties to preserve the inheritance of humanity passed on to us by our ancestors and convey it safely to our descendants.23 We do not want to be the failing link in the chain of generations, and we ought not to delete or abandon the great epic of human civilization that humankind has been working on for thousands of years, when it is clear that the narrative is far from having reached a natural terminus. Further, many theological perspectives deplore naturalistic existential catastrophes, especially ones induced by human activities: If God created the world and the human species, one would imagine that He might be displeased if we took it upon ourselves to smash His masterpiece (or if, through our negligence or hubris, we allowed it to come to irreparable harm).24

2NC Terror Rhetoric Good Reps don’t shape reality and terror discourse good

Taft-Kaufman, 95- (Jill, professor, Department of Speech Communication And Dramatic Arts, at Central Michigan University, Southern Communication Journal, Spring, proquest)

The postmodern passwords of "polyvocality," "Otherness," and "difference," unsupported by substantial analysis of the concrete contexts of subjects, creates a solipsistic quagmire. The political sympathies of the new cultural critics, with their ostensible concern for the lack of power experienced by marginalized people, aligns them with the political left. Yet, despite their adversarial posture and talk o f opposition, their discourses on intertextuality and inter-referentiality isolate them from and ignore the conditions that have produced leftist politics --conflict, racism, poverty, and injustice. In short, as Clarke (1991) asserts, postmodern emphasis on new subjects conceals the old subjects, those who have limited access to good jobs, food, housing, health care, and transportation, as well as to the media that depict them. Merod (1987) decries this situation as one which leaves no vision, will, or commitment to activism. He notes that academic lip service to the oppositional is underscored by the absence of focused collective or politically active intellectual communities. Provoked by the academic manifestations of this problem Di Leonardo (1990) echoes Merod and laments: Has there ever been a historical era characterized by as little radical analysis or activism and as much radical-chic writing as ours? Maundering on about Otherness: phallocentrism or Eurocentric tropes has become a lazy academic substitute for actual engagement with the detailed histories and contemporary realities of Western racial minorities, white women, or any Third World population. (p. 530) Clarke's assessment of the postmodern elevation of language to the "sine qua non" of critical discussion is an even stronger indictment against the trend. Clarke examines Lyotard's (1984) The Postmodern Condition in which Lyotard maintains that virtually all social relations are linguistic, and, therefore, it is through the coercion that threatens speech that we enter the "realm of terror" and society falls apart. To this assertion, Clarke replies: I can think of few more striking indicators of the political and intellectual impoverishment of a view of society that can only recognize the discursive. If the worst terror we can envisage is the threat not to be allowed to speak, we are appallingly ignorant of terror in its elaborate contemporary forms. It may be the intellectual's conception of terror (what else do we do but speak?), but its projection onto the rest of the world would be calamitous....(pp. 2-27) The realm of the discursive is derived from the requisites for human life, which are in the physical world, rather than in a world of ideas or symbols.(4) Nutrition, shelter, and protection are basic human needs that require collective activity for their fulfillment. Postmodern emphasis on the discursive without an accompanying analysis of how the discursive emerges from material circumstances hides the complex task of envisioning and working towards concrete social goals (Merod, 1987). Although the material conditions that create the situation of marginality escape the purview of the postmodernist, the situation and its consequences are not overlooked by scholars from marginalized groups. Robinson (1990) for example, argues that "the justice that working people deserve is economic, not just textual" (p. 571). Lopez (1992) states that "the starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present existential, concrete situation" (p. 299). West (1988) asserts that borrowing French post-structuralist discourses about "Otherness" blinds us to realities of American difference going on in front of us (p. 170). Unlike postmodern "textual radicals" who Rabinow (1986) acknowledges are "fuzzy about power and the realities of socioeconomic constraints" (p. 255), most writers from marginalized groups are clear about how discourse interweaves with the concrete circumstances that create lived experience. People whose lives form the material for postmodern counter-hegemonic discourse do not share the optimism over the new recognition of their discursive subjectivities , because such an acknowledgment does not address sufficiently their collective historical and current struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, and economic injustice. They do not appreciate being told they are living in a world in which there are no more real subjects. Ideas have consequences. Emphasizing the discursive self when a person is hungry and homeless represents both a cultural and humane failure. The need to look beyond texts to the perception and attainment of concrete social goals keeps writers from

marginalized groups ever-mindful of the specifics of how power works through political agenda s , institutions, agencies, and the budgets that fuel them.

Case Reforms fail – the NSA will circumvent

Greenwald 14 (Glenn, lawyer, journalist and author – he founded the Intercept and has contributed to Salon and the Guardian, named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013, “CONGRESS IS IRRELEVANT ON MASS SURVEILLANCE. HERE’S WHAT MATTERS INSTEAD”, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/19/irrelevance-u-s-congress-stopping-nsas-mass-surveillance/)

All of that illustrates what is, to me, the most important point from all of this: the last place one should look to impose limits on the powers of the U.S. government is . . . the U.S. government. Governments don’t walk around trying to figure out how to limit their own power, and that’s particularly true of empires.

The entire system in D.C. is designed at its core to prevent real reform . This Congress is not going to enact anything resembling fundamental

limits on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance. Even if it somehow did, this White House would never sign it. Even if all that miraculously happened, the fact that the U.S. intelligence community and National Security State operates with no limits and no oversight means they’d easily co- opt the entire reform process . That’s what happened after the eavesdropping scandals of the mid-1970s led to the establishment of congressional intelligence

committees and a special FISA “oversight” court—the committees were instantly captured by putting in charge supreme servants of the intelligence community like Senators

Dianne Feinstein and Chambliss, and Congressmen Mike Rogers and “Dutch” Ruppersberger, while the court quickly became a rubber stamp with subservient judges who operate in total secrecy. Ever since the Snowden reporting began and public opinion (in both the U.S. and globally) began radically changing, the White House’s strategy has been obvious. It’s vintage Obama: Enact something that is called “reform ”—so that he can

give a pretty speech telling the world that he heard and responded to their concerns—but that in actuality changes almost nothing , thus strengthening the very system he can pretend he “changed.” That’s the same tactic as Silicon Valley, which also supported this bill: Be able to point to something

called “reform” so they can trick hundreds of millions of current and future users around the world into believing that their communications are now safe if they use Facebook, Google, Skype and the rest. In pretty much every interview I’ve done over the last year, I’ve been asked why there haven’t been significant changes from all the disclosures. I vehemently disagree with the

premise of the question, which equates “U.S. legislative changes” with “meaningful changes.” But it has been clear from the start that U.S. legislation is not going to impose meaningful limitations on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance, at least not fundamentally.

Anxiety is good

Shepard 07 (Mark, Neuro Linguistic Programming Expert, “Anxiety - the ultimate survival tool!,” http://www.scribd.com/doc/2050501/Anxiety-The-Ultimate-Survival-Skill)

As much pain and suffering that highly sensitive people go through because of our worry and anxiety habits, these are traits that have ensured humanity's survival since time immemorial. What do I mean? First of all you have to understand that anxiety is a thought process . It is not a mental disease. When you are anxious, what are you thinking about? What's great? What's wonderful? How everything is going to turn out better than

you can possibly imagine? No! You are imagining the worst case scenario. A nxiety is thinking about what you do not want to have happen. Think about it! Let's float back in time for a moment to One Gazillion B.C. You are hanging out with your hunter gatherer buddies and it's summer time...There's plenty to eat and it's warm. All of a sudden you have an anxious thought. You think of something unpleasant about the future. You suddenly think of the coming... winter! You imagine digging through snow drifts scavenging for whatever scraps of food you can find. You imagine starving. You imagine your children,

hungry, cold, sick. That's anxiety. Thinking about what you do not want to have happen. What it's supposed to do is trigger a resourceful response. In this case, you come up with a brilliant idea. In order to avoid starvation in the coming winter you start drying food and storing it in underground containers. Thinking about the cold, you come up with the idea that you can make warm clothing. Come Fall you gladly trade that little summer loin cloth in for a

nice woolly mammoth coat. Thus the first root cellar is born and the fur coat is invented, because of anxiety. Your ability to think ahead and visualize bad things happening enables you to plan ahead and take decisive action to create a different outcome . This planning for the winter results in your family and tribe surviving! Your children and their children pass along this anxiety gene. The "lug-heads" who don't have this

ability perish. Survival is good, isn't it? So those who were able to foresee the future and imagine the worst were able to better plan

and as a result create a better future. Now. Fast forward to today. I would be willing to bet that you've been using this wonderful imagination of yours to imagine the worst. The added factor here is that your unconscious mind does not know the difference between what is real and what is imagined, so when you

imagine the worst, your body reacts as if that bad thing is really happening. That releases all sorts of stress hormones and chemicals in your body. The point is to

stop beating yourself up for having anxiety. Anxiety is merely an excellent survival tool that's been pushed beyond its original purpose. You can reclaim it's usefulness by doing what ancient people did. Become aware of a possible negative outcome in the future and then take positive, decisive action to make sure something better happens. If it's something beyond your control, practice imagining it working out positively and see how that feels in your body. For example: if you are worried about your kids driving home from college in a snow storm imagine them arriving safely and sitting in front of the fire sipping hot cocoa.

Psychological threat construction is inevitable and key to rational decisionmaking

Pyszczynski et al 6 – Tom Pysczczynski is the Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado. Sheldon Solomon is the Professor of Psychology at Skidmore College. Jeff Greenberg is the Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona. Molly Maxfield works at the University of Colorado. (“On the Unique Psychological Import of the Human Awareness of Mortality: Theme and Variations”, Psychological Inquiry, Volume 17, Issue 4)

Kirkpatrick and Navarette’s (this issue) first specific complaint with TMT is that it is wedded to an outmoded assumption that human beings share with many other species a survival instinct. They argue that natural selection can only build instincts that respond to specific adaptive challenges in specific situations, and thus could not have designed an instinct for survival because staying alive is a broad and distal goal with no single clearly defined adaptive response. Our use of the term survival instinct was meant to highlight the general orientation toward continued life that is expressed in many

of an organism’s bodily systems (e.g., heart, liver, lungs, etc) and the diverseapproach and avoidance tendencies that promote its survival and reproduction , ultimately leading to genes being passed on to fu- ture generations. Our use of this term also reflects the classic psychoanalytic, biological, and anthropological influences on TMT of theorists like Becker (1971, 1973, 1975), Freud (1976, 1991), Rank (1945, 1961, 1989), Zilborg (1943), Spengler (1999), and Darwin (1993). We concur that natural selection, at least initially, is unlikely to design a unitary survival instinct, but rather, a series of specific adaptations that have tended over evolutionary time to promote the survival of an organism’s genes. However, whether

one construes these adaptations as a series of discrete mechanisms or a general overarching tendency that encompasses many

specific systems, we think it hard to argue with the claim that natural selection usually orients organisms to approach things that facilitate continued existence and to avoid things that would likely cut life short. This is not to say that natural selection doesn’t also select for characteristics that facilitate gene survival in other ways, or that all species or even all humans, will always choose life over other valued goals in all circumstances. Our claim is simply that a general orientation toward continued life exists because staying alive is essential for reproduction in most species, as well as for child rearing and support in mammalian species and many others. Viewing an animal as a loose collection of independent modules that produce responses to specific adaptively-relevant stimuli may be useful for some purposes, but it overlooks the point that adaptation involves a variety of inter-related mechanisms working together to insure that genes responsible for these mechanisms are more numerously represented in future generations (see, e.g., Tattersall, 1998). For example, although the left ventricle of the human heart likely evolved to solve a specific adaptive problem, this mechanism would be useless unless well-integrated with other aspects of the circulatory system. We believe it useful to think in terms of the overarching function of the heart and pulmonary-circulatory system, even if specific parts of that system evolved to solve specific adaptive problems within that system. In addition to specific solutions to specific adaptive problems, over time, natural selection favors integrated systemic functioning (Dawkins, 1976; Mithen, 1997). It is the improved survival rates and reproductive success of lifeformspossessing integrated systemic characteristics that determine whether those characteristics become widespread in a population. Thus, we think it is appropriate and useful to characterize a glucose-approaching amoeba and a bear-avoiding salmon as oriented toward self-preservation and reproduction, even if neither species possesses one single genetically encoded mechanism designed to generally foster life or insure reproduction, or cognitive representations of survival and reproduction. This is the same position that Dawkins (1976) took in his classic book, The

selfish gene: The obvious first priorities of a survival machine, and of the brain that takes the decisions for it, are individual survival and reproduction. … Animals therefore go to elaborate lengths to find and catch food; to avoid being caught and eaten themselves; to avoid disease and accident; to protect themselves from unfavourable climatic conditions; to find members of the opposite sex and persuade them to mate; and to confer on their children advantages similar to those they enjoy themselves. (pp. 62–63) All that is really essential to TMT is the proposition that humans fear death. Somewhat ironically, in the early days of the theory,we felt compelled to explain this fear by positing a very basic desire for life, because many critics adamantly insisted, for reasons that were never clear to us, that most people do not fear death. Our explanation for the fear of death is that knowledge of the inevitability of death is frightening because people know they are alive and because they want to continue living. Do Navarrete and Fessler (2005) really believe that humans do not fear death? Although people sometimes claim that they are not afraid of death, and on rare occasions volunteer for suicide missions and approach their death, this requires extensive psychological work, typically a great deal of anxiety, and preparation and immersion in a belief system that makes this possible (see TMT for an explanation of how belief systems do this). Where this desire for life comes from is an interesting question, but not essential to the logic of the theory. Even if Kirkpatrick and Navarrete (this issue) were correct in their claims that a unitary self-preservation instinct was not, in and of itself,

selected for, it is indisputable that many discrete and integrated mechanisms that keep organisms alive were selected for. A desire to stay alive, and a fear of anything that threatens to end one’s life, are likely emergent properties of these many discrete mechanisms that result from the evolution of sophisticated cognitive abilities for symbolic, future- oriented, and self-reflective thought. As Batson and Stocks (2004) have noted, it is because we are so intelligent, and hence so aware of our limbic reactions to threats of death and of our many systems oriented toward keeping us alive that we have a general fear of death. Here are three quotes that illustrate this point.

First, for psychologists, Zilboorg (1943), an important early source of TMT: “Such constant expenditure of psychological energy

on the business of preserving life would be impossible if the fear of death were not as constant ” (p. 467). For literature buffs, acclaimed novelist Faulkner (1990) put it this way: If aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewil- derment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it. (pp. 141–142) And perhaps most directly, for daytime TV fans, from The Young and the Restless (2006), after a rocky plane flight:

Phyllis: I learned something up in that plane Nick: What? Phyllis: I really don’t want to die. An important consequence of the emergence of this general fear of death is that humans are susceptible to anxiety due to events or stimuli that are not immediately present and novel threats to survival that did not exist for our ancestors,such as AIDS, guns, or nuclear weapons. Regardless of how this fear originates, it is abundantly clear that humans do fear death. Anyone who has ever faced a man with a gun, a doctor saying that the lump on one’s neck is suspicious and requires further diagnostic tests, or a drunken driver swerving into one’s lane can attest to that. If humans only feared evolved specific death-related threats like spiders and heights, then a lump on an x-ray, a gun, a crossbow, or any number of weapons pointed at one’s chest would not cause panic; but obviously these things do. Of what use would the sophisticated cortical structures be if they didn’t have the ability to instigate fear reactions in response to such threats?

Emancipation is a strategy of the privileged – it fails to resolve structural security institutions

Brincat et al 12 (Shannon; co-editor for the journal Global Discourse, received doctorate from the University of Queensland; Laura Lima, submitted her doctoral thesis @ Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University; João Nunes, Postdoctoral Fellow @ University of Warwick; “Critical Theory in International Relations and Security Studies: Interviews and Reflections”)

The insecurity of women requires transforming the relations of production, representation, recognition, and reproduction, and the practices

associated with them including diplomatic, military, and economic relations. Does the concept of emancipation entail this transformation, or is emancipation in fact part of a system of oppression? From a post-structuralist perspective,

any attempt to broaden our inclusiveness necessarily draws a new line of inclusion and exclusion," such that emancipation is not transformative but always part of the system of oppression. " Interestingly enough,

in the historical practice of slavery, emancipation has always been a part of slavery; it does not engender a transformation from slavery. In a 1996 essay, Guyora Binder argues that manumission of slaves did not abolish the

practice of slavery. The argument is that the practice of slavery as described in new scholarship on slavery by Patterson (1982) and others

shows that the promise of emancipation was an essential practice of the institution of slavery. In fact, with the

abolition of the slave trade and the concurrent difficulty in replacing escaped slaves, the prospect of manumission became in increasingly important tool for keeping slaves in slavery.18 Through informal agreements between slaves and owners, the terms of which the owners controlled, the prospect of manumission for themselves or loved ones created incentives for slaves not to try to escape. Further, individual manumission changed the economic relationship between freed slave and citizens, but not the political or social relationship . Binder

suggests that even the United States' Thirteenth Amendment, understandably interpreted as ending the practice of slavery —

'Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude ... shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction' — in practice only manumitted the slaves, it did not transform the social or political relations between former slaves and citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment and subsequent civil rights legislation attempted to change those relations. Binder argues that

without transforming those relations, 'emancipation' was not a sufficient goal. From the perspective of feminist

and critical race inquiry, security and emancipation are complementary, but not in a way that promotes 'achievement of greater equity in people's material life , a greater sense of understanding and tolerance of differences in culture and ideas and a means of moderating conflict among peoples' (Cox, this volume, 20).

Security requires 'protection' etc. It is hierarchical and patronizing except between the two poles of a bi-polar international

system. Those in struggle for their security and their freedom cannot feel 'secured' if their enjoyment is dependent on others. Ironically, 'emancipation' is not empowering on the face of it . If political power, security and rights are privileges that can be granted and taken away, then, emancipation is an act of privilege, not a transformation in political relations. If political power, security and rights are privileges,

then the hierarchy underpinning their lack is not removed by their being granted . Wyn Jones seems to take this

up this concern: while I would insist on the centrality of emancipation, I would want to distinguish between taking emancipation seriously and defining security in terms of emancipation. while I still think the former is imperative, I am now much more dubious about the later, even if it was a pivotal argument in Ken's 'Security and Emancipation' piece as well as my own subsequent work. We have been rightly critiqued on that score, and I think Ken moved away from his ‘two sides of the same

coin’ image even before those criticisms were leveled. But while the initial impulse to equate security and emancipation may have been too crude, the concern with emancipation can and should remain absolutely central.

Islamic Nations will never have a democracy – The ages-old Sunni-Shiite dispute means that there is a firm divide between parties, and there will never be a real and equal democracy.

All it takes is one non-democracy to disrupt all prospects for democratic peace

Mearsheimer 3John, Professor of Political Science @ U Chicago, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Google Book

Another reason to doubt democratic peace theory is the problem of backsliding. No democracy can be sure that another democracy will not someday become an authoritarian state, in which case the reaming democracy would no longer be safe and secure. Prudence dicatats that democracies prepare for that eventuality, which means striving to have as much

power as possible just in case a friendly neighbor turns into the neighborhood bully. But even if one rejects these criticisms and embraces democratic peace theory, it is still unlikely that all the great powers in the system will become democratic and stay that way over the long term. It would only take a non-democratic China or Russia to keep power politics in play, and both of these states are likely to be non-democratic for at least part of the twenty first century . Social constructivists provide another perspective on how to create a world

of states with benign intentions that are readily recognizable by other states. They maintain that the way states behave toward eachother i s not a function of how the material world is structured – as realists argue—but instead is largely determined by how individuals think and talk about international plitics. This perspective is nicely captured by Alexander Wendt’s famouns claim that “anarchy is what states make of it.” Discourse, in short, is the motor that drives international politics. But unfortunately, say social constructivists, reaslim has been the dominantdiscourse for at least the past seven centuries, and realism tells states to distrust other states and to take advantage of them whenever possible. What is needed to create a more peaceful world is a replacement discourse that emphasizes trust and cooperation among states, rather than suspicion and hostility.

Case Enmity is good

Reinhard 04 – Kenneth Reinhard, Professor of Jewish Studies at UCLA, 2004, “Towards a Political Theology- Of the Neighbor,” online: http://www.cjs.ucla.edu/Mellon/Towards_Political_Theology.pdf

If the concept of the political is defined, as Carl Schmitt does, in terms of the Enemy/Friend opposition, the world we find ourselves in today is one from which the

political may have already disappeared, or at least has mutated into some strange new shape. A world not anchored by the “us” and “them” binarisms that flourished as recently as the Cold War is one subect to radical instability, both subjectively and politically, as

Jacques Derrida points out in The Politics of Friendship: The effects of this destructuration would be countless: the ‘subject’ in question would be looking for new reconstitutive enmities; it would multiply ‘little wars’ between nation-states; it would sustain at any price

so-called ethnic or genocidal struggles; it would seek to pose itself, to find repose, through opposing still identifiable adversaries – China, Islam? Enemies without which … it would lose its political being … without an enemy, and therefore without friends, where does one then find oneself,

qua a self? (PF 77) If one accepts Schmitt’s account of the political, the disappearance of the enemy results in something like global psychosis: since the mirroring relationship between Us and Them provides a form of stability, albeit one based on projective identifications and repudiations, the loss of the enemy threatens to destroy what Lacan calls the “imaginary tripod” that props up

the psychotic with a sort of pseudo-subjectivity, until something causes it to collapse, resulting in full-blown delusions, hallucinations, and

paranoia. Hence, for Schmitt, a world without enemies is much more dangerous than one where one is surrounded by enemies; as

Derrida writes, the disappearance of the enemy opens the door for “an unheard-of violence, the evil of a malice knowing neither measure nor ground, an unleashing incommensurable in its unprecedented – therefore monstrous –forms; a violence in the face of which what is called hostility, war, conflict, enmity, cruelty, even hatred, would regain reassuring and ultimately appeasing contours, because they would be identifiable” (PF 83).

