Tournament: ASU | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
Halloween Violation

1NC

A. Violation – We asked the Affirmative in Cross-X ‘Trick or Treat” and they failed to provide us with a Treat. We’re all giving up our Halloween weekends to be at this debate tournament in Arizona, (no offense). The least they could have done is brought some candy.

B. Impacts – 

1. Justifies the Trick – In the absence of a Treat, it is customary to play Tricks on the offending team or household. This justifies any abuse we may or may not commit in the debate round.

2. Fun – Halloween is one of the most fun holidays. It’s not all annoyingly religious and you get to wear cool costumes. The Affirmative would have us completely ignore Halloween in order to participate in debate. This is not a sacrifice anyone should have to make. Halloween is also a great opportunity to give things away to other people, which the Affirmative has completely missed. On that note, here’s some candy we’re gonna charge to Stanford.

(partner passes around a pumpkin full of candy to other team and judge)

Voting Issue – Reject the mechanistic fascism that would have us give up Halloween weekend without any expectation of fun or candy

Tournament: ASU | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
Isaura, city of a thousand wells, is presumed to lie above a deep underground lake. All around, where the inhabitants have been able to find water by digging long vertical holes, up to there and no further the city extends: its verdant perimeter repeats that of the dark shores of the buried lake; an invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything that moves in the sunlight is driven by the lapping wave enclosed beneath the rock's calcareous sky.

Consequently there are two types of religion in Isaura. Some say the city's gods live deep below in the lake which feeds the subterranean veins. Others say the gods live in the buckets which rise up hanging from rope, in the pulleys which turn, in the pump-levers, in the narrow arches of the aqueducts, in all the columns of water, the vertical pipes, the plungers, the drains, all the way up to the weathercocks that surmount the airy scaffoldings of Isaura, a city that moves entirely upward.

The two religions in this story, from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, demonstrate two views of truth, of metaphysical possibility, and of change. The Affirmative subscribes to a model of truth that sees our historical subjectivities as transcended by a single meaning that shapes all of social and political space. Like the first religion of Isaura, they believe the gods live deep underground – that the Truth of our reality can be understood through a single sign deep beneath it, a sign that simultaneously transcends and codes the entire symbolic field.

The danger of such an approach is that it engenders a myopic worldview where possibility and agency are profoundly limited, when in fact nothing could be further from the case. Like the second religion of Isaura, we have a different view of the world: that the gods are everywhere, in all the scaffolding of a city that moves ever upward. This is a philosophy that resists the urge to universalize our historical moment, or define it along one axis that determines its totality. Access to truth, and to resistance, and to change are all immanent to the social field, at every point – not external to it.
Unlike the Affirmative, we don’t believe there’s only way forward in History. Their monolithic understandings of meaning and subjectivity justify fascist violence. We offer instead a view of the world that sees possibility as immanent. The element of magic in magical realist storytelling can be seen as a stand in for Deleuze’s notion of immanent possibility, along a plane of pure deterritorialization. There is always the possibility for resistance and change, though you’ll miss it if you’re only looking for the gods underground.

Aldea 2011 (Eva, Magical Realism and Deleuze: The Indiscernibility of Difference in Postcolonial Literature, Continuum International Publishing Group, London, page 147, http://books.google.com/books?id=mkvZaieGa1UCandpg=PA147andlpg=PA147anddq=Gilles+Deleuze+enables+us+to+rethink+the+relationship+between+the+real+and+the+magic+radically,+by+inverting+the+hierarchy+of+different+and+same.+The+usual+approach+to+magical+realism+privileges+the+creation+of+unity+and+equivalence+between+two+elements+that+are+seen+as+incompatible+and+unequalandsource=blandots=cNJ4LP2ZWKandsig=RJhUdeo23j5CONrZyJkMjuYz9k4andhl=enandsa=Xandei=zLeNUMjrMeTcigKmh4H4DQandved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepageandq=Gilles%20Deleuze%20enables%20us%20to%20rethink%20the%20relationship%20between%20the%20real%20and%20the%20magic%20radically%2C%20by%20inverting%20the%20hierarchy%20of%20different%20and%20same.%20The%20usual%20approach%20to%20magical%20realism%20privileges%20the%20creation%20of%20unity%20and%20equivalence%20between%20two%20elements%20that%20are%20seen%20as%20incompatible%20and%20unequalandf=false)

