SCFI 2009

Framework
___ of ___

Debate Good / Bad

(Policy v. Kritik Frameworks)
***Top Shelf***
1NC Shell
1AC / 2AC Shell

2
3

***Debate Good***
Fiat Good Coverstone
Fiat Good Nuclear War***
Fiat Good Rawls
Fiat Good Democracy
Fiat Good - Education
Debate Good Research
Switch Side Debating Good
AT Kulnych

4
5
6
7
8
9
10
10

***AT Specific Frameworks***

AT Ontology
AT Reps / Discourse

11
12

***Debate Bad***
Debate Bad Mitchell
In-Round Activism Good Kulnych
Fiat Bad - General
Fiat Bad Dillon and Reid
Fiat Bad - Bureaucracy
Fiat Bad - Movements
Limits Bad Exclusion
AT Policy Making Good

13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20

***Specific Frameworks***
Methodology 1st
Discourse 1st
Discourse 1st
Random Trash Austin Cut

21
22
23
24

1NC Shell
A. Interpretation The affirmative must affirm the topic instrumentally. The 1AC must include a topical
plan that is justified with a normative defense of federal government adoption of such a policy.
Definitions
The topic is defined by the phrase following the colon the USFG is the agent of the resolution, not
the individual debaters
Websters Guide to Grammar and Writing 2K
http://ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/colon.htm
Use of a colon before a list or an explanation that is preceded by a clause that can stand by itself. Think of the colon as a gate, inviting one to go on
If the introductory phrase preceding the colon is very brief and the clause following the colon represents the real

business of the sentence, begin the clause after the colon with a capital letter.

The question posed by the resolution is about the desirability of USFG action
Cambridge Dictionary of American English 00
Should means used to express that it is necessary, desirable, and advisable, or important to perform the action of the
following verb.
The USFG is the government in Washington D.C.
Microsoft Online Encyclopedia 2K [http://encarta.msn.com]
The federal government of the United States is centered in Washington DC .

B. Violation The affirmative is not an instrumental affirmation of the resolution they affirm the topic
as _________
C. Reasons to Prefer
1. Ground Refusing to defend the implementation of the plan/resolution erases all predictable
negative counterplan, disadvantage and case ground. While we may have arguments indicting the idea
of the plan or personal advocacy, well never have evidence saying their specific advocacy of the plan
is bad. This eliminates all of our resolutionally-based offensive arguments.
2. Topical Education By manipulating the topic to access a political project they destroy discussion
of the important question asked by the resolution. This tactic promotes debate that is either stagnant
or shallow. They ruin a critical function of this activity which is to test the desirability of policy
implementation by not assesing the merits of specific policies.
3. Extra Topicality Even if they claim to defend their plan they skirt discussion of its merits by
arguing the benefits derived from their advocacy outweigh. This is a voting issue because were
forced to win framework just to get back to equal footing extra topicality also proves the resolution
insufficient and explodes aff ground.
D. Voting Issue If we demonstrate the affirmative does not meet the best interpretation of the topic
they have failed to justify the resolution and should be rejected. This is the best way to preserve
competitive equity by ensuring predictable ground for the negative.

1AC / 2AC Shell

A. Interpretation The Affirmative can affirm the topic instrumentally by defending a topical plan, the
neg can ONLY win by proving this plan is worse than the status quo or a competitive alternative. They
can run the K but we get to weigh our entire 1AC against any criticism.
B. Reasons to Prefer
1. Predictable Ground Refusing to allow the aff to defend the resolution erases all predictable
affirmative ground. Their framework is arbitrary which devastates aff ground by not centering the
debate about a topical advocacy and mooting 8 minutes of 1AC offense.
2. Topical Education By manipulating the topic to access a political project they destroy discussion
of the important question asked by the resolution. This tactic promotes debate that is either stagnant
or shallow. They ruin a critical function of this activity which is to test the desirability of policy
implementation by not assesing the merits of specific policies.
C. Voting Issue to preserve competitive equity

