A-to Kritik – Mini-Tourney

Feminism – Aff answers

2AC vs. Feminism Kritik

( ) Perm – do both.

( ) The permutation is better than the alternative alone – taking multiple perspectives into account leads to better solutions and avoids co-option. Sil and Katzenstein 10 – Rudra Sil, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and Peter Katzenstein, the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, 2010 (“Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics: Reconfiguring Problems and Mechanisms across Research Traditions,” June, Cambridge Core, Available Online At https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/div-classtitleanalytic-eclecticism-in-the-study-of-world-politics-reconfiguring-problems-and-mechanisms-across-research-traditionsdiv/B078D54DEFB199ADA653B7B35004EACF, Accessed 7-13-2017)

Our defense of analytic eclecticism takes its cue from Albert Hirschman’s famous observation: “ordinarily, social scientists are happy enough when they have gotten hold of one paradigm or line of causation. As a result, their guesses are often farther off the mark than those of the experienced politician whose intuition is more likely to take a variety of forces into account.” That is not to say that paradigms are not “useful for the apprehending of

many elements” in the unfolding of large-scale social transformations; but, for Hirschman, the paradigm-focused social scientist tends to focus on only some forces and ignore others, thereby running the risk of “a particularly high degree of error.”15

Hirschman’s position is not without empirical backing. In a study of judgmental accuracy under different modes of decision-making, Philip

Tetlock has suggested that grossly inaccurate forecasts are more likely to result when experts behave like

“intellectually aggressive hedgehogs,” relying on a single parsimonious approach to explain many things and depending

excessively upon “powerful abstractions to organize messy facts and to distinguish the possible from the impossible.”16 Better forecasts are more likely when experts behave more like “ eclectic foxes” who are able “to blend hedgehog arguments” and improvise ad hoc solutions in a rapidly changing world rather than becoming “anchored down by theory-laden abstractions .” 17 More recently, Scott Page has argued that long-term progress and innovation are more likely when a society or group depends less on singular solutions offered by brilliant individuals or like-minded experts and instead pools together a broader range of ideas generated by diverse groups of people . Based on his studies of a

wide range of social and institutional settings, Page contends: “collections of people with diverse perspectives and heuristics outperform collections of people who rely on homogeneous perspectives and heuristics.”18 In the context of Ancient Greece, Josiah Ober makes a similar observation in the process of analyzing how Athens emerged as the “preeminent Greek polis by a very substantial margin.” The key, Ober argues, was “the distinctive Athenian approach to the aggregation, alignment, and codification of useful knowledge . . . dispersed across a large and diverse population. . . .”19 What all of these authors are suggesting in quite different ways is

that, whatever the immediate intellectual payoffs of employing a particular approach, reliance on any one perspective involves tradeoffs that become increasingly costly in the absence of complementary and

countervailing efforts to draw upon multiple and diverse approaches. Analytic eclecticism is such an effort , a

means for social scientists to guard against the risks of excessive reliance on a single analytic framework and the simplifying assumptions that come with it.

( ) Zero link – this is a link of omission. Their Bates ev says “If education reform isn’t specifically trying to replace systems of patriarchy and white supremacy, what are we doing ?”… The perm does this…. And our trans- restroom Aff does get at questions of patriarchy.

( ) Conditionality is bad – it creates time skews and strategy skews. This hurts argument development, fairness, and education.

( ) Prefer a policy framework centered on teaching workable mechanisms for garnering collectives change. Non-policy frameworks allow endless items become nexus question. They also move the discussion away from the 1AC – which matters. Bryant ‘12 (Levi Bryant is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally studied 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, “Critique of the Academic Left”, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/)

Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This

because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park: The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: Well this is sadly how it often

is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows : Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete

social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right , but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives . In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall

apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we

condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and

identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people in to the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done! But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for

what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced , and when we do , our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How , I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production and

distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc. What are your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is

responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri & Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think

ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle. I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he

provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way? How would she provide food for the students? Wh a t would be her plan for waste

disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government , and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think there are alternatives. I saw one that

approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start . Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing real plans? But we haven’t even gotten to

that point. Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!” without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would

concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation. “Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of

synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation. We need less critique not because critique isn’t important or necessary– it is –but

because we know the critiques , we know the problems . We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe. We best every opponent with critique . We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique. But do we really do

anything with critique? What we need today, more than ever, is composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic

theory. None of us, however, are proposing alternatives . Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that.

( ) The Affirmative does tackle a mode of structural violence – and it certainly does not trade-off with efforts to resolve ongoing sexism.

( ) Their argument violently essentializes – Their Kimmel ev assumes that certain identities categories *must* talk solely about their identity as a prior question. That’s false – those lacking dominant identities can partake in discussions without categorically foregrounding their identity. This is especially true in the context of trans- restrooms.

( ) And, foregrounding trans- restroom policy *is* the discussion of racial identity that their Kimmel ev demands. Proves we solve and that the non-legal Alt would not.McKanders ‘17Karla McKanders is a Visiting Associate Professor at the Howard University College of Law for the 2016 – 2017 academic year where she teaches in the Civil Rights Clinic and Refugee Law. She is a tenured professor at the University of Tennessee, College of Law Amicus Brief - Gloucester County School Board, Petitioner, v. G.G., by his next friend and mother, Deirdre Grimm, Respondent. On Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit - BRIEF OF AMICUS CURIAE HOWARD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW CIVIL RIGHTS CLINIC IN SUPPORT OF RESPONDENTS- Available at SCOUTS blog – along with all amicus briefs on this matter- March – modified for language that may offend – – #CutWithKirby - http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/16-273_bsac_196_members_of_congress.pdf

The Court should not allow society's apprehension of change to determine the scope of transgender students' rights. These students' rights should be determined by the Constitution—not by society's discomfort with change in the existing social order.

The school board policy at issue here, mandating separate, single-sex restrooms for transgender students, is

reminiscent of the "separate but equal" doctrine that hindered racial equality for school children for over half a century. The policy singles out and labels transgender students as being different from others, rather than affording all students uniform rights. The policy is based on unfounded fears, which are inadequate to negate an individual's right to equality. Fear should never undermine the importance of equal protection and fairness under the law.

Furthermore, and perhaps equally important, the separate restroom policy will have a disparate impact on Black and Brown transgender students in lower socioeconomic school districts. In order to execute a policy similar to the one at issue in this case, schools will be required to build new, single-sex restrooms. Often, Black and Brown students attend schools with fewer financial resources; these

schools, therefore, will likely have difficulty installing truly "equal" facilities. As a result, students in these schools will be subject to makeshift accommodations that will be both separate and unequal. This unintended consequence will disproportionately impact many Black and Brown transgender students who already face a variety of challenges due to inadequate resources.

This case affords the Court an opportunity to uphold the principles of equality enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution and Title IX's prohibition against discrimination on the basis of sex in education. In upholding the Fourth Circuit's decision, this Court will continue its tradition of ensuring equality for all Americans, as it did in Brown.

This case is about more than the right to use a restroom. It is about equality. Equality is a fundamental principle at the foundation of American society and "at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment." Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12 (1967). At its core, this case is "about the founding ideals that have led this country - haltingly but inexorably - in the direction of fairness, inclusion and equality for all Americans."3

Protecting equality implicates all Americans, especially those who do not fit within existing social norms and the status quo. In protecting G.

Grimm ("G.G."), a transgender boy, this Court will affirm "the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we, as a people and as a country, have enacted to protect them - indeed, to protect all of us."4 G.G. has been singled out and forced to use separate restrooms in accordance with the Gloucester County Public School's ("GCPS") policy. J.A. 34. G.G. and other transgender students who will be impacted by this Court's decision only "ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law." Obergefell u. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, 2608 (2015).

The Equal Protection Clause and Title IX are not simply aspirational in nature; instead, this Court has made those principles a reality in the face of societal fear and resistance to change in the social hierarchy and the status quo. The United States has witnessed

discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress towards equality in our nation's history. The separation and discrimination

G.G. (Grimm) has faced is reminiscent of moments in our country's history where immutable differences have been a marker to justify disparate and discriminatory treatment—the antithesis of equality. Throughout U.S.

history, however, this Court has been the stalwart in safeguarding individuals who have been the targets of discrimination because of their differences. See State of Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938) ( allowing in-state tuition for African-American students ); Sipuel v. Bd. of Regents of Univ. ofOkl., 332 U.S. 631 (1948) (allowing African Americans to enroll in law school ); Brown v. Bd. of Ed. ofTopeka, Shawnee Cty., Kan., 347 U.S. 483 (1954)

(Brown I ), sub nom. Brown v. Bd. of Educ. ofTopeka, Kan., 349 U.S. 294 (1955) (Brown II ) (eliminating discrimination in public schools based on race ); Loving, 388 U.S. 1 (eliminating discrimination in marriage based on race );

Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Servs., Inc., 523 U.S. 75 (1998) (recognizing discrimination in workplace based on same-sex harassment); Obergefell, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (extending marital rights to same-sex couples).

Accordingly, this Court's decision will have a critical role in affirming the principles of equality enshrined in the Constitution and promulgated in Title IX to ensure that we continue to make progress towards a more equal society in the face of potential social discomfort

and unfounded fear. The theme of equal rights in American society continues to hold the force of power that will bridge the gap between the Constitution's promise of equality and the reality of deconstructing a social

hierarchy where race, class, sex , and gender have unjustly been determinative of the dignity accorded to members of our society.

