Now that the college year is over, let’s post some more cards. Everyone knows that Shively card, that one super annoying Shively card that some jackass pulled out of a book of mediocre essays on political philosophy? Well, here’s a card that answers that from Ms. Shively. Enjoy!

Shively explicitly doesn’t think that one interpretation can encompass the entirety of a debate topic. She thinks that multiple lines of critical reasoning are useful when it comes to debates, as long as we remain germane to the topic we’re good.

Shively 97 (Ruth Lessl, The Shively we all seem to quote. For no real reason. Used to be professor at Texas A&M and published a book and an essay. “Compromised Goods: A Realist Critique of Constructionist Politics. University of Wisconsin Press”. Pages 47-48)//UDC

Thus the above arguments appeal, respectively, to the criteria of consistency, coherence, and adequacy. And thus we may surmise that the constructionists believe at least in their own ability to argue objectively and rationally about abstract moral ideas. Indeed, given the esoteric nature of their claims, we may surmise that they believe in their ability to make effective metaphysical arguments. Of course, the arguments for moral realism to follow will make the same sorts of claims, suggesting (among other things) that realist self-conceptions are those most consistent with anthropological, psychological, and introspective evidences about personality; that to be coherent, normative thought and speech require a realistic metaphysic; and that antirealist political schemes cannot do justice, or are inadequate, to the realist elements of ordinary social and political thought. The differences between these groups, then, lie not in actual forms of argument, but in whether these forms are acknowledged in their respective theories of knowledge.

The general point here is that metaphysical or highly abstract moral arguments can proceed in much the same way that other arguments do: they build on ordinary empirical forms of evidence and ordinary rational forms of argument. Thus, contrary to the usual complaints, this kind of argument need not be an appeal to some contextless, transcendent perspective, like all other arguments, it needs only to build maximally consistent, coherent, and adequate accounts of relevant evidence.

Of course, agreement on standards of persuasion does not mean agreement on conclusions, for obviously we can expect people to come to different conclusions about what is consistent with, or adequate to, the evidence. And the more metaphysical-or the more abstract and complex the topic, the more likely we are to meet with a variety of interpretations, and the more we can expect people to come to different conclusions about what best fits their experience. These kinds of topics are not decided on some one definitive piece of evidence or some unarguable line of reasoning; rather, if people are convinced at all, it is usually by the more elusive criterion of adequacy: they see that one theory better accounts for all of the relevant information, considered as a whole.

It was nice to meet some fans of mine at Pennsbury today. After the round they asked for some good Extinction outweighs evidence. While this isn’t, necessarily, the best evidence on the subject it’s certainly pretty decent and well worth reading when you’re in those sorts of rounds.

Extinction comes first – Humanity is the source of all values and rights, justifying extinction is the death of not just our biological entities but of everything we have ever hoped to achieve and must be stopped whatever the cost.

Schell 82 (Jonathan Schell, Scholar and Visiting Fellow at Yale University. “The Fate of the Earth” page 136)

Implicit in everything that I have said so far about the nuclear predicament there has been a perplexity that I would now like to take up explicitly, for it leads, I believe, into the very heart of our response-or, rather, our lack of response-to the predicament. I have pointed out that our species is the most important of all the things that, as inhabitants of a common world, we inherit from the past generations, but it does not go far enough to point out this superior importance, as though in making our decision about extinction we were being asked to choose between, say, liberty, on the one hand, and the survival of the species, on the other. For the species not only overarches but contains all the benefits of life in the common world, and to speak of sacrificing the species for the sake of one of these benefits involves one in the absurdity of wanting to destroy something in order to preserve one of its parts, as if one were to burn down a house in an attempt to redecorate the living room, or to kill someone to improve his character, but even to point out this absurdity fails to take the full measure of the peril of extinction, for mankind is not some invaluable object that lies outside us and that we must protect so that we can go on benefiting from it; rather, it is we ourselves, without whom everything there is loses its value. To say this is another way of saying that extinction is unique not because it destroys mankind as an object but because it destroys mankind as the source of all possible human subjects, and this, in turn, is another way of saying that extinction is a second death, for one’s own individual death is the end not of any object in life but of the subject that experiences all objects. Death, however, places the mind in a quandary. One of-the confounding characteristics of death-“tomorrow’s zero,” in Dostoevski’s phrase-is that, precisely because it removes the person himself rather than something in his life, it seems to offer the mind nothing to take hold of. One even feels it inappropriate, in a way, to try to speak “about” death at all, as though death were a thing situated somewhere outside us and available for objective inspection, when the  fact is that it is within us is, indeed, an essential part of what we are. It would be more appropriate, perhaps, to say that death, as a fundamental element of our being, “thinks” in us and through us about whatever we think about, coloring our thoughts and moods with its presence throughout our lives.