***Debate Good***

Fiat Good Coverstone

Policy debate is best for real world change, their turn towards in-round activism threatens elite
takeover and destruction of debate as a neutral training ground for the real world
Coverstone 95 (Alan, debate coach, 1995, An Inward Glance, http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Coverstone1995China.htm)
Mitchell's argument underestimates the nature of academic debate in three ways. First, debate trains students in the very skills
required for navigation in the public sphere of the information age. In the past, political discourse was controlled by those elements who
controlled access to information. While this basic reality will continue in the future, its essential features will change. No longer will mere possession of
information determine control of political life. Information is widely available. For the first time in human history we face the prospect of an entirely new
threat. The risk of an information overload is already shifting control of political discourse to superior information managers. It is no longer possible to
control political discourse by limiting access to information. Instead, control belongs to those who are capable of identifying and delivering bits of
information to a thirsty public. Mitchell calls this the "desertification of the public sphere." The public senses a deep desire for the ability to manage the
information around them. Yet, they are unsure how to process and make sense of it all. In this environment, snake charmers and charlatans abound.
The popularity of the evening news wanes as more and more information becomes available. People realize that these half hour glimpses at the news
do not even come close to covering all available information. They desperately want to select information for themselves. So they watch CNN until they
fall asleep. Gavel to gavel coverage of political events assumes top spots on the Nielsen charts. Desperate to decide for themselves, the public of the
twentyfirst century drinks deeply from the well of information. When they are finished, they find they are no more able to decide. Those who make
decisions are envied and glorified. Debate teaches individual decision-making for the information age. No other academic
activity available today teaches people more about information gathering, assessment, selection, and delivery . Most
importantly, debate teaches individuals how to make and defend their own decisions. Debate is the only academic activity that moves at
the speed of the information age. Time is required for individuals to achieve escape velocity. Academic debate holds tremendous value as a
space for training. Mitchell's reflections are necessarily more accurate in his own situation. Over a decade of debate has well positioned him to
participate actively and directly in the political process. Yet the skills he has did not develop overnight. Proper training requires time. While there is a
tremendous variation in the amount of training required for effective navigation of the public sphere, the relative isolation of academic debate
is one of its virtues. Instead of turning students of debate immediately outward, we should be encouraging more to enter
the oasis. A thirsty public, drunk on the product of anyone who claims a decision, needs to drink from the pool of decision-making
skills. Teaching these skills is our virtue. Second, Mitchell's argument underestimates the risks associated with an outward turn .
Individuals trained in the art and practice of debate are, indeed, well suited to the task of entering the political world.
At some unspecified point in one's training, the same motivation and focus that has consumed Mitchell will also consume most of us. At that point,
political action becomes a proper endeavor. However, all of the members of the academic debate community will not reach that point together . A
political outward turn threatens to corrupt the oasis in two ways. It makes our oasis a target, and it threatens to politicize the training
process. As long as debate appears to be focused inwardly, political elites will not feel threatened . Yet one of Mitchell's primary
concerns is recognition of our oasis in the political world. In this world we face well trained information managers. Sensing a threat from
"debate," they will begin to infiltrate our space . Ready made information will increase and debaters will eat it up. Not yet able to truly discern
the relative values of information, young debaters will eventually be influenced dramatically by the infiltration of political elites .
Retaining our present anonymity in political life offers a better hope for reinvigorating political discourse . As perhaps the only
truly non-partisan space in American political society, academic debate holds the last real possibility for training active political participants. Nowhere
else are people allowed, let alone encouraged, to test all manner of political ideas. This is the process through which debaters learn what they believe
and why they believe it.

Fiat Good Nuclear War***

Policy education is critical to avert international genocide and nuclear extinction
Beres 03 (Louis Rene-, June 5, Journal and Courrier, Lexis)
Our response, even after Operation Iraqi Freedom, lacks conviction . Still pretending that "things will get better," we Americans
proceed diligently with our day-to-day affairs, content that, somehow, the worst can never really happen. Although it is true that we
must go on with our normal lives, it is also true that "normal" has now become a quaint and delusionary state. We want to be sure that a "new" normal
falls within the boundaries of human tolerance, but we can't nurture such a response without an informed appreciation of what is still
possible.
For us, other rude awakenings are unavoidable, some of which could easily overshadow the horrors of Sept. 11. There can be little doubt that, within a

few short years, expanding tribalism will produce several new genocides and proliferating nuclear weapons will generate
one or more regional nuclear wars. Paralyzed by fear and restrained by impotence, various governments will try, desperately, to deflect
our attention, but it will be a vain effort. Caught up in a vast chaos from which no real escape is possible, we will learn too late that there is no
durable safety in arms, no ultimate rescue by authority, no genuine remedy in science or technology.
What shall we do? For a start, we must all begin to look carefully behind the news . Rejecting superficial analyses of day-to-day events in
favor of penetrating assessments of world affairs , we must learn quickly to distinguish what is truly important from what is merely
entertainment. With such learning, we Americans could prepare for growing worldwide anarchy not as immobilized objects of false
contentment, but as authentic citizens of an endangered planet.
Nowhere is it written that we people of Earth are forever, that humankind must thwart the long-prevailing trend among all planetary life-forms (more than
99 percent) of ending in extinction. Aware of this, we may yet survive, at least for a while, but only if our collective suppression of purposeful fear
is augmented by a complementary wisdom; that is, that our personal mortality is undeniable and that the harms done by one tribal state or terror group
against "others" will never confer immortality. This is, admittedly, a difficult concept to understand, but the longer we humans are shielded from such
difficult concepts the shorter will be our time remaining.
We must also look closely at higher education in the United States, not from the shortsighted stance of improving test scores, but from the urgent
perspective of confronting extraordinary threats to human survival. For the moment, some college students are exposed to an occasional
course in what is fashionably described as "global awareness," but such exposure usually sidesteps the overriding issues: We now
face a deteriorating world system that cannot be mended through sensitivity alone; our leaders are dangerously unprepared to deal with
catastrophic deterioration; our schools are altogether incapable of transmitting the indispensable visions of planetary