Lips clenched on the pipe's amber stem, his beard flattened against his amethyst choker, his big toes nervously arched in his silken slippers, Kublai Khan listened to Marco Polo's tales without raising an eyebrow. These were the evenings when a shadow of hypochondria weighed on his heart.

'Your cities do not exist. Perhaps they have never existed. It is sure they will never exist again. Why do you amuse yourself with consolatory fables? I know well that my empire is rotting like a corpse in a swamp, whose contagion infects the crows that peck it as well as the bamboo that grows, fertilized by its humours. Why do you not speak to me of this? Why do you lie to the emperor of the Tartars, foreigner?'

Polo knew it was best to fall in with the sovereign's dark mood. 'Yes, the empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its sores. This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.'

At other times, however, the Khan was seized by fits of euphoria. He would rise up on his cushions, measure with long strides the carpets spread over the paths at his feet, look out from the balustrades of the terraces to survey with dazzled eye the expanse of the palace gardens lighted by the lanterns hung from the cedars.

'And yet I know,' he would say, 'that my empire is made of the stuff of crystals, its molecules arranged in a perfect pattern. Amid the surge of the elements, a splendid hard diamond takes shape, an immense, faceted, transparent mountain. Why do your travel impressions stop at disappointing appearances, never catching this implacable process? Why do you linger over inessential melancholies? Why do you hide from the emperor the grandeur of his destiny?'

And Marco answered: 'While, at a sign from you, sire, the unique and final city raises its stainless walls, I am collecting the ashes of the other possible cities that vanish to make room for it, cities that can never be rebuilt or remembered. When you know at last the residue of unhappiness for which no precious stone can compensate, you will be able to calculate the exact number of carats towards which that final diamond must strive. Otherwise, your calculations will be mistaken from the very start.'

(Moira Gatens, Professor of Philosophy at Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, Corporeal Representations in/and the Body Politic, Writing on the body: female embodiment and feminist theory, 1997, p. 85-87)
Our critique is an attempt at bringing to the fore the ashes of the other possible cities that have vanished to make room for the Affirmative. Like the fictional Marco Polo in the text, we represent the view of a nomad, a traveler between and through epistemic boundaries. This nomadic feminist seeks to restructure our relationship to the Other and to difference in a way that is not doomed to violence. 

(Rosi Braidotti, Director of Center for the Humanities at Utrecht, Mothers, Monsters, and Machines, Writing on the body: female embodiment and feminist theory, Pg 75-76)

It should be apparent that this is not the sort of critique that offers conclusions. Our methodology is instead about the process of critique without end or destination. It is a city constantly under construction. What is the aim of a city under construction, unless it is a finished city? We answer with a story:

Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences, the sackcloth screens, the scaffoldings, the metal armatures, the wooden catwalks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the ladders, the trestles. If you ask "Why is Thekla's construction taking such a long time?" the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long bruses up and down, as they answer "So that it's destruction cannot begin." And if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffoldings are removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, "Not only the city." 

If, dissatisfied with the answers, someone puts his eye to a crack in a fence, he sees cranes pulling up other cranes, scaffoldings that embrace other scaffoldings, beams that prop up other beams. "What meaning does your construction have?" he asks. "What is the aim of a city under construction unless it is a city? Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?" 

"We will show it to you as soon as the working day is over; we cannot interrupt our work now," they answer. 

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say. 

 (Invisible Cities)

Tournament: ASU | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
Pony Spec

A. Violation – Affirmative does not have a valid pony identification number. They had a chance to specify in cross-x of the 1AC, now it’s too late. Any future specification is unpredictable, and makes them a moving target, which is only ok if you’re moving on a pony that you’ve specified.

