Note that you’ll want to have evidence against the technological implementation ready to go; I’m predominantly attacking the hegemony here.

So one of the claims the case makes is that US hegemony provides for global stability and without it there’ll be transitional wars all over the world escalating to nuclear war that will kill us all. What this claim actually means is that there will transitional wars that we wish we were involved in but aren’t. Because the difference between the wars we delivered to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Pakistan and the wars throughout Africa that we’ve ignored, and the brutal oppression of populations in Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Palestine is that we’re not convinced that we should really try to put a forcible stop to any of the latter. Put simply, hegemony isn’t about peace and human rights in the world but rather about getting to choose where the violent oppression happens.

But they extended that claim to say that keeping hegemony solves for nuclear war. This is ridiculous in two ways: First, we’re not having a nuclear war for them to “solve for.” But secondly, and more importantly, as long as there are nuclear weapons in the world, we continue to be at risk of nuclear war. So if the nuclear war that we’re not having can be solved for, then the only way to solve it is total WMD disarmament. Which I think we should be doing anyway, but they’re not doing it.

But let’s get back to hegemony. The affirmative claims that when Space-Based Solar Power techno-magically makes us energy-independent and solves for climate change, things will be great. This is wrong. Because when we actually are energy-independent, we’ll be even more confused than we are now as to why we should be spending 24.9% — according to the taxpayer receipt from the IRS — on our oil-securing hegemony complex euphemistically referred to as “defense,” which, I should note, is merely going to increase the 4.5% that is additionally spent on veterans. So what happens when oil doesn’t need securing? Well, either we cut our military and lose the appearance of hegemony that way which the affirmative says would be bad, or we flail around trying to justify our desire to shoot something, like in the Balkans or in Panama, while claiming that the wars we’re pouring money into are really quite peaceful which I say is a lie that’s corrupting the affirmative’s otherwise good intentions.

But that’s only if it works. Please note: it won’t work. [This is the part where you read your technology won't work block.] So what we end up with instead is another debacle that we need to heighten our made-for-TV war-mania to successfully ignore. People won’t be impressed by our larger-than-life failure, they’ll be impressed by the explosions we can cause in a desperate attempt to distract the world from the fact that our grasp has once again exceeded our reach.

But let me explain for just a moment more about why it won’t work — certainly not as advertised. Think about it: they’re saying that in 2008, it would take less than a presidential term and rather less than the $787 billion later spent on economic stimulus. And with that, we’d have absolute energy independence, not have to worry about climate change, be able to continue detonating whoever we think deserves it (regardless of what the LD debaters think), and eventually colonize another planet. The only plausible explanation I can come up with for why this hasn’t already happened is because their intelligence is fixed around the policy. You may remember this from when we decided to invade Iraq: the government thinks that WMD are a good reason to invade Iraq and so willfully ignores or actively discredits any evidence they get saying that Iraq has no WMD whatsoever. Eugene Jarecki covers this in The American Way of War, which is a fascinating and horrifying read, but what is really fascinating and horrifying is that Condi Rice still justifies the decision by pointing out that everybody who looked at the errant evidence believed in the same orchestrated way (approx 3:30 in). But we’re looking at a similar problem here where the affirmative has so much interest in getting their policy approved that they’ve fixed their evidence to it and are relying on us not to merely cross-examine them and check them with scenarios of consequences, but to actively go minority-reporting their carefully cherry-picked hogwash. So don’t just ask yourself whose evidence you believe more; ask yourself why actual policymakers haven’t believed the evidence the affirmative has presented to you today.

And finally, let’s get back to hegemony and space colonization — or as Ralph Kramden summarized it, “Bang, zoom! Straight to the moon!” Because what the affirmative hasn’t considered is that spreading out the human race makes it difficult to maintain hegemony. And you can look back to England losing control of us precocious colonists or look to Heinlein’s book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (where lunar colonists rebel and catapult rocks at Earth allowing Earth’s gravity to do the hard work for them) to see that if they’ve got a pro-hegemony mindset — which, by claiming the so-called benefits of hegemony regardless of the success or failure of their plan, they do — then spreading the human race across great distances is only going to end badly for everybody. And this is a benefit they think they can claim despite all other physiological barriers, and happily ignoring that between nuclear power and continued development of conventional solar power, starting a colony is going to be in no way dependent on their Space-Based Solar Power plan.

So. Their belief in hegemony has totally corrupted their case and shows the actual agenda they’re fixing their unsound policy evidence around. They don’t really want to colonize beyond our hegemonic grasp and SBSP wouldn’t help them much if they did. They’re not going to solve for climate change because their ability to solve would be predicated on the belief that our policymakers — the ones who direct our hegemony that they love — decided either that they could not or should not use this technology in that way, which is why we don’t have it today. And that’s above and beyond all of the other technological limitations that got read in between the [ and the ] above.

Quit whining that you haven’t done anything wrong because, frankly, you haven’t done much of anything. –KMFDM, “Dogma”

I’m not a fan of critiques in policy debate. They tend to be unnatural abominations of half-baked ideas which don’t actually answer the case and policy that has been presented. But sometimes they just turn silly, like the one claiming that any interest in exploring or developing space is clearly a byproduct of rampaging narcissism and we should ignore their crazy affirmative plans because we’re all psychoanalysts and can see their underlying personality disorders. As far as I can tell, it starts with an ad-hominem attack and them links the affirmative to Everything Wrong with the world today while claiming that the negative and judge are just innocent bystanders. The first time I saw it, the negative team claimed “Narcissism is the most important thing in this round!” which got a response of “Well it certainly thinks so, doesn’t it?” but didn’t convince me of anything because the critique of the policy — like most badly stitched together critiques in policy debate — failed to actually critique the policy.

But if you get this critique run against you, I suggest you have some fun with answering it… like this.

If you want to mess with your opponents straight out, begin cross-examination with “So, according to your critique, we all need to examine our subconscious motivation for our actions. Please, tell me about your relationship with your mother.” The reason for this question is the fourth response to their critique (see below) and anything other than an honest and open discussion of their relationship with their mother shows that they’re failing to meet the obligations they’re trying to lay out in the critique. On the off-chance that they actually do answer the question, I’d go so far as to spend the whole cross-examination period on “I see. Please continue,” and “What did you mean by…?” — which is to say, the cross-examination becomes all about your opponent’s mother. If you get stuck for questions, switch over to: “Very interesting. Let’s try some word association, where I say a word and you say the first thing that comes to mind. Ready?” Bonus points if you’ve got an actual Rorschach test ready to go during cross-examination.