restructuring.
To institute productive student confrontations with survival imperatives, colleges and universities must soon take great risks, detaching themselves from
a time-dishonored preoccupation with "facts" in favor of grappling with true life-or-death questions. In raising these questions, it will not be enough to
send some students to study in Paris or Madrid or Amsterdam ("study abroad" is not what is meant by serious global awareness). Rather, all students
must be made aware - as a primary objective of the curriculum - of where we are heading, as a species, and where our limited survival
alternatives may yet be discovered.
There are, of course, many particular ways in which colleges and universities could operationalize real global awareness, but one way, longneglected, would be best. I refer to the study of international law. For a country that celebrates the rule of law at all levels, and which
explicitly makes international law part of the law of the United States - the "supreme law of the land" according to the Constitution and certain Supreme
Court decisions - this should be easy enough to understand. Anarchy, after all, is the absence of law, and knowledge of international law is

necessarily prior to adequate measures of world order reform.

Before international law can be taken seriously, and before "the blood-dimmed tide" can be halted, America's future leaders must at
least have some informed acquaintance with pertinent rules and procedures. Otherwise we shall surely witness the birth of a fully
ungovernable world order, an unheralded and sinister arrival in which only a shadowy legion of gravediggers would wield the forceps.

Fiat Good Rawls

Role Playing as policy makers is critical to liberal democracy solves world peace
Rawls 99 (John-, Prof of political philosophy at Harvard, The Law of Peoples, P 55-56)

Fiat Good Democracy

Role Playing is key to democracy
Mitchell 00 (Gordon. R. -, Winter, Argumentation & Advocacy, Simulated Public Argument as a Pedagogical Play on Worlds, Vol. 36 #3,
groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/SIMULATEDPUBLICARGUMENASPEDAGOGy.doc)

The lifeblood of American democracy courses through the arteries of an active, deliberating citizenry capable of
participating meaningfully in public argument on pressing issues of the day . Given this, the surfeit of commentary noting widespread
citizen alienation and withdrawal from political affairs should not be taken lightly. It is incumbent upon those directing the processes of knowledge
production in society to reflect carefully on the ways in which their own practices structure the character of contemporary public interchange. The fate

of efforts to right the course of American deliberative democracy will depend largely on choices made by those who have
power to influence prospects for citizen comprehension and engagement in argumentation over salient issues of public
interest. Given the gravity of these concerns, teachers and students of argumentation should feel unique pressures, since argumentation pedagogy
has long been counted on to empower students as exemplary participants in democratic public spheres of discussion.
In stark contrast to the restrictive pedagogical spaces often generated in traditional, passive learning environments (as well as hyper-agonistic policy
debate formats), active student participation in simulated public arguments can provide opportunities for students to develop
strong senses of themselves as powerful agents of social transformation . This transformative awareness on the part of students is not
likely to result from top-down didactic proclamations by teachers or combative verbal assaults from debating peers. Instead, the most powerful forms of
personal agency discovered by students are likely to be those that are found of their own accords, invented in supportive and reassuring learning
environments. "It is through the native language that students 'name their world' and begin to establish a dialectical relationship with the dominant class
in the process of transforming the social and political structures that imprison them in their 'culture of silence'" (Freire and Macedo 1987, p. 159; see
also Freiere 1998, 1995; Grossberg).

The experience of role-play simulation provides occasions for students to imagine alternative worlds where everyday
characters populate spheres of discussion and receive recognition as important sources of knowledge in public
arguments. In this way, role-play exercises free students to conceive of alternative modes of deliberation that receive only
limited practical expression in the current general climate of political apathy . In a progressive "pedagogy of hope" (see Freire 1994),
the first step toward changing unjust, exploitive or dangerous conditions in the world is to imagine alternative worlds worth seeking. "[H]ope is
constituted in the need to imagine an alternative human world and to imagine it in a way that enables one to act in the present as if this alternative had
already begun to emerge" (Simon 1992, p. 4).

Extinction
Diamond, 1995 (Larry, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution Promoting Democracy in the 1990s, wwics.si.edu/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/1.htm)
This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression
tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates
that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones . Nuclear,

chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate . The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears
increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by
the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness.
LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to
war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic
governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do
not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another.
Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for
investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the
destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness
makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties,
property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can
be built.