( ) The Alt doesn’t solve – fixing policy can’t change structural inequality within schools, students, or teachers. Daly 5 – Mary Daly, doctorates in philosophy and sacred theology from the University of Fribourg, BA in English from the College of Saint Rose, doctorate in religion from St. Mary’s College, former professor at Boston University, associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press, fired from Boston College for refusing to admit boys into her Women’s Studies class, 2005 (“Gender Mainstreaming in Theory and Practice,” Social Politics, Fall, Available Online At https://academic.oup.com/sp/article/12/3/433/1679271/Gender-Mainstreaming-in-Theory-and-Practice, Accessed 7-13-2017)

There is a second problem, also, in that gender mainstreaming theory has not devoted sufficient attention to the relationship between state and

society. Even if actors produce policy that is enlightened, gender inequality might be alleviated by public policy but will not be eliminated by it. Why? Because as a social phenomenon gender inequality has its roots in society, and policy is not (fully) determinative of society . The theorization of gender mainstreaming, I suggest, has to focus more on problematizing the relationship between gender mainstreaming and society/societal change. While trumpeted as fundamentally transformative, it lacks, as yet anyway, a full articulation of a theory of change. In essence, gender mainstreaming targets public policy reform with different dimensions identified as objects of change: policy-making

processes, policy actors, public policy. The “ change logic ” that underlies gender mainstreaming would seem to run as follows: by reorganizing policy-making structures, broadening the range of actors involved, changing the mind-set of actors and the content and framing of policy, there will come about a change in the nature and process of governance itself. Even if one accepts this logic, it is not clear how change in governance translates into soci(et)al change. What is the relationship between public policy and social structure and organization? These are not trivial points. As regards the embedding of gender inequality in society, gender mainstreaming, as it has been developed to date, speaks neither to agents who are not involved in the public realm nor to agency across different realms of society. Policy and social institutions/agency tend to be elided.

Moreover, it is not clear how a value change among policy-makers (which will presumably be generated by greater learning)

leads to a change in societal values. The vital gaps in theorizing mainstreaming lead me to suggest that the theory lacks a sociological core.

Specific answers to the Neg’s Title IX link (Stromquist 97)

Their Title IX link ev is a link of omission - Stromquist merely says that Title IX doesn’t go far enough because it only gives equity – and not “special consideration”. The perm solves this – we can permute the part of the Alt that gives special consideration. Nothing in Title IX *precludes* a school district that would like to do than merely restroom access for students identifying as trans- .

Stromquist does not contextualize to trans- restrooms. The card is trapped within gender binaries – and clearly references cis women. Also, our Aff defends that precedents will be set that could well lead to special considerations.

Cap K – Answers

( ) Zero link – their Slater ev doesn’t apply at all. Their ev is about a 1983 report from Reagan. The so-called “crisis” we outline results in the “horrible State intervention” of supporting trans- students. Our Aff proves that not all crisis rhetoric gets deployed to violent neoliberal ends.

( ) Perm – do both.

( ) Prefer a policy framework centered on teaching workable mechanisms for garnering collectives change. Non-policy frameworks allow endless items become nexus question. They also move the discussion away from the 1AC – which matters. This also proves their specific Alt will fail. Bryant ‘12 (Levi Bryant is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally studied 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, “Critique of the Academic Left”, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/)

Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or

regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park: The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like t his: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic

left. Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase

2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right , but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives . In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But

finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate

them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist

party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of

reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done! But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced , and when we do , our critique-intoxicated

cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How , I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc. What are your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is

addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri & Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet

another critical paradigm, Laruelle. I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound

way? How would she provide food for the students? Wh a t would be her plan for waste disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think there are alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start. Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing real plans? But we haven’t even gotten to that point. Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!” without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would

concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation. “Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation . We need less critique not because critique isn’t

important or necessary– it is –but because we know the critiques , we know the problems . We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe. We best every opponent with critique . We occupy a position of moral superiority with

critique. But do we really do anything with critique? What we need today , more than ever, is composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even the Tea Party knows

something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory. None of us, however, are proposing alternatives . Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that.

( ) Their impact is empirically false and a stretch. Our Aff alone obviously does not sustain all capitalism. And, we have had capitalism for a long-time – and we haven’t seen their exaggerative impacts.

( ) Root cause wrong Geras 5 (Norman, Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester, "The Reductions of the Left," Dissent, 52:1, Winter, p. 57-58)

THE SECOND PART of the answer- to which I now turn—is a seeming lack of ability, of the imagination, to digest the meaning of the great moral and political evils of the world and to look at them unflinchingly. This is a complementary failure. Elsewhere I have argued that Marxism is as familiar as any other intellectual tradition

with the realities of human violence and oppression and the more negative traits and potentialities in the makeup of human beings. At the same time, because of its Utopian aspiration—-which I do not mean in any pejorative sense—because of its progressive and meliorative impulse, there has always

been a tendency within this tradi¬tion to minimize, or sometimes just deny, the independent force of such negative character¬istics. They come to be treated, genericallv, as the product of class societies and, today, as the product of capitalism. The affinity between this overall intellectual

tendency within Marxist and other left thinking, and the practical reductionism I have just described—in which America is identified as the source of all worldly wrongs— should be transparent . The effect of the tendency, however, is , to

denature what one is looking at when one looks at the horrors of the world : a massacre of in- nocents; a woman being beaten in a public place or hanged in a football stadium; a place in which a man can have his ears surgically re¬moved or his tongue cut out, or be broken and destroyed, to be followed by the next such vic-tim, and the next, in a continuous sequence ol atrocity; or a place in which a parent can be forced to watch her child tortured and mur¬dered in front of her; or a place in which a hus¬band can be forced to watch his wife repeat-edly raped; an "ethnic^leansing" or a genocide in progress, in which entire communities are pulled up by the roots-arid people are shot or hacked or starved to death by the thousands or the tens of thousands; mass graves opened to yield up their terrible story. The list, as anyone knows who keeps read¬ing when the overwhelming temptation is to look away, could be

much extended. The items on it are moral and political realities in their own right. They need to be registered and fully recognized as such. To collapse them too quickly into their putative original causes, to' refer them immediately, or refer from them, to other things that have preceded them is not to give them their due as the specific phenomena they are, the horrors, tor those destroyed by them or enduring them, for those whose lives are torn and wrecked and filled with grief by them, are in a double sense reduced by this quick and easy reference back to something else, putatively their real cause or origin. Furthermore, not all the contributory causes of such grim events are of the type that the section of the left under discussion here likes to invoke—that is, causes arising else- where, either geographically (in the United

States) or societally (in the dynamics of capi- talism). Moral and political evils of this order and I make no apology for calling them that— can and

generally do have causes that are more local in a spatial sense; and they are governed or influenced by political, ideological, and moral specificities every bit as real as the capitalist economy. Not everything is systemic, in the sense of being an effect of pressures or ten¬dencies of economic provenance, whether from the global economy or from some more

par¬ticular region of it. There are independent patterns of coercion and cruelty, both interper¬sonal and embedded within political structures; forms of authoritarian imposition; types of invasive assault and violence, at the

micro-level and at the macro-level, involving large social forces.

( ) Performative contradiction is a voter - Anything can be spun as a “crisis” – including their own impacts on this K and on every other arg they made. They make debate worse and force us to contradict ourselves in order to reply to them.

( ) Zero link OR the Alt is violent. What is “the commons”. If the “commons” is treating everyone better, our Aff is consistent with that. If the Alt is “do what the majority of the people want” – that “common” action will often allow school districts to be anti-trans- . We are fine “making democracy impossible” if “majority rules” means that trans- student always lose out.

( ) The alt inevitably gets coopted – “commoning” makes no sense.Oyarzun 15 (Lucia Jalon, editor of Displacements: an X’scape Journal. She researches the political, body, spatial, and the commons. She’s also an architecture and professor of architecture in Spain. “Common Spatialities: The Production of the Multitude”, Spring 2015. journals.library.tudelft.nl/index.php/footprint/issue/download/16/366, 7/5/17)//JM

*Edited for sensitive and/or ableist language

This movement has led to many contemporary authors – from Antonio Negri or Paolo Virno to Jean-Luc Nancy or Giorgio Agamben – to talk

about a ‘crisis of the common’ . As the concept is hollowed out , ghostly impressions of it fill our everyday world. Once understood as a shared abstract dimension, the bond that gave coherence to our social life, the common is now a meme in the hands of the market , the media or the post-democratic political scenario. The common has been turned into a spectre of what it once was at the precise moment that it has become the core of our new economic system. Many names have been given to this new productive order: immaterial, cognitive or postFordist capitalism among others. But all definitions point to the same circumstance: our languages, communications, affects and knowledge, as well as our ability to produce space through their unfolding, are

its driving force. And so, just as the productive and produced condition of the common has come to the fore, so has its seizure [ capture ]. A seizure [capture] of the common enacted through the emptying of its meaning. A hollowing out that conceals the processes of expropriation, privatisation and manipulation that are taking it over . 5

Deschooling K – Aff answers

2AC

( ) Zero link – their Illitch ev doesn’t apply at all. Illitch critiques “conventional learning” – but their 1971 book *could not have even conceived* of a Court ruling to secure trans- restroom access. Their K hoists “mainstream” baggage on the Aff – but it doesn’t apply.

( ) Perm – do both.