But regardless of how you want to spend your cross-examination time, here’s five responses — stacked — to the critique:

1. It’s unethical to diagnose an opponent in an attempt to win an argument against them. The state of opposition in competition constitutes a relationship. From the American Psychological Association’s list of “Potential Ethical Violations,” we start with “psychologists are supposed to avoid relationships that could impair their professional performance or harm their clients.” So while this whole narcissism critique is a dubious ad-hominem attack (going after us instead of our case), in as much as it is also be an attack on our psychology claiming that we should be analysts, it immediately violates the basic ethics of being an analyst which the critique claims as its framework.
2. But even ignoring ethics, it’s illegal to actually practice psychology without a license. About.com explains to people pursuing work as psychologists that “In order to be licensed to practice, psychologists need to earn a degree from an accredited institution. After earning a degree, it is also necessary to complete the requirements to achieve professional licensing in the state where one wishes to work.” And advocating criminal behavior in a policy round seems counter-intuitive to say the least.
3. But let’s suppose that they’re not intending to go to the extremes of illegality or ethical conflicts of interest. In this case, we’ll play the analyst like they say we should and see in this critique they’ve made the markers of a Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder. We think it’s a bad idea to go down this path — both ethically and legally — but if they want to get into throw-away cheap-shots, we are prepared to defend ourselves here.
4. And yet we don’t think either of us should be getting into that territory because I don’t think any of us are prepared for the responsibilities of being a pscyhoanalyst. As Dr. Jung — the guy who laid the groundwork for Meyers-Briggs Personality types — recounts in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections:
   

   He wanted to be an analyst. I said to him, “Do you know what that means? It means that you must first learn to know yourself. You yourself are the instrument. If you are not right, how can the patient be made right? If you are not convinced, how can you convince him? You yourself must be the real stuff. If you are not, God help you! Then you will lead patients astray. Therefore you must first accept an analysis of yourself.”

   So a crucial part of wanting to play analyst is needing to be analyzed. Expecting that the negative team doesn’t actually have a certificate of clean mental health appropriate for practicing psychology, we reject their critique. But their critique also turns against them as their lack of preparation in their chosen field — which passive-aggressively avoided directly responding to the proposed policy — should lead you to question the validity of their other claims, in the exact same way they wanted their faux-diagnosis of narcissism to make you doubt our policy.

5. Finally, the critique misapplies psychology in an attempt to project the negative’s biases onto our status as mythological creatures. Joseph Campbell, whose work as an anthropologist was heavily influenced by Dr. Jung, describes this in Myths to Live By:
   

   [O]ur most immediate mysterious neighbor today is not the animal or the plant; nor is it any longer the heavenly vault with its wonderfully moving lights. Frobenius points out that we have demythologized those through our sciences, and that the center of mystery now is man himself: man as a Thou, one’s neighbor; not as “I” might wish him to be, or may imagine that I know and relate to him, but in himself, thus come, as a being of mystery and wonder.

   So from our relational vantage point as mythological beings vis-a-vis The Other, we reject their claims to know that we’re narcissists because they simply can’t know us well enough to make any such claim after a mere eleven minutes, even if they are of sound mind and licensed to practice in this state. But above and beyond that what Campbell reminds us of is that rocket science is relatively easy compared to figuring out people. And in that we’re more likely to be successful with our plan than their critique, you’ll want to vote for our plan.

In case you’re wondering, the markers that the linked Wikipedia article (ostensibly based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) lists for passive-aggressive personality disorder are as follows:

1. passively resists fulfilling routine social and occupational tasks like actually responding to the affirmative case.
2. complains of being misunderstood and unappreciated by others as the negative will do when they claim the point of the critique was totally missed.
3. is sullen and argumentative, especially the latter.
4. unreasonably criticizes and scorns authority, not only by calling our rocket scientists categorically narcissists, but I’m sure they’ll have some unkind things to say about Campbell, Jung, and the APA in defending their critique.
5. expresses envy and resentment toward those apparently more fortunate like those of us who have vision and ambition and rockets.
6. voices exaggerated and persistent complaints of personal misfortune which is where we get into their nuke war and extinction scenarios.
7. alternates between hostile defiance and contrition… okay, they might not have done this one.

Of course, with only a couple of subtle variations, almost any affirmative I’ve seen this year could run a PAPD critique against negatives. But then again, I’m in Oregon so alternate causality might be in play. Regardless, that’s how you can turn the Space Narcissism critique to claim your status as a mythological creature. Me, I’m a chimera!

Like a lot of American kids, I read [Lord of the Flies] in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn’t get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid. — Paul Graham

Dear Kids,

I went to see the movie version of The Hunger Games the other day. I’m glad I read the New Yorker’s book review first as it prepared me to appreciate it as an allegory of the college admissions process. And while I have heard the ancient rallying cry of my people that “The Book Was Better!” I’d like to take a few moments to highlight what crucial things about going from High School into College this particularly sadistic and murderous dystopia has to share with us. What I saw was:

• You have to work to make a mentor an invaluable asset.
• You have to compete on your own terms to stand out.
• You can use reputation to substitute for charisma.
• You can win and still fail.

Let’s start off by looking at Haymitch Abernathy. He won the games before Katniss or Peeta were born. He has, presumably, seen years of kids come to his tutelage and yet die in the same stupidly predictable ways. So while he is introduced as a coarse and abrasive drunk, his experience is that the abstractly dehumanized kids need to tap his well of experience far more than he needs to be involved with their soon-to-be-over lives. But what I love about this mentor is that he works hard for his kids in ways that they don’t even comprehend until after the fact — but only after their actions have convinced him that they’ll capitalize on the opportunities he provides them with. His actions save both Katniss and Peeta, but he eschews the spotlight while they claim they saved each other.

Now I can’t tell you what your mentor — if you’ve worked hard on getting one to pay attention to you — is doing for you that you don’t know about.¹ But what I can tell you is that your mentor’s perspective is likely to be skewed in one direction which makes them awesome at something (which you presumably want to emulate) and deficient at something else (which you probably don’t). We call this unfortunate trade-off “being human,” and we are trying to figure out how to fix it. But in the meantime, you’ll need to be watching for the gaps in the advice rather than just taking advice because it was given. As I explained to one of my students, “I’m just telling you what I would do if I were you, but since you’re the one doing this thing, you have to decide whether or not you want to take my advice.” The flip side of this was horrifyingly portrayed in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

As far as college admissions goes, Abernathy would be giving the kids ad hoc essay writing lessons, advising them on how to choose a good school, and then writing letters of recommendation after he was satisfied that they had a sound strategy for getting into and through college.

The second lesson of the film — and this is where I decided that I liked this movie — is that getting a perfect score on a test isn’t good enough; you have to compete on your own terms to stand out. Katniss was feeling proud of herself for nailing the target in the heart, but then realized that the judges weren’t paying any attention. The judges weren’t paying any attention because after 74 years of kids doing target practice (some of them trained specifically for target practice), nailing the target in the heart is ordinary. So while you might have a 4.0 GPA and be the best in your District 12 High School, that 4.0 GPA stops being special when you realize you’re competing against all of the other 4.0 GPAs from all of the other High Schools. And while the school councilors will say “Do soccer! Do debate!” the fact of the matter is that all of those other schools have soccer and debate, too. This is ordinary advice and no matter how many extracurricular activities you’re told to participate in, you’re not going to get away from the institutional banality of them. Katniss solves this problem by turning and shooting into her crowd of judges: suddenly her performance involves them and is, stunningly, about them. By breaking the framework of the competition, she shows that she’s superior to everybody who is still stuck inside the expectations of the competition.