Fiat Good - Education

Advocacy of specific reforms that cant be implemented in this debate is a valuable educational and
political strategy
Streeten 99 (Paul, Econ prof @ Boston, Development, v. 42, n. 2, p 118)
First, Utopian thinking can be useful as a framework for analysis. Just as physicists assume an atmospheric vacuum for some purposes,
so policy analysts can assume a political vacuum from which they can start afresh. The physicists assumption plainly would not be useful for the
design of parachutes, but can serve other purposes well. Similarly, when thinking of tomorrows problems, Utopianism is not helpful. But for longterm strategic purposes it is essential. Second, the Utopian vision gives a sense of direction, which can get lost in approaches

that are preoccupied with the feasible. In a world that is regarded as the second-best of all feasible worlds, everything
becomes a necessary constraint. All vision is lost. Third, excessive concern with the feasible tends to reinforce the
status quo. In negotiations, it strengthens the hand of those opposed to any reform. Unless the case for change can be
represented in the same detail as the case for no change, it tends to be lost. Fourth , it is sometimes the case that the conjuncture of
circumstances changes quite suddenly and that the constellation of forces, unexpectedly, turns out to be favourable
to even radical innovation. Unless we are prepared with a carefully worked out, detailed plan, that yesterday could
have appeared utterly Utopian, the reformers will lose out by default . Only a few years ago nobody would have expected the end
of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the unification of Germany, the break-up of Yugoslavia, the
marketization of China, the end of apartheid in South Africa. And the handshake on the White House lawn between Mr Peres and Mr Arafat. Fifth,
the Utopian reformers themselves can constitute a pressure group, countervailing the selfinterested pressures of the obstructionist groups. Ideas

thought to be Utopian have become realistic at moments in history when large numbers of people support them, and
those in power have to yield to their demands. The demand for ending slavery is a historical example. It is for these five
reasons that Utopians should not be discouraged from formulating their proposals and from thinking the unthinkable, unencumbered by the
inhibitions and obstacles of political constraints. They should elaborate them in the same detail that the defenders of the status quo devote to its
elaboration and celebration. Utopianism and idealism will then turn out to be the most realistic vision . It is well known that there
are three types of economists: those who can count and those who cant. But being able to count up to two, I want to distinguish between two
types of people. Let us call them, for want of a better name, the Pedants and the Utopians. The names are due to Peter Berger, who uses them in
a different context. The Pedants or technicians are those who know all the details about the way things are and work, and they have acquired an
emotional vested interest in keeping them this way. I have come across them in the British civil service, in the bureaucracy of the World Bank, and
elsewhere. They are admirable people but they are conservative, and no good companions for reform. On the other hand, there are the Utopians,
the idealists, the visionaries who dare think the unthinkable. They are also admirable, many of them young people. But they lack the attention to
detail that the Pedants have. When the day of the revolution comes, they will have entered it on the wrong date in their diaries and fail to turn up,
or, if they do turn up, they will be on the wrong side of the barricades. What we need is a marriage between the Pedants and the
Utopians, between the technicians who pay attention to the details and the idealists who have the vision of a better
future. There will be tensions in combining the two, but they will be creative tensions. We need Pedantic Utopian Pedants who will work out in
considerable detail the ideal world and ways of getting to it, and promote the good cause with informed fantasy. Otherwise, when the opportunity
arises, we shall miss it for lack of preparedness and lose out to the opponents of reform, to those who want to preserve the status quo.