( ) Prefer a policy framework centered on teaching workable mechanisms for garnering collectives change. Non-policy frameworks allow endless items become nexus question. They also move the discussion away from the 1AC – which matters. This card is specific to their neo-liberal themes. Bryant ‘12 (Levi Bryant is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. In addition to working as a professor, Bryant has also served as a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, where he originally studied 'disclosedness' with the Heidegger scholar Thomas Sheehan. Bryant later changed his dissertation topic to the transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze, “Critique of the Academic Left”, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/)

Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or

regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park: The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like t his: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic

left. Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase

2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right , but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives . In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But

finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate

them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist

party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of

reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done! But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced , and when we do , our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly

motives, and are doomed to fail. How , I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc. What are your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is

addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri & Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet

another critical paradigm, Laruelle. I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound

way? How would she provide food for the students? Wh a t would be her plan for waste disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think there are alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start. Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing real plans? But we haven’t even gotten to that point. Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!” without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would

concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation. “Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation . We need less critique not because critique isn’t

important or necessary– it is –but because we know the critiques , we know the problems . We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe. We best every opponent with critique . We occupy a position of moral superiority with

critique. But do we really do anything with critique? What we need today , more than ever, is composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even the Tea Party knows

something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory. None of us, however, are proposing alternatives . Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that.

( ) Their impact is empricially false and NOT SPECIFIC TO THE US. Their authors are writing about global education efforts in Eastern Europe and Latin America – not of which we change. That either overwhelms or the Alt is insufficient to solve international educational norms.

( ) Their impacts are wrong. Huge green impact aren’t inevitable. If they are, alt won’t solve wither. And, particular Aff actions can work.Parenti 11 (Christian, PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics, visiting fellow at CUNY's Center for Place, Culture and Politics, as well as a Soros Senior Justice Fellow, taught at the New College of California and at St. Mary's College, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, June 28, 2011)

There is one last imperative question. Several strands of green thin king maintain that cap italism is incapable of arriving at a

sustainable relationship with nature because, as an economic system, capitalism must grow exponentially, while the earth is finite.

You will find this argument in the literature of ecosocialism, deep ecology, and ecoanarchism. The same argument is often cast by liberal greens in deeply ahistorical and antitheoretical terms that, while critical of the economic system, often decline to name it. Back in the early

1970s, the Club of Rome’s book Limits to Growth fixated on the dangers of “growth" but largely avoided explaining why capitalism needs growth or how growth is linked to private ownership, profits, and interfirm competition. Whether these literatures describe the

problem as “modern industrial society," “the growth cult," or the profit system, they often have a similar takeaway: we need a totally

different economic system if we are to live in balance with nature. Some of the first to make such an argument were Marx and

Engels. They came to their ecology through examining the local problem of relations between town and country—which was

expressed simultaneously as urban pollution and rural soil depletion. In exploring this question they relied on the pioneering work of soil

chemist Justus von Liebig. And from this small- scale problem , they developed the idea of capitalism’s overall

“metabolic rift” with nature. Here is how Marx explained the dilemma: Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil .... All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil. From that grew the Marxist belief that capitalism, as a whole, is irreconcilably in contradiction with nature; that the economic system creates a rift in the balance of exchanges, or metabolism, connecting human society and natural systems. As with “soil robbing," so too with forests, fish stocks, water supplies, genetic inheritance, biodiversity, and atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The natural systems are out of sync; their elements are being rearranged and redistributed, ending up as garbage and pollution. As Mary Douglas, paraphrasing William James, put it, “Uncleanliness is matter out of place.”At a large enough scale, that disruption of elements threatens environmental catastrophe. It may be

true: capitalism may be, ultimately, incapable of accommodating itself to the limits of the natural world. However, that is not the same question as whether capitalism can solve the climate crisis. Because of its magnitude, the climate crisis can appear as if it is the

combination of all environmental crises—overexploitation of the seas, deforestation, overexploitation of freshwater, soil erosion , species and

habitat loss, chemical contamination, and genetic contamination due to transgenic bioengineering. But halting greenhouse gas emissions is a much more specific problem; it is only one piece of the apocalyptic panorama. Though all these problems are connected, the most urgent and all encompassing of them is anthropogenic climate change. The fact of the matter is time has run out on the climate missue. Either capitalism solves the crisis or it destroys civilization. Capitalism begins to deal with the crisis now, or we face civilizational collapse beginning

this century. We cannot wait for a socialist, or communist, or anarchist, or deep- ecology, neoprimitiverevolution; nor for a nostalgia-based localista conversion back to the mythical small-town economy of preindustrial America as some advocate. In short, we cannot

wait to transform everything—including how we create energy. Instead, we must begin immediately transforming the energy economy. Other necessary changes can and will flow from that. Hopeless? No. If we put aside the question

of capitalism’s limits and deal only with greenhouse gas emissions, the problem looks less daunting. While capitalism has not solved the environmental crisis —meaning the fundamental conflict between the infinite growth potential of the market and the finite

parameters of the planet— it has, in the past, solved specific environmental crises . The sanitation movement of the Progressive Era is an example. By the 1830s, industrial cities had become perfect incubators of epidemic disease, particularly cholera and yellow fever. Like climate change today, these diseases hit the poor hardest, but they also sickened and killed the wealthy. Class privilege offered some protection, but it was not a guarantee of safety. And so it was that middle-class do-gooder goo-goos and mugwumps began a series of reforms that contained and eventually defeated the urban epidemics. First, the filthy garbage-eating hogs were banned from city streets, then public sanitation programs of refuse collection began, sewers were built, safe public water provided, housing codes were developed and enforced.

And, eventually, the epidemics of cholera stopped. So, too, were other infectious diseases, like pulmonary

tuberculosis, typhus, and typhoid, largely eliminated. Thus, at the scale of the urban, capitalist society solved an environmental crisis through planning and public investment. Climate change is a problem on an entirely different order of magnitude, but past solutions to smaller environmental crises offer lessons. Ultimately, solving the climate crisis—like the nineteenth- century victory over urban squalor and epidemic contagions—will require a relegitimation of the state’s role in the economy. We will need planning and downward redistribution of wealth. And, as I have sketched out above, there are readily available ways to address the crisis immediately—if we make the effort to force our political leaders to act. We owe such an effort to people like Ekaru Loruman, who are already suffering and dying on the front lines of the catastrophic convergence, and to the next generation, who will inherit the mess. And, we owe it to ourselves.

( ) Perm – do the Alt – we didn’t commit to institutionalized learning. We can defend that de-schooling should exist AND that – if public schools exist – they should have just policies on bathroom access.

( ) Their alt is violent – and the Aff solves. De-schooling requires new resources. Communities lacking privilege lack those resources – and restroom access won’t change. This causes disparate racial violence – turning their K. McKanders ‘17Karla McKanders is a Visiting Associate Professor at the Howard University College of Law for the 2016 – 2017 academic year where she teaches in the Civil Rights Clinic and Refugee Law. She is a tenured professor at the University of Tennessee, College of Law Amicus Brief - Gloucester County School Board, Petitioner, v. G.G., by his next friend and mother, Deirdre Grimm, Respondent. On Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit - BRIEF OF AMICUS CURIAE HOWARD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW CIVIL RIGHTS CLINIC IN SUPPORT OF RESPONDENTS- Available at SCOUTS blog – along with all amicus briefs on this matter- March – modified for language that may offend – – #CutWithKirby - http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/16-273_bsac_196_members_of_congress.pdf

The Court should not allow society's apprehension of change to determine the scope of transgender students' rights. These students' rights should be determined by the Constitution—not by society's discomfort with change in the existing social order.

The school board policy at issue here, mandating separate, single-sex restrooms for transgender students, is reminiscent of the "separate but equal" doctrine that hindered racial equality for school children for over half a century. The policy singles out and labels transgender students as being different from others, rather than affording all students uniform rights. The policy is based on unfounded fears, which are inadequate to negate an individual's right to equality. Fear should never undermine the importance of equal protection and fairness under the law.

Furthermore, and perhaps equally important, the separate restroom policy will have a disparate impact on Black and Brown transgender students in lower socioeconomic school districts. In order to execute a policy similar to the one at issue in this case, schools will be required to build new, single-sex restrooms. Often, Black and Brown students attend schools with fewer financial resources; these

schools, therefore, will likely have difficulty installing truly "equal" facilities. As a result, students in these schools will be subject to makeshift accommodations that will be both separate and unequal. This unintended consequence will disproportionately impact many Black and Brown transgender students who already face a variety of challenges due to inadequate resources.

This case affords the Court an opportunity to uphold the principles of equality enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution and Title IX's prohibition against discrimination on the basis of sex in education. In upholding the Fourth Circuit's decision, this Court will continue its tradition of ensuring equality for all Americans, as it did in Brown.

This case is about more than the right to use a restroom. It is about equality. Equality is a fundamental principle at the foundation of American society and "at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment." Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12 (1967). At its core, this case is "about the founding ideals that have led this country - haltingly but inexorably - in the direction of fairness, inclusion and equality for all Americans."3

Protecting equality implicates all Americans, especially those who do not fit within existing social norms and the status quo. In protecting G.

Grimm ("G.G."), a transgender boy, this Court will affirm "the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we, as a people and as a country, have enacted to protect them - indeed, to protect all of us."4 G.G. has been singled out and forced to use separate restrooms in accordance with the Gloucester County Public School's ("GCPS") policy. J.A. 34. G.G. and other transgender students who will be impacted by this Court's decision only "ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law." Obergefell u. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, 2608 (2015).