I recall reading an article a couple of years ago that described the judging psychology in college admissions when looking at achievement-capped kids. It basically said that if you’ve got ordinary achievements, then they’ll be discounted by the evaluator who is seeing similar achievements on other applications and thinking “this looks common enough, I think I’d be able to do it too,” but an abnormal achievement that catches the evaluator off-guard may get a response of “I don’t know how this kid did this, and thus I am intrigued and wish to subscribe to their newsletter.”

But “Compete Different” is the advice I give to my students. There are seven billion people in the world. Being the best at anything ordinary is very hard to do and rarely lasts very long. But mixing and matching constantly developing skill-sets to develop creative combinations of competencies can let you carve out an odd little niche for yourself. It’s worked for me so far.

The third lesson of the film is that reputation can substitute for popularity. Katniss seems to detest crowds and fanfares in a way that I’ve not felt since my senior year of High School, a weakness that Haymitch says will make it difficult to get sponsors. Put another way, it’s easier to tell the scholarship committees how you’re improving other people’s lives if there are other people involved. But Katniss has a bit of reputation going for her: Peeta knows her hunting skills and Cinna knows her valor. Both of those guys are good at being popular and tapping into crowd-commonalities that Katniss is simply overwhelmed by. But because they recognize her reputation for actual skills and qualities, they put forth the effort to make her look good — as Haymitch explains to her, “he made you look desirable” — which she can them flip around and cite as her actual popularity without having to really change at all.

This is important because in the increasingly networked age, the adage that “it’s not what you know but who you know that matters” is being replaced with “it’s who knows you’re not a complete screw-up that matters” when it comes to having other people present opportunities for your capitalization. And this, combined with cheap computers, books, cameras, and web hosting are making it easier for intellectuals and introverts to build a reputation without having to put any effort into the seemingly unnatural process of becoming popular. Start developing your reputation for competing differently and competently early and have a lot to show off when it matters.²

The last big thing I want to bring out with regards to college admissions is that you can win and still fail. Just look at Cato: he got all of the prep on what to do to win the game. But in the end he realizes that even if he wins the game by killing everybody as he’s been trained to do, he doesn’t know what he’d be doing with his life. At that point he gives up and gets himself killed. And this is what people are actually worried about when they bemoan “teaching to the test” or the “unfair advantages of college admissions prep.” It’s not that what’s on the test isn’t important to the curriculum, but rather that it’s only important to the curriculum. They’re not worried about the 12 or 16 or 18 or even 21 year old taking the test. They’re worried about the 26 year old that probably has a bachelor’s degree but ran out of tests to take and has moved back in with their parents; a kid whose adulthood is doing anything but emerging because they can’t figure out how to go from being in a classroom with obvious and set targets to being in the real world full of sneaky and camouflaged opportunities. In the end, Katniss is a better person than Cato not just because she’s less of a homicidal maniac, but also because she’s got the life skills to hunt down an opportunity, kill it, skin it, and wear its antlers as a trophy of her victory. (Of course opportunities have antlers. You clearly don’t know what opportunities look like if you’re questioning me on this point.)

But when it comes to taking advice from a mentor or teacher or parent, do be sure to ask not how it’ll help you with college admissions, but with life. Because every little framework that is worth codifying at a small level connects into the larger framework of civilization somehow, assuming (dubiously) that it’s being done right. So the precise question is: how will this improve my life if I’m doing it right? And the answer isn’t “you’ll win” or “you’ll get into a good college,” but rather “you’ll progress towards enlightenment.” If your advisor can’t tell you that, then they probably can’t tell you how to do it particularly right, either. But, then again, enlightenment may be a very personal thing, so be wary of advice that won’t work for you.

That’s what I saw represented in the movie version of The Hunger Games. My thinking has been extensively influenced by Paul Graham’s writings on “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” and “Why Nerds are Unpopular,” which I am thus perpetually advising my students to read.

Good luck, and this is how to make the odds be in your favor.

Jason

¹ And I’m not going to tell you what I’ve done for my students, either, though my students are free to ask.
² That said, don’t show off gross breaches of decorum — enjoy your immaturity on your path to enlightenment, but don’t put it where any stranger or scholarship committee can see it.

I’m here to explain why you should write down that you’re voting to affirm that targeted killing is a morally permissible foreign policy tool.

As far as definitions go, I think my opponent and I can agree that we’re talking about the policy of blowing up alleged terrorists to keep everybody else safe, especially suburban and rural Americans.

But the definition of morally permissible needs a bit more work: the flip side of morally permissible is morally impermissible, which is to say it must not happen. [This is just based on the common definition of permissible, but there's probably some Rawls evidence floating around to back it up.] So if I can convince you that you might find it to be a morally permissible option, or agree with the government that it is desirable, either now or in the near future, then you’ll want to vote for the affirmative. In this round, the hard line is drawn on the opposition.

But that said, I value freedom of conscience. So while I’m going to try to influence you to vote for me because I want to win, ultimately I’m going to respect your freedom of conscience and your autonomy because without it your human dignity and the inherent value of your human life is undermined.

But we do have to look at this through a pragmatic lens: it would be foolhardy of us to exercise our freedom of conscience in a way that predictably provokes retaliation that will compromise our freedom of conscience. So while we may feel compelled to resist an overwhelming force, we must plan our resistance surreptitiously. [Recall what happened to poor Guy Fawkes, for example.]

First, biopower allows governments to manage growing populations effectively. [This is borrowing fast and loose from Foucault.] Biopower works on the theory that government can efficiently rule if it focuses on what humans have in common — or should have in common — as a species, and it works great for one-size-fits-all solutions. But as Charles de Gaulle expressed when asking “How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” one size rarely fits all and we quickly find that biopower achieves its success by starting with a homogenizing, quantifying dehumanization.

Second, to improve the uniformity and conformity of people so they’re easier to govern and/or control, spin doctors and propagandists are deployed to implant pseudothinking [Fromm] in the populous. This is what Edward Bernays referred to as “the engineering of consent” on the belief that it’s easier to control people if they’re not trying to think for themselves. After all, thinking for themselves in France got them 246 different kinds of cheese. Chomsky extends and expands this as a point of fear in Manufacturing Consent, but I prefer Huxley’s references to it as “herd poison” in looking at its early uses in the Nazi rise to power in Germany in Brave New World Revisited. So when we look at the question of Targeted Killing and our government’s policy of actively doing it, even to our fellow citizens, the lack of concern at the President’s press conference following Attorney General Holder’s defense of the practice on March 6th, we understand that the government position is that, as Nietzsche said (in Beyond Good and Evil) “It is desirable that as few people as possible should reflect upon morals, and consequently it is very desirable that morals should not some day become interesting!” But for those of us who do find morals interesting, well…

Third, you can be forcibly convinced that it’s morally okay. Rebecca Saxe was doing research into how people make judgments about narratives over the course of their lifetime and noted that as the person develops from child to adult, they shift their judgment from consequence-based thinking to intent-based thinking, and this uses a specific set of neurons in the brain. Back in 2009 she presented:

[O]f course what we’d rather is have a way to interfere with function in this brain region; and see if we could change people’s moral judgment. And we do have such a tool: it’s called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, or TMS. This is a tool that lets us pass a magnetic pulse through somebody’s skull into a small region of their brain and temporarily disorganize the function of neurons in that region.