Debate Good Research

Traditional debate's focus on research is key to education and activism.
Dybvig & Iverson 2K (Kristin Chisholm, Arizona State University, Joel O, ASU Can Cutting Cards Carve into Our Personal Lives,
http://debate.uvm.edu/dybvigiverson1000.html)
Addressing all of these differences is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, we focus upon the research process involved in the more
research intensive forms of debate: National Debate Tournament (NDT) and Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) style debate. We have
surmised that research has several beneficial effects on debaters. Research creates an in-depth analysis of issues that takes students
beyond their initial presuppositions and allows them to truly evaluate all sides of an issue. Not only is the research involved in debate a
training ground for skills, but it also acts as a motivation to act on particular issues. It is our contention that debate not only gives us the tools that
we need to be active in the public sphere, but it also empowers some debaters with the impetus to act in the public sphere.
We examine the role of research by analyzing the arguments regarding the role of debate for critical thinking as well as the role debate has begun to
play in activism. Specifically, we closely examine the analysis of Mitchell (1998) regarding the empowerment of debaters and the role of research in
academic debate. Next, we provide analysis of the role research plays in developing personal opinions and action based upon examples from our
collective debate experiences (Clandinin & Connelly, 1994) and conversations in situ. Finally, we offer some potential pathways for future conversations
and investigations into the role of research in policy and parliamentary debate.
Mitchell (1998) provides a thorough examination of the pedagogical implication for academic debate. Although Mitchell acknowledges that debate
provides preparation for participation in democracy, limiting debate to a laboratory where students practice their skill for future participation is criticized.
Mitchell contends:
For students and teachers of argumentation, the heightened salience of this question should signal the danger that critical thinking and oral advocacy
skills alone may not be sufficient for citizens to assert their voices in public deliberation. (p. 45)
Mitchell contends that the laboratory style setting creates barriers to other spheres, creates a "sense of detachment" and causes debaters to see
research from the role of spectators. Mitchell further calls for "argumentative agency [which] involves the capacity to contextualize and employ the skills
and strategies of argumentative discourse in fields of social action, especially wider spheres of public deliberation" (p. 45). Although we agree with
Mitchell that debate can be an even greater instrument of empowerment for students, we are more interested in examining the impact of the
intermediary step of research. In each of Mitchell's examples of debaters finding creative avenues for agency, there had to be a
motivation to act. It is our contention that the research conducted for competition is a major catalyst to propel their action, change
their opinions, and to provide a greater depth of understanding of the issues involved.
The level of research involved in debate creates an in-depth understanding of issues . The level of research conducted during a
year of debate is quite extensive. Goodman (1993) references a Chronicle of Higher Education article that estimated "the level and extent of research
required of the average college debater for each topic is equivalent to the amount of research required for a Master's Thesis (cited in Mitchell, 1998, p.
55). With this extensive quantity of research, debaters attain a high level of investigation and (presumably) understanding of a topic. As a result of this
level of understanding, debaters become knowledgeable citizens who are further empowered to make informed opinions and
energized to take action.
Research helps to educate students (and coaches) about the state of the world. Without the guidance of a debate topic, how many
students would do in-depth research on female genital mutilation in Africa , or United Nations sanctions on Iraq? The
competitive nature of policy debate provides an impetus for students to research the topics that they are going to debate. This in
turn fuels students awareness of issues that go beyond their front doors. Advocacy flows from this increased awareness. Reading books
and articles about the suffering of people thousands of miles away or right in our own communities drives people to become involved in the community
at large.
Research has also focused on how debate prepares us for life in the public sphere. Issues that we discuss in debate have found their way onto the
national policy stage, and training in intercollegiate debate makes us good public advocates. The public sphere is the arena in which we all must
participate to be active citizens. Even after we leave debate, the skills that we have gained should help us to be better advocates and citizens.
Research has looked at how debate impacts education (Matlon and Keele 1984), legal training (Parkinson, Gisler and Pelias 1983,
Nobles 1985) and behavioral traits (McGlone 1974, Colbert 1994). These works illustrate the impact that public debate has on students as they prepare
to enter the public sphere.
The debaters who take active roles such as protesting sanctions were probably not actively engaged in the issue until their research drew them into the
topic. Furthermore, the process of intense research for debate may actually change the positions debaters hold . Since debaters
typically enter into a topic with only cursory (if any) knowledge of the issue, the research process provides exposure to issues that were previously
unknown. Exposure to the literature on a topic can create, reinforce or alter an individual's opinions. Before learning of the School for the America's,
having an opinion of the place is impossible. After hearing about the systematic training of torturers and oppressors in a debate round and reading the
research, an opinion of the "school" was developed. In this manner, exposure to debate research as the person finding the evidence, hearing it as the
opponent in a debate round (or as judge) acts as an initial spark of awareness on an issue. This process of discovery seems to have a similar impact to
watching an investigative news report.
Mitchell claimed that debate could be more than it was traditionally seen as, that it could be a catalyst to empower people to act in the
social arena. We surmise that there is a step in between the debate and the action . The intermediary step where people are inspired
to agency is based on the research that they do. If students are compelled to act, research is a main factor in compelling them to do so.
Even if students are not compelled to take direct action, research still changes opinions and attitudes.

Switch Side Debating Good

Switch side debate is critical to our role-playing impacts, teaches empathy and is key to critical
thinking
Muir 93
(Star A,- Associate Professor of Communication at George Mason U., Philosophy and Rhetoric, A Defense of Contemporary Debate)
Only an activity that requires the defense of both sides of an issue , moving beyond acknowledgement to exploration and
advocacy, can engender such powerful role-playing. Redding explains that "debating both sides is a special instance of roleplaying,"43 where debaters are forced to empathize on a constant basis with a position contrary to their own . This role playing,
Baird agrees, is an exercise in reflective thinking, an engagement in problem solving that exposes weaknesses and
strengths.44 Motivated by the knowledge that they may debate against their own case, debaters constantly pose arguments and counterarguments for discussion, erecting defenses and then challenging these defenses with a different tact .45 Such conceptual
flexibility, Paul argues, is essential, for effective critical thinking, and in turn for the development of a reasoned moral identity.

AT Kulnych
Kulynych concludes aff citizen participation in policy debate is performative politics.
Kulynych 97 (Jessica, Asst Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University, Polity, Winter, n2 p315(32)
When we look at the success of citizen initiatives from a performative perspective, we look precisely at those moments of defiance and disruption that
bring the invisible and unimaginable into view. Although citizens were minimally successful in influencing or controlling the outcome
of the policy debate and experienced a considerable lack of autonomy in their coercion into the technical debate, the goal-oriented debate
within the energy commissions could be seen as a defiant moment of performative politics. The existence of a goal-oriented

debate within a technically dominated arena defied the normalizing separation between expert policymakers and
consuming citizens. Citizens momentarily recreated themselves as policymakers in a system that defined citizens out of
the policy process, thereby refusing their construction as passive clients.