Policy planning and implementation key to effective solutions

Brugère et al 10. Cécile Brugère: Aquaculture Officer (Planning) FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, Rome, Italy.

Neil Ridler: FAO Visiting Expert Professor Emeritus in Economics University of New Brunswick, Saint John, Canada. Graham Haylor: FAO Consultant Stirling, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Graeme Macfadyen FAO Consultant

Lymington, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Nathanael Hishamunda: Senior Aquaculture Officer (Policy and Planning) FAO Fisheries and Aquaculture Department, Rome, Italy. Aquaculture planning Policy formulation and implementation for sustainable development.http://www.fao.org/docrep/012/i1601e/i1601e00.pdf Page 1. MMGIn general terms, the act of planning a sector’s development provides the means to regulate, in the public interest, its development in order to achieve a set of determined goals and objectives. As such, planning reduces risk, informs decision-making, establishes trust and conveys information. To be applicable and effective in achieving the desired goals and objectives, planning relies on political support, participation and resource commitment. Thus, policy formulation (and its related implementation) is the outcome of a planning process. This applies to aquaculture development where planning is an important process that will stimulate and guide the evolution of the sector by providing incentives and safeguards, attracting investments and boosting development, while ensuring   its  long-term sustainability (economically, environmentally and socially) to ultimately contribute to economic growth and poverty alleviation. However, planning is not a magic formula for achieving development progress. Inadequately carried out, it will yield results that may not be any better than if no provisions for planning had been made. Problems hampering optimal planning processes in aquaculture development usually relate to weak planning processes and inadequate human capacity, and to information and data gaps. This has led to the overall slow or uncoordinated growth of the aquaculture sector in some regions, to poor economic choices and decisions, and to conflicts with other sectors and within the aquaculture sector itself. Although efforts have been made both at national levels to support aquaculture planning, additional measures are necessary to help countries overcome the planning challenges they face.\

Anxiety is good

Shepard 07 (Mark, Neuro Linguistic Programming Expert, “Anxiety - the ultimate survival tool!,” http://www.scribd.com/doc/2050501/Anxiety-The-Ultimate-Survival-Skill)

As much pain and suffering that highly sensitive people go through because of our worry and anxiety habits, these are traits that have ensured humanity's survival since time immemorial. What do I mean? First of all you have to understand that anxiety is a thought process . It is not a mental disease. When you are anxious, what are you thinking about? What's great? What's wonderful? How everything is going to turn out better than

you can possibly imagine? No! You are imagining the worst case scenario. A nxiety is thinking about what you do not want to have happen. Think about it! Let's float back in time for a moment to One Gazillion B.C. You are hanging out with your hunter gatherer buddies and it's summer time...There's plenty to eat and it's warm. All of a sudden you have an anxious thought. You think of something unpleasant about the future. You suddenly think of the coming... winter! You imagine digging through snow drifts scavenging for whatever scraps of food you can find. You imagine starving. You imagine your children,

hungry, cold, sick. That's anxiety. Thinking about what you do not want to have happen. What it's supposed to do is trigger a resourceful response. In this case, you come up with a brilliant idea. In order to avoid starvation in the coming winter you start drying food and storing it in underground containers. Thinking about the cold, you come up with the idea that you can make warm clothing. Come Fall you gladly trade that little summer loin cloth in for a

nice woolly mammoth coat. Thus the first root cellar is born and the fur coat is invented, because of anxiety. Your ability to think ahead and visualize bad things happening enables you to plan ahead and take decisive action to create a different outcome . This planning for the winter results in your family and tribe surviving! Your children and their children pass along this anxiety gene. The "lug-heads" who don't have this

ability perish. Survival is good, isn't it? So those who were able to foresee the future and imagine the worst were able to better plan

and as a result create a better future. Now. Fast forward to today. I would be willing to bet that you've been using this wonderful imagination of yours to imagine the worst. The added factor here is that your unconscious mind does not know the difference between what is real and what is imagined, so when you imagine the worst, your body reacts as if that bad thing is really happening. That releases all sorts of stress hormones and chemicals in your body. The point is to

stop beating yourself up for having anxiety. Anxiety is merely an excellent survival tool that's been pushed beyond its original purpose. You can reclaim it's usefulness by doing what ancient people did. Become aware of a possible negative outcome in the future and then take positive, decisive action to make sure something better happens. If it's something beyond your control, practice imagining it working out positively and see how that feels in your body. For example: if you are worried about your kids driving home from college in a snow storm imagine them arriving safely and sitting in front of the fire sipping hot cocoa.

Psychological threat construction is inevitable and key to rational decisionmaking

Pyszczynski et al 6 – Tom Pysczczynski is the Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado. Sheldon Solomon is the Professor of Psychology at Skidmore College. Jeff Greenberg is the Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona. Molly Maxfield works at the University of Colorado. (“On the Unique Psychological Import of the Human Awareness of Mortality: Theme and Variations”, Psychological Inquiry, Volume 17, Issue 4)

Kirkpatrick and Navarette’s (this issue) first specific complaint with TMT is that it is wedded to an outmoded assumption that human beings share with many other species a survival instinct. They argue that natural selection can only build instincts that respond to specific adaptive challenges in specific situations, and thus could not have designed an instinct for survival because staying alive is a broad and distal goal with no single clearly defined adaptive response. Our use of the term survival instinct was meant to highlight the general orientation toward continued life that is expressed in many

of an organism’s bodily systems (e.g., heart, liver, lungs, etc) and the diverseapproach and avoidance tendencies that promote its survival and reproduction , ultimately leading to genes being passed on to fu- ture generations. Our use of this term also reflects the classic psychoanalytic, biological, and anthropological influences on TMT of theorists like Becker (1971, 1973, 1975), Freud (1976, 1991), Rank (1945, 1961, 1989), Zilborg (1943), Spengler (1999), and Darwin (1993). We concur that natural selection, at least initially, is unlikely to design a unitary survival instinct, but rather, a series of specific adaptations that have tended over evolutionary time to promote the survival of an organism’s genes. However, whether

one construes these adaptations as a series of discrete mechanisms or a general overarching tendency that encompasses many

specific systems, we think it hard to argue with the claim that natural selection usually orients organisms to approach things that facilitate continued existence and to avoid things that would likely cut life short. This is not to say that natural selection doesn’t also select for characteristics that facilitate gene survival in other ways, or that all species or even all humans, will always choose life over other valued goals in all

circumstances. Our claim is simply that a general orientation toward continued life exists because staying alive is essential for reproduction in most species, as well as for child rearing and support in mammalian species and many others. Viewing an animal as a loose collection of independent modules that produce responses to specific adaptively-relevant stimuli may be useful for some purposes, but it overlooks the point that adaptation involves a variety of inter-related mechanisms working together to insure that genes responsible for these mechanisms are more numerously represented in future generations (see, e.g., Tattersall, 1998). For example, although the left ventricle of the human heart likely evolved to solve a specific adaptive problem, this mechanism would be useless unless well-integrated with other aspects of the circulatory system. We believe it useful to think in terms of the overarching function of the heart and pulmonary-circulatory system, even if specific parts of that system evolved to solve specific adaptive problems within that system. In addition to specific solutions to specific adaptive problems, over time, natural selection favors integrated systemic functioning (Dawkins, 1976; Mithen, 1997). It is the improved survival rates and reproductive success of lifeformspossessing integrated systemic characteristics that determine whether those characteristics become widespread in a population. Thus, we think it is appropriate and useful to characterize a glucose-approaching amoeba and a bear-avoiding salmon as oriented toward self-preservation and reproduction, even if neither species possesses one single genetically encoded mechanism designed to generally foster life or insure reproduction, or cognitive representations of survival and reproduction. This is the same position that Dawkins (1976) took in his classic book, The

selfish gene: The obvious first priorities of a survival machine, and of the brain that takes the decisions for it, are individual survival and reproduction. … Animals therefore go to elaborate lengths to find and catch food; to avoid being caught and eaten themselves; to avoid disease and accident; to protect themselves from unfavourable climatic conditions; to find members of the opposite sex and persuade them to mate; and to confer on their children advantages similar to those they enjoy themselves. (pp. 62–63) All that is really essential to TMT is the proposition that humans fear death. Somewhat ironically, in the early days of the theory,we felt compelled to explain this fear by positing a very basic desire for life, because many critics adamantly insisted, for reasons that were never clear to us, that most people do not fear death. Our explanation for the fear of death is that knowledge of the inevitability of death is frightening because people know they are alive and because they want to continue living. Do Navarrete and Fessler (2005) really believe that humans do not fear death? Although people sometimes claim that they are not afraid of death, and on rare occasions volunteer for suicide missions and approach their death, this requires extensive psychological work, typically a great deal of anxiety, and preparation and immersion in a belief system that makes this possible (see TMT for an explanation of how belief systems do this). Where this desire for life comes from is an interesting question, but not essential to the logic of the theory. Even if Kirkpatrick and Navarrete (this issue) were correct in their claims that a unitary self-preservation instinct was not, in and of itself,

selected for, it is indisputable that many discrete and integrated mechanisms that keep organisms alive were selected for. A desire to stay alive, and a fear of anything that threatens to end one’s life, are likely emergent properties of these many discrete mechanisms that result from the evolution of sophisticated cognitive abilities for symbolic, future- oriented, and self-reflective thought. As Batson and Stocks (2004) have noted, it is because we are so intelligent, and hence so aware of our limbic reactions to threats of death and of our many systems oriented toward keeping us alive that we have a general fear of death. Here are three quotes that illustrate this point.

First, for psychologists, Zilboorg (1943), an important early source of TMT: “Such constant expenditure of psychological energy on the business of preserving life would be impossible if the fear of death were not as constant ” (p. 467). For literature buffs, acclaimed novelist Faulkner (1990) put it this way: If aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewil- derment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it. (pp. 141–142) And perhaps most directly, for daytime TV fans, from The Young and the Restless (2006), after a rocky plane flight:

Phyllis: I learned something up in that plane Nick: What? Phyllis: I really don’t want to die. An important consequence of the emergence of this general fear of death is that humans are susceptible to anxiety due to events or stimuli that are not immediately present and novel threats to survival that did not exist for our ancestors,such as AIDS, guns, or nuclear weapons. Regardless of how this fear originates, it is abundantly clear that humans do fear death. Anyone who has ever faced a man with a gun, a doctor saying that the lump on one’s neck is suspicious and requires further diagnostic tests, or a drunken driver swerving into one’s lane can attest to that. If humans only feared evolved specific death-related threats like spiders and heights, then a lump on an x-ray, a gun, a crossbow, or any number of weapons pointed at one’s chest would not cause panic; but obviously these things do. Of what use would the sophisticated cortical structures be if they didn’t have the ability to instigate fear reactions in response to such threats?

Emancipation is a strategy of the privileged – it fails to resolve structural security institutions

Brincat et al 12 (Shannon; co-editor for the journal Global Discourse, received doctorate from the University of Queensland; Laura Lima, submitted her doctoral thesis @ Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University; João Nunes, Postdoctoral Fellow @ University of Warwick; “Critical Theory in International Relations and Security Studies: Interviews and Reflections”)

The insecurity of women requires transforming the relations of production, representation, recognition, and reproduction, and the practices

associated with them including diplomatic, military, and economic relations. Does the concept of emancipation entail this transformation, or is emancipation in fact part of a system of oppression? From a post-structuralist perspective,

any attempt to broaden our inclusiveness necessarily draws a new line of inclusion and exclusion," such that emancipation is not transformative but always part of the system of oppression. " Interestingly enough,

in the historical practice of slavery, emancipation has always been a part of slavery; it does not engender a transformation from slavery. In a 1996 essay, Guyora Binder argues that manumission of slaves did not abolish the

practice of slavery. The argument is that the practice of slavery as described in new scholarship on slavery by Patterson (1982) and others

shows that the promise of emancipation was an essential practice of the institution of slavery. In fact, with the

abolition of the slave trade and the concurrent difficulty in replacing escaped slaves, the prospect of manumission became in increasingly important tool for keeping slaves in slavery.18 Through informal agreements between slaves and owners, the terms of which the owners controlled, the prospect of manumission for themselves or loved ones created incentives for slaves not to try to escape. Further, individual manumission changed the economic relationship between freed slave and citizens, but not the political or social relationship . Binder

suggests that even the United States' Thirteenth Amendment, understandably interpreted as ending the practice of slavery —

'Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude ... shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction' — in practice only manumitted the slaves, it did not transform the social or political relations between former slaves and citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment and subsequent civil rights legislation attempted to change those relations. Binder argues that

without transforming those relations, 'emancipation' was not a sufficient goal. From the perspective of feminist

and critical race inquiry, security and emancipation are complementary, but not in a way that promotes 'achievement of greater equity in people's material life , a greater sense of understanding and tolerance of differences in culture and ideas and a means of moderating conflict among peoples' (Cox, this volume, 20).

Security requires 'protection' etc. It is hierarchical and patronizing except between the two poles of a bi-polar international

system. Those in struggle for their security and their freedom cannot feel 'secured' if their enjoyment is dependent on others. Ironically, 'emancipation' is not empowering on the face of it . If political power, security and rights are privileges that can be granted and taken away, then, emancipation is an act of privilege, not a transformation in political relations. If political power, security and rights are privileges, then the hierarchy underpinning their lack is not removed by their being granted . Wyn Jones seems to take this

up this concern: while I would insist on the centrality of emancipation, I would want to distinguish between taking emancipation seriously and defining security in terms of emancipation. while I still think the former is imperative, I am now much more dubious about the later, even if it was a pivotal argument in Ken's 'Security and Emancipation' piece as well as my own subsequent work. We have been rightly critiqued on that score, and I think Ken moved away from his ‘two sides of the same

coin’ image even before those criticisms were leveled. But while the initial impulse to equate security and emancipation may have been too crude, the concern with emancipation can and should remain absolutely central.

Literature and psychological bias runs towards threat deflation- we are the opposite of paranoid

Schweller, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University, 4

[Randall L., “Unanswered Threats A Neoclassical RealistTheory of Underbalancing,” International Security 29.2 (2004) 159-201, Muse]

Despite the historical frequency of underbalancing, little has been written on the subject . Indeed, Geoffrey Blainey's memorable observation that for "every thousand pages published on the causes of wars there is less than one page directly on the causes of peace" could have been made with equal veracity about overreactions to threats as opposed to underreactions to them.92 Library

shelves are filled with books on the causes and dangers of exaggerating threats , ranging from studies of domestic

politics to bureaucratic politics, to political psychology, to organization theory. By comparison, there have been few studies at any level of analysis or from any theoretical perspective that directly explain why states have with some, if not equal,

regularity underestimated dangers to their survival. There may be some cognitive or normative bias at work here. Consider, for instance, that there is a commonly used word, paranoia, for the unwarranted fear that people are, in some way, "out to get you" or are planning to do oneharm. I suspect that just as many people are afflicted with the opposite psychosis: the delusion that everyone loves you when, in fact, they do not even like you. Yet, we

do not have a familiar word for this phenomenon. Indeed, I am unaware of any word that describes this pathology (hubris

and overconfidence come close, but they plainly define something other than what I have described). That noted, i nternational relations

theory does have a frequently used phrase for the pathology of states' underestimation of threats to their survival , the so-called Munich analogy. The term is used, however, in a disparaging way by theorists to ridicule those who employ it. The central claim is that the naïveté associated with Munich and the outbreak of World War II has become an overused and inappropriate analogy because few leaders are as evil and unappeasable as Adolf Hitler. Thus, the analogy either mistakenly causes leaders [End Page 198] to

adopt hawkish and overly competitive policies or is deliberately used by leaders to justify such policies and mislead the public. A more compelling explanation for the paucity of studies on underreactions to threats , however, is the tendency of theories to reflect contemporary issues as well as the desire of theorists and journals to provide society with policy- relevant theories that may help resolve or manage urgent security problems . Thus, born in the

atomic age with its new balance of terror and an ongoing Cold War, the field of security studies has naturally produced theories of and prescriptions for national security that have had little to say about—and are, in fact, heavily biased against warnings of—the dangers of underreacting to or underestimating threats . After all, the nuclear

revolution was not about overkill but, as Thomas Schelling pointed out, speed of kill and mutual kill.93 Given the apocalyptic consequences of miscalculation, accidents, or inadvertent nuclear war, small wonder that theorists were more concerned about overreacting to threats than underresponding to them . At a time when all of humankind could be wiped out in less than twenty-five minutes, theorists may be excused for stressing the benefits of caution under conditions of uncertainty and erring on the side of inferring from ambiguous actions overly benign assessments of the opponent's intentions. The overwhelming fear was that a crisis "might unleash forces of an essentially military nature that overwhelm the political process and bring on a war thatnobody wants. Many important conclusions about the risk of nuclear war, and thus about the political meaning of nuclear forces, rest on this fundamental idea."94 Now that the Cold War is over, we can begin to redress these biases in the literature. In that spirit, I have offered a domestic politics model to explain why threatened states often fail to adjust in a prudent and coherent way to dangerous changes in their strategic environment. The model fits nicely with recent realist studies on imperial under- and overstretch. Specifically, it is consistent with Fareed Zakaria's analysis of U.S. foreign policy from 1865 to 1889, when, he claims, the United States had the national power and opportunity to expand but failed to do so because it lacked sufficient state power (i.e., the state was weak relative to society).95 Zakaria claims that the United States did [End Page 199] not take advantage of opportunities in its environment to expand because it lacked the institutional state strength to harness resources from society that were needed to do so. I am making a similar argument with respect to balancing rather than expansion: incoherent, fragmented states are unwilling and unable to balance against potentially dangerous threats because elites view the domestic risks as too high, and they are

unable to mobilize the required resources from a divided society. The arguments presented here also suggest that elite fragmentation and disagreement within a competitive political process, which Jack Snyder cites as an explanation for overexpansionist

policies, are more likely to produce underbalancing than overbalancing behavior among threatened incoherent states.96 This is

because a balancing strategy carries certain political costs and risks with few , if any, compensating short- term political gains , and because the strategic environment is always somewhat uncertain. Consequently, logrolling among fragmented elites within threatened states is more likely to generate overly cautious responses to threats than overreactions to them. This dynamic captures the underreaction of democratic states to the rise of Nazi Germany during the interwar period.97 In addition to elite fragmentation, I have suggested some basic domestic-level variables that regularly intervene to thwart balance of power predictions.

2NC Enmity GoodReinhard 04

Lack of a us vs. them binary that their radical inclusivity would deconstruct turns the case – the lack of set enmities would destroy subjectivity causing global paranoia – subjects desperate to defoine themselves would construct multiple enemies – increasing global conflict – turns case.

Distinctions are inevitable even in a liberal order

Rasch 3

(William Rasch is the Henry H. H. Remak Professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University, “Human Rights as Geopolitics ∂ Carl Schmitt and the Legal Form of American Supremacy,” Cultural Critique 54 (2003) 120-147, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v054/54.1rasch.html, BC)

In the past, we/they, neighbor/foreigner, friend/enemy polarities were inside/outside distinctions that produced a plurality of worlds, separated by physical and cultural borders. When these worlds collided, it was not always a pretty picture, but it was often possible to [End Page 138] maintain the integrity of the we/they distinction, even to regulate it by distinguishing between domestic and foreign affairs. If "they" differed, "we" did not always feel ourselves obliged to make "them" into miniature versions of "us," to Christianize them, to

civilize them, to make of them good liberals. Things have changed. With a single-power global hegemony that is guided by a universalist ideology, all relations have become, or threaten to become, domestic. The inner/outer distinction has been transformed into a morally and legally determined acceptable/unacceptable one, and the power exists (or is thought to exist), both spiritually and physically, to eliminate the unacceptable once and for all and make believers of everyone. The new imperative states: the other shall be included. Delivered as a promise, it can only be received, by some, as an ominous threat.∂ In his The Conquest of America, Tzvetan Todorov approaches our relationship to the "other" by way of three interlocking distinctions, namely, self/other, same/different, and equal/unequal. A simple superposition of all three distinctions makes of the other someone who is different and therefore unequal. The problem we have been discussing, however, comes to light when we make of the other someone who is equal because he is

essentially the same. This form of the universalist ideology is assimilationist. It denies the other by embracing him. Of the famous sixteenth-century defender of the Indians, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Todorov writes,∂ [his] declaration of the equality of men is made in the name of a specific religion, Christianity.... Hence, there is a potential danger of seeing not only the Indians' human nature asserted but also their Christian "nature." "The natural laws and rules and rights of men," Las Casas said; but who decides what is natural with regard to laws and rights? Is it not speciWcally the Christian religion? Since Christianity is universalist, it implies an essential non-difference on the part of all men. We see the danger of the identiWcation in this text of Saint John Chrysostrom, quoted and defended at Valladolid: "Just as there is no natural difference in the creation of man, so there is no difference in the call to salvation of all men, barbarous or wise, since God's grace can correct the minds of barbarians, so that they have a reasonable understanding."12∂ Once again we see that the term "human" is not descriptive, but evaluative. To be truly human, one needs to be corrected. Regarding the relationship of difference and equality, Todorov concludes, "If it is [End Page 139] incontestable that the prejudice of superiority is an obstacle in the road to knowledge, we must also admit that the prejudice of equality is a still greater one, for it consists in identifying the other purely and simply with one's own 'ego ideal' (or with oneself)" (1984, 165). Such identification is not only the essence of Christianity, but also of the doctrine of human rights preached by enthusiasts like Habermas and Rawls. And such identification means that the other is stripped of his otherness and made to conform to the

universal ideal of what it means to be human.∂ And yet, despite—indeed, because of—the all-encompassing embrace, the detested other is never allowed to leave the stage altogether. Even as we seem on the verge of actualizing Kant's dream, as Habermas puts it, of "a cosmopolitan order" that unites all peoples and abolishes war under the auspices of "the states of the First World" who "can afford to harmonize their national interests to a certain extent with the norms that define the halfhearted cosmopolitan aspirations of the UN" (1998, 165, 184), it is still fascinating to see how the barbarians make their functionally necessary presence felt. John Rawls, in his The Law of Peoples (1999), conveniently divides the world into well-ordered peoples and those who are not well ordered. Among the former are the "reasonable liberal peoples" and the "decent hierarchical peoples" (4). Opposed to them are the "outlaw states" and other "burdened" peoples who are not worthy of respect. Liberal peoples, who, by virtue of their history, possess superior institutions, culture, and moral character (23-25), have not only the right to deny non-well-ordered peoples respect, but the duty to extend what Vitoria called "brotherly correction" and

Habermas "gentle compulsion" (Habermas 1997, 133). 13 That is, Rawls believes that the "refusal to tolerate" those states

deemed to be outlaw states "is a consequence of liberalism and decency." Why? Because outlaw states violate human rights. What are human rights? "What I call human rights," Rawls states, "are ... a proper subset of the rights possessed by citizens in a liberal constitutional democratic regime, or of the rights of the members of a decent hierarchical society" (Rawls 1999, 81).