The Equal Protection Clause and Title IX are not simply aspirational in nature; instead, this Court has made those principles a reality in the face of societal fear and resistance to change in the social hierarchy and the status quo. The United States has witnessed

discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress towards equality in our nation's history. The separation and discrimination

G.G. (Grimm) has faced is reminiscent of moments in our country's history where immutable differences have been a marker to justify disparate and discriminatory treatment—the antithesis of equality. Throughout U.S.

history, however, this Court has been the stalwart in safeguarding individuals who have been the targets of discrimination because of their differences. See State of Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938) ( allowing in-state tuition for African-American students ); Sipuel v. Bd. of Regents of Univ. ofOkl., 332 U.S. 631 (1948) (allowing African Americans to enroll in law school ); Brown v. Bd. of Ed. ofTopeka, Shawnee Cty., Kan., 347 U.S. 483 (1954)

(Brown I ), sub nom. Brown v. Bd. of Educ. ofTopeka, Kan., 349 U.S. 294 (1955) (Brown II ) (eliminating discrimination in public schools based on race ); Loving, 388 U.S. 1 (eliminating discrimination in marriage based on race );

Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Servs., Inc., 523 U.S. 75 (1998) (recognizing discrimination in workplace based on same-sex harassment); Obergefell, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (extending marital rights to same-sex couples).

Accordingly, this Court's decision will have a critical role in affirming the principles of equality enshrined in the Constitution and promulgated in Title IX to ensure that we continue to make progress towards a more equal society in the face of potential social discomfort

and unfounded fear. The theme of equal rights in American society continues to hold the force of power that will bridge the gap between the Constitution's promise of equality and the reality of deconstructing a social

hierarchy where race, class, sex , and gender have unjustly been determinative of the dignity accorded to members of our society.

( ) Conditionality is bad – it creates time skews and strategy skews. This hurts argument development, fairness, and education.

( ) The Alt fails and harms students that currently lack privilege – those who are disinterested will turn back to manipulative institutions. Varbelow and Griffith 12 – Sanja Varbelow, Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Angelo State University, Former Field-Based Teaching Specialist in Learning and Innovation and Lecturer in Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Brownsville, Member of the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Professors of Education, Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Texas A&M University, M.A. in Education from Humbolt University, Bryant Griffith, Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, 2012 (“Deschooling Society: Re-Examining Ivan Illich’s Contributions to Critical Pedagogy for 21st Century Curriculum Theory,” Education Resources Information Center, June 6th, Accessed Online at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED532618.pdf, Accessed 6-2-17)

Illich illustrates the “Reference Service to Educational Objects” with the example of a friend who brought a pair of dice to the market with which he taught volunteers rules of semantics. While some children enjoyed the educational game and benefitted from it, others walked away .

This is a fundamental concern in Illich’s concept of deschooling society : Why did they leave? Did they understand too little of the concept to be curious? Or had they heard of semantics before and considered it boring? Should we ask them to stay? It can be concluded that Illich would object. If so, his approach might work only for highly motivated students but might not effective for those children we label “disadvantaged.”

One of the purposes of school must be to allow children to learn enough about themselves and an idea to decide whether it is worthy of finding out more about or whether it does not interest them.

I often see my students “walk away.” After having aroused their curiosity towards a particular idea, I see them never returning to it unless prompted by homework assignments to be rewarded/punished with a grade. I doubt they don’t pursue it because of their ignorance. Rather, I believe they are overwhelmed with the requirements school puts before them in order to acquire their certificate. Therefore, they have to

prioritize and lack the leisure to find out more about that initially interesting idea. Now, if we gave students a choice of what we ought to require of them based on their interests, would they be more engaged or would they spend their

time following the beckoning of “manipulative” institutions such as the mall ? I think Illich would not only entrust students to entertain their curiosity but also to know what concerns them based on their lives’ circumstances. His purpose of deschooling society is that students regain the ability and the courage to ask questions and voice concerns. If we successfully transform school into a “convivial” institution, students, by definition, would enjoy engaging in it.

Additional Impact D vs. Deschooling K or Cap K

A2: Capitalism UnsustainableCapitalism is inevitableStromberg 4 - Joseph R. Stromberg, Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and has held the JoAnn B. Rothbard chair in History at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He received his BA and MA from Florida Atlantic University, and his further graduate work was completed at the University of Florida, 2004 ("Why Capitalism is Inevitable," Mises Institute, 7-09-2004, Available Online at https://mises.org/library/why-capitalism-inevitable, Accessed on 7-5-2017 //JJ)

How striking to discover, then, how few writers and thinkers are willing to spell out precisely what they mean when they refer to the economics of capitalism. For many, the term capitalism is nothing but a vessel into which they pour all the people, institutions, and ideas that they hate. And so capitalism emerges as a synonym for greed, dirty rivers and streams, pollution, corrupt businessmen, entrenched social privilege, the Republican Party, criminal

syndicates, world Jewry, war for oil, or what have you. In fact, the advocates of capitalism themselves haven't always been entirely clear on the meaning and implications of capitalist theory.

And this is why Murray Rothbard went to such lengths to spell out precisely what he was endorsing when he championed the economics of capitalism. This was especially necessary when he was writing in 1973, a time which was arguably the low point for capitalist theory. Mises died that year, all economists were said to be Keynesians, Nixon closed the gold window, wage and price controls were fastened on industry as an inflation fix, and the US was locked in a titanic Cold War struggle that emphasized government weaponry over private enterprise. Murray Rothbard, meanwhile, was hard at work on his book For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, an effort to breath new life into a traditionally liberal program by infusing it with a heavy dose of political radicalism. It must have seemed like a hopeless task.

The same year, he was asked to contribute an essay in a series of readings called Modern Political Economy (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1973).

He was to address " The Future of Capitalism" (pp. 419-430), the conclusion of which might have seemed self-evidently bleak. But not to Rothbard. His contribution to the volume was lively, optimistic, enormously clarifying, and prescient to the extreme. Above all, he used the opportunity to explain with great clarity what precisely he means when he refers to capitalism: no more and no less than the sum of voluntary activity in society, particularly that characterized by exchange.

Does that seem like a stretch? Rothbard explains that the term capitalism itself was coined by its greatest enemy Karl Marx , and ever since the term has conflated two very different ideas : free-market capitalism, on the one hand, and state capitalism, on the other. "The difference between them, Rothbard notes, "is precisely the difference between, on the one hand, peaceful, voluntary exchange, and on the other, violent expropriation." This may seem like a small point, but the confusion accounts for why whole swaths of American historiography are incorrect, for example, in distinguishing Alexander Hamilton's supposed sympathy for capitalism

from Thomas Jefferson's sympathy for "agrarianism." Rothbard points out that Jefferson was in fact an advocate of laissez-faire who had read and understood the classical economists; as an "agrarian" he was merely applying the doctrine of free markets to the American regional context, even as Hamilton's mercantilist and inflationist sympathies are best described as a preference for state capitalism.

As Rothbard explains, capitalism is nothing but the system that emerges in the framework of free exchange of property and the absence of government efforts to stop it. Whether you are talking about buying a newspaper from a vendor or a group of stockholders hiring a CEO, the essence of the exchange is the same: two parties finding ways to benefit by the trade goods and services. From the exchange, both parties expect to benefit else the trade would not have occurred. The global marketplace at all levels is nothing but the extension of the idea of mutual betterment through peaceful exchange.

In contrast to market exchange, we have its opposite in government intervention. It can be classified in two ways: either as prohibiting or partially prohibiting an exchange between two people or forcing someone to make an "exchange" that would otherwise not take place in the market. All government activity—regulation, taxation, protectionism, inflation, spending, social insurance, ad infinitum—can be classified as one of those two types of interventions. Taxation is nothing more than robbery (Rothbard challenges anyone to define taxation in a way that would not also

describe high-minded theft), and the state itself is nothing but a much-vaunted robber on a mass scale—and it matters not whether the state is conducting domestic or foreign policy; the essence of statecraft is always coercion whereas the essence of markets is always voluntarism.

In Rothbard's conception, it is not quite correct to characterize support for free markets as either right or left. In 1973, he heard as many complaints about the supposed greed unleashed by markets from the followers of Russell Kirk as he did from the new left socialists. The right, in fact, was afflicted with a serious intellectual attachment to pre-capitalistic institutional forms of monopoly privilege, militarism, and the unrelenting drive to war.

This was what Rothbard saw the political establishment of 1973 bringing to the US: the march of the partnership between government and business that is nothing but the reinvention of political forms that pre-dated the capitalist revolution that began in the Italian city states of the 16th century. The US conservatives were entirely complicit in this attempt to reverse the classical liberal revolution in favor of free markets in order to fasten an old-world monopolist system on society.

In this, the conservatives resembled their supposed enemies, the socialists. After all, socialism was, as Rothbard put it, "essentially a confused, middle-of-the-road movement." Its supposed goal of liberty, peace, and prosperity was to be achieved through the imposition of new forms of regimentation, mercantilism, and feudalism. Socialism seeks, in Rothbard's words, "liberal ends by the use of conservative means." ("Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty," Left and Right, I, 1, Spring 1965).

Conservatives could be counted on to support the means but not the ends, and the result is something that approaches the current status quo in the US: a mixed political system that combines the worst features of egalitarian ideology with corporate militarism—a system that leaves enough of the private sector unhampered to permit impressive growth and innovation. It was precisely the productive power of market, as versus the dead-end of statist methods favored by both left and right, that led Rothbard to see that the gains of capitalism could not finally be reversed.