B. Standards

1. Limits – Having a specified pony is the only way we can research pony-specific disads, and K links, which are the cornerstone of negative ground on the pony debate. 

2. Terrorism – allowing ponies without valid pony ID makes it literally impossible to prevent nuclear, chemical, and biological rigged ponies from being planted in an American city and starting World War III. Any risk of a link should be treated as absolute.

3. Ontological Damnation – The Being of Being is dependent on an ethical ontological relationship with Being in, and through the Pony as metaphor for Being.

Michael Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy at Tulane, Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity, 119-20, 1994

C. Voting Issue – Pony Spec is a voter for fairness, education, jurisdiction, ontology, and patriotism. It’s the highest priority framing issue in the round because it accesses all levels of the debate.

Tournament: ASU | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
Vermin Supreme

A. Text: The United States Supreme Court will rule in a 5-4 decision that the winner of the 2012 presidential election is Vermin Supreme.

B. Competition: Counterplan competes through net benefits. It avoids the link to the Fun K, Storytime, and Women Pirates.

C. Solvency: Vermin Supreme is a friendly fascist. He will not lie to you, unless you want him to, in which case he always will, and always has. Vermin Supreme has the best plan for erasing America’s energy dependence via transitioning to a pony-based economy, as well as harnessing the limitless potential energy of zombies on hamster wheels.

Samantha Grossman, Reporter for Newsfeed, 1/10/12, http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/10/vermin-supreme-the-presidential-candidate-who-promises-free-ponies/

Tournament: ASU | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
Aglaura

There is little I can tell you about Aglaura beyond the things its own inhabitants have always repeated: an array of proverbial virtues, of equally proverbial faults, a few eccentricities, some punctilious regard for rules. Ancient observers, whom there is no reason not to presume truthful, attributed to Aglaura its enduring assortment of qualities, surely comparing them to those of the other cities of their times. 

Perhaps neither the Aglaura that is reported nor the Aglaura that is visible had greatly changed since then, but what was bizarre has become usual, what seemed normal is now an oddity, and virtues and faults have lost merit or dishonor in a code of virtues and faults differently distributed. In this sense, nothing said of Aglaura is true, and yet these accounts create a solid and compact image of a city, whereas the haphazard opinions which might be inferred from living there have less substance. This is the result: the city that they speak of has much of what is needed to exist, whereas the city that exists on its site, exists less.

So if I wished to describe Aglaura to you, sticking to what I personally saw and experienced, I should have to tell you that it is a colorless city, without character, planted there at random. But this would not be true, either: at certain hours, in certain places, along the street, you see opening before you the hint of something unmistakable, rare, perhaps magnificent; you would like to say what it is, but everything previously said of Aglaura imprisons your words and obliges you to repeat rather than say.

Therefore, the inhabitants still believe they live in an Aglaura which grows only with the name Aglaura and they do not notice the Aglaura that grows on the ground. And even I, who would like to keep the two cities distinct in my memory, can speak only of the one, because the recollection of the other, in the lack of words to fix it, has been lost.

 (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)

 Stop flowing for a second. Listen, and you can hear the Aglaura that grows on the ground. There is truth that emerges from this debate round, though you’d never hear it through all the noise. So stop listening for a minute. Tune me out while I finish this tag. Think about something that makes you happy. We’re gonna read the card slow anyway, and later on in the round we’re probably just gonna lie about what it says.