Because of their violation of these liberal rights, nonliberal, nondecent societies do not even have the right "to protest their condemnation by the world society" (38), and decent peoples have the right, if necessary, to wage

just wars against them. Thus, [End Page 140] liberal societies are not merely contingently established and historically conditioned forms

of organization; they become the universal standard against which other societies are judged. Those found wanting are banished, as outlaws, from the civilized world. Ironically, one of the signs of their outlaw status is their insistence on autonomy, on sovereignty. As Rawls states, "Human rights are a class of rights that play a special role in a reasonable Law of Peoples: they restrict the justifying reasons for war and its conduct, and they specify limits to a regime's internal autonomy. In this way they reflect the two basic and historically profound changes in how the powers of sovereignty have been conceived since World War II" (79). Yet, what Rawls sees as a postwar development in the notion of sovereignty—that is, its restriction—could not, in fact, have occurred had it not been for the unrestricted sovereign powers of the victors of that war, especially, of course, the supreme power of the United States. The limitation of (others') sovereignty is an imposed limitation, imposed by a sovereign state that has never relinquished its own sovereign power. What for Vitoria was the sovereignty of Christendom and for Scott the sovereignty of humanity becomes for Rawls the simple but uncontested sovereignty of liberalism itself. 14

Lack of distinction between friends and enemies generates inhuman others to be eradicated—that justifies the worst forms of war and violence

Rasch 2k

(William Rasch is the Henry H. H. Remak Professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University, “Conflict as a Vocation: Carl Schmitt and the Possibility of Politics,” Theory, Culture, and Society 2000 (Sage, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 17(6): 1—32, BC)

In Schmitt's view, then, the sovereignty of the state as the unity of the difference of civil society serves a higher pluralism,

the pluralism of an international order of autonomous states. He starts, in other words, with a unity of difference in order to attain a difference of unities. Liberal plural-ism, on the other hand, is winnowed, he believes, because it works in the opposite

direction. It too seeks the unity of the difference of associations, but the unity it finds is singular and 'sovereign'. There is no resultant differ-ence of unities, no we pluralism, according to Schmitt, because liberal unity is represented by the ultimate `monism' of 'humanity'. Whereas the sovereignty of the state is local and plural, and therefore gives rise to legiti-mate, political content among sovereign equals, the sovereignty of the ethos of humanity is absolute and incontestable. In the name of individual auton-omy and emancipation, liberal pluralism annihilates the space of the politi-cal. The 'political world is a pluriverse', Schmitt emphasizes, and if a single world state 'embracing all of humanity' were to appear, foreclosing both con-flict and civil war, then what would remain would be 'neither politics nor state' (1976: 53), but rather a violence for worse than the structured conflict of politics. What would remain would be the concept of humanity as an `ideo-logical

instrument of imperialist expansion° (1976: 54). Used politically, in other words, the term 'humanity' takes the form of a particularly brutal weapon. When one works with distinctions such as those between friend and enemy, good and bad, economic partner and competitor, educated and une-ducated, employer and employee, and so on, `humanity' remains an unre-marked and unsurpassable horizon within which such distinctions can be drawn. Indeed, `humanity' as horizon guarantees that both friends and ∂ enemies are human, even the good and the bad, the partner and the com-petitor, the employer and employee .

When, however. the terra is itself manip-ulated as one side of a distinction , when, for instance, bourgeois society is contrasted with a future, 'truly human' society, or the purported character-istics done racial group are stylized as

'ideal types', as it were, then 'human-ity' needs a counterpart — it needs the dehumanized and inhuman enemy, the subhuman. Once it is displaced from its position as the horizon of possi-bility and wielded as a

weapon, 'humanity' has to be opposed by its other, and, quite simply, that other cannot be human. As Reinhart Koselleck, building on Schmitt's insights, states: ∂ The dualistic criteria of distribution between Greek and Barbarian, and between Christian and Heathen [two distinctions he examinee), were always related, whether implicitly or explicitly, to Menschheit as a totality. To this extent, Menschheit,genushumonian, was a presupposition of all dualities that organized Menschheir physically, spatially, spiritually, theologically, or tem-porally. It will now appear that Menschhea, up to this point a condition imma-nent in all dualities, assumes a different quality as soon as it enters into argument as a political reference. The atomic funmion of distributional con-cepts alters as soon as a totalizing concept —for this is what is involved with Menschheis — is brought into political language, which, in spite of its totaliz-ing claim, generates polarities. (Koselleek,

1985: 186) And so, as Schmitt had already observed, those who fight in the name of humanity are free to deny 'the enemy the quality of being human and declar-ing him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity' (Schmitt, 1976: 54).

2NC Policy Good A refusal to engage politically will further the right- risks extinction. Reformism

is necessary

Wapner, 8 [Paul Wapner, director of the Global Environmental Politics Program in SIS. 2008 ( “the importance of critical environmental studies in the new environmentalism” project muse)]

To many readers, such questions probably sound familiar. Efforts to rid the world of war, poverty, human rights abuses and injustice in general are perennial challenges that require heightened compassion and a commitment that transcends one’s time on earth. The questions are especially relevant, however, to environmentalists. They represent the kind of challenges we constantly pose to ourselves and to those we try

to convince to join us. Environmental issues are some of the gravest dangers facing humanity and all life on the planet. At their most immediate, environmental problems undermine the quality of life for the poorest and are increasingly eroding the quality of life of even the affluent. At the extreme,

environmental challenges threaten to fracture the fundamental organic infrastructure that supports life on Earth and thus imperil life’s very survival. What to do? Environmental Studies is the academic discipline charged with trying to figure this out. Like Feminist and Race Studies, it emerged out of a political movement and thus never understood itself as value-neutral. Coming on the heels of the modern environmental movement of the 1960s, environmental studies has directed itself toward understanding the biophysical limits of the earth and how humans can live sustainably given those limits. As such, it has always seen its normative commitments not as biases that muddy its inquiry but as disciplining directives that focus scholarship in scientifically and politically relevant directions. To be sure, the discipline’s natural scientists see themselves as objective observers of the natural world and understand their work as normative only to the degree that it is shaped by the hope of helping to solve environmental problems. Most otherwise remain detached from the political conditions in which their work is assessed. The discipline’s social scientists also maintain a stance of objectivity to the degree that they respect the facts of the social world, but many of them engage the political world by offering policy prescriptions and new political visions. What is it like to research and teach Environmental Studies these days? Where does the normative dimension of the discipline fall into

contemporary political affairs? Specifically, how should social thinkers within Environmental Studies understand the application of their normative commitments? Robert Cox once distinguished what he calls “problem-solving” theory from “critical theory.” The former, which aims toward social and political reform, accepts prevailing power relationships and institutions and implicitly uses these as a framework for inquiry and action. As a theoretical enterprise, problem-solving theory works within current paradigms to address particular intellectual and practical challenges. Critical theory, in contrast, questions existing power dynamics and seeks not only to reform but to transform social and political conditions.1 Critical environmental theory has come under attack in recent years. As the discipline has matured and further cross-pollinated with other fields, some of us have become enamored with continental philosophy, cultural and communication studies, high-level anthropological and sociological theory and a host of other insightful disciplines that tend to step back from contemporary events and paradigms of thought and reveal structures of power that

reproduce social and political life. While such engagement has refined our ability to identify and make visible impediments to creating a greener world, it has also isolated critical Environmental Studies from the broader discipline and, seemingly, the actual world it is trying to transform. Indeed, critical environmental theory has become almost a sub-discipline to itself. It has developed a rarefied language and, increasingly, an insular audience. To many, this has rendered critical theory not more but less politically engaged as it scales the heights of thought only to be further distanced from practice. It increasingly seems, to many, to be an impotent discourse preaching radical ideas to an already initiated choir. Critical Environmental Studies is also sounding ºat these days coming off the heels of,

arguably, the most anti-environmentalist decade ever. The Bush Administration’s tenure has been an all-time low for environmental protection. The Administration has installed industry-friendly administrators throughout the

executive branch, rolled back decades of domestic environmental law and international environmental leadership, politicized scientific evidence and expressed outright hostility to almost any form of environmental regulation.2 1. Cox 1996. 2. Gore 2007; and Pope and

Rauber 2006. With the US as the global hegemon, it is hard to overestimate the impact these actions have had on world environmental affairs. Being a politically engaged environmental scholar has been difficult during

the past several years. In the US, instead of being proactive, the environmental community has adopted a type of rearguard politics in which it has tried simply to hold the line against assaults on everything from the Endangered Species Act, New Source Review and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the Kyoto Protocol and international

cooperative efforts to curb deforestation and loss of biological diversity. Outside the US, the environmental community has had to struggle for pronounced relevance in similar issues as it has operated in the shadow of an environmentally-irresponsible hegemon. Much of the academic world has followed suit, as it were. In the US, it has found itself needing to argue for basics like the knowledge of environmental science, the wisdom of enforcing established law, the importance of holding violators accountable and the significance of the US to remain engaged in international environmental affairs. Outside the US, the academic community has fared only marginally better. For instance, many in Europe, who have long advanced analyses of the formation and implementation of regimes, found themselves backpedaling as they wrestled with the significance of international regimes absent hegemonic participation. The result is that the space for what was considered politically-relevant scholarship has shrunk dramatically; what used to be considered problemsolving theory has become so out of touch with political possibility that it has been relegated to the margins of contemporary thought. Put differently, the realm of critical theory has grown tremendously as hitherto reasonable ideas have

increasingly appeared radical and previously radical ones have been pushed even further to the hinterlands of critical thought. As we enter the final stretch of the Bush Administration and the waning years of the millennium’s first decade, the political landscape appears to be changing. In the US, a Democratic Congress, environmental action at the municipal and state levels, and a growing sense that a green foreign policy may be a way to weaken global terrorism, enhance US energy independence and reestablish US moral leadership in the world, have partially resuscitated and reenergized environmental concern.3 Worldwide, there seems to be a similar and even more profound shift as people in all walks of life are recognizing the ecological, social and economic effects of climate change, corporations are realizing that environmental action can make business sense, and environmental values in general are permeating even some of the most stubborn societies. The “perfect storm” of this combination is beginning to put environmental issues ªrmly on the world’s radar screen. It seems that a new day is arising for environmentalism and, by extension, Environmental Studies. What role should environmental scholarship assume in this

new climate? Specifically, how wise is it to pursue critical Environmental Studies at such an opportune moment? Is it strategically useful to study the outer reaches of environmental thought and continue to reflect on the structural dimensions of environmental degradation when the political tide seems to be turning and problem-solving theorists may once again have the ear of those in power? Is now the time to run to

the renewed, apparently meaningful center or to cultivate more incisive critical environmental thought? Notwithstanding the promise of the new environmental moment for asking fundamental questions, many may counsel caution toward critical Environmental Studies. The political landscape may be changing but it is unclear if critical Environmental Studies is prepared to make itself relevant. Years of being distant from political influence has intensified the insularity and arcane character of critical environmental theory, leaving the discipline rusty in its ability to make friends within policy circles. Additionally, over the past few years, the public has grown less open to radical environmental ideas, as it has been fed a steady diet of questioning even the basics of environmental issues. Indeed, that the Bush Administration enjoyed years of bulldozing over environmental concern without loud, sustained, vocal opposition should give us

pause. It suggests that we should not expect too much, too soon. The world is still ensconced in an age of global terror; the “high” politics of national security and economic productivity continue to

over-shadow environmental issues; and the public needs to be slowly seasoned to the insights and arguments of critical theory before it can appreciate their importance—as if it has been in the dark for

years and will be temporary blinded if thrown into the daylight too soon. From this perspective, so the logic might go, scholars should restrict themselves to problemsolving theory and direct their work toward the mainstream of environmental thought. Such prudence makes sense. However, we should remember that problemsolving theory, by working within existing paradigms, at best simply smoothes bumps in the road in the reproduction of social practices. It solves certain dilemmas of contemporary life but is unable to address the structural factors that reproduce broad, intractable challenges. Problem-solving theory, to put it differently, gets at the symptoms of environmental harm rather than the root causes. As such, it might slow the pace of environmental degradation but doesn’t steer us in fundamentally new, more promising directions. No matter how politically sensitive one wants to be, such new direction is precisely what the world needs. The last few years have been lost time, in terms of fashioning a meaningful, global environmental agenda. Nonetheless, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that we were in some kind of green nirvana before the Bush Administration took power and before the world of terror politics trumped all other policy initiatives. The world has faced severe environmental challenges for decades and, while it may seem a ripe time to reinvigorate problem-solving theory in the new political climate, we must recognize that all the problem-solving theory of the world won’t get us out of the predicament we’ve been building for years. We are all familiar with the litany of environmental woes. Scientists tell us, for example, that we are now in the midst of the sixth great extinction since life formed on the planet close to a billion years ago. If things don’t change, we will drive one-third to one-half of all species to extinction over the next 50 years.4 Despite this, there are no policy proposals being advanced at the national or international levels that come even close to addressing the magnitude of biodiversity loss.5 Likewise, we know that the build-up of greenhouse gases is radically changing the climate, with catastrophic dangers beginning to express themselves and greater ones waiting in the wings. The international community has embarked on signiªcant efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions but no policies are being debated that come even close to promising climate stabilization—including commitments to reduce the amount of carbon emissions per unit of GDP, as advanced by the US government, and to reduce GHG emissions globally by 5 percent below 1990 levels, as specified by the Kyoto Protocol. Scientists tell us that, to really make a difference, we need reductions on the order of 70–80 percent below 1990 levels.6 Such disconnects between high-level policy discussions and the state of the environment are legion. Whether one looks at data on ocean fisheries, fresh water scarcity or any other major environmental dilemma, the news is certainly bad as our most aggressive policies fall short of the minimum required. What is our role as scholars in the face of such a predicament? Many of us can and should focus on problem-solving theory. We need to figure out, for example, the mechanisms of cap and trade, the tightening of rules against trafficking in endangered species and the ratcheting up of

regulations surrounding issues such as water distribution. We should, in other words, keep our noses to the grindstone and work out incremental routes forward. This is important not simply because we desperately need policy-level insight and want our work to be taken seriously but also because it speaks to those who are tone-deaf to more radical orientations. Most of the public in the developed world apparently doesn’t like to reflect on the deep structures of environmental affairs and certainly doesn’t like thought that recommends dramatically changing our lifestyles. Nonetheless, given the straits that we are in, a different appreciation for relevance and radical thought is due—especially one that takes seriously the normative bedrock of our discipline. Critical theory self-consciously eschews value-neutrality and, in doing so, is able to ask critical questions about the direction of current policies and orientations. If there ever were a need for critical environmental theory, it is now— when a thaw in political stubbornness is

seemingly upon us and the stakes of avoiding dramatic action are so grave. The challenge is to fashion a more strategic and meaningful type of critical theory. We need to find ways of speaking that re-shift the boundary between reformist and radical ideas or, put differently, render radical insights in a language that makes clear what they really are, namely, the most realistic orientations these days. 4. Wilson 2006. 5. Meyer 2006. 6. Kolbert 2006. Realism in International Relations has always enjoyed a step-up from other schools

of thought insofar as it proclaims itself immune from starry-eyed utopianism. By claiming to be realistic rather than idealistic, it has enjoyed a permanent seat at the table (indeed, it usually sits at the head). By analogy, problem-solving theory in Environmental Studies has likewise won legitimacy and appears particularly attractive as a new environmental day is, arguably, beginning to dawn. It has claimed itself to be the most reasonable and policyrelevant. But, we must ask ourselves, how realistic is problem-solving theory when the numbers of people currently suffering from environmental degradation—either as mortal victims or environmental refugees—are rising and the gathering evidence that global-scale environmental conditions are being tested as never before is becoming increasingly obvious. We must ask ourselves how realistic problem-solving theory is when most of our actions to date pursue only thin elements of environmental protection with little attention to the wider, deeper and longer-term dimensions. In this context, it becomes clear that our notions of realism must shift. And, the obligation to commence such a shift sits squarely on the

shoulders of Environmental Studies scholars. That is, communicating the realistic relevance of environmental critical theory is our

disciplinary responsibility. For too long, environmental critical theory has prided itself on its arcane language. As theoreticians, we have scaled the heights of abstraction as we have been enamored with the intricacies of sophisticated theory-building and philosophical reflection. In so doing, we have often adopted a discourse of high theory and somehow felt obligated to speak in tongues, as it were. Part of this is simply the difficulty of addressing complex issues in ordinary language. But another part has to do with feeling the scholarly obligation to pay our dues to various thinkers, philosophical orientations and so forth. Indeed, some of it comes down to the impulse to sound unqualifiedly scholarly—as if saying something important demands an intellectual artifice that only the best and brightest can understand. Such practice does little to shift the boundary between problemsolving and critical theory, as it renders critical theory incommunicative to all but the narrowest of audiences. In some ways, the key insights of environmentalism are now in place. We recognize the basic dynamic of trying to live ecologically responsible lives. We know, for example, that Homo sapiens cannot populate the earth indefinitely; we understand that our insatiable appetite for resources cannot be given full reign; we know that the earth has a limit to how much waste it can absorb and neutralize. We also understand that our economic, social and political systems are ill-fitted to respect this knowledge and thus, as social thinkers, we must research and prescribe ways of altering the contemporary world order. While we, as environmental scholars, take these truths to be essentially self-evident, it is clear that many do not. As default critical theorists, we thus need to make our job one of meaningful communicators.We need to find metaphors, analogies, poetic expressions and a host of other discursive techniques for communicating the very real and present dangers of environmental

degradation. We need to do this especially in these challenging and shadowy times. Resuscitating and refining critical Environmental Studies is not simply a matter of cleaning up our language. It is also about rendering a meaningful relationship between transformational, structural analysis and reformist, policy prescription. Yes, a realistic environmental agenda must understand itself as one step removed from the day-to-day incrementalism of problem-solving theory. It must retain its ability to step back from contemporary events and analyze the structures of power at work. It must, in other words, preserve its critical edge.

Nonetheless, it also must take some responsibility for fashioning a bridge to contemporary policy initiatives. It must analyze how to embed practical, contemporary policy proposals (associated with, for

example, a cap-and-trade system) into transformative, political scenarios.Contemporary policies, while inadequate themselves to engage the magnitude of environmental challenges, can nevertheless be guided in a range of various directions. Critical Environmental Studies can play a “critical” role by interpreting such policies in ways that render them consonant with longer-range transformative practices or at least explain how such policies can be reformulated to address the root causes of environmental harm. This entails radicalizing incrementalism—specifying the relationship between superstructural policy reforms and structural political transformation

Democracy Democratic Countries go to war more often than non-democratic countries

Mueller ’04 (Harald Mueller, Director at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Co-chair of the Working Group on Peace and Conflict Research of the German Foreign Office; vice-president of the EU Consortium for Non-Proliferation; professor at the Goethe University Frankfurt, 2004, The Antinomy of Democratic Peace)

Research on the ‘democratic peace’ has neglected the fact that democracies fight wars that no one else would, particularly to preserve international law and to prevent human disasters and large-scale violations of human rights. What is more, data on average probabilities of democratic war involvement have obscured that there have been vast differences in democracies’ use of military force. This article demonstrates that the causal mechanisms of established approaches to the democratic peace do not preclude democracies’ involvement in war. Most importantly, the ambivalence of the Kantian tradition allows for two competing logics of appropriateness that can be used to construct two ideal types: whereas, militant democracies conceive of their entire relation to non-democracies as antagonistic, and frequently fight wars to de-throne dictators, pacifist democracies believe in a modus vivendi with autocracies and try to assist their transformation into democracies. International Politics(2004)41,494–520. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800089 The still prevailing opinion on ‘democratic peace’ has endorsed the ‘double finding’: that democracies keep peace with each other while being as warlike as any other kind of state. Growing evidence, however, indicates more peaceful behaviour by democracies (Rousseauet al., 1996; Gleditsch and Hegre, 1997, 295; Geis, 2001;Russett and Oneal, 2001; Schultz, 2001, 137; Huth and Allee, 2002b; MacMillan,2003; Hasenclever, 2003). Still, scarce attention has been devoted to the fact that democracies, notably after the end of the great geopolitical contest with the ‘evil empire’, have tended to initiate and fight wars no one else would — either to preserve international law and the national sovereignty of states with which they are not allied against aggression, as in the Gulf war of 1991;1to bring food to people against the armed resistance of warlords, as in Somalia in 1993; to terminate massive breaches of human rights as in Bosnia 1995 or Kosovo 1999; to prop up failed states as in Sierra Leone in 2002; or to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, democratize forcefully an erstwhile dictatorship, and

reshape the strategic face of a region torn by repressive regimes and continuing violence as in Iraq in 2003. Democratic peace theory has to account for this inclination to fight ‘democratic wars’. Once the focus is on this issue, another, extremely important fact comes to light that has been concealed by the data showing average probabilities of democratic war involvement: that the military engagement of democracies in armed conflict is distributed very unevenly. The bifurcation of democratic policies towards war and peace is most tangible in the high

variation of democracies’ propensity to participate in violent disputes. Figure 1 shows the descriptive statistics for the militarized disputes involving the use of force of those 22 states between 1950 and 2001 that have been consistently democratic at a level of 7 and higher on the

combined autocracy/democracy scale of Polity IV.2The data show an extremely unequal distribution of involvement in militarized disputes that has been obscured almost completely in the majority of statistical studies on democracy and war. Of the 283discrete involvements by these stable democracies, 75.6% of these were carried out by just four countries (19% of the whole group): Israel, the United States, India, and the United Kingdom. The argument that smaller states have little chance to get involved cannot be taken seriously in the age of coalition warfare which makes military involvement particularly easy for democracies with close security relationships, even without power projection capacities of their own. Since World War II at the latest, major armed conflicts have been fought by at times large coalition

Islamic Nations will never have a democracy – The ages-old Sunni-Shiite dispute means that there is a firm divide between parties, and there will never be a real and equal democracy.