In addition, he may have been the first to anticipate the way in which the terms left and right would eventually come to mean their precise opposite in the reforming economies of Eastern Europe. He was fascinated but not entirely surprised by the events in old Yugoslavia, where a Stalinist system had been forced to reform into a more market oriented economy. In fact, he noted that the trend had begun in the 1960s, and extended all over Eastern Europe. What was essentially happening, Rothbard wrote, was that socialism had been tried and failed and now these countries were turning to market models.

Keep in mind that this was 1973, when hardly anyone else believed these countries capable of reform: "In Eastern Europe , then, I think that the prospects for the free market are excellent --I think we’re getting free-market capitalism and that its triumph there is almost inevitable." Ten years later, it was still fashionable to speak of authoritarian regimes that could reform, as contrasted with socialist totalitarianism that could not be reform and presumably had to be obliterated. Rothbard did not believe this, based on both theory and evidence.

Rothbard saw that all sectors in all countries moving either toward capitalism or toward socialism , which is to say, toward freedom or toward control. In the US, the trends looked very bleak indeed but he found trends to cheer in the antiwar movement, which he saw as a positive development against military central planning. "Both in Vietnam and in domestic government intervention, each escalating step only creates more problems which confront the public with tile choice: either, press on further with more interventions, or repeal them--in Vietnam, withdraw from the country."

His conclusion must have sounded impossibly naïve in 1973 but today we can see that he saw further than any other "futurists" of his time:

"the advent of industrialism and the Industrial Revolution has irreversibly changed the prognosis for freedom and statism. In the pre-industrial era, statism and despotism could peg along indefinitely, content to keep the peasantry at

subsistence levels and to live off their surplus. But industrialism has broken the old tables; for it has become evident that socialism cannot run an industrial system , and it is gradually becoming evident that neomercantilism, interventionism, in the long run cannot run an industrial system either. Free-market capi talism, the victory of social power and the economic means, is not only the only moral and by far the most productive system; it has become the only viable system for mankind in the industrial era. Its eventual triumph is therefore virtually inevitable."

Rothbard's optimism about the prospects for liberty is legendary but less well understood is the basis for it: markets work and government do not. Left and right can define terms however much they want, and they can rant and rave from

the point of view of their own ideological convictions, but what must achieve victory in the end is the remarkable influence of millions and billions of mutually beneficial exchanges putting relentless pressure on the designs of central planners to thwart their will. To be optimistic about the prospects for capitalism requires only that we understand Mises's argument concerning the inability of socialist means to produce rational outcomes, and to be hopeful about the triumph of choice over coercion.

Capitalism is fundamentally sustainable- innovation, increasing equality, improved standard of living, democracy, and empirics proveForbes 09 Steve Forbes, editor in chief of Forbes Magazine, (“How Capitalism Will Save Us”, https://www.forbes.com/2009/11/03/capitalism-greed-recession-forbes-opinions-markets.html, 11/3, accessed 7/7/17 EVH)

Because of the Rap, people are blind to the Reality–that far from having failed, democratic capitalism is the world’s greatest economic success story . No other system has improved the lives of so many people . The turmoil of the past few years by no means mitigates the explosion of prosperity that has taken place since the early 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan enacted promarket reforms to free the economy from the Carter-Nixon stagnation of the 1970s. Those reforms–lowering tax rates and loosening regulations–unleashed job-creating capital. The result: a roaring economy that produced a flood of innovations–from personal computers and cellular phones to the Internet . Indeed, we may one day look back on the period of 1982 to 2007 as an economic golden age. Many conveniences we take for granted today–from automatic teller machines and DVD players to home computers and CAT scans–did not exist or were not widely used as recently as the 1970s and early ’80s. It’s not just that we have more and better gizmos. All you have to do is watch an old movie from the 1970s. Even when the past is glamorized by

Hollywood, it’s obvious–looking at everything from appliances to cars to homes–that living standards back then were lower. We’ve come a long way. Not only “the rich” but people of all incomes today are doing better . No system has been as effective as capitalism in turning scarcity into abundance . Think of computers. Forty years ago, only business and government could afford the old massive mainframes. A single machine filled an entire room. Today the BlackBerry device in the palm of your hand has even more computing power than those old machines. Thanks to capitalism , Americans as a nation are living dramatically better and longer than they did at the beginning of the twentieth century. In The Greatest Century That Ever Was: 25 Miraculous Trends of the Past 100 Years, noted economist Stephen Moore and the late business professor Julian Simon make the powerful

observation that since the early twentieth century, life expectancy has increased; infant mortality rates have fallen tenfold. Major killer diseases –from tuberculosis to polio, typhoid, and pneumonia– have in most parts of the world been, if not eradicated, drastically reduced; agricultural productivity has soared. The environment is also cleaner in many parts of the world . Air quality has improved about 30 percent in American cities since 1977. Not only that, Moore and Simon write, “the affordability and availability of consumer goods have greatly increased. Even most poor Americans have a cornucopia of choices that a century ago the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts could not have purchased .” Until the credit crisis, tens of millions of people a year worldwide were joining the middle class. Between 2003 and 2007, the growth of the American economy alone exceeded the size of the entire Chinese economy. We grew the equivalent of China in four and a half years. China’s growth rates are higher–but they’re coming from a much smaller base. Free-market economic reforms–especially since the fall of the Berlin wall–have brought an unprecedented explosion of wealth to India, China, Brazil, and nations in central and eastern Europe as well as in Latin America and Africa.

Capitalism has helped to usher in an era of wealth and economic growth that failed foreign-aid programs since World War II were never able to accomplish. In China, for example, over two hundred million people now have discretionary income. The country has a burgeoning middle class. The

current recession should be seen historically as an interruption, not an end, of this extraordinary economic expansion. Along with bringing prosperity to millions, democratic capitalism has undermined political tyranny and promoted democracy and peace between nations of the world. It is , without doubt, the world’s most moral system . This last statement may raise eyebrows in an era that has seen scandals from the collapse of Enron to the devastation of personal and charitable wealth caused by Bernard Madoff. That is not to minimize the crimes of individuals like Madoff and others or the damage they cause. As we explain, the off-the-charts criminality of individuals like Madoff no more reflects the immorality of free

enterprise than the murderous crimes of a Ted Bundy or a Jeffrey Dahmer reflect a fundamental breakdown of democratic society . Democratic capitalism , as a system, is more humane than government-dominated economies , including those in countries that are otherwise democracies. Nations that liberalize their economies , that allow people greater economic self-determination, end up moving, sooner or later, toward democracy . Since the nations of the world began to liberalize their economies in the mid-1980s, the percentage of democratically elected

governments has surged from 40 percent to more than 60 percent today. China, for example , is not yet a Western-style democracy. But the nation is freer today than it was during the era of Mao Tse Tung and the repressive Cultural Revolution. Despite all the gloom and doom voiced by its critics, the free-enterprise system is – and has always been– the best way to unleash the creativity, inventiveness, and energy of people and mobilize them to meet the wants and needs of others. That’s because free-market transactions , far from being driven by greed, are about achieving the greatest possible mutual benefit, not only for the parties directly involved but eventually for the rest of society.

A2: Democracy---2ACDemocracy resilient – overwhelming public backing supports gainsWollack 16 ---- Kenneth, president of the National Democratic Institute, former co-editor of the Middle East Policy Survey, former senior fellow at UCLA’s School for Public Affairs, “How Resilient is Democracy?” This text is the transcript from an interview with Alexander Heffner, PBS – The Open Mind, 10/15, http://www.thirteen.org/openmind/government/how-resilient-is-democracy/5553/

Well I think we’re seeing a number of phenomena that take place. Um, first of all you have new democracies around the

world, that are struggling to deliver for its people. New institutions, political institutions that for the first time have legitimacy among the people, but in order to succeed and sustain their democratic system, they have to deliver on quality of life issues for, for the entire population. And if those institutions don’t deliver in many of these new democracies that have emerged over the last forty years, uh, then you’re gonna see backsliding and people will either go to the streets or vote for a

populist demagogue who promises to bring sort of instant solutions to their problems. And then in non-democratic countries, you have what is

called authoritarian learning, and that is autocrats today that are smarter than they were before, uh, that are fearful of diffusion of political power, uh, fearful of losing power themselves. Um, and they are using uh, traditional means and new legal means in which to repress the population, prevent the emergence of

civil society, and not to speak of opposition political parties. And then you have a situation that you see in a number of countries in the Middle East where you

have a sectarian strife and conflict. Uh, but in all of these situations , what you find is democratic resilience . That

people around the world basically want the same thing. They want to put food on their table , uh, they want to have

jobs and shelter and they want a political voice . And that, those aspirations and those hopes, uh, and those desires as I said are universal, and if you look at public opinion polls around the world , uh, people do want to have democratic systems that allow them to participate in the political life of their country . And that is, we are in the optimism business , and we believe in people and I think that ultimately those efforts , um, will, will succeed . But they need a lot of support, they need backing, um, uh, in order for uh, some very brave and courageous people to, to move the democratic for—uh, process forward in some of the most unlikely places in the world.