What this means, of course, is that if sign your name agreeing with the negative that the TK our government currently has an active policy of engaging in is a morally impermissible foreign policy tool, you’ve identified yourself as a dissident in need of some TMS acceptance therapy. (My advice: wearing a tin-foil hat makes it hurt a lot more.)

Fourth and finally, we have to realize that because we’re talking about a standing government policy, we’ll need something more than a couple of high schoolers and a judge or few opposing it. People will mentally circumvent any actual wrongness in their actions: “‘I did that, says my memory. ‘I could not have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually — the memory yields.” observes Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil; the apparent lingering wrongness is due to subtle differences in neurophysiological configuration. Saxe goes on to explain

People come especially well-equipped to think about other people’s thoughts. We have a special brain system to think about what other people are thinking. This system takes a long time to develop… and even in adulthood, differences in this region can explain differences in how we think about and judge people.

So you may be totally opposed to our government’s TK policy and I may be totally opposed to our government’s TK policy, but until we’ve got a clue as to how to organize to successfully oppose our government’s TK policy, documenting our opposition to this policy will merely make us targets for re-education, just like posting those “Death to America” videos to the internet make terrorist suspects targets for our nation’s TK policy because we want to not have them carry out any plans involving “Death to America.”

Overall, if you agree with the government that a TK policy against the “Death to America” crowd is a morally permissible foreign policy tool, then you’ll want to express your freedom of conscience and vote aff. But the catch is that if you disagree with the government and think that it’s morally impermissible that we’re using our TK policy to execute citizens who haven’t been charged with anything in a court of law, you’ll still want to write down an affirmative vote to retain your freedom of conscience from a government that can kill on a whim, is well versed in propaganda, and can probably alter your conscience to be more in line with theirs — that’s just being practical. And while this may be a horrifying conclusion, ask yourself: if the government is already doing the impermissible, what do you think they’ll do next? And the final issue is that even if you’re willing to risk your freedom of conscience by rebelling against the government and writing down that their behavior is morally impermissible, you’ll still want to logically vote affirmative because by acknowledging your need for re-education, you’ve admitted the high likelihood that you’ll be feeling differently about this issue in the future.

Now, is this all crazy paranoia? I’d like to think so, but hearing about the FBI’s $450M Sentinel System or the $200M data crunching budget from the executive office with another $250M from the DoD, or the NSA’s Spy Center at the same time as the FBI is thinking it can bend or suspend the law and I get a bit nervous.

April 27: AJE is reporting that “targeted killing” no longer even needs to know who is being targeted. Rolling Stone has an in-depth article on drone strikes, concluding that “according to a detailed study of drone victims compiled by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, at least 174 of those executed by drones were under the age of 18 – in other words, children.”

But here’s the other thing that occurred to me (thanks to Joseph Campbell): Sun Tzu says that “War is a matter of vital importance to the State; the province of life or death; the road to survival or ruin. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied.” But then Sun Tzu says that the first fundamental factor of war is moral influence, and “By moral influence (tao) I mean that which causes people to be in harmony with their leaders, so that they will accompany them in life and unto death without fear of mortal peril.” Which is all well and good until you consider that targeted killing and drone strikes, when evaluated as acts of war, minimize the check of harmony between people and leaders so as to avoid questions of morality and moral permissibility. The CIA operatives safely distanced from the flyers they are remotely controlling are not accompanying their leaders unto death, and there are really very few of them accompanying them even in life. So when we claim that morality is a code of behavior agreeable to rational people, what Sun Tzu is explaining to us here is that the moral permissibility of war isn’t a matter of people merely saying that it’s okay but rather a matter of people who are willing to actually risk themselves by going to war. By minimizing the people involved and eliminating the apparent risk to the people, we’ve eliminated the ability to demonstrate that targeted killing is a morally permissible act of war. We might as well be liking it on Facebook.

Violence breeds violence. Repression breeds retaliation. And only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our souls. –KMFDM, “Bait & Switch”

When faced with the topic of “Resolved: Targeted killing is a morally permissible foreign policy tool,” most students will face the issue in abstraction, rather than questioning the impacts of the issue on themselves and their audience. So here’s the negative case — it runs long — that I’ve been sitting on for the past week, made available now that it’s too late to be successfully adopted against my students.

I care deeply about maintaining innocence, which can be thought of as the non-culpability and objective distance from an act to determine with moral authority whether it seems permissible or not prior to engaging in it. Furthermore, as Duschinsky explains, “the position of innocence at the biographical origin of the human subject has served as a principle for separating between normal and abnormal forms of behaviour and subjectivity. The former are constructed as cultivated forms of this imputed natural essence. The later are constructed as degrees towards monstrosity — both corrupted and corrupting.” This last bit is critical: we maintain our innocence by not cavalierly accepting corruption. So as you evaluate this round, I want you to be considering if the corruptive effects that go with the affirmative side are worth it. Because I maintain Nietzsche’s concern on this point: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

Example 1: President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder

On March 5th, attorney General Holder defended President Obama’s ordered targeted killings of three American citizens abroad, explaining that their summary executions, devoid of checks and balances fulfilled the modern version of constitutional due process. Glenn Greenwald disagrees, observing:

Throughout the Bush years, then-Sen. Obama… stood up on the Senate floor and denounced Bush’s Guantanamo detentions on the ground that a “perfectly innocent individual could be held and could not rebut the Government’s case and has no way of proving his innocence.” He spoke of “the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence.” … Then we have Eric Holder. … In light of what the Attorney General said and justified yesterday, just marvel at what he said back then, a mere three years ago: ‘To those in the Executive branch who say “just trust us”… I say remember your history. In my lifetime, federal government officials wiretapped, harassed and blackmailed Martin Luther King… in the name of national security. One of America’s greatest heroes … was treated like a criminal by those in our federal government possessed of too much discretion and a warped sense of patriotism. Watergate revealed similar abuses during the Nixon administration.’ To recap Barack Obama’s view: it is a form of “terror” for someone to be detained “without even getting one chance to prove their innocence,” but it is good and noble for them to be executed under the same circumstances. To recap Eric Holder’s view: we must not accept when the Bush administration says “just trust us” when it comes to spying on the communications of accused Terrorists, but we must accept when the Obama administration says “just trust us” when it comes to targeting our fellow citizens for execution.