All it takes is one non-democracy to disrupt all prospects for democratic peace

Mearsheimer 3John, Professor of Political Science @ U Chicago, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Google Book

Another reason to doubt democratic peace theory is the problem of backsliding. No democracy can be sure that another democracy will not someday become an authoritarian state, in which case the reaming democracy would no longer be safe and secure. Prudence dicatats that democracies prepare for that eventuality, which means striving to have as much

power as possible just in case a friendly neighbor turns into the neighborhood bully. But even if one rejects these criticisms and embraces democratic peace theory, it is still unlikely that all the great powers in the system will become democratic and stay that way over the long term. It would only take a non-democratic China or Russia to keep power politics in play, and both of these states are likely to be non-democratic for at least part of the twenty first century. Social constructivists provide another perspective on how to create a world

of states with benign intentions that are readily recognizable by other states. They maintain that the way states behave toward eachother is not a function of how the material world is structured – as realists argue—but instead is largely determined by how individuals think and talk about international plitics. This perspective is nicely captured by Alexander Wendt’s famouns claim that “anarchy is what states make of it.” Discourse, in short, is the motor that drives international politics. But unfortunately, say social constructivists, reaslim has been the dominantdiscourse for at least the past seven centuries, and realism tells states to distrust other states and to take advantage of them whenever possible. What is needed to create a more peaceful world is a replacement discourse that emphasizes trust and cooperation among states, rather than suspicion and hostility.

Solvency Reforms fail – the NSA will circumvent

Greenwald 14 (Glenn, lawyer, journalist and author – he founded the Intercept and has contributed to Salon and the Guardian, named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013, “CONGRESS IS IRRELEVANT ON MASS SURVEILLANCE. HERE’S WHAT MATTERS INSTEAD”, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/19/irrelevance-u-s-congress-stopping-nsas-mass-surveillance/)

All of that illustrates what is, to me, the most important point from all of this: the last place one should look to impose limits on the powers of the U.S. government is . . . the U.S. government. Governments don’t walk around trying to figure out how to limit their own power, and that’s particularly true of empires.

The entire system in D.C. is designed at its core to prevent real reform . This Congress is not going to enact anything resembling fundamental

limits on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance. Even if it somehow did, this White House would never sign it. Even if all that miraculously happened, the fact that the U.S. intelligence community and National Security State operates with no limits and no oversight means they’d easily co- opt the entire reform process . That’s what happened after the eavesdropping scandals of the mid-1970s led to the establishment of congressional intelligence

committees and a special FISA “oversight” court—the committees were instantly captured by putting in charge supreme servants of the intelligence community like Senators

Dianne Feinstein and Chambliss, and Congressmen Mike Rogers and “Dutch” Ruppersberger, while the court quickly became a rubber stamp with subservient judges who operate in total secrecy. Ever since the Snowden reporting began and public opinion (in both the U.S. and globally) began radically changing, the White House’s strategy has been obvious. It’s vintage Obama: Enact something that is called “reform ”—so that he can

give a pretty speech telling the world that he heard and responded to their concerns—but that in actuality changes almost nothing , thus strengthening the very system he can pretend he “changed.” That’s the same tactic as Silicon Valley, which also supported this bill: Be able to point to something

called “reform” so they can trick hundreds of millions of current and future users around the world into believing that their communications are now safe if they use Facebook, Google, Skype and the rest. In pretty much every interview I’ve done over the last year, I’ve been asked why there haven’t been significant changes from all the disclosures. I vehemently disagree with the

premise of the question, which equates “U.S. legislative changes” with “meaningful changes.” But it has been clear from the start that U.S. legislation is not going to impose meaningful limitations on the NSA’s powers of mass surveillance, at least not fundamentally.

T/Framework

T

T – Domestic Surveillance A. Interpretation – Domestic surveillance is info gathering on US persons

IT Law Wiki 15 IT Law Wiki 2015 http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Domestic_surveillanceDefinition EditDomestic surveillance is the acquisition of nonpublic information concerning United States persons.

B. Violation – Surveillance of foreign agents is not domestic surveillance, even if in the US

McCarthy 6 Andrew C. McCarthy former assistant U.S. attorney, now contributing editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. May 15, 2006 National Review It’s Not “Domestic Spying”; It’s Foreign Intelligence Collection http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/122556/its-not-domestic-spying-its-foreign-intelligence-collection-andrew-c-mccarthy

Eggen also continues the mainstream media’s propagandistic use of the term “domestic surveillance [or 'spying'] program.” In actuality, the electronic surveillance that the NSA is doing — i.e., eavesdropping on content of conversations — is not “domestic.” A call is not considered “domestic” just because one party to it happens to be inside the U.S., just as an investigation is not “domestic” just because some of the subjects of interest happen to reside inside our country. Mohammed Atta was an agent of a foreign power, al Qaeda. Surveilling him — had we done it — would not have been “domestic spying.” The calls NSA eavesdrops on are “international,” not “domestic.” If that were not plain enough on its face, the Supreme Court made it explicit in the Keith case (1972). There, even though it held that judicial warrants were required for wiretapping purely domestic terror organizations, the Court excluded investigations of threats posed by foreign organizations and their agents operating both within and without the U.S. That is, the Court understood what most Americans understand but what the media, civil libertarians and many members of Congress refuse to acknowledge: if we are investigating the activities of agents of foreign powers inside the United States, that is not DOMESTIC surveillance. It is FOREIGN counter-intelligence.That, in part, is why the statute regulating wiretaps on foreign powers operating within the U.S. — the one the media has suddenly decided it loves after bad-mouthing it for years as a rubber-stamp — is called the FOREIGN Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The United States has never needed court permission to conduct wiretapping outside U.S. territory; the wiretapping it does inside U.S. territory for national security purposes is FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION, not “domestic surveillance.”

C. Standards

1. Limits – justifies the inclusion of the people of more than 200 other countries—explodes the topic and destroys research and predictability

2. Ground – there is a huge difference in the literature between US persons and non-US persons—robs all predictable ground

D. Reasonability is arbitrary, prefer competing interps. Depth over breadth, that’s key to detailed debates and sufficient neg ground.

T is a voter for Fairness and Education

T – Curtail A – Interpretation: Curtail means reduce or limit

Merriam-Webster 15 © 2015 Merriam-Webster, Incorporated http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/curtail

Curtail verb cur·tail \(ˌ)kər-ˈtāl\: to reduce or limit (something)Full Definition of CURTAILtransitive verb: to make less by or as if by cutting off or away some part <curtail the power of the executive branch> <curtail inflation>

B – Violation: Curtail does not mean eliminate

Simons 94 OPINION BY: SIMONS, J. RUSSELL J. NOTIDES, Plaintiff and Appellant, v. WESTINGHOUSE CREDIT CORPORATION et al., Defendants and Respondents. No. A062773. COURT OF APPEAL OF CALIFORNIA, FIRST APPELLATE DISTRICT, DIVISION TWO 40 Cal. App. 4th 148; 37 Cal. Rptr. 2d 585; 1994 Cal. App. LEXIS 1321 December 12, 1994, Decided lexis

Appellant suggests that Jenkins knew that the problem would be handled by curtailing new deals, not simply being selective. In his deposition he stated that "the step of curtailing new business is a logical one to take." Appellant seems to misunderstand the word "curtail" to mean "eliminate." Even if Jenkins made the same error, he said that this decision to curtail was not made until the Fall of 1990, several months after the hiring and shortly before Notides was informed of the decision. C. Standards

1. Limits – Limits are necessary for negative preparation and clash, and their interpretation makes the topic too big. Permitting limits on methods of surveillance, but not surveillance itself, permits the affirmative to avoid the issues of less surveillance and forces the negative to debate a huge number of different techniques

2. Ground – there is a huge difference in the literature between reducing and completely eliminating—robs all predictable ground

D. Reasonability is arbitrary, prefer competing interps. Depth over breadth, that’s key to detailed debates and sufficient neg ground.

T is a voter for Fairness and Education

CP’s/CA’s

Terror list CP Counterplan: The United States Federal Government should end the War on

Terror by substantially curtailing its surveillance of all suspected terrorists except those on the FBI’s most wanted Terrorists List.

Terrorist Groups are extremely weak after the death of a leader – Bin Laden proves

John Maraia, USIP's Army Fellow, Col. John Maraia, 5-2-2011, "The Impact of Osama bin Laden's Death on al-Qaida," United States Institute of Peace, http://www.usip.org/publications/the-impact-osama-bin-ladens-death-al-qaida

Bin Laden’s death will obviously be a blow to their organization and they will need to replace his leadership. I would expect al-Qaida to have planned for this possibility and that it would have a procedure in place for a subordinate to quickly assume the leadership role. However, that may not be a smooth process and a new leader may not be as universally accepted within the ranks as bin Laden apparently was. Any friction in the succession process will limit al-Qaida’s effectiveness and potentially expose them to counter-terrorism efforts. Bin Laden’s death will impact Islamic extremism, but it won’t cause those who espouse extremism to suddenly change their minds. Those who were committed to violence yesterday remain committed to violence today.

Courts CP Counterplan: The Supreme Court should end the War on Terror by substantially

curtailing its surveillance of all suspected terrorists.

NB: PTX Congress link

Supreme Court

CP

K’s

K of Ignoring White Terrorist(make it a pik or pair w/ countergazing alt)

Their 1AC ignores the domestic terrorism that routinely takes place in the form of white supremacy – recreates the whiteness implicit in the western definition of terrorism and masks over anti-black violence

King 15 (Shaun, “Why we Must Call Dylan Roof a Terrorist” http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/18/1394297/-Why-we-must-call-Dylann-Roof-a-terrorist)

What is terrorism if it is not peaceful people worshipping their God who are shot and killed by a gunman they openly allowed into their church? Dylann Roof, who is now the primary suspect in the Charleston, South Carolina, massacre of nine women and men in the historic Emmanuel AME Church is a terrorist. Call it domestic terrorism if you must, but this man is a terrorist and what he did, pure and simple, was terrorism. He knowingly and willfully targeted a church full of African American men and women not because he knew them—all indications are that he didn't, but because he wanted to send a message and strike terror into people. This is not a guess. Read this description from someone who was there. He left a witness living so she could tell everyone what happened. Church members at Emanuel AME were gathered for a prayer meeting when gunfire erupted in the 19th century building. A female survivor told family members that the gunman initially sat down in the church for a while before standing up and opening fire, according to Dot Scott, president of the Charleston NAACP. The gunman reportedly told the woman that he was letting her live so she could tell everyone else what happened, Scott said. Mullen confirmed that the shooter was in the church for almost an hour attending the prayer meeting with the group before shooting. African American churches across the United States will be on high alert not only this weekend, but for the foreseeable future. The actions of this man caused this terror to have ripple effects far beyond Charleston. Don't call this a tragedy. A mudslide or an earthquake is tragic. An accidental house fire is tragic. Those things don't cause people 11 states over to have genuine fear. If a house burns down in Iowa, homeowners in Florida aren't scared shitless the next day. If a mudslide happens in Santa Barbara, homeowners in Montana aren't worried to death it will happen to them next. This is terrorism. Don't call this the act of a madman. It is an insult to those battling mental illness and it is also a degree of deference you never saw given to men like Osama Bin Laden. This was a well-planned, well-conceived attack. The murderer didn't stumble upon this church in some type of manic accident. It was strategic. Dylann Roof is a racist and his actions were driven by his racism. On his jacket, in the picture above, are patches from the racist regimes of apartheid South Africa and colonial Rhodesia. This means he had a philosophy, a worldview, which celebrated the brute force and violence used against Africans on the continent. Could it be that America, with its deeply troubling racist past, is refusing to call Dylann Roof a terrorist because it would then mean that so many other people in our history who inflicted such pain would also have to fit the bill? Are we saying that terrorists can't be white? Are we saying that terrorists can't be American? Must they be brown? Must be Muslims? Of course not. This is terrorism. Calling it anything less is an insult to the victims of this massacre.

As the aff calls for a decrease in surveillance of white terrorists, justifying the murder of black people and destruction of black religious sites, they ignore the unwarranted, unjust surveillance of Black and Brown people used by local police departments to further structural racism and criminalize people of color.

Malkia Amala Cyril, 4-1-2015, "Black America's State of Surveillance," The Progressive Inc., http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance

Ten years ago, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, my mother, a former Black Panther, died from complications of sickle cell anemia. Weeks before she died, the FBI came knocking at our door, demanding that my mother testify in a secret trial proceeding against other former Panthers or face arrest. My mother, unable to walk, refused. The detectives told my mother as they left that they would be watching her. They didn’t get to do that. My mother died just two weeks later. My mother was not the only black person to come under the watchful eye of American law enforcement for perceived and actual dissidence. Nor is dissidence always a requirement for being subject to spying. Files obtained during a break-in at an FBI office in 1971 revealed that African Americans, J. Edger Hoover’s largest target group, didn’t have to be perceived as dissident to warrant surveillance. They just had to be black. As I write this, the same philosophy is driving the increasing adoption and use of surveillance technologies by local law enforcement agencies across the United States. Today, media reporting on government surveillance is laser-focused on the revelations by Edward Snowden that millions of Americans were being spied on by the NSA. Yet my mother’s visit from the FBI reminds me that, from the slave pass system to laws that deputized white civilians as enforcers of Jim Crow, black people and other people of color have lived for centuries with surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a racial hierarchy. It’s time for journalists to tell a new story that does not start the clock when privileged classes learn they are targets of surveillance. We need to understand that data has historically been overused to repress dissidence, monitor perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an impoverished underclass. In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and secrecy of data collection. Thanks to new surveillance technologies, law enforcement agencies are now able to collect massive amounts of indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not caught up to this technological advance. Concerned advocates see mass surveillance as the problem and protecting privacy as the goal. Targeted surveillance is an obvious answer—it may be discriminatory, but it helps protect the privacy perceived as an earned privilege of the inherently innocent. The trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not involved in any crime. For targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of privacy from government or corporate surveillance. Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect us. Instead, we’ve birthed a complex and coded culture—from jazz to spoken dialects—in order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built environment as the streets covered in our blood. In a recent address, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear: “2015 will be one of the most significant years in the history of this organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally will give to every member of this department technology that would’ve been unheard of even a few years ago.” Predictive policing, also known as “Total Information Awareness,” is described as using advanced technological tools and data analysis to “preempt” crime. It utilizes trends, patterns, sequences, and affinities found in data to

make determinations about when and where crimes will occur. This model is deceptive, however, because it presumes data inputs to be neutral. They aren’t. In a racially discriminatory criminal justice system, surveillance technologies reproduce injustice. Instead of reducing discrimination, predictive policing is a face of what author Michelle Alexander calls the “New Jim Crow”—a de facto system of separate and unequal application of laws, police practices, conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that operate more as a system of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime prevention or punishment. In New York City, the predictive policing approach in use is “Broken Windows.” This approach to policing places an undue focus on quality of life crimes—like selling loose cigarettes, the kind of offense for which Eric Garner was choked to death. Without oversight, accountability, transparency, or rights, predictive policing is just high-tech racial profiling—indiscriminate data collection that drives discriminatory policing practices. As local law enforcement agencies increasingly adopt surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen in on specific conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements of individuals and groups; and to observe data trends. Police departments like Bratton’s aim to use sophisticated technologies to do all three. They will use technologies like license plate readers, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be disproportionately used in communities of color and communities in the process of being gentrified. They will use facial recognition, biometric scanning software, which the FBI has now rolled out as a national system, to be adopted by local police departments for any criminal justice purpose. They intend to use body and dashboard cameras, which have been touted as an effective step toward accountability based on the results of one study, yet storage and archiving procedures, among many other issues, remain unclear. They will use Stingray cellphone interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray technology is an invasive cellphone surveillance device that mimics cellphone towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into transmitting their locations and identifying information. When used to track a suspect’s cellphone, they also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby. The same is true of domestic drones, which are in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to conduct routine aerial surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are considering arming these remote-controlled aircraft with weapons like rubber bullets, tasers, and tear gas. They will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase interagency collaboration for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the intelligence community. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on record. They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used “suspicious activity reports”—described as “official documentation of observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity.” These reports and other collected data are often stored in massive databases like e-Verify and Prism. As anybody who’s ever dealt with gang databases knows, it’s almost impossible to get off a federal or state database, even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true. Predictive policing doesn’t just lead to racial and religious profiling—it relies on it. Just as stop and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of color, almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime, suspicious activities reporting and the dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities of color. One review of such reports collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color. This is the future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of power. One of the most terrifying aspects of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of those it disproportionately

impacts. The NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement agencies and electronic surveillance technologies to spy on Muslims living in the United States. According to FBI training materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat “mainstream” Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by Muslims as “a funding mechanism for combat,” and to view Islam itself as a “Death Star” that must be destroyed if terrorism is to be contained. From New York City to Chicago and beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded unlawful and covert racial and religious profiling against Muslims not suspected of any crime. There is no national security reason to profile all Muslims. At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities throughout the United States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and the elderly. Undocumented migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal policing practices, including illegal surveillance practices. According to the Sentencing Project, of the more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States, more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities. But by far, the widest net is cast over black communities. Black people alone represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More black men are incarcerated than were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest some misinterpret that statistic as evidence of greater criminality, a 2012 study confirms that black defendants are at least 30 percent more likely to be imprisoned than whites for the same crime. This is not a broken system, it is a system working perfectly as intended, to the detriment of all. The NSA could not have spied on millions of cellphones if it were not already spying on black people, Muslims, and migrants. As surveillance technologies are increasingly adopted and integrated by law enforcement agencies today, racial disparities are being made invisible by a media environment that has failed to tell the story of surveillance in the context of structural racism. Reporters love to tell the technology story. For some, it’s a sexier read. To me, freedom from repression and racism is far sexier than the newest gadget used to reinforce racial hierarchy. As civil rights protections catch up with the technological terrain, reporting needs to catch up, too. Many journalists still focus their reporting on the technological trends and not the racial hierarchies that these trends are enforcing. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.” Journalists have an obligation to tell the stories that are hidden from view. We are living in an incredible time, when migrant activists have blocked deportation buses, and a movement for black lives has emerged, and when women, queer, and trans experiences have been placed right at the center. The decentralized power of the Internet makes that possible. But the Internet also makes possible the high-tech surveillance that threatens to drive structural racism in the twenty-first century. We can help black lives matter by ensuring that technology is not used to cement a racial hierarchy that leaves too many people like me dead or in jail. Our communities need partners, not gatekeepers. Together, we can change the cultural terrain that makes killing black people routine. We can counter inequality by ensuring that both the technology and the police departments that use it are democratized. We can change the story on surveillance to raise the voices of those who have been left out. There are no voiceless people, only those that ain’t been heard yet. Let’s birth a new norm in which the technological tools of the twenty-first century create equity and justice for all—so all bodies enjoy full and equal protection, and the Jim Crow surveillance state exists no more.

Anti-black terror at the hand of white supremacist groups is THE biggest threat to U.S. national security. It did not end with the Jim Crow South, but as we have seen in Charleston, is an ongoing concern.

Julia Craven, 6-24-2015, "White Supremacists More Dangerous Than Foreign Terrorists: Study," Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/24/domestic-terrorism-charleston_n_7654720.html

Nine people were added to a long list of lives taken by domestic terrorism when Dylann Roof allegedly began shooting inside a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17. At least 48 people have been killed stateside by right-wing extremists in the 14 years since since the September 11 attacks -- almost twice as many as were killed by self-identified jihadists in that time, according to a study released Wednesday by the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C., research center. The study found that radical anti-government groups or white supremacists were responsible for most of the terror attacks. The data counters many conventional thoughts on what terrorism is and isn’t. Since Sept. 11, many Americans attribute terror attacks to Islamic extremists instead of those in the right wing. But the numbers don't back up this popular conception, said Charles Kurzman, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kurzman is co-authoring a study with David Schanzer of Duke University, set to be published Thursday, that asks police departments to rank the three biggest threats from violent extremism in their jurisdiction. Law enforcement agencies reported they were more concerned about the activities of right-wing extremist groups than Islamic extremists in their jurisdictions (about 74 percent versus 39 percent) due to the "menacing" rhetoric used by some of these groups -- and that they were training officers to take caution when they saw signs of potentially violent individuals, Kurzman and Schanzer found. "Muslim extremism was taken seriously in many of these jurisdictions that we surveyed… but overall, they did not see as much of an issue with Muslim extremism as with right-wing extremism in their locations," Kurzman told The Huffington Post. He added that it's hard to get a definitive statistical picture of plots and acts of violent extremism since that definition tends to vary and data for incidents nationwide is hard to come by. The accused Charleston shooter is currently being investigated under domestic terrorism charges by the Department of Justice -- a move that acknowledges the long history of anti-black terrorist attacks. America’s first federal anti-terrorism law, known as the Third Force Act or the Ku Klux Klan Act, which was passed by Congress in 1871, caused nine counties in South Carolina to be placed under martial law and led to thousands of arrests. The Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional in 1882. David Pilgrim, the founder and director of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University, told HuffPost in February that the actions of foreign extremist groups are no better or worse than the historic violence against African-Americans by domestic actors. "There's nothing you're going to see today that's not going to have already occurred in the U.S.," he said. "If you think of these groups that behead now -- first of all, beheading is barbaric but it's no more or less barbaric than some of the lynchings that occurred in the U.S." Pilgrim said he found it offensive that, after Sept. 11, some Americans bemoaned that terrorism had finally breached U.S. borders. "That is ignoring and trivializing -- if not just summarily dismissing -- all the people, especially the peoples of color in this country, who were lynched in this country; who had their homes bombed in this country; who were victims of race riots," he said evoking lynching victims who were often burned, castrated, shot, stabbed -- and in some cases beheaded. And while most officially

acknowledged anti-black terrorism cases occurred during the eras of slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, as recent news demonstrate, this type of terrorism is still an ongoing concern.