***AT Specific Frameworks****

AT Ontology
Ontological questioning must stop in the face of mass death we need to prioritize
Davidson 89 (Arnold co-editor of Critical Inquiry, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Member of the Committees on General Studies in the
Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago, Critical Inquiry, Winter, 1989)
I understand Levinas work to suggest another path to the recovery of the human, one that leads through or toward other human beings:
The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face.Hence metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is enactedin our relations
with men.The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God
is revealed. It is our relations with menthat give to theological concepts the sole signification they admit of.
Levinas places ethics before ontology by beginning with our experience of the human face: and, in a clear reference to
Heideggers idolatry of the village life of peasants, he associates himself with Socrates, who preferred the city where he encountered men to the
country with its trees. In his discussions of skepticism and the problem of others , Cavell also aligns himself with this path of thought,

with the recovery of the finite human self through the acknowledgment of others:
As long as God exists, I am not alone. And couldnt the other suffer the fate of God?I wish to understand how the other
now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in the universe. This requires understanding the philosophical problem of the other as
the trace or scar of the departure of God. [CR, p. 470]

The suppression of the other, the human, in Heideggers thought accounts, I believe, for the absence, in his writing after the war, of
the experience of horror. Horror is always disconnected toward the human: every object of horror bears the imprint of the human
will. So Levinas can see in Heideggers silence about the gas chambers and death camps a kind of consent to the
horror. And Cavell can characterize Nazis as those who have lost the capacity for being horrified by what they do. Where was Heideggers horror? How could he have failed
to know what he had consented to?
Hannah Arendt associates Heidegger with Paul Valerys aphorism, Les evenements ne sont que lecume des choses (Events are but the foam of things). I think one understands

The mass extermination of human beings,

is here that questioning must stop.
the source of her intuition.

however,

does not produce foam, but dust and ashes; and it

AT Reps / Discourse
Policy analysis should precede discourse most effective way to challenge power
Taft-Kaufman 95 (Jill, Speech prof @ CMU, Southern Comm. Journal, Spring, v. 60, Iss. 3, Other Ways)
The postmodern passwords of "polyvocality," "Otherness," and "difference," unsupported by substantial analysis of
the concrete contexts of subjects, creates a solipsistic quagmire. The political sympathies of the new cultural critics, with their
ostensible concern for the lack of power experienced by marginalized people, aligns them with the political left. Yet , despite their adversarial
posture and talk of opposition, their discourses on intertextuality and inter-referentiality isolate them from and ignore
the conditions that have produced leftist politics--conflict, racism , poverty, and injustice. In short, as Clarke (1991) asserts,
postmodern emphasis on new subjects conceals the old subjects, those who have limited access to good jobs, food, housing, health care, and
transportation, as well as to the media that depict them. Merod (1987) decries this situation as one which leaves no vision, will, or
commitment to activism. He notes that academic lip service to the oppositional is underscored by the absence of focused collective or
politically active intellectual communities. Provoked by the academic manifestations of this problem Di Leonardo (1990) echoes Merod and
laments: Has there ever been a historical era characterized by as little radical analysis or activism and as much

radical-chic writing as ours? Maundering on about Otherness: phallocentrism or Eurocentric tropes has become a
lazy academic substitute for actual engagement with the detailed histories and contemporary realities of Western racial
minorities, white women, or any Third World population. (p. 530) Clarke's assessment of the postmodern elevation of language to the
"sine qua non" of critical discussion is an even stronger indictment against the trend. Clarke examines Lyotard's (1984) The
Postmodern Condition in which Lyotard maintains that virtually all social relations are linguistic, and, therefore, it is through the coercion that
threatens speech that we enter the "realm of terror" and society falls apart. To this assertion, Clarke replies : I can think of few more striking

indicators of the political and intellectual impoverishment of a view of society that can only recognize the discursive. If
the worst terror we can envisage is the threat not to be allowed to speak, we are appallingly ignorant of terror in its
elaborate contemporary forms. It may be the intellectual's conception of terror (what else do we do but speak?), but its
projection onto the rest of the world would be calamitous ....(pp. 2-27) The realm of the discursive is derived from the
requisites for human life, which are in the physical world, rather than in a world of ideas or symbols .(4) Nutrition, shelter,
and protection are basic human needs that require collective activity for their fulfillment . Postmodern emphasis on the discursive
without an accompanying analysis of how the discursive emerges from material circumstances hides the complex
task of envisioning and working towards concrete social goals (Merod, 1987). Although the material conditions that create the
situation of marginality escape the purview of the postmodernist, the situation and its consequences are not overlooked by scholars from
marginalized groups. Robinson (1990) for example, argues that "the justice that working people deserve is economic, not just
textual" (p. 571). Lopez (1992) states that "the starting point for organizing the program content of education or political
action must be the present existential, concrete situation" (p. 299). West (1988) asserts that borrowing French post-structuralist
discourses about "Otherness" blinds us to realities of American difference going on in front of us (p. 170). Unlike postmodern "textual radicals" who
Rabinow (1986) acknowledges are "fuzzy about power and the realities of socioeconomic constraints" (p. 255), most writers from marginalized
groups are clear about how discourse interweaves with the concrete circumstances that create lived experience. People whose lives form

the material for postmodern counter-hegemonic discourse do not share the optimism over the new recognition of their
discursive subjectivities, because such an acknowledgment does not address sufficiently their collective historical and
current struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, and economic injustice. They do not appreciate being told
they are living in a world in which there are no more real subjects. Ideas have consequences. Emphasizing the
discursive self when a person is hungry and homeless represents both a cultural and humane failure. The need to
look beyond texts to the perception and attainment of concrete social goals keeps writers from marginalized groups
ever-mindful of the specifics of how power works through political agendas, institutions, agencies, and the budgets that fuel
them.