One of the big problems with the Consult CP is the problem of defining what it means to consult. This is Paul Wolfowitz, who has a lot of experience with international relations and consultation, offering a very concise definition of consultation with a internal reference to a historical event.

 Perm: Call [insert country] twenty-four hours ahead of time and inform them of the plan. Context proves that this is considered consultation.
Wolfowitz 09 (Paul,  Former Deputy Secretary of Defence from 2001-2005. “A Conversation with Paul Wolfowitz” at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Part of the two-day conference, “When Walls Came Tumbling Down: Berlin, 9/11, and U.S. Strategy in Uncertain Times.”  10/26/09 http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/id/214425)
It’s interesting. If you tell someone you’re about to do something 24 Hours before you do it, it’s consultation. If you tell them 24 hours after you’ve done it, which is 36 hours after they’ve read it in the press, it’s, as the Japanese call it, a “Shocku.”

Everybody should be prepared for the age old debate over whether or not Discourse might create ‘Reality’ and whether we should look at the words we use  or just the “real” effects of the plan. The answer, in this card, is that it obviously does and the warrants in here are especially good. 

Discourse creates policy and is just as important, if not more important, than the policies themselves. Policy papers like these are just as important as actual “decision makers”.

Doty 93 (Roxanne Doty, Professor at Arizona State University. “Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of US Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines” International Studies Quarterly)