The tactics turn monstrous; innocence is lost.

But above and beyond that, Holder claimed that the policies would remain in place because, quote: “The unfortunate reality is that our nation will likely continue to face terrorist threats.” So targeted killings, even of American citizens, don’t resolve the problem of terrorism; they merely make us more monstrous.

Example 2: Israel

[Sheikh] Yassin, a [67-year old] quadriplegic who was nearly blind… was assassinated [March 22, 2004] when an Israeli helicopter gunship fired a missile at him as he was being wheeled from early morning prayers… in an attack that claimed the lives of both his bodyguards and nine bystanders.

Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli Defense Minister, branded Yassin “the Palestinian Bin Laden” and said, “If we have to balance how many more terrorists Yassin would have sent, how many terror attacks he would have approved, if we weigh this on the scales, we acted rightly”.

Shimon Peres, then leader of [Israel's] Labour opposition, was critical of the assassination, suggesting that it “could lead to an escalation of terror.” Jack Straw, then British Foreign Secretary, said: “All of us understand Israel’s need to protect itself – and it is fully entitled to do that – against the terrorism which affects it, within international law. But it is not entitled to go in for this kind of unlawful killing and we condemn it. It is unacceptable, it is unjustified and it is very unlikely to achieve its objectives.”

At a memorial service for Sheik Yassin, [Abdel Aziz Rantisi] declared that “The Israelis will not know security… We will fight them until the liberation of Palestine, the whole of Palestine.”… Rantisi was himself killed by Israel on 17 April 2004 in an assassination almost identical to Yassin’s.
On 31 August 2004, at least 15 Israeli people were killed and 80 injured in a suicide attack… a revenge for the assassination of Rantissi and Yassin.

[Information compiled from historical sources via Wikipedia.]

Detonating a old man in a wheelchair — along with anybody standing close enough of him to catch guilt-by-association — on his way home from early morning prayers? Monstrous. And the predictable and predicted blowback shows that Mofaz was wrong, so the use of targeted killing as a policy “tool” is doubtful.

Example 3: How does this relate back to us?

In December 2010, Glenn Beck claimed that 10% of Muslim were terrorists. Fareed Zakaria points out that this would be 157 million terrorists. While I agree with Zakaria that this number is absurdly high, it does serve to underscore Holder’s concession that a policy of targeted killing will not effectively curb terrorism (with the Israel example showing that it may well exacerbate it). But Glenn’s producer defended this claim by citing a definition of terrorist (from dictionary.com) as a person who uses or advocates terrorism. Which Zakaria observed could be used to describe Glenn Beck. I, meanwhile, would be concerned that it’s the kind of definition that Al-Qaeda used to justify targeted killing of 3000 Americans on September 11, 2001, claiming “It is allowed for Muslims to kill protected ones among unbelievers on the condition that the protected ones have assisted in combat, whether in deed, word, mind or any other form of assistance, according to the prophetic command.” So if we give our explicit approval to the government’s policies of targeted killing we will merely be giving credence to the terrorists’ rhetoric that none of us are innocent, that we are all monsters, and that we are all valid targets for killing.

I am not willing to do that, I am not willing to agree to that, and I don’t think you should be either.

The direct clashing impact to a plethora of affirmative cases is that anybody who wants to protect innocent life may be trying to protect life, but actively destroying innocence.

The two-part rejection of consequentialism is first that there is no objective distance between the evaluation of the action and the desire to do it; people will always claim that they’ve not done more than they are allowed to do. But beyond that, there is no such thing as consequentialism: First, time continues and there is no terminal point of consequences that make a static and determinant “outcome” as consequentialism says there must be. But second, when dealing with permissibility, consequentialism is forward-looking and dealing with what a person believes will-be, not what actually will be. As Niebuhr explains in The Responsible Self, “For the time-full self the past and future are not the no-longer and the not-yet; they are extensions of the present. They are the still-present and the already-present.” Thus, by the miracle of wishful thinking and willful ignorance of the ongoing future, the faux-position of consequentialism will bless whatever action the evaluator wants to take anyway, which only accelerates the corruption the negative is struggling to resist.

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. –Terry Pratchett

It’s time to talk about state vaccination policy again. And by “again,” I mean I’m going to be a bit lazy about it. This time the specific wording of the topic for Public Forum is “Resolved: State mandated administration of childhood vaccinations is justified,” which is a lot simpler than the resolution we had back in 2009. It’s a decent resolution with policy on one side and value on the other: the affirmative should be talking about herd immunity and how it’s not about the individual but rather the diseases that they may be carrying, while the negative will be talking about freedom and autonomy and distrust of elected officials making blanket mandates that would foolishly overwhelm rational self interest.

You’ll note that I don’t advise the negative to go claiming that vaccines cause autism, or that freedom of conscience and/or religion means you don’t have to do any of that “medicine” mumbo-jumbo. Above and beyond the obvious counters to these basic claims — which is what those links are to — there’s a much better claim to make: the frequency of the torch-and-pitchfork crowd making these sorts of claims has undermined the quality of scientific and medical insight available to policymakers. Amy Wallace explains in “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All” (Wired, Nov 2009)

Consider the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which reviews new vaccines and administration schedules: Back in the late ’90s and early ’00s, Offit was a member of the panel, along with experts in infectious diseases, virology, microbiology, and immunology. Now the 15-person panel is made up mostly of state epidemiologists and public-health officials… That’s not by accident. According to science journalist Michael Specter, author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, the controversy surrounding vaccine safety has made lack of expertise a requirement when choosing members of prominent advisory panels on the issue. “It’s shocking,” Specter says. “We live in a country where it’s actually a detriment to be an expert about something.” When expertise is diminished to such an extent, irrationality and fear can run amok.

And this is a problem when capitalism is working the way it’s supposed to: somebody sees a problem to be solved, they invent a solution, they go to sell the solution, and people accuse them of just trying to sell the solution and not solve the problem. This is absurd on a couple of levels, doubly so when applied to vaccines — Offit sums it up in that article: “Vaccines, after all, are given once or twice or three times in a lifetime. Diabetes drugs, neurological drugs, Lipitor, Viagra, even Rogaine — stuff that a large number of people use every day — that’s where the money is.” — especially since there are a plethora of vaccines which aren’t being researched or manufactured (like malaria, if I remember correctly) because the corporate accountants think that they’d be money-losers. But it doesn’t change the fact that noisy voters spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt over the policymaking process until the policymaking process is necessarily compromised. So if you’re thinking that the government is doing something stupid to appease irrational constituents, there’s a goodly chance you’re right.