Aldea 2011 (Eva, Magical Realism and Deleuze: The Indiscernibility of Difference in Postcolonial Literature, Continuum International Publishing Group, London, page 147, http://books.google.com/books?id=mkvZaieGa1UCandpg=PA147andlpg=PA147anddq=Gilles+Deleuze+enables+us+to+rethink+the+relationship+between+the+real+and+the+magic+radically,+by+inverting+the+hierarchy+of+different+and+same.+The+usual+approach+to+magical+realism+privileges+the+creation+of+unity+and+equivalence+between+two+elements+that+are+seen+as+incompatible+and+unequalandsource=blandots=cNJ4LP2ZWKandsig=RJhUdeo23j5CONrZyJkMjuYz9k4andhl=enandsa=Xandei=zLeNUMjrMeTcigKmh4H4DQandved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepageandq=Gilles%20Deleuze%20enables%20us%20to%20rethink%20the%20relationship%20between%20the%20real%20and%20the%20magic%20radically%2C%20by%20inverting%20the%20hierarchy%20of%20different%20and%20same.%20The%20usual%20approach%20to%20magical%20realism%20privileges%20the%20creation%20of%20unity%20and%20equivalence%20between%20two%20elements%20that%20are%20seen%20as%20incompatible%20and%20unequalandf=false)

Tournament: ASU | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
Pirates
There is a fascination in the modern Body Politic with the image of the One Body. The dream of Fascism is a dream of Unity containing difference, of Order defeating instability, of Reason taming the chaos of the world. The image of the One Body permeates all these dreams, from international politics to the politics of the debate round and the bodies of debaters. 

(Moira Gatens, Professor of Philosophy at Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, Corporeal Representations in/and the Body Politic, Writing on the body: female embodiment and feminist theory, 1997, p. 85-87)

The figure of the 17th Century Caribbean Pirate provides a counterpoint to the image of the One Body perpetuated by the Affirmative. On the Open Ocean of the debate round, piracy represents the unpredictable, the chaotic, that which prevents the rule of Order. The Affirmative is like a mercantile ship, ready to exchange their goods for the ballot. But in order for the exchange to occur, certain rules have to be followed. Piracy is an active intervention into this process of exchange, which is rooted in systems of structural violence that privilege the One Body. The kritik is a performance of stealing this round from them.

Klausmann, Meinzerin, and Kuhn 1997 (Ulrike, Marion, and Gabriel, Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger, Black Rose Books, Montreal, New York, London) 

Tournament: ASU | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
Fun

The energy that flows through this debate round is the energy of the universe, the energy of stars whose fire contributes to nothing. Maybe we are just wasting time here, but so what? Not every moment of every day has to be useful. Not even every round of every debate tournament. People act like this shit is so important, like if we let our guards down and just had fun for one second we’d be costing the world some invaluable act of performance or policy discussion. Like the fate of the Earth hangs in the balance of this debate tournament.
So here’s a radical thought: maybe our community would be less nihilistic and useless if we called a spade a spade, and admitted that most of what happens here doesn’t matter. We’re not saying we don’t love debate – believe us, we do! We’re psyched about debate. But that doesn’t mean we have to pretend the debate round is important for any reason outside of itself. Not everything has to be useful. In fact, the obsessive accumulation of useful energy is precisely the problem that put our world on the brink of nuclear war and global ecocide to begin with. Let’s instead just let the debate round be wasted.

Skoekl (Allan, professor of French and comparative literature at Penn State University, Bataille’s Peak:Energy, Religion and Postsustainability, 2007 Pg xvi -“ xviii)

Tournament: Wake  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
The affirmative rhetorical silence on whiteness is an active stance that allows white privilege to thrive by masking its existence and treating is as an assumed norm.
We once believed that SILENCE was golden interpreting it to be a precious and valuable commodity.  While still viewed as a precious and valuable commodity the color has changed and SILENCE is now the veil and cloak of WHITENESS and WHITE PRIVILEGE
DR. CRENSHAW Prof of Speech Comm @ Univ. Ala.  1997
Carrie-PhD. USC; former director of debate @ Univ. of Ala.; WESTERN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION

Racism justifies atrocities, creates another and should be rejected
MEMMI  Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris    2000
Albert-; RACISM, translated by Steve Martinot, pp.163-165

Tournament: Wake | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
Raciology must be rejected in all of its manifestations even progressive and non-static understandings of race get at the nature of the problem. The move beyond race is difficult, but necessary – as any conception of racial difference disrupts any attempts to resolve the crisis of raciology.
Gilroy 2K Paul, Professor @ London School of Economics, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line

attempts to reinvent racial aesthetics risk ultraconservative regulation and authoritarianism. race thinking ultimately devolves into who belongs and who does not. Who is the most resistant and who doesn’t make the cut. Worse yet, contributing to the currency of race reinvigorates the logic of racial determinism that justified slavery and violence to begin with. We must insist on the absurdity and failure of race to combat these tendencies.
Gilroy 2K Paul, Professor @ London School of Economics, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line

The alternative is to join us in a new abolitionism. 