This kind of approach addresses the how-question discussed earlier because it does not presuppose that particular subjects are already in place. It thus does not look to individual or collective subjects as the loci of meaning. Regarding language practices themselves as relatively autonomous admits the question of a kind of power that constitutes subjects, modes of subjectivity, and “reality.” In contrast to the Social Performance Approach in which signifiers (words, images) ultimately refer back to signifieds (shared templates), in the Discursive Practices Approach signifiers refer only to other signifiers, hence the notion of intertextuality, i.e., a complex and infinitely expanding web of possible meanings. That meaning does often appear to be fixed and decideable rather than an infinite play of signifiers is indicative of the workings of power. This presents us with a radically new conception of power which is inherent in the linguistic practices by which agents are constructed and become articulated within particular discourses. This approach, like any approach, has its analytic form. The form of this approach is a “discursive practice.” A discursive practice is not traceable to a fixed and stable center, e.g., individual consciousness or a social collective. Discursive practices that constitute subjects and modes of subjectivity are dispersed, scattered throughout various locales. This is why the notion of intertextuality is important. Texts always refer back to other texts which themselves refer to still other texts. The power that is inherent in language is thus not something that is centralized, emanating from a pre-given subject. Rather, like the discursive practices in which it inheres, power is dispersed and, most important, is productive of subjects and their worlds. A discourse, i.e., a system of statements in which each individual statement makes sense, produces interpretive possibilities by making it virtually impossible to think outside of it. A discourse provides discursive spaces, i.e., concepts, categories, metaphors, models, and analogies by which meanings are created. The production of discourses and of subjectivity and sociality is indissoluble (Henriques et al., 1984:106). This is because discourses create various kinds of subjects and simultaneously position these subjects vis-a-vis one another. For example, a traditional discourse on the family would contain spaces for a subject with traits conventionally defined as “male” and another kind of subject with traits conventionally defined as “female.” These subjects would be positioned vis-à-vis one another in a particular way, e.g., female subservient to male. Within the traditional discourse on the family it is impossible to think outside of these categories except in terms of deviance or abnormality. Within this discourse, there is no discursive space for the single mother by choice or the gay or lesbian couple with children except as departures from the “normal” family or as deviants. Subjects, then, can be thought of as positions within particular discourses, intelligible only with reference to a specific set of categories, concepts, and practices. Policy makers also function within a discursive space that imposes meanings on their world and thus creates reality (Shapiro, 1988:100, 116). An approach that focuses on discursive practices as a unit of analysis can get at how this “reality” is produced and maintained and how it makes various practices possible. The analytic question addressed is not why particular decisions are made; the policy decision in itself becomes a secondary concern. What is central is the discourse(s) which construct a particular “reality.” An analysis of discourses can reveal the necessary but not sufficient conditions of various practices. Applying this approach to the study of foreign policy, not only do we broaden our conception of what foreign policy is, the sites of foreign policy, i.e., where foreign policy takes place, also become much more extensive. This approach suggests that what foreign policy is need not be limited to the actual making of specific decisions nor the analysis of temporally and spatially hounded “events.” Similarly, “foreign policy makers” need not be limited to prominent decision makers, but could also include those rather anonymous members of the various bureaucracies who write the numerous memorandums, intelligence reports, and research papers that circulate within policy circles. The discourse(s) instantiated in these various documents produce meanings and in doing so actively construct the “reality” upon which foreign policy is based. Moreover, foreign policy making can also extend beyond the realm of official government institutions. The reception as meaningful of statements revolving around policy situations depends on how well they fit into the general system of representation in a given society. Evenspeeches and press conference statements produced for specific purposes, in order to be taken seriously, must make sense and fit with what the general public takes as “reality.“ Thus, the analysis of statements can entail the examination of what was said and written within broad policy-making contexts as well as statements made in society more generally 8

Sitting around with nothing to do? Have an angry coach yelling at you because you haven’t been cutting enough cards for the team? Want to find answers to that random ass team that’s running a St. Augustine K but don’t know where to look? Well, I have an answer for you. Behold Gigapedia, the one stop shop for e-books of all sorts hosted in the great state of Niue. Except… it’s not really so much a shop as it is an open depository. All you need to register is a G-mail account and then you’re free to browse the entirety of the collection, indexed by a fantastically thorough search engine, at your leisure. The books are even downloadable, so you can give promising sources of cards to novices and look like a wise sage while you sit on your lazy ass and let them do all the work. 

May you never want for cards again. (Also, it’s a pretty good source of textbooks… just saying.)

If there is one argument in debate that I hate more than any other it is the Politics Dis/ad. I loathe it. It is counter-educational, small-minded, relies on evidence cut wildly out of context written by largely unqualified authors who have a structural interest in favor hyperbole and extreme bias, and it encourages the weakest of counter-plans. If I could wave a magic wand I would obliterate the Politics DisAd from the face of the Earth. 

This is a card in that vein. It’s not quite offensive, but combined with some of the other ev that’s been posted here you can probably shut down most Politics Dis/Ads in the 2AC.

Media journalism is widely off the mark when it comes to political reporting. Journalists don’t have an understand, or inclination to understand, deeper causes of political issues. Political science shows most political journalism to be widely inaccurate.