Beyond that point, teaching people that it’s safe to rely on vaccinations for disease prevention and mitigation reduces the likelihood that people are going to mitigate their risk of disease catching-and-spreading in other ways. Brownlee and Lenzer cover herd behavior in “Does the Vaccine Matter?” (The Atlantic, Nov 2009)

The other possibility, of course, is that we’re relying heavily on vaccines and antivirals that simply don’t work, or don’t work as well as we believe. And as a result, we may be neglecting other, proven measures that could minimize the death rate during pandemics. “Vaccines give us a false sense of security,” says Sumit Majumdar. “When you have a strategy that [everybody thinks] reduces death by 50 percent, it’s pretty hard to invest resources to come up with better remedies.” … In the U.S. … our reliance on vaccination may have the opposite effect: breeding feelings of invulnerability, and leading some people to ignore simple measures like better-than-normal hygiene, staying away from those who are sick, and staying home when they feel ill.

So when we’re talking about people here, we’re seeing two polarities: those that are afraid of the abuse of biopower and are pressuring public policy away from competence, and those that are so confident in the progressive power of science that they forget to take care of themselves in case they’re the unfortunate folks who don’t actually gain immunity from a vaccination. And that’s how we’re going to compromise herd immunity and end up spreading measles. And while the affirmative can claim Wallace’s citation of a 2002 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases that

Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.

they can’t claim that a government mandate actually results in public adherence more than government advice, or that the government mandate makes the vaccines more potent. The government mandates that immigration should be managed through legal channels and we can see that the policy there isn’t having the effects that were expected of it. Same deal here: the fringe groups that want to avoid vaccinations will increase their resistance if the government steps up the power of the mandate. Furthermore, if the government gets tied up in immunizations and tracking immunization records, then we can readily guarantee that anybody wanting to avoid the government — illegal immigrants? — will avoid getting immunized to ensure that they’ve got one less point of contact with the government that they fear and/or loathe regardless of how much they may love medical care. So while we love herd immunity, trying to use government mandates and administration — above and beyond recommendations and subsidies — to force the issue is going to compromise herd immunity.

One crucial thing that the negative is going to have to watch out for is how the affirmative defines the “childhood vaccinations,” because there’s a goodly chance that they’ll define it in terms of a status quo which the resolution does not specify. The resolution does not place a limit on vaccinations which can be given in childhood, and it seems reasonable to expect that we will have more vaccines for more diseases which can be administered during childhood, and it is — over time — going to predominantly be those vaccines that need to have their place in public policy justified. Put another way, it is nonsensical to argue over the smallpox vaccine at this point; fait accompli, don’t waste your (plague-bearing) breath. Argue instead over whether future such concerns warrant a big mandate. The negative should be talking about the lack of childhood problems that can be vaccinated against anymore. The affirmative should be able to counter this with an appropriately scary disease that could be solved for with an existing-but-under-deployed vaccine.

Of course, the people that are pressuring public policy away from rationality are helping to ensure the survival and return of dangerous childhood diseases. Dr. Hall writes in “Vaccines and Autism: a Dangerous Manufactroversy”

The evidence is in. The scientific community has reached a clear consensus that vaccines don’t cause autism. There is no controversy… There is, however, a manufactroversy — a manufactured controversy — created by junk science, dishonest researchers, professional misconduct, outright fraud, lies, misrepresentations, irresponsible reporting, unfortunate media publicity, poor judgment, celebrities who think they are wiser than the whole of medical science, and a few maverick doctors who ought to know better… [The decline in vaccinations has resulted in the] return of endemic measles in the U.K. and various outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in the U.S. [C]hildren have died. Herd immunity has been lost. The public health consequences are serious and are likely to get worse before they get better…

So there’s the bodies on the flow for the affirmative. Wallace also mentions that

[The manufactroversy] is also, ironically, a product of the era of instant communication and easy access to information. The doubters and deniers are empowered by the Internet (online, nobody knows you’re not a doctor) and helped by the mainstream media, which has an interest in pumping up bad science to create a “debate” where there should be none.

which means that ordinarily rational people might be led to believe dumb ideas. If you’re surprised by this, consider how many people will be voting for the other guy in this November’s election, regardless of who the other guy is. “So while we trust our opponents to not be dumb,” says the affirmative, “because they’re clearly bright enough to distrust the torch-and-pitchfork crowd’s agenda and get their vaccinations voluntarily, we do have concerns that other people might be torch-and-pitchforkers incidentally spreading diseases but looking just like any of us here. And frankly, we’d feel better about our society if people could be forcibly vaccinated against This-itis, That-asum, and the Other-eotis before they had a chance to fail at thinking for themselves. Even accepting that some people will avoid the mandate, we can look to the Netherlands evidence to say that the vaccinated folks will still be better off overall.”

Unfortunately, this plays into the neg position of putting too much faith in vaccinations and paying no attention to preventative measures. Such a counter claim might be rebuffed with observations on the power of positive thinking and evidence on the placebo effect (which interestingly enough can cause harm if harm is expected). That said, I would still lean towards the negative since the affirmative has just mixed the not-yet scientific with the insistence that policy be used to drive science.

April 27 Update: In case it comes up again in the future, we had a local Whooping Cough outbreak and it was found that immunity fades away allowing for retransmission. This may not matter if the infected person isn’t a “super spreader,” a concept worth looking into for the future of disease control and mitigation — see also the SARS outbreak diagram reprinted in Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence. Finally, Donald Trump aligns with the torch-and-pitchfork crowd demonstrating the threat of The Public to Public Policy.

…is why Kant rejects utilitarianism as a properly ethical position in favor of his ethics of duty. For Kant the underlying precondition of ethics is autonomy. Acting according to self interest undermines the notion of autonomy, of freedom, as it makes actions predictable and thus deterministic. Thus utilitarianism with its emphasis on creating the most happiness cannot be an ethical position as it would render decisions predictable and would thus undermine autonomy, the precondition for the existence of ethics in the first place.

So all rational persons who adhere to that moral code can’t even be said to be acting ethically because they’ve undermined their autonomy through their lucid rationality. But let’s not even dwell on that point, and instead look at the debate as the student has framed it: “my position values what every rational person agrees on, so anybody who disagrees with me — like my opponent — is not just immoral, but also irrational.” That’s what they’re effectively saying when they claim that in order to support morality, such-and-such a dubious behavior should be deemed morally acceptable (or not). But they can’t mean that because they’ve accepted by their active participation that there’s a debate to be had on this topic, so they’ve effectively ceded that not all rational people agree such that morality doesn’t exist or they’re acting immorally by willingly blundering into an irrational argument. So I doubt that they quite mean what they say.

Now it is entirely possible that the student doesn’t really mean anything because they simply don’t know any better as demonstrated by their inability to think beyond the words in the resolution — but I like to think that students can at least believe that they mean something when they’re taking my time to say it at me. So what I suspect that what a student means when they claim to value morality is the same thing most people mean they they delineate between moral and immoral, and that is that they value “my morality, projected outward.” This is the action of an ego trying to maintain a status quo as an uncomfortable new position is foisted upon it. TLP summarizes the underlying position thusly: “The unconscious… has one single goal, protect the ego, protect status quo. Do not change and you will not die.” And the qualifiers on the resolutions help push the discussion away from the student to let them stay in their status quo where they wouldn’t kill anybody because nobody they know warrants that kind of reaction — and as long as they can avoid ever meeting wife-beaters or battered women, or Iranian nuclear physicists or CIA snipers, their morality should hold up well-enough for them.