Abolishing race is something that everyone must participate in. Those once defined as racial master and those defined as slaves must take part in destroying the logic of race that has marginalized our collective possibility as humans unmodified.
Gilroy 2K Paul, Professor @ London School of Economics, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line

Tournament: Wake | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
Colbert Video - http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/420904/november-07-2012/wind-power-s-health-hazards

Start Video at :44

End Video at 3:32

Tournament: Wake | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
The affirmative reduces the political gesture of the their performance to a technical problem, not a question of specific resistance to specific discourses of domination. Our task is not to find the purest law, the best solution for every problem, but to problematize the very foundation of law and its ability to inscribe itself in culture. As part of a broader struggle, we must resist each site of power which acts upon us

Giroux, the Global Television Network Chair in Communication Studies, 1979
Henry, “Schooling and the Culture of Positivism: Notes on the Death of History,” Educational Theory, Journal Citation: v29 n4 p263-84 Fall

The affirmatives ‘science’ is exlusive- it doesn’t take into account women’s experience and knowledge that results in bias data that allows for the patriarchal system to skew data in their favor. 

Nhanenge 7 – Master of Arts at the development studies @ the University of South Africa (Jytte “Ecofeminism: Towards Integrating the concerns of women _{poor people and nature into development” http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/570/dissertation.pdf?sequence=1)}

Tournament: Wake | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
Towson’s advocacy that we should black women as America’s first colonial act masks the historical fact that the violent history of the United States of America was only possible by a prior exclusion and extermination of Native Americans.

The silence of the 1AC is strategic—at best, their lip-service to the first priority of violence against American Indians avoids confronting the primordial justification of the violence their 1AC. Their progressive struggle will fail, because its progress will only occur on STOLEN LAND.
Churchill 96 (Ward Churchill, Former Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of Colorado, Boulder “I Am Indigenist,” From A Native Son pgs 520-30)

And, their omission is not neutral—it obscures the fact that the most egregious structural violence in America is perpetuated against Native Americans
Churchill 92 (Ward Churchill, Codirector of the Colorado chapter of the American Indian Movement. A previous professor at the University of Colorado/Boulder, “Fantasies of the Master Race.” pg. 7-9)

Historical amnesia of colonial dispossession maintains white supremacy: The most important necessary cause of white supremacy is white possession: The idea that we can take something and say “that’s my property” by right. The very act of starting with slavery and migration hides the reality of where we live. Rather than begin with slavery, our historical analysis of white supremacy starts with and centers appropriation of indigenous land and its relationship to white possessiveness.
Moreton-Robinson 8 (Aileen, “Transnational Whiteness Matters”, p. kindle)

The continuing genocide of Native America puts all life on earth at risk
Friedberg 2K (Lilian Friedberg, author and political activist with a master's degree in the humanities from the University of Chicago and is currently a doctoral candidate in Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Dare to Compare:  Americanizing the Holocaust, The American Indian Quarterly 24.3 (2000) 353-380)

Eric and I advocate First Priority to First Americans as a strategy of impossible realism which seeks to banish the United States federal government from North America and planet Earth. We have to abolish the USFG right here in this community so that it may serve as a praxis and starting point for fighting all oppressions such as racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia both in Indian country and around the globe.

Politics invariably requires the establishment of priorities – ours should be this: First Priority to First Americans
Churchill 96 (Ward Churchill, Former Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of Colorado, Boulder, “I Am Indigenist,” From A Native Son pgs 89-94)