Critique Neg Core BBHS SDI 2010

SDI 2010BBHS

Critique Neg Core

Critique Neg Core—BBHS—SDI 2010

*** Framework......

Critique Framework First Line......

Representations Shape Policy Outcomes......

A2: Role-Playing/Policy Simulation Good......

*** A2: Anti-Politics......

A2: Anti-Politics—Top Shelf Critique Of ‘Anti-Politics’......

A2: Anti-Politics—Utopian Literature Counter-Metaphor......

A2: Anti-Politics—Utopian Literature—Effective Citizenship......

A2: Anti-Politics—Utopian Literature—Turn Shield......

A2: Anti-Politics—Utopian Literature—A2: Utopian Fiat Bad......

A2: Anti-Politics—Utopian Literature—A2: Moots 1AC......

A2: Anti-Politics—Utopian Literature—A2: Policymaking Good......

A2: Anti-Politics—They Say: Key To Education......

A2: Anti-Politics—They Say: Key To Activism/Politics......

A2: Anti-Politics—They Say: Key To Grammar/Topicality......

*** Other Essentials......

Footnoting DA To Permutations......

Serial Policy Failure......

A2: Inevitability Claims......

*** Framework

Critique Framework First Line

Our framework is that the affirmative should win if the topical plan and the reasons they offer for endorsing it are superior to the status quo or a competitive alternative. This distills the debate to a single yes/no question and is best for both fairness and education:

The 1AC is a staging ground for their advocacy:

Discussions of how they propose their policy and how they defend it are critical to gauging the desirability of their policy. Their argument is Playboy logic – you don’t just read it for the articles – you have to evaluate their presentation as a whole, not just isolate one snippet.

The ballot is a referendum on the whole of the affirmative’s presentation:

The decision about whether or not to adopt their policy is reliant on the justifications they presented. There are multiple reasons to do any policy – we should support those that are justified and discount those that are not. Debate is a forum for the contestation of ideas – the ballot should serve as an evaluation of the arguments made in the round, not as a recommendation for political action.

We cannot divorce the desirability of the plan from the desirability of the affirmative’s justifications—if we win that their defense of the plan is bad, vote negative.

Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, 1991 (“The Message of Affirmative Action,” The Affirmative Action Debate (1995), edited by Steven M. Cahn, Published by Routledge, Reprinted from Social Philosophy & Policy, p. 169-170)

Actions, as the saying goes, often speak louder than words. There are times, too, when only actions can effectively communicate the message we want to convey, and times when giving a message is a central part of the purpose of action. What our actions say to others depends largely, though not entirely, upon our avowed reasons for acting; and this is a matter for reflective [end page 169] decision, not something we discover later by looking back at what we did and its effects. The decision is important because "the same act" can have very different consequences, depending upon how we choose to justify it. In a sense, acts done for different reasons are not "the same act" even if otherwise similar, and so not merely the consequences but also the moral nature of our acts depend in part on our decisions about the reasons for doing them. Unfortunately, the message actually conveyed by our actions does not depend only on our intentions and reasons, for our acts may have a meaning for others quite at odds with what we hoped to express. Others may misunderstand our intentions, doubt our sincerity, or discern a subtext that undermines the primary message. Even if sincere, well-intended, and successfully conveyed, the message of an act or policy does not by itself justify the means by which it is conveyed; it is almost always a relevant factor, however, in the moral assessment of the act or policy. These remarks may strike you as too obvious to be worth mentioning; for, even if we do not usually express the ideas so abstractly, we are all familiar with them in our daily interactions with our friends, families, and colleagues. Who, for example, does not know the importance of the message expressed in offering money to another person, as well as the dangers of misunderstanding? What is superficially "the same act" can be an offer to buy, an admission of guilt, an expression of gratitude, a contribution to a common cause, a condescending display of superiority, or an outrageous insult. Because all this is so familiar, the extent to which these elementary points are ignored in discussions of the pros and cons of social policies such as affirmative action is surprising. The usual presumption is that social policies can be settled entirely by debating the rights involved or by estimating the consequences, narrowly conceived apart from the messages that we want to give and the messages that are likely to be received.