***Debate Bad***

Debate Bad Mitchell

Ignoring your personal advocacy only makes Debater a spectator activity.

In-Round Activism Good Kulnych

Micropolitial Movements that are started in the Debate round are key to
creating and organizing Change outside of the Round.
Kulynych 97 [Jessica, assistant professor of political science at Winthrop University, Performing Politics, Polity Winter v.XXX, n.2
pages 336 and 346]

Fiat Bad - General

Speaking in abstraction about what form the world should take through fiat ignores and marginalizes
all the people who would be affected,
Nayar 99 [Jayan, Fall, School of Law, University of Warwick Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems Orders of Inhumanity]
Located within a site of privilege, and charged to reflect upon the grand questions of world-order and the human condition as
the third Christian Millennium dawns, we are tempted to turn the mind to the task of abstract imaginings of "what could be" of our
"world," and "how should we organize" our "humanity." Perhaps such contemplations are a necessary antidote to cynicism and skepticism regarding
any possibility of human betterment, a necessary revitalization of critical and creative energies to check the complacencies of the state of things as they
are. n1 However, imagining [*601] possibilities of abstractions--"world-order," "international society," "the global village," "the family of humankind,"
etc.--does carry with it a risk. The "total" view that is the take-off point for discourses on preferred "world-order" futures risks

deflection as the abstracted projections it provokes might entail little consequence for the faces and the names of the
humanity on whose behalf we might speak. So, what do we do?

Policy making is unnecessary we can pose questions about the state without taking on the role of
the policy maker
Foucault 84 (Michel, Professor in the History of Thought Systems at the College de France. 25 April Politics, Philosophy, Culture. 1988. p51-2)
I believe too much in truth not to suppose that there are different truths and different ways of speaking the truth. Of course, one can't expect the
government to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. On the other hand , we can demand of those who govern us a certain

truth as to their ultimate aims, the general choices of their tactics, and a number of particular points in their programs: this
is the parrhesia (free speech) of the governed, who can and must question those who govern them, in the name of the
knowledge, the experience they have, by virtue of being citizens, of what those who govern do, of the meaning of their
action, of the decisions they have taken.
However, one must avoid a trap in which those who govern try to catch intellectuals and into which they often fall: "Put yourselves in our place and tell
us what you would do." It is not a question one has to answer. To make a decision on some question implies a knowledge of

evidence that is refused us, an analysis of the situation that we have not been able to make. This is a trap. Nevertheless,
as governed, we have a perfect right to ask questions about the truth : "What are you doing, for example when you are hostile to
Euromissiles, or when, on the contrary, you support them, when you restructure the Lorraine steel industry, when you open up the question of private
education.

Fiat Bad Dillon and Reid

POLICY BASED APPROACHES DISPLACE EFFECTIVE POLITICAL
ACTION AGAINST THE AFFIRMATIVES HARMS.
Dillon and Reid 2002[ Michael and Julian, Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency, Alternatives:
social Transformation & Humane Governence, Jan-March 2000, Vol 25 Issue 1, EBSCO.]
As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account, poses the question of order not in terms of the origin of
the law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms instead of the management of population. The management of
population is further refined in terms of specific problematics to which population management may be reduced. These typically include but are not
necessarily exhausted by the following topoi of governmental power: economy, health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, demographics, resources,
skills, culture, and so on. Now, where there is an operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is knowledge there is an operation of power.
Here discursive formations emerge and, as Foucault noted, in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and
redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its
ponderous, formidable materiality.[ 34] More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a
policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy
domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into
"problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete
on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we may also discover
what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to
formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which
the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization
is capable of becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy science, in which
problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations.
Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer
difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely
contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with
problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they
are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they
do not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy failure--the fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a continuous search for
the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[ 35] Serial policy failure is no simple
shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological
assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness
landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global
governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal
governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and
knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of
wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it. In
consequence, thinking and acting politically is displaced by the institutional and epistemic rivalries that infuse its power/ knowledge networks, and by the
local conditions of application that govern the introduction of their policies. These now threaten to exhaust what "politics," locally as well as globally, is
about.[ 36] It is here that the "emergence" characteristic of governance begins to make its appearance. For it is increasingly recognized that there are
no definitive policy solutions to objective, neat, discrete policy problems. The "subjects" of policy increasingly also become a matter of definition as well,
since the concept population does not have a stable referent either and has itself also evolved in biophilosophical and biomolecular as well as
Foucauldian "biopower" ways.