Marx 2010 (Greg Marx, Political Scientist, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.  “Embrace the Wonk” http://www.cjr.org/feature/embrace_the_wonk_1.php?page=2 June 10^th, 2010)

While Bai’s tone verged on the scornful, most journalists aren’t looking to start a fight with political science. But they’re not often looking to it for inspiration, either. Diligent reporters may turn to political scientists for a useful primer on a new beat; lazy ones know how to use the field’s “quote machines” to pad a story. But when it comes to daily coverage of the core subjects of political life—elections and campaigns, public opinion and voter behavior, legislative deal-making and money-grubbing—the relevance of a field in which an idea might gestate for two years before seeing print to a news cycle that turns over three times a day is not always obvious. As journalists go, Jeff Zeleny of The New York Times is hardly averse to political science—he studied it as an undergraduate, and can list the names of academics he’s relied on. But for most of what he writes, he says, “The reality is, it’s a newspaper story or a Web story. You can’t go into abstract theories.”
In recent years, though, there have been signs that views are shifting. In June 2007, Ezra Klein, then an associate editor for the liberal journal The American Prospect, put out a request for links to bloggers “who aggregate and keep track of political science research.” The call yielded almost no response—evidence that, while economists had colonized the wonkier regions of the blogosphere in the same way they’d taken over many D.C. policy shops, political scientists had largely ceded the terrain. But Klein’s item caught the eye of Henry Farrell, a professor of political science at George Washington University and a contributor to the early group blog Crooked Timber. The post, Farrell says, made it “very clear that there was a demand out there for political science”—and he encouraged his GW colleague John Sides, who’d been tinkering with the idea of a blog devoted to expanding the field’s audience, to meet it.
In November 2007, The Monkey Cage—the name comes from an H. L. Mencken line about the nature of democracy—was launched. It had two central goals: to publicize political science research, and to provide commentary on current political events—a task, Sides presciently acknowledged in a mission statement, that might involve “testing and perhaps contesting propositions from journalists or commentators.”
The site quickly established credibility among political scientists. And it has attracted a respectable audience as a niche blog, drawing more than 30,000 unique visitors in peak months. But perhaps The Monkey Cage’s greatest influence has been in fostering a nascent poli-sci blogosphere, and in making the field’s insights accessible to a small but influential set of journalists and other commentators who have the inclination—and the opportunity—to approach politics from a different perspective.
That perspective differs from the standard journalistic point of view in emphasizing structural, rather than personality-based, explanations for political outcomes. The rise of partisan polarization in Congress is often explained, in the press, as a consequence of a decline in civility. But there are reasons for it—such as the increasing ideological coherence of the two parties, and procedural changes that create new incentives to band together—that have nothing to do with manners. Or consider the president. In press accounts, he comes across as alternately a tragic or a heroic figure, his stock fluctuating almost daily depending on his ability to “connect” with voters. But political-science research, while not questioning that a president’s effectiveness matters, suggests that the occupant of the Oval Office is, in many ways, a prisoner of circumstance. His approval ratings—and re-election prospects—rise and fall with the economy. His agenda lives or dies on Capitol Hill. And his ability to move Congress, or the public, with a good speech or a savvy messaging strategy is, while not nonexistent, sharply constrained.

These powerful, simple explanations are often married to an almost monastic skepticism of narratives that can’t be substantiated, or that are based in data—like voter’s accounts of their own thinking about politics—that are unreliable. Think about that for a moment, and the challenge to journalists becomes obvious: If much of what’s important about politics is either stable and predictable or unknowable, what’s the value of the sort of news—a hyperactive chronicle of the day’s events, coupled with instant speculation about their meaning—that has become a staple of modern political reporting? Indeed, much of the media criticism on The Monkey Cage is directed at narratives that, from the perspective of political science, are either irrelevant or unverifiable. In the wake of the special election in Massachusetts, Sides wrote numerous posts noting the weakness of the data about voter opinion there and faulting journalistic efforts to divine the meaning of Scott Brown’s victory. “Yes, I know political science is a buzzkill,” he wrote in one. “And no one gets paid to say ‘We don’t and can’t know.’ But that’s what we should be saying.” This is the sort of thing that John Balz—the son of veteran Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz, and a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of Chicago—might be referring to when he says the field produces what are, “from a journalistic perspective, unhelpful answers.”