Democracy doesn’t cause peace – statistical models are spurious and don’t assume economic growthMousseau, 12 (Michael – Professor IR Koç University, “The Democratic Peace Unraveled: It’s the Economy” International Studies Quarterly, p 1-12)

Model 2 presents new knowledge by adding the control for economic type. To capture the dyadic expectation of peace among contract-intensive nations, the variable Contract- intensive EconomyL (CIEL) indicates the value of impersonal contracts in force per capita of the state with the lower level of CIE in the dyad; a high value of this measure indicates both states have contract-intensive economies. As can be seen, the coefficient for CIEL ()0.80) is negative and highly significant. This corroborates that impersonal economy is a highly robust force for peace. The coefficient for DemocracyL is now at zero. There are no other differences between Models 1 and 2, whose samples are identical, and no prior study corroborating the democratic peace has

considered contractintensive economy. Therefore, the standard econometric inference to be drawn from Model 2 is the nontrivial result that all prior reports of

democracy as a force for peace are probably spurious , since this result is predicted and fully

accounted for by economic norms theory. CIEL and DemocracyL correlate only in the moderate range of 0.47 (Pearson’s r), so the insignificance of democracy is not likely to be a statistical artifact of multicollinearity. This is corroborated by the variance inflation factor for DemocracyL in Model 2 of 1.85, which is well below the usual rule-of-thumb indicator of multicollinearity of 10 or more. Nor should readers assume most democratic dyads have both states with impersonal economies: While almost all nations with contract-intensive economies (as indicated with the binary measure for CIE) are democratic (Polity2 > 6) (Singapore is the only long-term exception), more than half—55%—of all democratic nation-years have contract-poor economies. At the dyadic level in this sample, this translates to 80% of democratic dyads (all dyads where DemocracyBinary6 = 1) that have at least one state with a contract-poor economy. In

other words, not only does Model 2 show no evidence of causation from democracy to peace (as reported in

Mousseau 2009), but it also illustrates that this absence of democratic peace includes the vast majority —80%—

of democratic dyad-years over the sample period. Nor is it likely that the causal arrow is reversed — with democracy being the ultimate cause of contract-intensive economy and peace . This is because correlations among independent variables are not calculated in the results of multivariate regressions: Coefficients

show only the effect of each variable after the potential effects of the others are kept constant at their mean

levels. If it was democracy that caused both impersonal economy and peace, then there would be some variance in DemocracyL remaining, after its partial correlation with CIEL is excluded, that links it directly with peace. The positive direction of the coefficient for DemocracyL informs us that no such direct effect exists (Blalock 1979:473–474). Model 3 tests for the effect of DemocracyL if a control is added for mixed-polity dyads, as suggested by Russett (2010:201). As discussed above, to avoid problems of mathematical endogeneity, I adopt the solution used by Mousseau, Orsun and Ungerer (2013) and measure regime difference as proposed by Werner (2000), drawing on the subcomponents of the Polity2 regime measure. As can be seen, the coefficient for Political Distance (1.00) is positive and significant, corroborating that regime mixed dyads do indeed have more militarized conflict than others. Yet, the inclusion of this term has no effect on the results that concern us here: CIEL ()0.85) is now even more robust, and the coefficient for DemocracyL (0.03) is above zero.7 Model 4 replaces the continuous democracy measure with the standard binary one (Polity2 > 6), as suggested by Russett (2010:201), citing Bayer and Bernhard (2010). As can be observed, the coefficient for CIEL ()0.83) remains negative and highly significant, while DemocracyBinary6 (0.63) is in the positive (wrong) direction. As discussed above, analyses of fatal dispute onsets with the far stricter binary measure for democracy (Polity = 10), put forward by Dafoe (2011) in response to Mousseau (2009), yields perfect prediction (as does the prior binary measure Both States CIE), causing quasi-complete separation and inconclusive results. Therefore, Model 5 reports the results with DemocracyBinary10 in analyses of all militarized conflicts, not just fatal ones. As can be seen, the coefficient for DemocracyBinary10 ()0.41), while negative, is not significant. Model 6 reports the results in analyses of fatal disputes with DemocracyL

squared (after adding 10), which implies that the likelihood of conflict decreases more quickly toward the high values of DemocracyL. As can be seen, the coefficient for DemocracyL 2 is at zero , further corroborating that even very high levels of democracy do not appear to cause peace in analyses of fatal disputes, once consideration is given to contractintensive economy . Models 3, 4, and 6, which include Political Distance, were repeated (but unreported to save space) with analyses of all militarized interstate disputes, with the democracy coefficients close to zero in every case. Therefore, the conclusions reached by Mousseau (2009) are corroborated even with the

most stringent measures of democracy, consideration of institutional distance, and across all specifications: The democratic peace

appears spurious , with contract-intensive economy being the more likely explanation for both democracy and the democratic peace .

A2: Democracy---Ext---No WarDemocracy doesn’t solve warTaner, 2 (Binner, PhD Candidate – Syracuse U., Alternatives: Turkish Journal of Int’l Relations, 1(3), p. 43-44, http://www.alternativesjournal.com/binnur.pdf)

The discussion above suggests that the most important drawback of the “democratic peace” theory is the essentialization of the political regime as the only factor contributing to international peace and war. The ‘democratic peace’ theory underemphasizes, and most often neglects , the importance of other domestic factors such as political culture ,35 degree of development, socio-economic and military considerations ,36 the role of interest-groups and other domestic constituencies,37 strategic culture 38 among others in decision-making. In other words, it is easily the case that the “democratic peace theory” lacks sensitivity to context and decisionmaking process. Although one should not dispute the fact that domestic political structure/regime type is an important component of any analysis of war

and peace, this should be seen as only one of domestic variables, not necessarily the variable. Devoid of an analysis that gives respect to a number of other factors, superficial and sweeping generalizations will leave many details in

decision-making unaccounted for . Consequently, although “democratic peace” theory should not be discarded entirely, current

emphasis on the importance of “democracy” in eliminating bloody conflicts in the world should not blind scholars and policy circles alike to the fact that “democratic peace” is theoretically and empirically overdetermined.

A2: Environment---2ACNo impact on human survivalRaudsepp-Hearne 10 (Ciarra, PhD in the Department of Geography, Elena M. Bennett is an assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences and McGill School of Environment, Graham K. MacDonald is a doctoral student in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences, and Laura Pfeifer is a master’s student in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences and the McGill School of Environment, all at McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec. Garry D. Peterson is a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, at Stockholm University. Maria Tengö is currently a researcher at the Department ofSystems Ecology and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University. Tim Holland currentlyworks for SNV Netherlands Development Organisation in Hanoi, Vietnam. Karina Benessaiah is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. September 2010; “Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade?”; http://www.aibs.org/bioscience-press-releases/resources/Raudsepp-Hearne.pdf)

Although many people expect ecosystem degradation to have a negative impact on human well-being, this measure ¶ appears to be increasing even as provision of ecosystem ¶ services declines . From George Perkins Marsh’s Man and¶ Nature in 1864 to today (Daily 1997), scientists have described¶ how the deterioration of the many services provided¶ by

nature, such as food, climate regulation, and recreational¶ areas, is endangering human well-being. However, the Millennium ¶ Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a comprehensive study of¶ the world’s resources, found that declines in the majority of ¶ ecosystem services assessed have been accompanied by steady ¶ gains in human well-being at the global scale (MA 2005). We¶ argue that to understand this apparent paradox, we need to¶ better understand the ways in which ecosystem services are¶ important for human well-being, and also whether human¶ well-being can continue to rise in the future despite projected¶ continued declines in ecosystem services. In this article, we¶ summarize the roots of the paradox and assess evidence¶ relating to alternative explanations of the

conflicting trends¶ in ecosystem services and human well-being.¶ The environmentalist’s expectation could be articulated ¶ as: “Ecological degradation and simplification will be followed by a decline in the provision of ecosystem services, leading to a decline in human well-being.” Supporters¶ of this hypothesis cite evidence of unsustainable¶ rates of resource consumption, which in the past have had¶ severe impacts on human well-being, even causing the collapse¶ of civilizations (e.g., Diamond 2005). Analyses of the¶ global ecological footprint have suggested that since 1980,¶ humanity’s footprint has exceeded the amount of

resources¶ that can be sustainably produced by Earth (Wackernagel¶ et al. 2002). Although the risk of local and regional societies ¶ collapsing as a result of ecological degradation is much ¶ reduced by globalization and trade , the environmentalist’s ¶ expectation remains: Depletion of ecosystem services translates¶ into fewer benefits for humans, and therefore lower¶ net human well-being than would be possible under better¶ ecological management.¶ By focusing on ecosystem services—the benefits that¶ humans obtain from ecosystems—the MA set out specifically¶ to identify and assess the links between ecosystems and¶ human well-being

(MA 2005). The MA assessed ecosystem ¶ services in four categories: (1) provisioning services, such ¶ as food, water, and forest products; (2) regulating services, which modulate changes in climate and regulate floods, ¶ disease, waste, and water quality; (3) cultural services, which ¶ comprise recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits; and ¶ (4) supporting services, such as soil formation, photosynthesis, ¶ and nutrient cycling (MA 2003). Approximately 60%¶ (15 of 24) of the ecosystem services assessed by the MA were¶ found to be in decline. Most of the declining services were¶ regulating and supporting services, whereas the majority of¶ expanding ecosystem services were provisioning services,¶ such as crops, livestock, and fish aquaculture (table 1). At the¶ same time, consumption of more than 80% of the assessed¶ services was found to

be increasing, across all categories. In¶ other words, the use of most ecosystem services is increasing ¶ at the same time that Earth’s capacity to provide these ¶ services is decreasing .¶ The MA conceptual framework encapsulated the

environmentalist’s¶ expectation, suggesting tight feedbacks between¶ ecosystem services and human well-being. However, the ¶ assessment found that aggregate human well-being grew ¶ steadily over the past 50 years, in part because of the rapid ¶ conversion of ecosystems to meet human demand for food, ¶ fiber, and fuel (figure 1; MA 2005). The MA defined human¶ well-being with five components: basic materials, health,¶ security, good social relations, and freedom of choice and¶

actions, where freedom of choice and actions is expected to¶ emerge from the other components of well-being. Although¶ the MA investigated each of the five components of well-being¶ at some scales and in relation¶ to some ecosystem services,¶ the assessment of global¶ trends in human well-being¶ relied on the human development¶ index (HDI) because of¶ a lack of other data. The HDI¶ is an aggregate measure of¶ life expectancy, literacy, educational¶ attainment, and per¶ capita GDP (gross domestic¶ product) that does not capture¶ all five components of¶ well-being (Anand and Sen¶ 1992).¶