But it totally misses the point of having the debate, as demonstrated by the fact that they’ve got a case for the 50% of the time they have to argue the exact opposite way from their claims of valuing morality is accordance with either doing or not doing something really dodgy. So let me be perfectly clear: the point behind debate is to shake up your understanding of the world and savagely brutalize everything you think you know, such that you are either forced to defend and thus strengthen your beliefs or abandon them because they’re non-sensical and thus indefensible to the point where you would be inherently irrational for acting — or even speaking — on them.

So, to address a value of “morality” which suggests that any opposition to the stated position is immoral (and probably irrational) I would suggest cross-examining along these lines:

• What we’re debating here is whether or not such-and-such action qualifies as a moral or morally permissible action? This is the yes-bait question.
• But if this debate shows that we haven’t agreed on the boundaries of morality, and thus don’t have a solid understanding of morality, how can you be certain that you’re valuing it? The weak debaters will flounder here because they haven’t a clue. The stronger debaters will start talking about their criterion — which should be either a measurable demonstration of how actively they support their value or a measurable demonstration of how they’re superior to you, preferably both, but is, with astonishing consistency, neither — as their actual value. But they won’t call it out as their actual value, which is good for you, except that you may have to cut them off with…
• But if it’s so obvious because of your criterion, why are we bothering to debate it?

All of this is set-up to be able to claim:

This debate is over the boundaries of, the very definition of, morality. Whoever you [dear judge] vote for is going to inherently value morality. But here’s the thing: if you vote for me, then my opponent either has to admit that they’re not actually valuing morality or they agree with me. Because that’s the definition of morality that we’re debating and submitting to judgment. And this shows that my opponent isn’t clear on what they’re really valuing (and might actually be valuing their criterion, vaguely), so I’d be hesitant to vote for them if I were you already, but let’s talk about [my value], which better contributes to the understanding of morality we’re trying to establish here.

And then you explain how your criterion supports your value, and then every contention should close with a link back up to show that you’re hitting your criterion and thus always always always driving towards your prime value. For example:

I value life because most people seem to like being alive. And I’m going to show how much I value life by keeping more people alive than my opponent does. Contention one: Killing people kills people. So by being opposed to killing people, I’m keeping people alive (by not making them dead), thus supporting my value of life. Tah dah!

That’s a gross oversimplification to better expose the structure of the argument, but it is a source of continual astonishment to me how routinely the structure gets ignored because students either don’t comprehend the structure or simply don’t comprehend the abstract concepts they’re batting about well enough to wrap their points of contention back around into a higher value.

First, Nietzsche hates nihilists. In Beyond Good and Evil he writes “there may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience, who prefer to put their last trust in a sure nothing, rather than in an uncertain something. But that is Nihilism, and the sign of a despairing, mortally wearied soul, notwithstanding the courageous bearing such a virtue may display. It seems, however, to be otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers who are still eager for life.” The affirmative, by proposing a policy that advances the species — double points if you’re trying to “surpass mere humanity” here — thus demonstrates that they are “stronger and livelier thinkers” than the “despairing, mortally wearied souls” on the negative side. (That augments your ethos and makes the judge want to vote for you.)

Second, Nietzsche hates people who advocate suffering. In Thus Spake Zarathrustra he writes “‘Life is only suffering’: so say others, and lie not. Then see to it that ye cease! See to it that the life ceaseth which is only suffering!” Nietzsche consistently advocates for progress, for surpassing, for overcoming, not to be free of problems but rather to not be consumed by problems that we should have already solved. So if you’re wallowing in boring suffering for fear of triggering a non-unique spending disadvantage or something even more ridiculous (like the philosophical notion that suffering is peachy-keen), then Nietzsche would just as soon that you take your fatalism and die so the rest of us can get on to solving problems that will allow for the advancement of the species. We’re not trying to solve for suffering so that people can Like “Not Suffering” on Facebook here; we’re trying to solve for suffering to unlock the human potential that it binds, that war binds, that famine binds, that plague binds. If you like famine, if you like plague, then you should just go try ‘em: that’s Nietzsche.

Second-and-a-half, double check and linger on that previous quotation: “so say others, and lie not.” This is Nietzsche’s bent into existentialism, which he transcends into early absurdism. But the point here isn’t that we’re going to solve for the suffering that is life at an existential level, but rather we’re going to solve for current boring suffering to allow for creative new suffering to occur which we will, in turn, work to overcome… with transportation infrastructure policy suggestions in just a few months. Unlike the negative, we’re not stuck on saying that “Life is only suffering” because we’re pushing for the progress that moves our species out of its current predicament, even if we philosophically expect that we’ll simply arrive in a new predicament. When Nietzsche says in Thus Spake Zarathrustra “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going,” that’s what the affirmative plan is doing here that the negative refuses to engage with. And that lovable-ness that is in us is why you’re going to give us high speaker points in addition to voting for us. (Insert a cute smile here.)

Third, let’s talk specifically about the progress that Nietzsche consistently advocates for. He’s got this concept of a “will to power,” and it gets summed up in Beyond Good and Evil: “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength — life itself is Will To Power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results thereof.” So first of all, Nietzsche is fine with self-preservation because it’s a side-effect of Doing Stuff. But here’s the strange circular bit: as long as we can Do Stuff, we’re going to be Doing Stuff that we generally don’t think will result in our immediate demise. What this means is that any human-caused nuke-war scenario that doesn’t start with everybody dying is almost certainly wrong: the Will To Power that gave certain people atomic weaponry is the same Will To Power that ensures they dare not use it on the knowledge that use of atomic weaponry works against their self-preservation. But more than that, what we see is that the affirmative is Doing Stuff — exercising that Will To Power that Nietzsche said was necessary to the progress of the species — and we’re looking to eliminate so much banal suffering that inhibits our self-preservation and leeches our capacity as a species to become more than merely human. So, again, the affirmative is totally in line with Nietzsche and the negative is just way off base.

The point isn’t that the affirmative actually agrees with Nietzsche, or that Nietzsche would agree with the affirmative: Nietzsche was a top-notch Elitist Jerk who thought that The State was little more than a festering breeding pit for the paltry mediocrity of the “many-too-many” (which would’ve made him opposed to the Nazis — National Socialists — that dubiously claimed him as their philosophical patron). The point is that the negative doesn’t have a clue about what they’re saying: they’re using a dodgy secondary source to make a ludicrous claim against the primary source that actively disavowed the position that they themselves dare not live out. And frankly, getting evidence that backwards shouldn’t just be a turn of the critique, but rather rip open a vortex of credibility in the middle of their case that sucks everything they say down into the shadows of doubtfulness.