Within our framework, the role of the ballot is to choose between competing visions of the world. This is the most desirable interpretation:

Subpoint A is our defense—

There is no ground loss – the affirmative gets to leverage the impacts of their case against the alternative. They should be prepared to defend the fundamental assumptions of their affirmative – this is more predictable than process counterplans or case/DA strategies because our links are derived from the affirmative’s justification for their plan, not from the method of plan implementation.

Critique Framework First Line

Subpoint B is education—

Debates about the desirability of the arguments used in defense of the plan are critical to in-depth clash and education – they teach vital framing skills and encourage students to learn how to effectively package their arguments which is independently key to activist and policy success. Even if we don’t grow up to be policymakers, learning how to effectively argue for change is a vital life skill.

Subpoint C is policy success—

The way we frame the problem and the solution is important – using the ballot to conduct strategic frame analysis allows us to better evaluate representations and their impact on public policy.

The FrameWorks Institute, 2004 (“The FrameWorks Perspective: Strategic Frame Analysis,” Available Online at Accessed 08-02-2010)

For the past five years, a rare collaboration between communications scholars and practitioners has begun to evolve a new approach to explaining social issues to the public. Strategic frame analysis is an approach to communications research and practice that pays attention to the public's deeply held worldviews and widely held assumptions. This approach was developed at the FrameWorks Institute by a multi-disciplinary team of people capable of studying those assumptions and testing them to determine their impact on social policies. Recognizing that there is more than one way to tell a story, strategic frame analysis taps into decades of research on how people think and communicate. The result is an empirically-driven communications process that makes academic research understandable, interesting, and usable to help people solve social problems. This interdisciplinary work is made possible by the fact that the concept of framing is found in the literatures of numerous academic disciplines across the social, behavioral and cognitive sciences. Put simply, framing refers to the construct of a communication — its language, visuals and messengers — and the way it signals to the listener or observer how to interpret and classify new information. By framing, we mean how messages are encoded with meaning so that they can be efficiently interpreted in relationship to existing beliefs or ideas. Frames trigger meaning. The questions we ask, in applying the concept of frames to the arena of social policy, are as follows: How does the public think about a particular social or political issue? What is the public discourse on the issue? And how is this discourse influenced by the way media frames that issue? How do these public and private frames affect public choices? How can an issue be reframed to evoke a different way of thinking, one that illuminates a broader range of alternative policy choices? This approach is strategic in that it not only deconstructs the dominant frames of reference that drive reasoning on public issues, but it also identifies those alternative frames most likely to stimulate public reconsideration and enumerates their elements (reframing). We use the term reframe to mean changing "the context of the message exchange" so that different interpretations and probable outcomes become visible to the public (Dearing & Rogers, 1994: 98). Strategic frame analysis offers policy advocates a way to work systematically through the challenges that are likely to confront the introduction of new legislation or social policies, to anticipate attitudinal barriers to support, and to develop research-based strategies to overcome public misunderstanding.

Critique Framework First Line

The ballot should reflect a judgment about whose arguments in favor of competing visions of the world should be preferred. The way we frame the problem has immense power – an interrogation of the story that the affirmative tells is a vital prerequisite to policy analysis.

Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies and Co-Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Colorado-Boulder, 2006 (Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin, Published by Paradigm Publishers, ISBN 1594512752, p. ix)

The terrible attack of September 11, 2001, raised America’s concerns about national security to new heights. Yet George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisors responded to the attack with policies that are likely to make America less secure. Why? This book offers a part of the answer, beginning with a simple observation. The Bush administration does not treat the attackers of 9/11, and those who might be attackers in the future, as real human beings. It treats them as the villains in a story, as monsters who must be destroyed. The president and the neoconservatives have produced a huge body of public words about the monsters and the need to destroy them. Those words fall into patterns—I call them stories—about themselves, their ideals, their motives, and their policies. Every government policy begins with a story; the choices made by policymakers depend on the stories they tell themselves and others. Their stories have immense power. They create the narrative framework within which U.S. policy is enacted, explained, rationalized, and justified. Everyone hears the administration’s stories of terror and response to terror, and many millions believe them, or at least take them quite seriously. Yet the underlying structure and implications of the prevailing stories remain little studied and poorly understood.

Examining the stories underlying our relationship with the world is vital – these stories subconsciously shape our conclusions – absent interrogation, the affirmative’s methodology creates a rigged game.