Ecosystems are resilient McDermott, 9 (Mat, Editor for Business and Energy sections; Master Degree from NYU’s Center for Global Affairs in environment and energy policy. May, 27, 2009: “Good News: Most Ecosystems Can Recover in One Lifetime from Human-Induced or Natural Disturbance”; http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/good-news-most-ecosystems-can-recover-in-one-lifetime-from-human-induced-or-natural-disturbance.html)

There's a reason the phrase "let nature take its course" exists: New research done at the Yale University School

of Forestry & Environmental Science reinforces the idea that ecosystems are quiet resilient and can rebound from pollution and environmental degradation . Published in the journal PLoS ONE, the study shows that most damaged ecosystems worldwide can recover within a single lifetime , if the source of pollution is removed and restoration work done. The analysis found that on average forest ecosystems can recover in 42 years, while in takes only about 10 years for the ocean bottom to recover. If an area has seen multiple , interactive disturbances, it can take on average 56 years for recovery. In general, most ecosystems take longer to recover from human-induced disturbances than from natural events, such as hurricanes.¶ To reach these recovery averages, the researchers looked at data from peer-reviewed studies over the past 100 years on the rate of ecosystem recovery once the source of pollution was removed.¶

Interestingly, the researchers found that it appears that the rate at which an ecosystem recovers may be independent of its degraded condition : Aquatic systems may recover more quickly than, say, a forest, because the species and

organisms that live in that ecosystem turn over more rapidly than in the forest.¶ As to what this all means, Oswald Schmitz, professor of ecology at Yale and report co-author, says that this analysis shows that an increased effort to restore damaged ecosystems is justified, and that:¶ Restoration could become a more important tool in the management portfolio of conservation organizations that are entrusted to protect habitats on landscapes.¶ We recognize that humankind has and will continue to actively domesticate nature to meet its own needs. The message of our paper is that recovery is possible and can be rapid for many ecosystems , giving much hope for a transition to sustainable management of global ecosystems.

A2: Environment---Ext---No ImpactNo invisible threshold – new technology allows us to revive extinct speciesRidley 12 (Matt, 2007 Davis Award winner for the History of Science, “Reversing extinction”; March 13, http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/reversing-extinction.aspx)

The fruit of a narrow-leaved campion , buried in permafrost by a ground squirrel 32,000 years ago on the banks of the Kolyma river in Siberia, has been coaxed into growing into a new plant , which then successfully set seed itself in a Moscow laboratory. Although this plant species was not extinct, inch by inch scientists seem to be closing in on the outrageous goal of bringing a species back from the dead . I don't

expect to live to see a herd of resurrected mammoths roaming the Siberian steppe, but I think my grandchildren just might. The mammoth is the best candidate for resurrection mainly because flash-frozen ones with well-preserved tissues are regularly found in the Siberian permafrost. Occasionally these have been fresh enough to tempt scientists to cook and eat them, usually with disappointing results. Just last week a Chinese paleontologist in Canada, Xing Lida, filmed himself frying and eating what he said was a small mammoth steak. Cells from such carcasses have been recovered, encouraging a rivalry between Japanese and Russian scientists to be the first to revive one of these huge, elephant-like mammals

by cloning. Four years ago the mammoth genome was sequenced, so we at least now know the genetic recipe. The news of the resurrected flower does, apparently, remove one obstacle. After 32,000 years the plant's DNA had not been so damaged by natural radioactivity in the soil as to make it unviable, which is a surprise. Mammoth carcasses are often much younger - the youngest, on Wrangel Island, being about 4,700 years old, contemporary with the Pharoahs. So the DNA should be

in even better shape. However, plants are much better at cloning themselves from any old cutting. Coaxing an elephant cell into becoming an embryo is not at all easy; though, as Dolly the sheep showed, not impossible. To do the same for a mammoth cell would be harder still. And then there is the problem of how to get the embryo to grow. Implanting it into the womb of an Indian elephant (its closest living relative) is the best bet, but experiments with implanting rare embryos into other species' wombs have been mostly unsuccessful. For example, a rare form of wild ox, the gaur, was going to have its embryos reared in cattle wombs, but it did not work. So do not book the Siberian mammoth safari trip just yet. Equally, don't bet against it eventually coming off. Which other species might follow? One that only recently went extinct (last seen in 1936) is the marsupial carnivore called the thylacine, or "Tasmanian tiger". A few years ago, genes from a dead thylacine were injected into a mouse and "expressed" in its tissue. The great auk, the dodo and other creatures that died out before the invention of refrigeration are going to be much harder to revive. Perhaps fortunately, Neanderthals, dead for 28,000 years, unfrozen and not very closely related to their likely surrogate parent (you and me), would be harder still, though their DNA sequence is now known. And as for the dinosaurs - 65 million years dead - forget it. Although come to think of it, re-engineering a chicken until it looks like a dinosaur cannot be ruled out, once people learn to play genetics well

enough. The real significance of the Siberian flower , though, is that it makes future extinctions potentially reversible . So long as we can flash-freeze seeds and tissues from threatened species (a disused mine in a frozen mountain in Spitsbergen already holds a seedbank of rare plant varieties), then we can give posterity the chance to resurrect them. Combine this with the news that extinction rates , at least of birds and mammals, have been falling in recent decades, and there are grounds for a glimmer of ecological optimism. The great spasm of extinction caused by humans - mainly when we spread our rats, weeds and bugs to oceanic islands - may be coming to an end. Far more significant than the reversal of extinction, however , is the revival of wild ecosystems . Ecologists are finding that wild habitats can be put back together more easily than they thought . A marine reserve off Mexico is now teeming with large fish again. Yellowstone Park's ecological revival following the introduction of the wolf is remarkable: by cutting the numbers of elk, wolves have brought back aspen trees and long grass and hence beavers, rodents and hawks. In Costa Rica, a rainforest rich in tree species is now thriving on what was, in 1993, exhausted farmland. Once a canopy of sun-loving trees was planted, hundreds of other tree species moved in naturally. One commentator

says: "The accepted belief is that once destroyed, tropical rainforests could never be restored. But is that really the case or just a myth?"

Environmentalists will worry that such optimism breeds complacency about habitat destruction. But it might instead breed ambition to restore habitats and revive rare species . Over the past 50 years, agricultural yields have risen and, in real terms, food prices have fallen, with the result that marginal land has been released from growing food worldwide. Forest cover has increased in most of Europe and North America; nature reserves have expanded even in the tropics. So here's an image of the future. With much of the world's meat grown, brain-free and legless, in factories, and much of its fruit and vegetables in multi-storey urban farms lit with cheap fusion power, there will again be vast steppes, savannahs, prairies and rain forests, teeming with herds of wild game. Perhaps even a few woolly mammoths among them.

A2: Environment---Ext---ResiliencyDestruction only increases resiliency Cote 10 (Isabelle M., tropical marine ecologist at Simon Fraser University; Emily S. Darling, marine ecologist at Simon Fraser University; July 27, 2010, “Rethinking Ecosystem Resilience in the Face of Climate Change”, http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000438 DA:7/11/2012)

The two predictions of the conventional view of ecological resilience are poorly supported by empirical evidence pertaining to coral reefs. We believe that the selective culling of disturbance-sensitive taxa by local stressors can explain why more intact reef communities do not appear to be more resilient to climate disturbance. If a species' tolerance to a non-climatic disturbance is correlated with its tolerance to climatic impacts (e.g., positive co-tolerance, [55]), then degradation can actually increase the abundance of disturbance-tolerant speci es within a community [26],[28] and thus the ability of an ecosystem to resist the impacts of climate disturbance .

This alternative view, which is more consistent with the majority of empirical observations, is depicted in Figure 1. Thus, with continued degradation caused by local stressors, altered communities become composed of disturbance-tolerant species and the tipping point in response to climate change will shift to the right (Figure 1B; black arrows), making the ecosystem more resilient to climate disturbance. Management that seeks to control local anthropogenic disturbances and reverse degradation (Figure 1B; red block arrows) will inadvertently shift the tipping point back to the left, towards lower resilience (Figure 1B; red arrows) to climate disturbance. Thus, management that controls local stressors to reverse degradation and recover original species assemblages will actually increase the proportion of sensitive taxa within the assemblage, and may effectively decrease ecosystem resilience to climate change.

Note that the alternative states depicted in Figure 1 are not assumed to be stable. Moreover, our conceptual model works with or without thresholds. If ecosystem state declines linearly with climate disturbance, we expect that the slope of this relationship will decrease as degradation increases (i.e., as the intercept decreases).