The Undercommons

Link - Pain Narratives Research is used to commodify pain narratives and damage representations to

reproduce oppression with the justification of the academy

Tuck and Yang 14 [Eve, & K.W., 2014, “R-Words: Refusing Research.” In n D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuck-and-Yang-R-Words_Refusing-Research.pdf]

Urban communities, and other disenfranchised communities. Damage-centered researchers may operate, even benevolently, within a theory of change in which harm must be recorded or proven in order to convince an outside adjudicator that reparations are deserved. These reparations presumably take the form of additional resources,

settlements, affirmative actions, and other material, political, and sovereign adjustments. Eve has described this theory of change as both colonial and flawed, because it relies upon Western notions of power as scarce and concentrated, and because it requires disenfranchised communities to posi-tion themselves as both singularly defective and powerless to make change (2010). Finally, Eve has observed that “won” reparations rarely become reality, and that in many cases, communities are left with a narrative that tells them that they are broken.Similarly, at the center of the analysis in this chapter is a concern with the fixation social science research has exhibited in eliciting

pain stories from com-munities that are not White, not wealthy, and not straight. Academe’s demon-strated fascination with telling and retelling narratives of pain is troubling, both for its voyeurism and for its consumptive implacability. Imagining “itself to be a voice, and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonised” (Simpson, 2007, p. 67, emphasis in the original) is not just a rare historical occurrence in anthropology and related fields. We observe that much of the work of the academy is to reproduce stories of oppression in its own voice . At first, this may read as an intolerant condemnation of the academy, one that refuses to forgive past blunders and see how things have changed in recent decades. However, it is our view that while many individual scholars have cho-sen to pursue other lines of inquiry than the pain narratives typical of their disciplines, novice researchers emerge from doctoral programs eager to launch pain-based inquiry projects because they believe that such approaches embody what it means to do social science. The collection of pain narratives and the theories of change that champion the value of such narratives are so prevalent in the social sciences that one might surmise that they are indeed what the academy is about. In her examination of the symbolic violence of the academy, bell hooks (1990) portrays the core message from the academy to those on

the margins as thus: No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk. (p. 343) Hooks’s words resonate with our observation of how much of social science research is concerned with providing recognition to the presumed voiceless, a recognition that is enamored with knowing through pain. Further, this passage describes the ways in which the researcher’s voice is constituted by, legitimated by, animated by the voices on the margins. The researcher-self is made anew by telling back the story of the marginalized/subaltern subject. Hooks works to untangle the almost imperceptible differences between forces that silence and forces that seemingly liberate by inviting those on the margins to speak, to tell their stories. Yet the forces that invite those on the margins to speak also say, “Do not speak in a voice of resistance. Only speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound, an unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain” (hooks, 1990, p. 343).

Research is used to commodify pain narratives- a refusal to enagage in research is necessary

Tuck and Yang 14 [Eve, & K.W., 2014, “R-Words: Refusing Research.” In n D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities https://faculty.newpaltz.edu/evetuck/files/2013/12/Tuck-and-Yang-R-Words_Refusing-Research.pdf]

Research is a dirty word among many Native communities (Tuhiwai Smith,1999), and arguably, also among ghettoized (Kelley,

1997), Orientalized(Said, 1978), and other communities of overstudied Others. The ethicalstandards of the academic industrial complex are a recent development, and likeso many post–civil rights reforms, do not always do enough to ensure that socialscience research is

deeply ethical, meaningful, or useful for the individual or com-munity being researched. Social science often works to collect stories of pain andhumiliation in the lives of those being researched for commodification. However,these same stories of pain and humiliation are part of the collective wisdom thatoften informs the writings of researchers who attempt to position their intellectualwork as decolonization. Indeed, to refute the crime, we may

need to name it. Howdo we learn from and respect the wisdom and desires in the stories that we (over)hear, while refusing to portray/betray them to the spectacle of the settler colonialgaze? How do we develop an ethics for research that differentiates between power—which deserves a denuding, indeed petrifying scrutiny—and people? Atthe same time, as fraught as research is in its complicity with power, it is one ofthe last places for legitimated inquiry. It is at least still a space that proclaims tocare about curiosity. In this essay, we theorize refusal not just as a “no,” but as atype of

investigation into “what you need to know and what I refuse to write in”(Simpson, 2007, p. 72). Therefore, we present a refusal to do research, or a refusalwithin research, as a way of thinking about humanizing researchers. We have organized this chapter into four portions. In the first three sections,we lay out three axioms of social science research. Following the work of EveKosofsky Sedgwick (1990), we use the exposition of these axioms to articulateotherwise implicit, methodological, definitional, self-evident groundings (p. 12)of our arguments and observations of refusal. The axioms are: (I) The subalterncan speak, but is only invited to speak her/our pain; (II) there are some forms of knowledge that the academy doesn’t deserve; and (III) research may not be theintervention that is needed. We realize that these axioms may not appear self-evident to everyone, yet asserting them as apparent allows us to proceed towardthe often unquestioned limits of research. Indeed, “in dealing with an open-secret structure, it’s only by being shameless about risking the obvious that wehappen into the vicinity of the transformative” (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 22). In thefourth section of the chapter, we theorize refusal in earnest, exploring ideas thatare still forming.Our thinking and writing in this essay is informed by our readings of postco-lonial literatures and critical literatures on settler colonialism. We locate much ofour analysis inside/in relation to the discourse of settler colonialism, the particu-lar shape of colonial domination in the United States and elsewhere, includingCanada, New Zealand, and Australia. Settler colonialism can be differentiatedfrom what one might call exogenous colonialism in that the colonizers arrive at a place (“discovering” it) and make it a permanent home (claiming it). The perma-nence of settler colonialism makes it a structure, not just an event (Wolfe, 1999).The settler colonial nation-state is dependent on destroying and erasingIndigenous inhabitants in order to clear them from valuable land. The settlercolonial structure also requires the enslavement and labor of bodies that have been stolen from their homelands and transported in order to labor the land stolenfrom Indigenous people. Settler colonialism refers to a triad relationship, betweenthe White settler (who is valued for his leadership and innovative mind), the dis-appeared Indigenous peoples (whose land is valued, so they and their claims to itmust be extinguished), and the chattel slaves (whose bodies are valuable butownable, abusable, and murderable). We believe that this triad is the basis of theformation of Whiteness in settler colonial nation-states, and that the interplay oferasure, bodies, land, and violence is characteristic of the permanence of settlercolonial structures.Under coloniality, Descartes’ formulation, cognito ergo sum (“I think, thereforeI am”) transforms into ego conquiro (“I conquer, therefore I am”; Dussel, 1985;Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Ndlvou-Gatsheni, 2011). Nelson Maldonado-Torres(2009) expounds on this relationship of the conqueror’s

sense-of-self to hisknowledge-of-others (“I know her, therefore I am me”). Knowledge of self/Others became the philosophical justification for the acquisition of bodies and territo-ries, and the rule over them. Thus the right to conquer is intimately connected tothe right to know (“I know, therefore I conquer, therefore I am”). Maldonado-Torres (2009) explains that for Levi Strauss, the self/Other knowledge paradigmis the methodological rule for the birth of ethnology as a science (pp. 3–4). Settler colonial knowledge is premised on frontiers; conquest, then, is an exerciseof the felt entitlement to transgress these limits. Refusal, and stances of refusal inresearch, are attempts to place limits on conquest and the colonization of knowl-edge by marking what is off limits, what is not up for grabs or discussion, what issacred, and what can’t be known. To speak of limits in such a way

makes some liberal thinkers uncomfortable, andmay, to them, seem dangerous. When access to information, to knowledge, to theintellectual commons is controlled by the people who generate that information[participants in a research study], it can be seen as a violation of shared standards of justice and truth. (Simpson, 2007, p. 74) By forwarding a framework of refusal within (and to) research in this chapter, weare not simply prescribing limits to social science research. We are making visibleinvisibilized limits, containments, and seizures that research already stakes out.

Link - Overcoming The attempt to overcome the conditions of modernity, the founding original

violences which constitutes our current epistemologies is the logic of settler colonialism. It operates on a fetishization of woundedness.

Tuck and Yang 14 [Eve, & K.W., 2014, “R-Words: Refusing Research.” In n D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.) Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 223-248). Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications. Pp. 228-9]

As numerous scholars have denoted, many social science disciplines emerged from the need to provide justifications for social hierarchies

undergirded by White supremacy and manifest destiny (see also Gould, 1981; Selden, 1999; Tuck & Guishard, forthcoming). Wolfe (1999) has

explored how the contoured logic of settler colonialism (p. 5) can be mapped onto the microactivities of anthropology; Guthrie (1976) traces

the roots of psychology to the need to “scientifically” prove the supremacy of the White mind. The origins of many social science

disciplines in maintaining logics of domination, while sometimes addressed in graduate schools, are regularly thought to be just errant or inauspicious beginnings—much like the ways in which the genocide of Indigenous peoples that afforded the founding of the Unites States has been reduced to an unfortunate byproduct of the birthing of a new and great nation. Such amnesia is required in settler colonial societies, argues Lorenzo Veracini,

because settler colonialism is “characterized by a persistent drive to supersede the conditions of its operation,” (2011, p. 3); that is, to make itself invisible, natural, without origin (and without end), and inevitable.

Social science disciplines have inherited the persistent drive to supersede the conditions of their operations from settler colonial logic, and it is this drive, a kind of unquestioning push forward, and not the origins of the disciplines that we

attend to now. We are struck by the pervasive silence on questions regarding the contemporary rationale(s) for social science research. Though a variety of ethical and procedural protocols require researchers to compose statements regarding the objectives or purposes of a particular project, such protocols do not prompt reflection upon the underlying beliefs about knowledge and change that too often go unexplored or unacknowledged. The rationale for conducting social science research

that collects pain narratives seems to be self-evident for many scholars, but when looked at more closely, the rationales may be unconsidered,

and somewhat flimsy. Like a maritime archaeological site, such rationales might be best examined in situ, for fear of deterioration if extracted.

Why do researchers collect pain narratives? Why does the academy want them? An initial and partial answer is

because settler colonial ideology believes that, in fiction author Sherril Jaffe’s words, “scars make your body more interesting,” (1996, p. 58). Jaffe’s work of short, short of fiction bearing that sentiment as title captures the exquisite crossing of wounds

and curiosity and pleasure. Settler colonial ideology, constituted by its conscription of others, holds the wounded body as more engrossing than the body that is not wounded (though the person with a wounded body does not politically or materially benefit for being more engrossing). In settler colonial logic, pain is more compelling than privilege, scars more enthralling than the body unmarked by experience. In settler colonial ideology, pain is evidence of authenticity, of the verifiability of a lived life.

Academe, formed and informed by settler colonial ideology, has developed the same palate for pain.

Emerging and established social science researchers set out to document the problems faced by communities, and often in doing so, recirculate common tropes of dysfunction, abuse, and neglect.

Link - Inclusion The aff’s politics of inclusion gets coopted by the University

Brown 1996 [Wendy Brown, Prof. Political Science, Prof. Rhetoric, Prof. Critical Theory @ UC-Berkeley, 96, “In the ‘folds of our own discourse’: The Pleasures and Freedoms of Silence,” 3 U. Chi. L. Sch. Roundtable, 189-91]

In her lecture at the Swedish Academy on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison also displaces the conventional

antinomy between silence and language, arguing that certain kinds of language are themselves silencing, capable of violence and killing, as well as "susceptible to death, erasure." A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or

written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than to maintain the free range of its own narcotic

narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect, for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language

smitheried to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor, polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight

departed long ago. 4 While Morrison is concerned in this passage primarily with state languages, with bureaucratic and

'official' languages, any language of regulation, including those originally designed on behalf of our emancipation, has the potential to become "official" in the sense she describes. If silence can function as speech in discourse, can be a function of discourse, and can also function as a resistance to regulatory discourse, such practices of silence are hardly unfettered. The complexities of silence and speech in relation to freedom brings us to the second passage of

Foucault's that I want to consider. It is from his "Two Lectures" on power,"5 and occurs in the context of his discussion of discovering or

"disinterring" subjugated knowledges: .. . is it not perhaps the case that these fragments of genealogies are no

sooner brought to light, that the particular elements of the knowledge that one seeks to disinter are no sooner accredited and put into

circulation, than they run the risk of re-codification, recolonisation? In fact, those unitary discourses, which first disqualified and then ignored them when they made their appearance, are, it seems, quite ready now to annex them, to take them back within the fold of their own discourse and to invest them with everything

this implies in terms of their effects of knowledge and power." Here, Foucault's concern is less with disrupting the conventional modernist equation of power with speech on one side, and oppression with silence on the

other, than with the ways in which insurrectionary discourse borne of exclusion and marginalization can be colonized by that which produced it much as counter-cultural fashion is routinely commodified by the corporate textile industry. While "disqualified" discourses are an effect of domination, they nevertheless potentially function as

oppositional when they are deployed by those who inhabit them. However, when "annexed" by those "unitary" discourses which they

ostensibly oppose, they become a particularly potent source of regulation, carrying as they do intimate and detailed knowledge of their subjects. Thus, Foucault's worry would appear to adhere not simply to the study of but to the overt

political mobilization, of oppositional discourses. Consider the way in which the discourse of multiculturalism has been annexed by mainstream institutions to generate new modalities of essentialized racial discourse;

how "pre-menstrual syndrome" has been rendered a debilitating disease in medical and legal discourses;'7 how "battered women's syndrome" has been deployed in the courtroom to defend women who strike back at their assailants by casting them as sub-rational, egoless victims of

male violence; 8 or how some women's response to some pornography was generalized by the Meese Commission on pornography as the

violence done to all women by all pornography. 9

Impact The University creates social death for the subject represented – Turns the case

Occupied UC Berkeley 09 [“The Necrosocial: Civic Life, Social Death, and the UC. http://anticapitalprojects.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-necrosocial/]

In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories—our force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us. Here we are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians,

faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be. That is, we are students,

or students of color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are

custodians, or we are shift leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given meaning. We form teams, clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subcultures—and thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot. Who doesn’t participate in this graveyard? In the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of separation, which in reality translates to a value of domination. We spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves we’re brighter than everyone else. Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than everyone else. We have measured ourselves and we have measured others. It should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It should never feel terrible to diagnose people as an expert, manage them as a bureaucrat,

test them as a professor, extract value from their capital as a businessman. It should feel good, gratifying, completing. It is our private wet dream for the future; everywhere, in everyone this same dream of domination. After all, we are intelligent, studious, young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve this. We are convinced, owned, broken. We know their values better than they do: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. This triumvirate of sacred values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater—the fight between the university and its own students—we have used their words on their stages:

Save public education! When those values are violated by the very institutions which are created to protect them, the veneer

fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice, we get indignant. We demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their

values. What many have learned again and again is that these institutions don’t care for those values, not at all, not for all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own. The values create popular images and

ideals (healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, public education) while they mean in practice the selling of commodified identities, the state’s monopoly on violence , the expansion of markets and

capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class, and domination and

humiliation in general. They sell the practice through the image. We’re taught we’ll live the images once we accept the practice. In this crisis the Chancellors and Presidents, the Regents and the British Petroleums, the politicians and the managers, they all intend to be true to their values and capitalize on the university economically and socially—which is to say, nothing has changed, it is only an escalation, a

provocation. Their most recent attempt to reorganize wealth and capital is called a crisis so that we are more willing to accept their new terms as well as what was always dead in the university, to see just how dead we are willing to play, how non-existent, how compliant, how desirous.

Refusal Alt We must not attempt to redeem this world but refuse the demand for

redemption, of ourselves or this world. Instead we need to tear shit down. Do not ask what will come next. The world beyond cannot be access except through a refusal to be held hostage to this one.

Halberstam 13 [Jack Halberstam, Prof. English @ USC, 2013, “The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, p. 5-6]

It ends with love, exchange, fellowship. It ends as it begins, in motion, in between various modes of being and belonging, and on the way to new economies of giving, taking, being with and for and it ends with a ride in a Buick Skylark on the way to another place altogether. Surprising, perhaps, after we have engaged dispossession, debt, dislocation and violence. But not surprising when you have understood that the projects of “fugitive planning and black study” are

mostly about reaching out to find connection; they are about making common cause with the brokenness of being, a brokenness, I would venture to say, that is also blackness, that remains blackness, and will , despite all, remain broken because this book is not a prescription for repair. If we do not seek to fix what has been broken, then

what? How do we resolve to live with brokenness , with being broke, which is also what Moten and Harney call

“debt.” Well, given that debt is sometimes a history of giving, at other times a history of taking, at all times a history of capitalism and given

that debt also signifies a promise of ownership but never delivers on that promise, we have to understand that debt is something that cannot be paid off. Debt , as Harney puts it, presumes a kind of individualized relation to a naturalized economy that is predicated upon exploitation. Can we have, he asks, another sense of what is owed that does not presume a nexus of activities like recognition and acknowledgement, payment and gratitude. Can debt “become a principle of elaboration”? Moten links economic debt to the brokenness of being in the interview with

Stevphen Shukaitis; he acknowledges that some debts should be paid, and that much is owed especially to black people by white people, and yet , he says: “I also know that what it is that is supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It can’t be repaired. The only thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something new.” The undercommons do not come to pay their debts, to repair what has been broken, to fix what has come undone. If you want to know what the undercommons wants , what Moten and Harney

want, what black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people want, what we (the “we” who cohabit in the space of the undercommons ) want, it is this – we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that

we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that , right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and

to access the places that we know lie outside its walls. We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet , because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming. What we want after “the break” will be different from what we think we want before the break and both are necessarily different from the desire that issues from being in the break.

Refusal is the first step to the undercommons

Halberstam 13 [Jack Halberstam, Prof. English @ USC, 2013, “The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, p. 8]

The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal. In The Undercommons if we begin anywhere, we begin with the right to refuse what has been refused to you. Citing Gayatri Spivak, Moten and Harney call this refusal the “first

right” and it is a game-changing kind of refusal in that it signals the refusal of the choices as offered. We can

understand this refusal in terms that Chandan Reddy lays out in Freedom With Violence (2011) – for Reddy, gay marriage is the option that cannot be opposed in the ballot box. While we can circulate multiple critiques of gay marriage in

terms of its institutionalization of intimacy, when you arrive at the ballot box, pen in hand, you only get to check “yes” or “no” and the no, in this case, could be more damning than the yes. And so, you must refuse the choice as offered.

Baudrillard

Link - Cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism is the formation of the viral Other, the final amassing of difference into one huge melting pot. This inevitably recreates racism in a more viral form.

*could also be answer to permutation (see proper use of otherness section)

Grace 2000—Senior Lecturer in Feminist Studies @ University of Canterbury at Christchurch (Victoria, 2000, Routledge, “Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading,” http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100724/20100724151252877.pdf, rmf)

As the biological bases of racism are exposed as pure fallacy in theoretical and genetic terms, and as the principles of democracy have advanced since the Enlightenment, racism should have declined. Logically, as Baudrillard claims in his book The Perfect Crime (PC), this should have been the case, yet he observes that as cultures become increasingly hybrid, racism actually grows stronger (PC: 131– 2). He analyses this contra-indication in terms of the increasing fetishisation of difference and the loss of the encounter with the Other , and in the erosion of the singularity of cultures qua increasing simulation of differentiation. The ‘relation’ within the order of ‘cultural difference’ is phobic, according to Baudrillard: a kind of reflex that is fundamentally irrational in terms of the logic of the system. The ‘other’ is idealised, and: because it is an ideal other, this relationship is an exponential one: nothing can stop it, since the whole trend of our culture is towards a fanatically pursued differential construction, a perpetual extrapolation of the same from the other. (PC: 132) ‘Autistic culture by dint of fake altruism’, he adds, recapturing the cultural imperative of the western hyperreal ‘culture’ to recognise, value, liberate, and understand difference. On the other hand, racism can equally result from the opposite sentiment; that of a desperate attempt to manifest the other as an evil to be overwhelmed. Either way, both the benevolence of the humanitarian and the hatred of the racist seek out the ‘other’ for reasons symptomatic of the fetishisation of difference . As the increasingly cult-like dedication to differences escalates with its concurrent impulse to increasing homogeneity ,4 another ‘other’ emerges . Baudrillard comments on the figure of the alien as a ‘monstrous metaphor’ for the ‘viral Other’ , which is, in his words, ‘ the compound form of all the varieties of otherness done to death by our system ’ (TE: 130). I remember thinking recently how there must be some significance to the outpouring of ‘alien’ movies (on television especially) and wondered if this was the final frontier of ‘otherness’ to be ‘done to death’ (what else is left?). I recall also being disturbed, as I watched one such movie, to reflect on my accepting without question the imperative of exterminating the aliens who (that?) were going to invade and transform human society in evil ways. Baudrillard emphasises that this metaphor of alien ‘Other’ seizes on what he describes as a ‘viral and automatic’ form of racism that perpetuates itself in a way that cannot be countered by a humanism of difference. Viral in the sense of self-generating and invisibly infecting, reconstructing: a ‘virus of difference’, played out through minute variations in the order of signs. Such a form of monstrous otherness is also the product of what Baudrillard calls an ‘obsessional differentiation’ (TE: 130), emanating from the compulsion of the ‘self’ (same) to manifest signs of ‘difference’ in the form of the ‘other’. The problematic structure of this self (same)–other(different) dynamic, Baudrillard argues, demonstrates the weakness of those ‘dialectical’ theories of otherness which ‘aspire to promote the proper use of otherness’ (TE: 130). Racism, especially in its current viral

and immanent form, makes it clear that there is no such thing as the ‘proper use of difference’. This point links again with my concerns about the emptiness of feminist claims for the importance of ‘irreducible differences’ in the absence of a structural critique.