No matter how painful or frightening the world might become, it is always easier to handle if we can fit it all into a storyline. Stories give shape to our lives. They create a secure picture of what the world is like and how life should be lived. We rely on our stories to give structure to our experience, to make it seem meaningful, to turn it from chaos into order. A story lets us hope that we can somehow bring even the most overwhelming events and feelings under control. Most of the time, we can’t even tell our most important stories completely in any detailed narrative. We take them for granted. We know them only in bits and pieces, but the whole story is always there. Mentioning just one piece is like pushing a button that brings the whole story to life; the process unfolds largely unconsciously. An outsider who studied our lives closely might well see the full structure of our stories more clearly than we could. That’s why it may be helpful for an outsider like myself, a critic of nearly every aspect of Bush administration policy, to piece together the stories of the administration.

Representations Shape Policy Outcomes

Representational choices construct the meaning of the “reality” on which the affirmative’s policy prescription is founded – an interrogation of these choices is inextricably linked with an interrogation of their policy.

Roxanne Lynn Doty, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State University, 1996 (Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations, Published by the University of Minnesota Press, Borderlines Series, ISBN 0816627622, p. 169-171)

The cases examined in this study attest to the importance of representational practices and the power that inheres in them. The infinity of traces that leave no inventory continue to play a significant part in contemporary constructions of “reality.” This is not to suggest that representations have been static. Static implies the possibility of fixedness, when what I mean to suggest is an inherent fragility and instability to the meanings and identities that have been constructed in the various discourses I examined. For example, to characterize the South as “uncivilized” or “unfit for self-government" is no longer an acceptable representation. This is not, however, because the meanings of these terms were at one time fixed and stable. As I illustrated, what these signifiers signified was always deferred. Partial fixation was the result of their being anchored by some exemplary mode of being that was itself constructed at the power/ knowledge nexus: the white male at the turn of the century, the United States after World War II. Bhabha stresses “the wide range of the stereotype, from the loyal servant to Satan, from the loved to the hated; a shifting of subject positions in the circulation of colonial power” (1983: 31). The shifting subject positions--from uncivilized native to quasi state to traditional “man” and society, for example--are all partial fixations that have enabled the exercise of various and multiple forms of power. Nor do previous oppositions entirely disappear. What remains is an infinity of traces from prior representations [end page 169] that themselves have been founded not on pure presences but on differance. “The present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the trace,” Derrida writes (1982: 24). Differance makes possible the chain of differing and deferring (the continuity) as well as the endless substitution (the discontinuity) of names that are inscribed and reinscribed as pure presence, the center of the structure that itself escapes structurality. North-South relations have been constituted as a structure of deferral. The center of the structure (alternatively white man, modern man, the United States, the West, real states) has never been absolutely present outside a system of differences. It has itself been constituted as trace—the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself (ibid.). Because the center is not a fixed locus but a function in which an infinite number of sign substitutions come into play, the domain and play of signification is extended indefinitely (Derrida 1978: 280). This both opens up and limits possibilities, generates alternative sites of meanings and political resistances that give rise to practices of reinscription that seek to reaffirm identities and relationships. The inherently incomplete and open nature of discourse makes this reaffirmation an ongoing and never finally completed project. In this study I have sought, through an engagement with various discourses in which claims to truth have been staked, to challenge the validity of the structures of meaning and to make visible their complicity with practices of power and domination. By examining the ways in which structures of meaning have been associated with imperial practices, I have suggested that the construction of meaning and the construction of social, political, and economic power are inextricably linked. This suggests an ethical dimension to making meaning and an ethical imperative that is incumbent upon those who toil in the construction of structures of meaning. This is especially urgent in North-South relations today: one does not have to search very far to find a continuing complicity with colonial representations that ranges from a politics of silence and neglect to constructions of terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, international drug trafficking, and Southern immigration to the North as new threats to global stability and peace. The political stakes raised by this analysis revolve around the question of being able to “get beyond” the representations or speak outside of the discourses that historically have constructed the North [end page 170] and the South. I do not believe that there are any pure alternatives by which we can escape the infinity of traces to which Gramsci refers. Nor do I wish to suggest that we are always hopelessly imprisoned in a dominant and all-pervasive discourse. Before this question can be answered--indeed, before we can even proceed to attempt an answer--attention must be given to the politics of representation. The price that international relations scholarship pays for its inattention to the issue of representation is perpetuation of the dominant modes of making meaning and deferral of its responsibility and complicity in dominant representations.