Fiat Bad - Bureaucracy

Role-Playing is BAD! It Leaves us Defenseless against the Logic of Institutions and Makes us Servants
of the Bureaucracy

Fiat Bad - Movements

(_) Political metaphors, aka fiat undermines critical movements.

(_) Fiat locks down other perspectives into a world of subjugation, your
assumption of things only guts your solvency and bites the K links.

Limits Bad Exclusion

AT Policy Making Good

(_) We solve your offense, critical discussions allow for policy-making.

***Specific Frameworks***

Methodology 1st
Methodology is key to effective policy making vital to true education
Bartlett 90 (Katharine T., Professor of Law @ Duke University, (Feminist Legal Methods, Harvard Law Review, February)
Feminists have developed extensive critiques of law n2 and proposals for legal reform. n3 Feminists have had much less to say, however, about what
the "doing" of law should entail and what truth status to give to the legal claims that follow. These methodological issues matter because

methods shape one's view of the possibilities for legal practice and reform. Method "organizes the apprehension of truth;
it determines what counts as evidence and defines what is taken as verification." n4 Feminists cannot ignore method,
because if they seek to challenge existing structures of power with the same methods that [*831] have defined what
counts within those structures, they may instead "recreate the illegitimate power structures [that they are] trying to identify
and undermine." n5
Method matters also because without an understanding of feminist methods, feminist claims in the law will not be perceived
as legitimate or "correct." I suspect that many who dismiss feminism as trivial or inconsequential misunderstand it.
Feminists have tended to focus on defending their various substantive positions or political agendas, even among
themselves. Greater attention to issues of method may help to anchor these defenses, to explain why feminist agendas
often appear so radical (or not radical enough), and even to establish some common ground among feminists.
As feminists articulate their methods, they can become more aware of the nature of what they do, and thus do it better.
Thinking about method is empowering. When I require myself to explain what I do, I am likely to discover how to improve
what I earlier may have taken for granted. In the process, I am likely to become more committed to what it is that I have
improved. This likelihood, at least, is a central premise of this Article and its primary motivation.

Discourse 1st
(_) The use of discourse shapes our reality.

Discourse 1st
(_) Discourse shapes our reality, only by paving the way for new
movements in this frozen social plane can we hope to affect the real
world, if your policy makers-framework truly relies on the real world to
shape action, the neg. solves back and creates your framework.

Random Trash Austin Cut

Postmodern action allows for true action and change in our world.
Jayan Nayar, School of Law at the University of Warwick, in 1999 (Re-framing international law for the
21st century, 9 Transnat'l L. & Contemp. Probs. 599, Fall, 1999)Returning to this question of a change in our understanding of the world, I wonder if here lies the issue: what change to whose
understanding of the world? Why do I feel this insecurity? Why do I find myself constantly in this spiral of seeking direction, perhaps
even, sometimes, solace, from the vast "treasures" of "scholarly" expositions? Is it because I am afraid to shift my eyes from the "book"
to the world? Is it because I am afraid to see? I wonder if the searching for comfort in the mind relieves what is already known. When we
speak of a change in our understanding of the world, this heralded "epistemic transition" that is supposed to be the hallmark of
"post-modern knowledge," what we are really talking about is the way in which we who are afraid to accept our own
responsibility for the many expressions of violence in the world, although we know it, seek to find a means of making sense, from
a distance, of violence, of madness. By changing the way in which we understand the world intellectually therefore we postpone again
that time when pain and joy are allowed to filter into our hearts in lived emancipation, with all their messy repercussions. Instead we
remain largely untouched within this realm of theorized emancipation. It is not easy however to keep our distance. It requires a lot of
effort in order to not see and feel. We have to keep ourselves constantly busy. This spiral of constant reinterpretations of violence
through so many theories becomes almost an anaesthetic. When I plunder through my "readings," as I search for further articulations
of "good ideas," with my daily musings over "theoretical frameworks," as I keep myself busy, I am diverted from asking why--what is
this all for? I know that if I stop, if I have a moment or two for reflection, if I deny myself the distractions of "good ideas," that question
re-emerges; in our quiet moments, if we allow ourselves quiet moments, we cannot hide from ourselves. If we take away the numbing
comfort and security of our professional reason for being, we are faced with the disconcerting uncertainties of our responsibility in being.
This is not easy. Yet, perhaps, it is only when we are pulled in every direction with doubt, conviction, pain and joy, that we are able to
share in the emancipatory wisdom of humanity that has been the lived life of generations before us and of generations to come. Life then
ceases to be a problem to be solved. Rather it reveals itself as a journey to be traveled, and travailed. In all wonder, I take my
first tentative steps. And the directions for these steps must always be the subject of personal and collective judgment, nurtured
through conversation rather than orders, relationships rather than orderings, in located worlds rather than in the abstracted
"world," in living rather than in acting

(_) Dirty words are inevitable; by focusing on them we undermine

successful movements.