Link – Culture We now live in an era of constant simulation of past political conflicts. Nostalgic

for a time when power was opposable, the affirmative engages in this banal form of reliving the past through their project of liberation. This reproduces their impacts in a simulated form.

Grace 2000—Senior Lecturer in Feminist Studies @ University of Canterbury at Christchurch (Victoria, 2000, Routledge, “Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading,” http://sociology.sunimc.net/htmledit/uploadfile/system/20100724/20100724151252877.pdf, rmf)

The Transparency of Evil opens with Baudrillard’s observation that our current predicament could be described as ‘after the orgy’. This depiction evokes a sense of extravagant and committed energy expended with earnest ebullience and intensity, in all directions at once, from which one emerges having ‘done it’, and wondering what to do next now that it is in fact ‘over’. This allegory refers to the explosive moment of modernity when ‘liberation’ in every sphere was the passionate and energising motivation for political action: ‘[p]olitical liberation, sexual liberation, liberation of the forces of production , liberation of the forces of destruction, women’s liberation, children’s liberation, liberation of unconscious drives, liberation of art’ (TE: 3). ‘After the orgy’ does not necessarily mean that the ‘goals’ of liberation have been achieved in their own liberal or radical, transformative terms . It can rather be understood to refer to the entry into a world structured in accordance with the logic of sign value, where all values, all signifiers, are indeed ‘liberated’ to produce more of the same, ad infinitum , in a boundless, hyperrealised consumerist world. All signifiers are ‘liberated’ in the sense of no longer being caught up in the oppressive dialectics of ‘race, gender, class’, but the fact that this means we are now wandering around in the ‘depressing ruins of late capitalism’ (to use Walters’ phrase), rather than blissfully enjoying some other fantasised form of ‘freedom’, testifies to the poverty of the understandings on which such politics of liberation were premised, and to their illusory character. If ‘liberation’ was the political goal, and if everything has been ‘liberated’ (albeit in a manner not recognised as ‘liberation’ by advocates and protagonists of the multitude of causes – as Baudrillard himself writes, ‘not in the way we expected’), the preferred action now appears to be to simulate a continuing orgy through simulated liberatory agendas . Baudrillard refers to this simulated liberatory movement as one which is in fact ‘accelerating in a void’ (TE: 3): its goals are behind it, having already been achieved, so it is on a fast track to nowhere in a sort of meaningless orbital circuit, nostalgic for the times when there were ‘real’ opponents and ‘real’ power relations. Having overshot the finalities of modernity (remember Foucault and the finalities of ‘man’), through what Baudrillard elsewhere has referred to as a ‘hypertelic process’ (Gane 1993: 163), we have moved into a state he characterises through the repetitive use of the prefix ‘trans’: transpolitical, transsexual, transeconomic, transaesthetic. What to do after the orgy? ‘[ W]e can only “hyper-realize” them [utopias] through interminable simulation. We live amid the interminable reproduction of ideals, phantasies, images and dreams which are now behind us, yet which we must continue to reproduce in a sort of inescapable indifference’ ( TE: 4). This indifference results from the radical indeterminacy that accompanies the ‘liberated’ state; ‘[e]verywhere what has been liberated has been liberated so that it can enter a state of pure circulation, so that it can go into orbit’ (TE: 4). The tensions and contradictions which were understood to traverse and constitute relative social positions meant subjects-in-process were always somewhere, relative to something or someone else/others. Positions could be challenged and overwhelmed. ‘Politics’ meant

something. But in a social (that is probably, therefore, no longer a social) where all such positions lose their dialectical relationality and float with a kind of weightlessness ‘free’ from any bearings, these tensions and contradictions have vaporised, leaving an indifference to the very simulations of conflict and tension endlessly fabricated .

DA’s

Terror DA

NSA Links Prohibiting NSA data collection under FISA prevents extensive analysis if data,

k2 prevent terrorism

Bradbury 15 ( Steven. G, “BALANCING PRIVACY AND SECURITY”, HARVARD JOURNAL OF LAW AND PUBLIC POLICY, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2011&q=FISA+approvals&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5)

Responding to public opposition to the NSA’s telephone metadata program, Congress is currently considering legislation that would prohibit the collection of bulk metadata under FISA. In my view, such a restriction is a bad idea. Under this legislation, the NSA would be unable to collect data from multiple companies where necessary to assemble a single, efficiently searchable database.31 This restriction would also mean that the NSA would be prevented from collecting and storing data in bulk where doing so is the only way to preserve important business records that may be useful for a counterterrorism investigation.32 Without the ability for U.S. intelligence agencies to acquire the data in bulk under FISA, these important business records would only exist for as long as the private companies happen to retain the data for their own business purposes or as required by regulatory agencies for reasons unrelated to

national security.33 For example, telephone companies typically retain their metadata calling records for only 18 months, as specified by the Federal Communications Commission for purposes of resolving customer billing disputes.34 Under its metadata program, on the other hand, the NSA was storing the data for five years, so that it could conduct more extensive historical analyses of calling connections involving suspected terrorist numbers—historical analyses that can often provide very important new leads for FBI investigations.

FISA is an archaic mechanism that doesn’t allow law enforcement to respond to modern threats, Status quo allows for sufficient NSA capabilities

CFR 13 (Council on Foreign Relations, “U.S. Domestic Surveillance” CFR, http://www.cfr.org/intelligence/us-domestic-surveillance/p9763)

After 9/11, the Bush administration opted not to seek approval from the FISC before intercepting "international communications into and out of the United States of persons linked to al-Qaeda (PDF) or related terrorist organizations." The special secret court, set up in 1978 following previous administrations' domestic spying abuses, was designed to act as a neutral overseer in granting government agencies surveillance authorization. After the NSA program was revealed by the New York Times in late 2005, former attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales argued (PDF) that President Bush had the legal authority under the constitution and congressional statute to conduct warrantless surveillance on U.S. persons "reasonably believed to be linked to al-Qaeda." The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), without specifically mentioning wiretapping, grants the president broad authority to use all necessary force "against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the [9/11] terrorist attacks." This includes, administration officials say, the powers to secretly gather domestic intelligence on al-Qaeda and associated groups. The Bush administration maintained that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was an outdated law-enforcement mechanism that was too time-consuming given the highly fluid, modern threat environment. Administration officials portrayed the NSA program as an "early warning system" (PDF) with "a military nature that requires speed and agility." Moreover, the White House stressed that the

program was one not of domestic surveillance but of monitoring terrorists abroad, and publicly referred to the operation as the "Terrorist Surveillance Program." Opponents of the program referred to it as "domestic spying." Under congressional pressure, Gonzales announced in January 2007 plans to disband the warrantless surveillance program and cede oversight to FISC, but questions about the legality of the program lingered in Congress and Gonzales resigned months later. But Washington's vow to seek FISA approval for domestic surveillance was short-lived. In July 2007--weeks before Gonzales stepped down--intelligence officials pressed lawmakers for emergency legislation to broaden their wiretapping authority following a ruling by the court overseeing FISA that impacted the government's ability to intercept foreign communications passing through telecommunications "switches" on U.S. soil.

PRISM Links

The PRISM program is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks globally – empirics prove

Kelly, reporter for CNN, 8/1/13 – (Heather, CNN, August 1, 2013, “NSA chief: Snooping is crucial to fighting terrorism” http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/31/tech/web/nsa-alexander-black-hat/, accessed 7/15/15 JH @ DDI)

The National Security Agency's controversial intelligence-gathering programs have prevented 54 terrorist attacks around the world, including 13 in the United States, according to Gen. Keith Alexander, NSA director.

Speaking before a capacity crowd of hackers and security experts Wednesday at the Black Hat computer-security conference, Alexander defended the NSA's embattled programs, which collect phone metadata and online communications in an effort to root out potential terrorists. The secret programs have come under fire since their existence was revealed in June by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked details about them to several newspapers. "I promise you the truth -- what we know, what we're doing, and what I cannot tell you because we don't want to jeopardize our future defense," Alexander told the audience, which included a few hecklers who shouted profanities and accused him of lying. He then gave a partial recap, using PowerPoint slides, of how the two intelligence programs work. Alexander said the NSA can collect metadata on phone calls in the United States, including the date and time of the call, the numbers involved and the length of the conversations. He made a special point of saying the NSA does not have access to the content of citizens' calls or text

messages. Alexander said the NSA's PRISM surveillance program, which probes digital activity such as e-mail, instant messaging and Web searches, focuses on foreign actors and does not apply to people in the United States. He

said the phone and Internet data is necessary to "connect the dots" and identify potential terrorists before they act. Alexander attempted to reassure the audience that NSA officials are not abusing access to the databases to intrude on Americans' privacy. "The assumption is that people are out there just wheeling and dealing (users' information), and nothing could be further from the truth," he said. "We have tremendous oversight and compliance in these programs." Congress and courts make sure the programs operate within the bounds of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and internal auditing systems are in place to prevent any abuse by employees, Alexander said. He added that only 35 analysts are authorized to run queries on the phone metadata.

Data gathered by PRISM is some of the most useful foreign intelligence gathered and is essential to prevent terror attacks

Thompson, contributor to Forbes on National Security and Business, 6/7/13 – (Loren, Forbes, June 7, 2013, “Why NSA's PRISM Program Makes Sense” http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2013/06/07/why-nsas-prism-program-makes-sense/, accessed 7/15/15 JH @ DDI)

President Obama’s firm defense of the National Security Agency’s “domestic” surveillance program on Friday should calm some of the more

extravagant fears provoked by public disclosure of its existence. I put the word “domestic” in quotes because the effort to monitor Internet and other communications traffic isn’t really about listening in on Americans , or even foreign nationals

living here, but rather intercepting suspicious transmissions originating overseas that just happen to be passing through the United States. That is an eminently sensible way of keeping up with terrorists, because it is so much easier than tapping into network conduits in other countries or under the seas (not that we don’t do that). In order to grasp the logic of the NSA program, which is code-named PRISM, you have to understand how the Internet evolved. It was a purely American innovation at its inception, with most of the infrastructure concentrated in a few places like Northern Virginia. I live a few miles from where the Internet’s first big East Coast access point was located in the parking garage of an office building near the intersection of Virginia’s Routes 7 and 123, an area that some people refer to as Internet Alley. Because the Worldwide Web grew so haphazardly in its early days, it was common until recently for Internet traffic between two European countries to pass through my neighborhood. There were only a few major nodes in the system, and packet-switching sends messages through whatever pathway is available. The Washington Post story on PRISM today has a graphic illustrating my point about how bandwidth tends to be allocated globally. Like a modern version of ancient Rome’s Appian Way, all digital roads

lead to America. It isn’t hard to see why Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper could say on Thursday that “information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect.” No kidding: PRISM generated an average of four items per day for the President’s daily intelligence briefing in 2012. The key point to recognize, though, is that this really is foreign intelligence. The architecture

of the Internet enables NSA to collect it within U.S. borders, but there is no intention to spy on U.S. citizens. A few elementary algorithms used in narrowing the analysis of traffic should be sufficient to assure that the privacy of American citizens is seldom compromised. President Obama stressed in his comments today that safeguards have been put in place to prevent the scope of NSA surveillance from expanding beyond its original purpose.

PTX Iran DA

1NC

Politics DA Obama can hold off a veto now – but his political capital is key

Walsh and Barrett 7/16 (Deirdre, Senior Congressional Producer for CNN, Ted, senior congressional producer for CNN Politics, “WH dispatches Joe Biden to lock down Iran deal on Capitol Hill,” CNN, 7/16/2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/15/politics/iran-deal-white-house-democrats-congress/)//duncan

Two days after the Iran deal was unveiled, the Obama administration's sales job is in full swing. Vice

President Joe Biden traveled to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to convince House Democrats to support the deal, while a small group of senators were invited to the White House to get their questions answered directly from officials who sat across from the Iranians at the negotiating table. Biden meets with Senate Democrats of the Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday. House lawmakers said Biden was candid about the strengths and weaknesses of the compromise deal. One described his behind closed doors pitch.

"I'm going to put aside my notes and talk to you from my heart because I've been in this business for 45 years," Biden said in his opening comments, according to Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-New Jersey, who attended the session. "I'm not going to BS you. I'm going to tell you exactly what I

think," the vice president reportedly said. Obama got a boost from the leader of his party in the chamber when Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi formally announced Thursday that she was backing the deal . SInce Republicans in the House and Senate are firmly against the Iran nuclear deal -- announced by President Barack Obama on Tuesday -- the administration is cranking up its campaign to sway concerned Democrats to back the agreement. Under

legislation that allows Congress to review the agreement, the White House needs to secure enough votes from members of his own party to sustain the President's promised veto on an resolution of disapproval -- 145 in the House

and 34 in the Senate. After the session with Biden, several House Democrats stressed that while the process is just beginning, right now the administration likely has the votes to sustain the President's veto on a resolution to block the deal. "I'm confident they will like it when they understand it all," the vice president told reporters on his way

into the session, beginning what will be a two month campaign culminating in a vote, expected in September. Democrats , both for and against the deal, praised Biden's presentation . "Joe Biden was as good as I've seen him," Rep. John Larson, D-Connecticut, told

CNN. "I thought he did an excellent job." Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar said Biden is a "master of detail" and helped clarify some concerns he had about the verification provisions in the deal, but he still planned to carefully study it and said he was undecided. Pascrell also cited the verification issue as a potential sticking point but said he is leaning 'yes' on the agreement. "On our side of

the aisle there is concern and skepticism shared by a number of members but an openness to be persuaded if the facts take them that way," Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia said. "I think (Biden) made some real progress on behalf of the administration today." But Democratic Rep. Steve Israel of New York, a former member of Democratic leadership, told reporters he wasn't sold yet. "For me, I still have some very significant questions with respect to lifting of the embargo on conventional arms. And missiles. The (International Atomic Energy Agency) verification process for me is not any time anywhere, I think there are some very significant

delays built into that," Israel said. Larson noted that both Biden's presentation, along with Hillary Clinton's a day earlier, who he said

spoke favorably about the deal, helped lay the groundwork for most Democrats to back the White House . At the same time on Wednesday that the President held a news conference trying to persuade the public he had brokered an strong and effective deal with Iran, Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, and a handful of other senators, were in a separate part of the White House meeting with some of the President's top negotiators, who had just returned from Vienna. "I was very satisfied with an awful lot of the answers

we received," Manchin told CNN. The intimate meeting for senators was another example of the White House's effort to shore up support in the Senate where leaders believe as many as 15 Democrats could oppose the deal . If they did, it could provide Senate Republicans the votes needed to override a veto of the disapproval resolution and scuttle the deal . But Manchin , a centrist who has close relations with senators on both sides of the aisle, said at this point he has not detected major blowback from Senate Democrats to the deal. "At caucus yesterday I didn't get a reading there is hard, hard opposition. I did not," he said. In fact, Manchin said he thought Republicans actually might struggle getting the 60 votes they will need to pass the disapproval resolution, much less the dozen or so votes that

might be needed to sustain a veto. One key senator whose position will be closely monitored by the White House and his

colleagues from both parties on the Hill, is Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrats who is poised to become the

Democratic leader in the next Congress. Schumer has many Jewish voters in his state who are wary of the impact of the Iran agreement on the security of Israel. Schumer said he is skeptical of the deal and won't decide whether to support it before doing his homework. "I will sit down, I will read the agreement thoroughly and then I'm gonna speak with officials -- administration officials, people all over on all different sides," he said when asked about his decision-making process. "Look, this is a decision

that shouldn't be made lightly and I am gonna just study this agreement and talk to people before I do anything else." Sen. John McCain, R-

Arizona, a leading critic of the agreement with Iran, said "the pressure will be enormous from the administration," as it tries to keep Democrats from defecting. As chairman of the Armed Services Committee, McCain said he intends to hold

hearings to demonstrate what he calls the "fatal flaws" in the deal. House conservatives speaking at a forum sponsored by the Heritage

Foundation, a conservative think tank, one after another ripped the Iran deal. But they conceded that ultimately they may not be able to block it. " The game is rigged in favor of getting this done" Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan said.

Obama will fight the plan- It undermines administration’s counterterrorism efforts

Ackerman 14 (Spencer Ackerman: National security editor for Guardian, “White House Iftar dinner guests press Obama on surveillance of Muslims”, The Guardian, 7/16/2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/16/white-house-iftar-obama-surveillance-muslims, Accessed: 7/17/14, RRR)

Attendees of a White House dinner this week celebrating a Muslim holiday attempted to leverage their direct interaction with Barack Obama into a presidential commitment to discuss widespread and controversial surveillance of their communities. They left feeling they had Obama's interest, but not much more. Less than a week after the Intercept, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, showed US Muslim activists and attorneys had been targeted for surveillance, Obama gathered legislators, diplomats and US Muslim community leaders to the White House on Monday night

for an Iftar dinner, the sunset meal during Ramadan. In remarks released by the White House, Obama stressed the value of pluralism, sidestepping the surveillance controversy . Not everyone was satisfied with the omission. Some of the people who attended were signatories of a letter sent to the White House in the wake of the Intercept story urgently requesting a meeting with Obama. Without that commitment yet in hand, took the opportunity to raise the issue with Obama personally at the Monday dinner. "I specifically asked the president if he would meet with us to discuss NSA spying on the American Muslim community. The president seemed to perk up and proceeded to discuss the issue, saying that he takes it very seriously," said Junaid Sulahry, the outreach manager for Muslim Advocates, a legal and civil rights group. Obama was non-committal, Sulahry said, but displayed "a clear willingness to discuss the issue." Hoda Elshishtawy, the national policy analyst for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said that she brought it

up as part of a "table-wide discussion" on post-9/11 surveillance of US Muslims. "Our communities can't be seen as suspects and partners at the same time," Elshishtawy said. That tension has plagued the Obama administration's domestic counterterrorism – or, as it prefers, "countering violent extremism" – for its entire tenure . The departments of justice and homeland security lead outreach efforts in Muslim and other local communities, stressing vigilance against radicalizing influences and dialogue with law enforcement. Yet Muslim communities labor under widespread suspicion of incubating terrorism.

Surveillance from law enforcement and US intelligence is robust, from the harvesting of digital communications to the recruitment of informants inside mosques. The F ederal B ureau of I nvestigation compiles maps of Muslim businesses and religious institutions, without suspicion of specific crimes . The mixed message comes amidst the freight of a foreign policy featuring drone strikes in Muslim countries, a reluctance to foreclose on indefinite detention that functionally is only aimed at Muslims, and difficulty concluding the war in Afghanistan – all of which have strained relations with American-Muslim communities. Some of those community leaders have already come under fire for attending the White House dinner. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee urged a boycott over the surveillance and administration support for Israel during the current Gaza offensive, rejecting what it called "normalization of the continuous breach of our fundamental rights." Representatives of organizations that rejected the boycott argued that they can exercise greater influence through access than through rejection. "Our strategy is to worth through the system," said Farhana Khera, Muslim Advocates'

executive director. The White House declined comment on what it called "private conversations at a closed press event."