A2: Serial Policy FailureNo policy failure or offense – concrete action is inevitable Friedrichs, Oxford politics lecturer, 2009

(Jorg, “From positivist pretense to pragmatic practice: Varieties of pragmatic methodology in IR scholarship. International Studies Review 11(3): 645–648)

As Friedrich Nietzsche ([1887] 1994:1; cf. Wilson 2002) knew, the knower isstrangely unknown to himself. In fact, it is much more hazardous to contemplate the way how we gain knowledge than to gain such knowledge in the first place. This is not to deny

that intellectuals are a narcissistic Kratochwil lot, with a penchant for omphaloskepsis. The typical result of their navel- gazing , however, is not increased self-awareness. Scholars are more likely to come up with ex-post-facto rationalizations of how

they would like to see their activity than with accurate descriptions of how they go about business. As a result, in science there is a paradoxical divide between positivist pretenseand pragmatic practice. Many prominent scholars proceed pragmatically in gen-erating their knowledge, only to vest it all in a positivist cloak when it comes topresenting results. In the wake of Karl Popper (1963), fantasies about ingeniousconjectures and inexorable refutations continue to hold sway despite the muchmore prosaic way most scholars grope around in the formulation of their theo-ries, and the much less rigorous way they assess the value of their hypotheses. In proposing pragmatism as a more realistic alternative to positivist idealiza-tions, I am not concerned with the original intentions of Charles Peirce. Theseare discussed and enhanced by Ryto¨ vuori-Apunen (this forum). Instead, Ipresent various attempts to make pragmatism work as a methodology for IR scholarship. This includes my own preferred methodology, the pragmaticresearch strategy of abduction. As Fritz Kratochwil and I argue elsewhere,

abduction should be at the center of our efforts, while deduction and induction areimportant but auxiliary tools (Friedrichs and 2009).Of

course, one does not need to be a pragmatist to proceed in a pragmatic way. Precisely because it is derived from practice, pragmatic commonsense is a sold as the hills. For example, James Rosenau (1988:164) declared many yearsago that he coveted ‘‘a long-held conviction that one advances knowledge most effectively by continuously moving back and forth between very abstract and very empirical levels of inquiry, allowing the insights of the former to exert pressurefor the latter even as the findings of the latter, in turn, exert pressure for the for-mer, thus sustaining an endless cycle in which theory and research feed on eachother.’’ This was shortly before Rosenau’s turn to postmodernism, while he wasstill touting the virtues of behaviorism and standard scientific requisites, such asindependent and dependent variables and theory testing. But if we take his state-ment at face value, it appears that Rosenau-the-positivist was guided by a sort of pragmatism for all but the name. While such practical commonsense is certainly valuable, in and by itself,

it does not qualify as scientific methodology. Science requires a higher degree of methodological awareness. For this reason, I am not interested here in pragma-tism as unspoken commonsense, or as a pretext for doing empirical researchunencumbered by theoretical and methodological considerations. Nor am I con-

cerned with pragmatism as an excuse for staging yet another epistemological debate . Instead, I am interested in pragmatism as an

instrument to go about research with an appropriate degree of epistemological and methodologicalawareness. Taking this criterion as my yardstick, the following three varieties of pragmatist methodology in recent IR scholarship are worth mentioning: theory synthesis, analytic eclecticism (AE), and abduction.Theory synthesis is proposed by Andrew Moravcsik (2003), who claims that theories can be combined as long as they are compatible at some unspecifiedfundamental level, and that data will help to identify the right combination of theories. He does not explicitly invoke pragmatism but vests his pleading in apositivist cloak by using the language of theory testing. When looking closer,however, it becomes apparent that his theoretical and methodological noncha-lance is far more pragmatic than what his positivist rhetoric suggests. Moravcsiksees himself in good company, dropping the following names: Robert Keohane,Stephen Walt, Jack Snyder, Stephen Van Evera, Bary Buzan, Bruce Russett, John O’Neal, Martha Finnemore, and Kathryn Sikkink. With the partial excep-tion of Finnemore, however, none of these scholars explicitly links his or herscholarship to pragmatism. They employ pragmatic commonsense in theirresearch, but devoutly ignore pragmatism as a philosophical and methodologicalposition. As a result, it is fair to say that theory synthesis is only on a slightly higher level of intellectual awareness than Rosenau’s statement quoted above. Analytic eclecticism, as advertized by Peter Katzenstein and Rudra Sil, links acommonsensical approach to empirical research with a more explicit commit-ment to pragmatism (Sil and Katzenstein 2005; Katzenstein and Sil 2008).The 7 Even the dean of critical rationalism, Karl Popper, is ‘‘guilty’’ of lapses into pragmatism, for example when hestates that scientists, like hungry animals, classify objects according to needs and interests, although with the impor-tant difference that they are guided in their quest for finding regularities not so much by the stomach but ratherby empirical problems and epistemic interests (Popper 1963:61–62). 646 Pragmatism and International Relations idea is to combine existing research traditions in a pragmatic fashion and thusto enable the formulation and exploration of novel and more complex sets of problems. The constituent elements of different research traditions are trans-lated into mutually compatible vocabularies and then recombined in novel ways.This implies that most scholars must continue the laborious process of formulat-ing parochial research traditions so that a few cosmopolitan colleagues will beenabled to draw upon their work and construct syncretistic collages. 8 In additionto themselves, Katzenstein and Sil cite a number of like-minded scholars such asCharles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, Paul Pierson, and Robert Jervis. 9 The ascription isprobably correct given the highly analytical and eclectic approach of these schol-ars. Nevertheless, apart from Katzenstein and Sil themselves none of these schol-ars has explicitly avowed himself to AE.My preferred research strategy is abduction, which is epistemologically asself-aware as AE but minimizes the dependence on existing research traditions.The typical situation for abduction is when we, both in everyday life and as socialscientists, become aware of a certain class of phenomena that interests us for somereason, but for which we lack applicable theories. We simply trust, although we donot know for certain, that the observed class of phenomena is not random. Wetherefore start collecting pertinent observations and, at the same time, applyingconcepts from existing fields of our knowledge. Instead of trying to impose anabstract theoretical template (deduction) or ‘‘simply’’ inferring propositions fromfacts (induction), we start reasoning at an intermediate level (abduction). Abduction follows the predicament that science is, or should be, above all amore conscious and systematic version of the way by which humans have learnedto solve problems and generate knowledge in their everyday lives. As it iscurrently practiced,

science is often a poor emulator of what we are able toachieve in practice. This is unfortunate because human practice is the ultimatemiracle. In our own practice, most of us manage to deal with many challenging situations . The way we accomplish this is completely different from, and far

moreefficient than, the way knowledge is generated according to standard scientific methods. If it is true that in our own practice we proceed not so much by induction or deduction but rather by abduction, then science would do well tomimic this at least in some respects. 10 Abduction has been invoked by numerous scholars, including Alexander Wendt, John Ruggie, Jeffrey Checkel, Martin Shapiro, Alec Stone Sweet, andMartha Finnemore. While they all use the term abduction, none has ever thor-oughly specified its meaning. To make up for this omission, I have developedabduction into an explicit methodology and applied it in my own research oninternational police cooperation (Friedrichs 2008). Unfortunately, it is impossi-ble to go into further detail here. Readers interested in abduction as a way toadvance international research and methodology can also be referred to my recent article with Fritz Kratochwil (Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009).On a final note, we should be careful not to erect pragmatism as the ultimateepistemological fantasy to caress the vanity of Nietzschean knowers unknown tothemselves, namely that they are ingeniously ‘‘sorting out’’ problematic situa-tions. Scientific inquiry is not simply an intimate encounter between a researchproblem and a problem solver. It is a social activity taking place in communitiesof practice (Wenger 1998). Pragmatism must be neither reduced to the utility of results regardless of their social presuppositions and meaning, nor to the 8 Pace Rudra Sil (this forum), the whole point about eclecticism is that you rely on existing traditions to blendthem into something new. There is no eclecticism without something to be eclectic about. 9 One may further expand the list by including the international society approach of the English school (Ma-kinda 2000), as well as the early Kenneth Waltz (1959). 10 Precisely for this reason, abduction understood as ‘Inference to the Best

Explanation’ plays a crucial role inthe field of Artificial Intelligence. 647 The Forum fabrication of consensus among scientists. Pragmatism as the

practice of dis-cursive communities and pragmatism as a device for the generation of useful knowledge are two sides of the same coin

A2: Value to LifeValue to life is subjective and always existsCoontz’1 Phyllis D. Coontz, PhD Graduate School of Public and International Affairs University of Pittsburgh, et al, Journal of Community Health Nursing, 2001, 18(4), 235-246 – J-Stor

In the 1950s, psychiatrist and theorist Viktor Frankl ( 1963) described an existential theory of purpose and meaning in life. Frankl, a long-time prisoner in a concentration camp , re- lated several instances of transcendent states that he experienced in the midst of that terri- ble sufferin g using his own experiences and

observations. He believed that these experi- ences allowed him and others to maintain their sense of dignity and self-worth . Frankl (1969) claimed that transcendence occurs by giving to others, being open to others and

the environment, and coming to accept the reality that some situations are un- changeable. He hypothesized that life always has meaning for the individual ; a person can always decide how to face adversity . Therefore, self-transcendence provides mean- ing and enables the discovery of meaning for a person (Frankl, 1963).

Expanding Frankl's work, Reed (1991b) linked self-transcendence with mental health. Through a developmental process individuals gain an increasing understanding of who they are and are able to move out beyond themselves despite the fact that they are ex- periencing physical and mental pain. This expansion beyond the self occurs through in- trospection , concern about others and their well-being, and integration of the past and fu- ture to strengthen one's present life (Reed, 1991b).