On the upcoming topic Public Forum topic “Resolved: The United States should suspend all assistance to Pakistan” I won’t be posting cases until I’m certain that my students won’t be using them at our national qualifier tournament. I’d totally start with this CNN article, but there’s a sneaky reason for suspending aid that isn’t in the news at all which directly conflicts with what is almost certainly our main reason for continuing to provide aid to Pakistan.

Finally, on the upcoming LD topic of “Resolved: Targeted killing is a morally permissible foreign policy tool,” the same national qualifier moratorium is in place. But beyond that: why the hell are students debating the moral permissiblity of premeditated murder for effectively half a year? Maybe I’m just biased against these topics because I’ve not committed premeditated murder so I really can’t speak from experience, but it seems to me — paraphrasing Freire — that these debates are being deprived of their dimension of action, so the students’ capacity for reflection is suffering as well; “and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating ‘blah.’” Really, when was the last time a student actually explained the impact of an action being morally impermissible? I haven’t heard it yet, and without that ability to distinguish between the affirmative and negative sides, they may as well be debating “Resolved: when the stars are aligned, it is morally preferable to be eaten by Cthulhu than enslaved by him.”

This begs to be resoundingly negated. The only thing to really wonder about?

Oh, where to begin…

1. Topicality: Those 18 satellites the affirmative wants to launch aren’t exploring space and they’re not a particularly noticeable development compared to the 13000 satellites we’ve got blipping away overhead at this very moment. They add nothing to our space infrastructure; they are 0.13%-ish increase in the status quo, using a mash-up of existing technologies. So we don’t think they’re really affirming the resolution here, but that’s okay because there’s other problems with the case we’ll talk about more.
2. Inherency: Even if it were topical, we’re not hearing anything in the core of their plan that really couldn’t have already happened — there’s no status quo barrier to implementation. For all we know, some lackies may be putting the finishing touches on making it happen right now. We hope not, because it’s a bad idea, but other than that they’re not pointing to any law, practice, or precedent that has to be overcome to make this happen. But even if they turn around and say we’re going to a bajillion satellites so that we’re absolutely developing space and doing stuff well outside of the status quo, they’re just going to run into, if you will pardon the pun…
3. A Kessler Syndrome Disadvantage: This is where the satellites run into each other like they did in 2009. If you’re a policy debater, you should already have this in your files; if not, go look one up. Regardless, if they want to propose something interesting enough to be topical and interesting enough to debate, they’ll run smack into this. But you know what’s so far away as to not even pass like ships in the night?
4. Solvency vs. Coast Guard: While we like the Coast Guard, the fact of the matter is that the Columbian subs are going to El Salvador and not coming anywhere near the US. Or Russia for that matter, but we’ll come back to it. Oakland Ross reports on this in The Star January 21, 2012:
   

   “These submarines are such an innovation,” says Bruce Michael Bagley, chair of international studies at the University of Miami, who follows the drug trade closely. “They can go up to 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres).”… The voyage is undoubtedly hellish — hot, stinking, claustrophobic and perilous. It ends at a pre-arranged rendezvous at sea, often near the Gulf of Fonseca, where three Central American republics — Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador — converge around a large salt water bay. Here, the submarine crew will be greeted by local fishing boats or small outboard vessels. The cargo is off-loaded…
   A 2010 police estimate, cited by a U.S. research and documentation centre called Insight — Organized Crime in the Americas, suggests that as many as 30 vessels unload their drug cargos in or near the Gulf of Fonseca on an average day.

   So the smugglers starting out from Columbia are stopping off the shore of El Salvador, and not taking their submarines with a 2000 mile range further north past the remaining 2000-ish miles of Mexico to the waters where our Coast Guard has jurisdiction. Why? Because they don’t go that far. So their plan to let the Coast Guard know about these subs is going to fail even if it works. You know who might like to know how to track drug subs? Mr. Bergman of the DEA.

5. Solvency vs. Smart Smugglers: But even if the aff changes their plan to ensure that Mr. Bergman knows where to be deploying agents and sending Columbian police and military, the satellites are a problem for us because they’re not going to adapt to tracking the smugglers as fast as the smugglers are going to adapt to them. The reason we’re having this conversation now is precisely because the smugglers are quick to adapt. In his article, Ross points out:
   

   If there is one constant in the South American drug trade, it’s change. The result is an always deadly game of snakes and ladders, pitting well-financed criminal organizations against the often beleaguered forces of the law, with tactics that evolve almost month by month, as the drug barons try anything and everything to bring their product to market.

   So if the satellites miraculously work, the cartels are just going to bust out new and stranger ideas to make them stop working and we’ll be back having a debate just like this — instead of on US transit infrastructure — next year. If we survive the rainforest depletion which isn’t going to stop because of boats. But we don’t want to sound like we’re giving into the drug cartels, so we propose…

6. Counterplan, with CIA Drones: We suggest that instead of using satellites that are expensive to launch and quickly rendered obsolete that we take some of our remote-controlled drones that the CIA operates, wire them up with the capabilities that the affirmative wanted to put on satellites and deploy them on the Gulf of Fonseca relaying information to the DEA until the drug runners come up with something different to throw at us — at which point we’ll land the drones, re-tool them and re-launch them ready to face the new threat. Of course, sending the CIA into Latin America hasn’t had great results in the past, but it’s still a better idea than what the affirmative presented. And that’s even before we get into…
7. Nuke War vs. Common Sense: This is just odious. Nothing short of nuclear disarmament will ever solve for nuke war. We may mitigate one excuse for being trigger-happy, but that’s hardly the same thing as every other case with a plethora of ways to cause nuclear war — inclusive of giving post office boxes to homeless people — would readily demonstrate. But what makes this even worse is the ridiculous fear-mongering: did you catch that “terrorists with WMDs will kill us all” card from 2001, when fear was whipping the American public into supporting not just one but two land wars in Asia?
   
   This is the part where I pull out a Politics of Fear critique — and if you don’t have one, why not? Go find one now and use it whenever you’re faced with a case that claims nothing more than to save us from nuclear annihilation or some other form of extinction — and explain that scare tactics are designed to lubricate the slide to bad decisions, that the evidence the affirmative presented for our impending demise is brinkless because it is bullshit, and that neither the Russian underworld (they sell us heroin) nor the Columbians we’re trying to stop here today want to see anybody cut loose with WMDs because it would be bad for their business to not have customers.

So, to recap, the affirmative is trying to cook up a nuke war scenario to make you scared enough to vote for a bad plan that would be better solved by CIA drones feeding information to the DEA to stop the current-and-temporary practice of drug-smuggling subs going from Columbia to El Salvador where the US Coast Guard has no business being. For the paltry amount of effort this plan requires to enact as-is, we’d not be surprised to hear that it’s already been done as some misguided “economic stimulus,” to which end we don’t see what it is the affirmative is hoping to explore or develop in outer space — unless they want to overkill it, in which case they’ll run into the Kessler syndrome and still not solve anything. That’s what we’ve got, please vote against their plan.