Obama’s gathered enough support among Dems to save the deal – but political capital is key

Lee et al 7/15 (Carol E, Colleen McCain Nelson, Kristina Peterson, all write for the Wall Street Journal, “Obama Girds for Battle With Congress on Iran Deal,” WSJ, 7/15/2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/obama-girds-for-battle-with-congress-on-iran-deal-1437005023)//duncan

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama delivered an unusually animated and sometimes combative defense of the Iran nuclear deal the day after it was reached, girding for a complicated political challenge likely to force him to use his veto to save his crowning foreign-policy achievement. Lawmakers have 60 days to review the agreement and an option to vote on approving or disapproving it, with opposition to the deal widespread among Republicans who control both houses of Congress. If they vote it down, the deal’s survival will hinge on Mr. Obama’s ability to secure enough support from his own Democratic Party to prevent a two-thirds majority in each chamber from overriding his promised veto. Opponents of the deal ramped up their criticism and organization against it on Wednesday. Mr. Obama, in a 67-minute news conference at the White House, accused opponents—from Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu to Republican lawmakers—of pushing political talking points to simply discredit the accord as a bad deal. “For all the objections of Prime Minister Netanyahu or, for that matter, some of the Republican leadership that’s already spoken, none of them have presented to me or the American people a better alternative,” Mr. Obama said. “Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through a negotiation or it’s resolved through force, through war,” he added. “Those are the options.” President Obama talks about the details of the nuclear deal with Iran at a White House news conference on Wednesday. The president’s aggressive defense of the deal drew quick pushback from Republicans in Congress, where the criticism has largely been twofold: that the agreement won’t stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and that it doesn’t address broader concerns about Tehran’s behavior in the region. Rep. Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.) disputed the president’s assertion that this is a choice between the accord or war. “Here’s an alternative other than war: A better deal,” Mr. Zeldin said. “For the security of America and the stability of the Middle East, we must pursue a better direction immediately.” Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican and 2016 presidential candidate, started an online petition opposing the deal, and the powerful pro-Israel lobby Aipac is calling on lawmakers to vote against it. At the same time, J Street, a liberal pro-Israel group, said Wednesday it will launch a multimillion-dollar effort, including ads in print and broadcast media, to lobby lawmakers to support the deal. The agreement reached Tuesday in Vienna puts strict limits on Iran’s nuclear program for the next decade that are designed to keep Tehran from being at least 12 months away from amassing enough nuclear fuel for a bomb. In exchange, the U.S., the European Union and the United Nations will lift economic

sanctions on Iran. Mr. Obama said he is “not betting on the Republican Party rallying around this agreement,” and Vice President Joe Biden met with Democrats on Capitol Hill. Mr. Biden told Democratic lawmakers he was initially skeptical of the deal but is now convinced the

agreement, while not perfect, is worth supporting, according to participants. But even some Democrats expressed concerns about the deal, particularly on the inspections provisions and the decision to lift United Nations embargoes on arms and ballistic missile sales to Iran. As the Iran nuclear pact heads to Congress, WSJ’s Jerry Seib identifies the key Democrats in the coming fight over whether to reject the deal. Photo: AP “For most members, including myself, it comes down to verification,” said Rep. Ron Kind of Wisconsin, chairman of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of centrist House Democrats. “It comes down to access to the sites, making sure they’re not impeded in any way, that we’ve got unlimited access to where we need to go to make sure Iran is living up to

their agreement.” T he White House’s effort to preserve the deal depends on cohesion among Democrats in the House and persuading wavering Democratic senators to stick with the president. That is because it became clear in the hours after the agreement’s unveiling that few, if any, Republicans were likely to support it. For Mr. Obama, the next best option would be for Democrats to block the Republican-controlled Congress from passing a resolution of disapproval. Such a resolution would likely prompt the agreement’s collapse if Congress could override a veto from Mr. Obama. The debate will apply particular pressure to Democrats with large Jewish constituencies and those who were early advocates of Congress getting the right to review and vote on any

final deal. They i nclude Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York who is expected to succeed Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada as the Democratic leader, and others both on and off the Foreign Relations Committee. Holding the line in the House will be a tough task , where legislation can pass on a majority vote. Mr. Obama has better prospects in the Senate, where Republicans hold 54 of the 100 seats and most bills need 60 votes to clear procedural hurdles. Democrats said they were weighing the risks of spurning a deal painstakingly reached against embracing an agreement with an outcome that is ultimately unclear. “The risk of voting for it is that if the Iranians cheat and somehow achieve a path to a bomb in spite of the agreement, then you look like you signed on to something that wasn’t effective,” said Sen. Angus King (I., Maine). Conversely, the risk of rejecting the deal is that it scuttles the

international agreement, unraveling the sanctions and leaving Iran’s nuclear ambitions unchecked, he said. “There are risks in both directions.” If both chambers were to pass a resolution disapproving the deal, Mr. Obama has said he would veto it.

Democratic lawmakers and aides said they thought there would be enough support to sustain the president’s veto. It takes a two-thirds majority in each chamber to override a veto.

Deal failure itself causes global war

PressTV 13 (“Global nuclear conflict between US, Russia, China likely if Iran talks fail,” http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/11/13/334544/global-nuclear-war-likely-if-iran-talks-fail/)

A global conflict between the US, Russia, and China is likely in the coming months s hould the world powers fail to reach a nuclear deal with Iran, an American analyst says. “If the talks fail, if the agreements being pursued are not successfully carried forward and implemented, then there would be enormous international pressure to drive towards a conflict with Iran before [US President Barack] Obama leaves office and that’s a very great danger that no one can underestimate the importance of,” senior editor at the Executive Intelligence Review Jeff Steinberg told Press TV on Wednesday.

“The U nited States could find itself on one side and Russia and China on the other and those are the kinds of

conditions that can lead to miscalculation and general roar,” Steinberg said. “So the danger in this situation is that if these talks

don’t go forward, we could be facing a global conflict in the coming months and years and that’s got to be avoided at all costs when you’ve got countries like the United States, Russia, and China with” their arsenals of “nuclear weapons,” he warned. The warning came one day after the White House told Congress not to impose new sanctions against Tehran because failure in talks with Iran could lead to war.

Obama link Obama will fight the plan- Recent meeting proves he supports surveillance of

Muslims

Blumenthal 14 (Max Blumenthal: Writer for Alternet- Syndication service and online community of the alternative press, featuring news stories from alternative newsweeklies, magazines and web publications, “Obama Humiliates Muslim Guests at White House Ramadan Event, Endorses Israel’s Gaza Assault and NSA Surveillance,” 7/17/14, http://www.alternet.org/world/obama-humiliates-muslim-white-house-guests-endorsing-israels-gaza-assault-defending-nsa, Accessed: 7/17/15, RRR)

At the annual White House Iftar dinner commemorating the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, President Barack Obama endorsed Israel’s ongoing assault on the

Gaza Strip and defended government spying on Muslim-Americans. Alongside dozens of Muslim-American community activists and

Muslim diplomats, the White House welcomed Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer, an outspoken advocate of Israel's settlement enterprise who has claimed Muslim and Arab culture is endemically violent . In the past, the annual Iftar dinner passed without much notice. Last year, President Barack Obama delivered a boilerplate speech to the assembled crowd of Muslim-American community activists and Middle Eastern ambassadors about his efforts to spur entrepreneurship. But this time, amidst a one-sided Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that was about to claim its 200th death in just a week, and which the US had backed to the hilt, the heat was on. While Obama prepared his remarks, calls rang out with unprecedented intensity for invitees to boycott the July 14 ceremony. Among those who urged a boycott in protest of the Gaza assault and ongoing government spying on Muslim-Americans was the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), an established presence in Washington representing the country’s largest Arab-American advocacy group. Joining the boycott call was Mariam Abu-Ali, the sister of Ahmed Abu Ali, a US citizen renditioned to Saudi Arabia

for torture before being sentenced to life in prison on dubious charges of threatening to kill George W. Bush. “ The White House Iftar is a slap in the face to those in the Muslim community who have been victims of U.S. civil-rights and human-rights abuses ,” Abu Ali wrote. “It is an attempt by administration after administration to whitewash the crimes of the U.S. government against Muslims by painting a less-than-accurate picture of their relationship with the American Muslim community.” As established Muslim-American leaders like Laila Al-Marayati lined up to boycott (Al-Marayati rejected an invitation to the State Department’s Iftar), others defended their presence at the ceremony. Most vocal among them was Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), one of the two Muslim members of Congress. “I disagree with the tactic,” Ellison remarked in a statement released by his office. “It will not close Guantanamo Bay, guarantee a cease-fire between Israel and Palestine or undo the NSA’s targeting of Muslims.” The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) echoed Ellison, insisting that the event would “allow [them] to engage with senior White House officials for a decent amount of time on substantive issues.” While Muslim-American civil rights groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations have assumed a more confrontational posture towards the White House and boycotted a prayer breakfast with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in protest of his support for NYPD surveillance of Muslims, MPAC has taken an altogether different tack. Its role as a paid consultant on the cable TV series, “Tyrant,” was perhaps the best example of its accommodationist stance. Produced by Howard Gordon, the creator of “24” and “Homeland,” the show starred a white actor playing a pathological Arab dictator who ruled over the deeply dysfunctional fictional nation of Abuddin. Even mainstream TV critics derided the series as unbearably Orientalist, with the Washington Post’s Hank Stuever describing it as a “stultifyingly acted TV drama stocked with tired and terribly broad notions of Muslim culture in a make-believe nation on the brink.” Leading up to the White House Iftar, a leader of a major Muslim advocacy organization told me on background that MPAC was bleeding support, especially from younger activists. At the Iftar dinner, Obama launched into a defense of Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip, declaring, “I will say very clearly, no country can accept rockets fired indiscriminately at citizens. And so, we’ve been very clear that Israel has the right to defend itself against what I consider to be inexcusable attacks from Hamas.” He went on to claim against all evidence that his administration had “worked long and hard to alleviate” the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and that it had “emphasized the need to protect civilians, regardless of who

they are or where they live.” Ali Kurnaz, the central regional director for the Florida-based Emerge USA, was in the audience. He told me that Obama’s remarks provoked deep discomfort, with attendees exchanging disturbed looks and rolling their eyes in astonishment. No one walked out in protest, however. “After the dinner, I overheard at least three different exchanges attendees pointing out that Palestinians should have a right to defend themselves too,” Kurnaz recalled. Like many others who joined the dinner, Kurnaz was not aware that Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer had been invited. Dermer was a longtime confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the son of the Republican former Mayor of Miami Beach. This year, Dermer broke diplomatic protocol by appearing at a fundraiser for the Republican Jewish Committee, helping to raise money for a partisan

organization dedicated to undermining Obama’s agenda. Perhaps the most startling aspect of Dermer’s presence at the Iftar dinner was his stated belief that “a cultural tendency towards belligerency” is “deeply embedded in the culture of the Arab world and its foremost religion.” According to Kurnaz, Dermer spent the evening isolated in the White House’s Green Room adjacent to the main reception area, where he milled around mostly without company. None of the activists invited to the dinner approached him.

When dinner began, Kurnaz said Obama was unusually candid with those seated at his table. They confronted him on the issue of domestic spying, an issue that took on renewed immediacy after revelations by the Intercept that the

NSA and FBI has spied on leading Muslim-American civil rights activists. Obama attempted to remind them that the spying had begun under his predecessor, Bush, but defended the practice nonetheless , denying that the NSA had violated any laws.

Obama will fight the plan- It undermines administration’s counterterrorism efforts

Ackerman 14 (Spencer Ackerman: National security editor for Guardian, “White House Iftar dinner guests press Obama on surveillance of Muslims”, The Guardian, 7/16/2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/16/white-house-iftar-obama-surveillance-muslims, Accessed: 7/17/14, RRR)

Attendees of a White House dinner this week celebrating a Muslim holiday attempted to leverage their direct interaction with Barack Obama into a presidential commitment to discuss widespread and controversial surveillance of their communities. They left feeling they had Obama's interest, but not much more. Less than a week after the Intercept, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, showed US Muslim activists and attorneys had been targeted for surveillance, Obama gathered legislators, diplomats and US Muslim community leaders to the White House on Monday night

for an Iftar dinner, the sunset meal during Ramadan. In remarks released by the White House, Obama stressed the value of pluralism, sidestepping the surveillance controversy . Not everyone was satisfied with the omission. Some of the people who attended were signatories of a letter sent to the White House in the wake of the Intercept story urgently requesting a meeting with Obama. Without that commitment yet in hand, took the opportunity to raise the issue with Obama personally at the Monday dinner. "I specifically asked the president if he would meet with us to discuss NSA spying on the American Muslim community. The president seemed to perk up and proceeded to discuss the issue, saying that he takes it very seriously," said Junaid Sulahry, the outreach manager for Muslim Advocates, a legal and civil rights group. Obama was non-committal, Sulahry said, but displayed "a clear willingness to discuss the issue." Hoda Elshishtawy, the national policy analyst for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said that she brought it

up as part of a "table-wide discussion" on post-9/11 surveillance of US Muslims. "Our communities can't be seen as suspects and partners at the same time," Elshishtawy said. That tension has plagued the Obama administration's domestic counterterrorism – or, as it prefers, "countering violent extremism" – for its entire tenure . The departments of justice and homeland security lead outreach efforts in Muslim and other local communities, stressing vigilance against radicalizing influences and dialogue with law enforcement. Yet Muslim communities labor under widespread suspicion of incubating terrorism.

Surveillance from law enforcement and US intelligence is robust, from the harvesting of digital communications to the recruitment of informants inside mosques. The F ederal B ureau of I nvestigation compiles maps of Muslim businesses and religious institutions, without suspicion of specific crimes . The mixed message comes amidst the freight of a foreign policy featuring drone strikes in Muslim countries, a reluctance to foreclose on indefinite detention that functionally is only aimed at Muslims, and difficulty concluding the war in Afghanistan – all of which have strained relations with American-Muslim communities. Some of those community leaders have already come under fire for attending the White House dinner. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee urged a boycott over the surveillance and administration support for Israel during the current Gaza offensive, rejecting what it called "normalization of the continuous breach of our fundamental rights." Representatives of organizations that rejected the boycott argued that they can exercise greater influence through access than through rejection. "Our strategy is to worth through the system," said Farhana Khera, Muslim Advocates'

executive director. The White House declined comment on what it called "private conversations at a closed press event."

Schumer Link Module Schumer for surveillance, says it stops terrorists.

Ellen Abbot, Reporter on Syracuse, 7/2 2015, “Federal authorities say July 4th terror warnings require vigilance,” http://wrvo.org/post/federal-authorities-say-july-4th-terror-warnings-require-vigilance

Federal authorities are ratcheting up terror warnings across the country in advance of this Fourth of July holiday weekend. The D epartment of H omeland S ecurity and the FBI are asking local law enforcement officials to be prepared for any potential terrorist activity . Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) says this alert reflects a new kind of radicalization. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) talking about recent terror warning during a visit to Syracuse Monday. Sen. Charles Schumer

(D-NY) talking about recent terror warning during a visit to Syracuse Monday. CREDIT ELLEN ABBOTT / WRVO NEWS “What’s happened now is a new phenomenon which is lone wolves -- disturbed people, lonely people, angry people, who are contacted on the Internet and importuned by these Islamic fundamentalists to do serious, terrible things. And that’s new,” said Schumer. “They don’t tell them what to do, they don’t instruct them what to do, they don’t coordinate what they do. They just try to get them to do it. And praise God, nothing bad has happened yet, but you’ve got to be really vigilant.” Schumer says the good news is that the government’s surveillance tactics often have been able to break up terrorist plans before they happen. Federal investigators stopped Islamic State-inspired plots in Boston and the metro New York area in recent weeks.

Schumer supports mosque surveillance

NY Daily News 12 (New York Daily News, "Senator Chuck Schumer Stands Up for the NYPD's Fight Against Terrorism", www.nydailynews.com/opinion/sen-chuck-schumer-stands-nypd-fight-terrorism-article-1.1029599, 2/28/2012, sr)

Finally, after weeks of innuendo, half-truths and distortions that have depicted the NYPD as spying on the city’s Muslim communities, an

elected official has spoken the truth. There’s no there there, said Sen. Chuck Schumer of reports that the department’s Intelligence Division invasively monitored New Yorkers based on their religious beliefs. Excavated endlessly by The Associated Press in a series built on the false premise that to gather preventive information is to violate rights, the division’s work has amounted, for the most part, to checking out facts that are in the public record. For example, where in the city particular nationalities are clustered, according to the Census. For example, the locations and descriptions of community institutions like mosques,

schools and social gathering places. For example, what’s written on publicly accessible websites of Muslim student associations. Schumer perceptively divined that which should have been obvious to all of the city’s elected leaders: Checking out information in the public domain tramples on no one’s rights or privacy . More important, the NYPD needs to have the facts on hand in order to know where to go and to whom to speak in the event that the CIA passes on a tip that a suspected terrorist from, say, Pakistan is somewhere in the city. Referring to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, Schumer said: “I don’t think he has a bigoted bone in his body.” He added: “ There is nothing wrong with the NYPD collecting and assessing publicly available information from New York, New Jersey, the other 48 states or around the world in the effort to prevent another terror attack like 9/11 . In fact, it is widely understood that the NYPD’s actions have kept us safer. Looking at public information and following leads is perfectly acceptable as long as any one group, in its entirety, is not targeted based only on its religious or ethnic affiliation.”

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn followed Schumer’s lead — but hedging all the way. “ Unless we know that laws were broken or someone’s civil liberties were violated, I do not think the NYPD should stop the practice,” she said, leaving open a specter of wrongdoing for which there is zero evidence. Quinn’s expected rivals for the mayoralty, city Controller John Liu, Manhattan Borough President Scott

Stringer and former Controller Bill Thompson, were even more qualified in backing the NYPD. They praised the cops in the abstract, while professing concerns about the anti-terrorism effort. Public Advocate Bill de Blasio has ducked the issue entirely. They don’t get what Kelly and New Yorkers understand. There’s nothing abstract about terror, and there’s no way for a mayor to duck the fight.

Schumer’s key to the deal—make or break

Bolton 7/14 (Alexander Bolton, Senior Reporter The Hill, "GOP Crafts Iran Deal Attack Plan", thehill.com/homenews/senate/247957-gop-crafts-attack-plan-on-iran-deal, 7/14/15, sr)

New York Sen. Charles Schumer , the third-ranking member of the Senate Democratic leadership, is emerging as a critical vote . Senate Republicans need to hold their ranks and persuade 13 Democrats to vote with them to override

President Obama’s threatened veto of a resolution of disapproval. “If Schumer comes out and says , ‘I looked at the bill and studied its details and think it’s a good deal and will stop Iran from getting weapons,’ there will be zero hope of overriding an Obama veto, ” said Noah Pollak, executive director of the Emergency Committee for Israel, which funded a six-figure Web campaign targeting Schumer earlier this year. “ If Schumer says this doesn’t do it , it lifts the arms embargo and doesn’t have anytime, anywhere inspections, then we have a fight on our hands. He’s a linchpin or a bellwether ,” he added. Schumer and other Senate Democrats held off on judging the deal Tuesday. “I intend to go through this agreement with a fine-tooth comb, speak with administration officials, and hear from experts on all sides,” Schumer said in a statement. “Supporting or opposing this agreement is not a decision to be made lightly, and I plan to carefully study the agreement before making an informed decision.” Colleagues say Schumer appears genuinely torn. “He’s very sober. He said, ‘I’m going to make a decision on this based on what’s best for the country,’ ” said a Democratic colleague speaking on background. Republican leaders in Congress are crafting their attack plan against the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. Lawmakers will have 60 days to review the deal after the White House delivers the text of the historic agreement to Capitol Hill. The GOP could seek to move a measure of disapproval, but it will be difficult to win a filibuster-proof 60 votes, much less the 67 required to overcome a presidential veto.

DA FirstLife is intrinsically value --- biological death destroys any hope of ontological improvement

Paterson 3 - Department of Philosophy, Providence College, Rhode Island (Craig, “A Life Not Worth Living?”, Studies in Christian Ethics, Sage)//trepka

Only Personal Life? As we have seen above, human life is often perceived only as an instrumental good at the service of the person. It is said that human life, as such, is not a basic human good, and is merely a necessary means utilised in the promotion of other goods. When human life itself fails to live up to our expected requirements, it can ultimately be dispensed with. Merely being a living member of the species, Homo sapiens, is considered to offer no valid ground for ascribing to all humans an ‘inviolability’ that protects them from being

intentionally killed.16 Lying behind such accounts are forms of threshold sufficiency criteria used to establish whether or not individual human beings are able to qualify as human persons . On one side of the threshold is

considered to be a human life worthy of being valued since that life instantiates feature(s) X . . . Z. A human life with feature(s) X . . . Z is alone considered worthwhile , since it instantiates that which is sufficient to attribute real value to human existence. Thus, there are effectively two primary categories of human life to be identified: ‘personal life’ manifesting feature(s) X . . . Z, and ‘non-personal life’ that is incapable of manifesting feature(s) X . . . Z. Human life is valued as long as it is capable of instantiating the feature(s) sufficient to constitute personal life. Mere non-personal life (not worth living and thus not worthy of full protection from intentional killing) is thus heavily contrasted with personal life (worth living and thus alone worthy of full protection from intentional killing). Jonathan Glover, James Rachels, Peter Singer, Helga Kuhse and John Harris all subscribe to the notion that what is truly valued is not human life as such but personal life, life that is capable of manifest- ing the sufficient feature(s) X . . . Z — rationality, self-awareness, consciousness, etc., or some composite thereof.17

They therefore identify certain attributes that alone are sufficient to warrant the classification of being a person. The voice of John Locke can be seen to echo strongly in these approaches, for he defined a person as ‘a thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself’.18 In the conclusions reached by the above-mentioned authors, all would argue that patients suffering from advanced forms of senility, or the permanently comatose, cannot be regarded as persons, and will not therefore be classified as being possessed of lives truly worth living. Since they are not properly capable of being categorised as persons, they cannot be

accorded the same protections that we ascribe to those we do identify as persons.19 The principal difficulty with such theories of the worth of human life , however, stems from an inadequate justification upon which to make such a determination that an individual human life Y must contain those sufficient feature (s) X . . . Z in order to qualify for the status of being regarded by others as a ‘person’.20 With regard to non-philosophical usage, people in general do not make a distinction between attributions of the status ‘person’ and attributions of the status ‘human being’. Basic patterns of usage point not to the widespread understanding of being a person as actually having ‘self-awareness . . . X . . . Z’ but rather to a widespread under- standing that being a person is treated synonymously with being a particular kind of being (by virtue of his or her membership in that distinct class of being). ‘Y is a human being’, and not, say, a horse or a cat, is interchangeable with ‘Y is a person’, since ‘Y is recognisably one of us’.21 This assertion of an interchangeable understanding between ‘person’ and ‘human being’, is borne out by the prevailing definitions offered by the Oxford English Dictionary, where the noun ‘person’ is viewed as referring to (1) an individual human being, and (2) human beings distinguished from other things, especially lower animals. Of 1 course it is right to be wary of dictionary definitions. They are clearly not definitive. Nevertheless, I think that the patterns of usage wit- nessed by the OED are supportive evidence for the proposition that people generally do not use ‘person’ and ‘human being’ to refer to differences in kind between ‘human persons’ and ‘human non-persons’, such that the former are entitled to have their lives regarded as worthy of being fully protected by negative prohibitions while the latter are not.22

Consider further a common reaction to patients suffering from advanced senility, or to patients in a permanent vegetative state. Often we will say that the patient is in a profoundly damaged/disabled condition, or that a patient’s quality of life is at a minimum, and so on. Often we will be deeply disturbed by the gap that exists between the condition of the patient and his

or her flourishing as a human being. No one (except the perverted) would want to be placed in such a condition. Human life is very imperfectly manifested in such a condition.23 Yet, it simply does not follow that we would generally seek to infer from this debilitated state of being that the patient has ceased to be a person and has therefore

undergone such a change in kind that we now regard the patient as a ‘non-person’.24 Our ready ability to identify with ‘ human non-persons’ in a way that we do not seem able to identify with ‘non-human non-persons’ seems to offer additional testimony as to why we continue to view such ‘human non-persons’ as persons simpliciter despite their profoundly damaged state of being.25 This ready ability to make such identification helps to make sense of the observation that people can and do seek to defend and promote human life without seeking an explanation for protecting or

preserving human life in those who are profoundly damaged beyond an appeal to that good itself (i.e. when asked to explain

actions such as continuing to feed a severely demented Alzheimer’s patient).26 As such a basic good, an indispensable constituent of our being, human life itself is capable of providing an adequate explanation for rendering actions of this kind properly intelligible to us in a way that actions of this kind cannot be explained for ‘non-human non-persons’.27 Still, it can be argued that the above account is simply the product of muddled conventional thinking, conventional thinking spurred on by the impact of understandable but ultimately irrational sentiment concerning the state of patients in those kinds of

condi- tion.28 There is, however, good philosophical reason to affirm that those pre-philosophical apprehensions that we have concerning the use of the terms ‘person’ and ‘human being’, are indeed sound. This can be achieved by

positing a credible account of what it is to be a human person by virtue of being a member of the species, Homo sapiens. It explains why our basic identification with profoundly damaged ‘human non-persons’ is not merely a product of convention, sympathy, or compassion, but is ultimately ontological in nature.29 Aquinas quoted and affirmed the definition of what it is to be a person, as stated by Boethius. A person is ‘an individual substance of a rational nature’.30 The definition offered by Boethius is inherently more satisfactory than the definition offered by John Locke, for it is able to account for our understanding of what can be termed our ‘species solidarity’ — a solidarity that points against the classification or treatment of profoundly damaged human beings as sub-personal (semihominem) and whose lives are consequently judged to be of less worth than the rest of us.31 Rather than focusing on the idea that the individual must be actually rational (conscious, self-aware, etc.) in order to be thought of as a person (as with John Locke), this

definition clearly points to a second basic understanding of what it is to be a person.32 A person is an individual who is a member of a class of being characterised by those attributes. When we reflect on the nature of our species Homo sapiens, it is clear that our species is a kind that is rational, self-aware, and so on. This holds true even if some members of that species are incapable of rational thought, lack self-awareness, and so on.33 Jenny Teichman supports this central line of argumentation when she states

that ‘the idea that a creature can have a rational nature without being rational . . . does not appear to me to be any more intrinsically problematic than the idea that all cattle are mammals — even the bulls’ .34 Teichman, therefore, challenges the idea that the way in which we classify our own kind ought to be treated any differently from the way we classify other things. Does a dog cease to be classified as a dog when it has lost its bark? Does a pail cease to be classified as a pail when it is no longer capable of holding water due a large hole in its bottom? If not, why should the very senile or the permanently comatose be classified as non-persons even if they are deeply defective with respect to an exercisable capacity for rational thought or a capacity for self-awareness?35 We can therefore credibly argue that ‘non-persons’ in a state of severe impairment are still fully members of the same species to which we all belong. The very senile or permanently comatose do not become members of a different species. Through their ‘natural kind’ they still speak to us as members of the same species via a common shared human nature and continue to make many of the same moral claims upon us, for example, a right not to be intentionally killed by other persons in acts of non-consensual euthanasia.36 When Aristotle stated that we are by nature ‘rational animals’, he was not making a statement particular to those fully functional members of the human species at the height of their faculties. He was, rather, defining the essential universal nature of the species.37 He was pointing out what the nature of being a member of the human species entails simply by being a recognisable member of that species. It is a credible principle of reasoning to state that by virtue of the basic kind of being a thing is, the archetypal characteristics of that kind can be ascribed to any member of that kind, even though not every member of that kind, may, as a matter of fact, actually manifest those archetypal characteristics.38 Therefore, it can be stated that all members of our species can justifiably be said to participate and share in the rightful protection offered to the archetypal members of our species because of what they essentially are, irrespective of the particular circumstances of any given member.39 Why then should being profoundly damaged detract from the moral status of certain human beings if they are by virtue of their nature as fully human as the most fully

flourishing members of our species? Such damage does not render them a member of a different species, for differences between humans concerning levels of intelligence, levels of consciousness, levels of coherence or inco- herence in thoughts, etc. are all questions of degree and not of kind .40 It is not a question of a decline in, or non-presence of, an ability that is capable of rendering a substantial change in the nature of a human being . Rather, it is only the event of death itself that is capable of bringing about a substantial change in the kind of thing that we are. I t is death that brings about a fundamental ontological chang e in status, for a corpse is no longer an individual with a human kind of nature .41 By virtue of the status of being a member of the human species, then, that status can indeed be said to be one of being a person simpliciter. All persons are entitled to the same basic types of immunity from intentional killing as are accorded the archetypal mature members of the

species. It can, in consequence, never be morally justified to intentionally kill human beings on the ground that individual lives are judged to be insufficiently worthwhile in order to qualify for the kinds of protection that Rachels, Singer, Kuhse and Harris would reserve only for humans who are actually capable of individually exercising those attributes of our kind. Life’s Inherent Value A common link is drawn between a patient’s right to refuse treatment and the right of a patient to assess the quality of his or her own life. Such a right, it is claimed, is tantamount to an assessment of the worth of life, such that a patient with a low life quality can commit suicide, be assisted in that goal, or be euthanised.42 Here, I would argue, that this train of thought posits a mistaken frame of reference for the moral evaluation of the duties we have towards the preservation of human life. It carries plausibility, firstly, because it trades partly on

the looseness or ‘open texture’ of language, and secondly, because it expands upon an appropriate sphere of decision-making in which patients are indeed intimately involved in the assessment of the burdens and benefits of treatment.43 No reasonable person would say that a life of less complete, less perfect, human flourishing is better than a life of more complete, more perfect, human flourishing.44 A life endowed with more flourishing, that realises more profusion in various horizons of possibility, is a fuller life than a life that is impaired in its ability to flourish. In that

sense there can be said to be more ‘quality’, a greater instantiation of good, in the former than the latter.45 But it is an illicit move to go from that sense of flourishing and its diminishment, to the conclusion that a life is not worth living, for there is quite simply no critical threshold that can be crossed, such that a diminishment in flourishing ceases to instantiate any inherent good genuinely worth preserving.46 An appeal can be made (and usually is) to various forms of con- sequentialism to

justify the conclusion that certain lives are not worth living. Consequentialism purports to offer an answer by posing a common denominator to reckon with these factors, but the com- plexity of human value, most significantly the incommensurability of certain goods, defies all such levelling attempts.47 W. D. Ross, Charles Fried, Ronald Dworkin, and other proponents of mixed consequentialist systems, simply propose prima facie duties without explaining exactly what it is about the nature of the process of human reasoning that determines the strength of certain values, such that the duty to respect them is overridden in some situations, but not in others.48 Perhaps an appeal to convention may provide some sort of guide. However, this just retreats into a form of sub- jectivity, taking

comfort in the fact that a practice may be widely spread. This will not do when we consider the course of human history that has thrown up radically evil forms of convention, e.g. eugenics, mass killing , etc.49 Again, if a life is judged not worth living, what is it about death that is supposed to be judged objectively commensurable to staying alive? How is it calculated? Perhaps intuition can attempt to supply an answer. However, a thoroughgoing appeal to intuition here simply negates the ability we have to use practical reason to inform our decision-making and guide our choices. But this will not do, for it is tantamount to saying that in the very situations where human reason is most crucially needed it is of no use to us! In reality, such a thoroughgoing appeal to intuition readily degenerates into a form of a posteriori rationalisation to justify choices already opted for on the basis of sub-rational emotion.50 While use of

language sometimes leads us to suspect that lives are often evaluated in terms of their overall worth, we should nevertheless be very suspicious of attempting to extrapolate from statements that (1) ‘doing X is a valuable part of A’s life

and that A’s life is diminished by not being able to do X’, to (2) ‘A’s life is no longer worth living and it is therefore right to

intentionally end it because A cannot do X’. Such inferences only seem plausible because there is a shift in the correct locus of evaluation, especially in the framework of medical decision-making, from the worthwhileness of certain treatments to the worthwhileness of certain lives.51 The correct question to be focused upon, should be whether a proposed treatment for a patient would be worthwhile; not whether a patient’s life would be worthwhile. The distinction between the worthwhileness of certain treatments and the worthwhileness of certain lives is no mere semantic ploy, for it legitimately seeks to address what the scope of decision-making concerning the preser- vation of life and health should be. In doing so, it provides for a sphere of delimitation where patient choice concerning treatment can reasonably be made.52 The responsibility for safeguarding and promoting the good of health lies primarily with the patient and not with the medical profession. That patient assessment should be centred squarely on the impact of proposed treatments, however, is not tantamount to endorsing the idea that we can truly judge the worth of our own lives. The capacity to choose crucially brings with it the responsibility of making choices that do in fact serve to promote rather than under- mine the ends of integral human flourishing. Given the diversity of choices that are consistent with human flourishing, there will often be considerable leeway in a patient’s deliberation. Yet, leeway does not endorse license, and there are limits on the shaping of reasonable choice concerning the refusal or withdrawal of treatments.53 The non-consequentialist framework being espoused here is not one advocating the naïve preservation of life at all costs, for in many cases it is indeed licit to withhold or withdraw life-preserving treat- ment.54 More precisely, there cannot be said to be a duty to undergo a treatment that is not worthwhile (offering no reasonable hope of benefit to the patient), or that is considered medically futile.55 Without offering any exclusive listing of factors, Germain Grisez and Joseph Boyle helpfully list several factors that would offer reasonable grounds for justifying the withdrawal or non-provision of a medical treatment: a risky or experimental treatment; avoidance of significant further pain or trauma associated with treatment; the impact that 52 a treatment may have on the patient’s participation in activities or experiences the patient values; conflicts with deep-seated moral or religious principles to which the patient is committed to; a treatment psychologically repelling or repugnant to the patient; compelling burdens on family or finances.56 Such a framework for decision-making can indeed be abused and can result in the refusal of treatments that would seem to offer considerable benefits to patients without significant burden being attached to them. This will come as no surprise, and indeed can result in decisions that are directly suicidal in nature. However, the question that needs to be faced here is that there need be no essential incompatibility between, on the one hand, placing severe restraints on interference with the persistent choice of patients, even though they are intentionally suicidal, and yet, on the other, still uphold the respect due to the good of human life.57 It is a ‘brute fact’ that interference would be visited with all manner of difficulty, not least the fact that successful treatment usually requires the active co-operation of the patient. The problems that would be visited by enforcing treatments against the vehement will of a patient would be immense. Effects on the morale of the patient, family, and professions would be considerable. One only has to consider the impact of force feeding against a person’s will to see the traumatic means that may have to be resorted to. Further than that, the imposition of such an overt act of countermanding a patient’s decision, would serve only to undermine the already tested repu- tation of the medical profession in the eyes of the public, suspicious of paternalistic interventionism by physicians, and with it, a concomitant perception of disregard for the dignity of the individual patient.58 For those reasons, then, the general decision not to overrule a patient’s suicidal intent to end life by refusal or withdrawal of treatment, other than by means of, say, persuasion, will sometimes happen. Yet, this does not amount to a policy of condoning the aiding

and abetting of a suicide. Rather, it represents a principled decision to intentionally act for a good objective, the

common good of patients, and the community generally. This good objective being acted for may practically permit the consequence of resultant death as an unintended yet fair side effect of a good intention. This is a sensible and principled way of responding to the reality, particularly in the context of medicine, that in order to prevent the execution, even of a serious wrong, there is only so much that can reasonably be done to protect patients from the consequences of their own wrongful decisions. Better off Dead? A Concluding Caveat Supporters of suicide and assisted suicide claim that we can justifi- ably argue that it makes sense to say that a person would be ‘better off dead’ rather than continuing to live, say, a life of severely diminished quality. Such value judgements, it is said, are compara- tively sound.59

Yet, how is it possible for death to benefit the person who dies? Death destroys the person. How can we

produce a benefit, therefore, if we destroy the self, the potential beneficiary? One of the commonest lines of argumentation made here is termed the ‘deprivation account’. Key exponents include Thomas Nagel, Harry Silverstein and Fred Feldman.60 The argument advanced basically trades on a parallel question concerning death, arguing that a person can be posthumously harmed by his or her future loss, even though death means that the person is no longer actually in existence to experience it.61 For example, suppose Charles Dickens’s life would have included more literary achievement if he had lived for a few more years. Because literary achievement is a good, Dickens can be said to have had a less good life overall than he would have had if he had lived longer. Living a less good life is a harm to the person. By excluding those future possible achievements, then, Dickens’s death can be said to be a harm to him, for it prevented a life that would have been better than it was.62 Trading on this parallel, it is then argued that death can be a benefit in a comparison of future possible lives. Suppose a person’s life would go on containing severe suffering and pain. That person would be better off having a shorter life than having a life of prolonged misery. Since living a better life is a benefit, it is said that living the shorter life, here, is a benefit, since it is the better life. By interfering with the

infliction of evils, the person’s death can therefore be said to be a genuine benefit to him or her, since it prevents a worse life being lived.63 By engaging in such comparisons of future lives, the conclusion is reached by deprivation theorists that death is only an evil for the person if the future lost is one that offers better prospects for the person than death itself. Death itself is typically conceived of as the destruction of the self ; the non-existence of the self; the non-state of non-being .64 How can we respond to this assessment that death can be said to benefit a patient when the patient’s future prospects in life seem so grim? The non-state that death brings in its wake is seen as being preferable to the continuance of life. Yet, are persons who make and act upon such calculations objectively justified in opting for death? Can it truly be a rational act for a person to choose the destruction of self over the continuation of self, even a self racked by the severe impositions of pain and suffering?65 Philip Devine attempts to criticise the logicality of a decision to self-kill by stating what he considers to be the obscurity of what we can know about death.66 He argues that if rational choice requires that a person knows what he or she is choosing (a leap in the dark not sufficing), then it cannot be rationally possible to intentionally choose death because of the ‘opaqueness of death’.67 As Devine says, ‘. . . a precondition of rational choice is that one knows what one is choosing, either by experience or by the testimony of others who have experienced it or something very like it’.68 Death cannot be rationally commensurated against, for we do not know what we are comparing life to. Life cannot simply be judged an overall evil and acted against by intentionally embracing death, for the ‘overall evil of life’ cannot be rationally traded in for the ‘opaqueness of death’. For Devine, choosing death is simply akin to leaping into the bowels of radical uncertainty that cannot function as a useful ground for objective rational choice.69 While I agree with Devine’s conclusion that intentionally opting for death is ultimately an unreasonable act, I think

his reasoning for supporting that conclusion lacks credibility, since the epistemic premise of his argument here is faulty. First, it can be stated that even if death really is shrouded in mystery, it is sometimes possible to make rational decisions without our knowing exactly what we are choosing. Consider a quiz programme in which the contestant is asked to take a fixed prize of cash or a mystery gift. The participant opts for the mystery gift. This risk seems perfectly reasonable.70 Can this not function as an analogy for a patient faced with the prospect of suffering and pain who opts for the ‘mystery’ of death? Second, I crucially do

not think that the mystery option is the actual choice placed before us, for I think that we can have sufficient relevant knowledge about death to understand important impli- cations of the choice being opted for. Unlike Devine, I think that the unreasonableness of opting for death arises precisely because we do know enough about what is being chosen to make it an

objectively irrational choice.71 What we can know about death, based on natural human reason alone, is that it results in the destruction of the self. There will no longer be a human being in existence. There will be no carrier of value or disvalue. There will be no subject in existence that is capable of bearing any of the kinds of predication typical of living human beings. Death is an event that results in the non-being of the human person that was.72 Unlike Devine, I would argue that an intention to bring about this non-state, given the relevant (if incomplete) knowledge we have about it, points to the incoherence behind the idea that death can really be said to be a benefit for the person who is dead, as argued for by contemporary deprivation authors.73 When we assert that a person is harmed or benefited by a state, this requires that there is actually a subject in existence who is capable of being the bearer of the value or disvalue. If a person must actually exist in order to be the subject bearer of harms and benefits that happen, then how can there be said to be a subject who is capable of being benefited posthumously by his or her death? This line of argumen- tation against deprivation accounts (that death can be a benefit) is convincingly argued for by John Donnelly and J.

L. A. Garcia. If a person succeeds in killing himself or herself, there can be no betterment ascribed to the person. For Donnelly, it is muddled to argue that a person can be said to be posthumously benefited or harmed if the person must first be destroyed as a prerequisite for the benefit.74 The irrationality of thinking that death can be a benefit for a person is

further addressed by Garcia.75 If it is good to be without pain, as indeed it is under most circumstances, this presupposes the existence of the

subject in order to instantiate that good (any good). If a person can be ‘better off dead’, then the continued existence of the person must continue after death. Yet no one on the basis of reason alone can justifiably claim that death can allow for the continuation of the person qua person . To realise goods and to minimise evils requires the presence of that single constant, a live human being, who can possibly make sense of such value statements. For Garcia, therefore, it is quite illicit to jump from the evaluation of means to minimise, or be free from, the evils of suffering and pain, to the conclusion that the destruction

of the subject itself can make a person in any meaningful sense better off. Consequently, all that can reasonably be done is to seek to benefit persons in their present lives, that is to improve as best we can the extent of their flourishing within the framework of humanitarian means available at our disposal.76 Contrary to Donnelly and Garcia, Nagel argues that there are plausible exceptions that render such accounts sensible to us, notwithstanding the destruction of the subject. For example, Nagel argues that a person can be harmed posthumously by having his or her reputation harmed, and can therefore be said to be posthumously benefited by having his or her reputation restored. When all is said and done, therefore, it seems that we can reasonably talk of ‘benefiting the dead’.77 In reply, it can be stated that there are other plausible explanations of what is meant by the dead ‘being subjected’ to harms and benefits that do not presuppose that the dead can actually be said to experi- ence those harms or benefits. Thus, to take Nagel’s example con- cerning posthumous reputation, we can plausibly state that it is the reputation of a former person that is harmed, say, by an act of slander, and not a person as such.78 Similarly we can say that the reputation of a former person is benefited by nice things being said about the former person. The living seek to protect their reputations because they, while alive, identify with them and realise

that the reputations they identify with are capable of being posthumously harmed or benefited.79 If the above arguments are sound, (1) that we can have enough relevant knowledge of what death would entail, and (2) that the dead cannot really be said to be harmed or benefited, then I think they severely undermine the contemporary deprivation accounts of death. Contrary to those accounts, I would argue that it is death per se that is really the objective evil for us, not because it deprives us of a prospective future of overall good judged better than the alter- native of

non-being. It cannot be about harm to a former person who has ceased to exist , for no person actually suffers from

the sub-sequent non-participation. Rather, death in itself is an evil to us because it ontologically destroys the current existent subject — it is the ultimate in metaphysical lightning strikes .80 The evil of death is truly an ontological evil borne by the person who already exists, independently of calculations about better or worse possible lives. Such an evil need not be consciously experienced in order to be an evil for the kind of being a human person is. Death is an evil because of the change in kind it brings about, a change that is destructive of the type of entity that we essentially are.

Anything, whether caused naturally or caused by human intervention (intentional or unin- tentional) that drastically interferes in the process of maintaining the person in existence is an objective evil for the person . What is crucially at stake

here, and is dialectically supportive of the self-evidency of the basic good of human life, is that death is a radical interference with the current life process of the kind of being that we are. In consequence, death itself can be credibly thought of as a ‘primitive evil’ for all persons, regardless of the extent to which they are currently or prospectively capable of participating in a full array of the goods of life.81 In conclusion, concerning willed human actions, it is justifiable

to state that any intentional rejection of human life itself cannot therefore be warranted since it is an expression of an ultimate disvalue for the subject, namely, the destruction of the present person; a radical 79

ontological good that we cannot begin to weigh objectively against the travails of life in a rational manner. To deal with the sources of disvalue (pain, suffering, etc.) we should not seek to irrationally destroy the person , the very source and condition of all human possibility .82

Despite every flaw in calculating risk of human existence, we are still right: you have to weigh survival as an a priori question and sculpt deliberate policies to protect humanity

Matheny 7

(Jason, Department of Health Policy and Management, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University. “Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction.” Risk Analysis. Vol 27, No 5, 2007,

http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/website/resources/publications/2007_orig-articles/2007-10-15-reducingrisk.html)

9. Conclusion We may be poorly equipped to recognize or plan for extinction risks (Yudkowsky, 2007). We may not be good at grasping the significance of very large numbers (catastrophic outcomes) or very small numbers

(probabilities) over large timeframes. We struggle with estimating the probabilities of rare or unprecedented events

(K5unreuther et al., 2001). Policymakers may not plan far beyond current political administrations and rarely do risk assessments value the existence of future generations.18 We may unjustifiably discount the value of future lives. Finally, extinction risks are market failures where an individual enjoys no perceptible benefit from his or her investment in risk reduction. Human survival may thus be a good requiring deliberate policies to protect. It might be feared that consideration of extinction risks would lead to a reductio ad absurdum: we ought to invest all our resources in asteroid defense or nuclear disarmament, instead of AIDS, pollution, world hunger, or other problems we face today. On the contrary,

programs that create a healthy and content global population are likely to reduce the probability of global war or catastrophic terrorism. They should thus be seen as an essential part of a portfolio of risk-reducing projects.