Tournament: usc | Round: 1 | Opponent: unt ak | Judge: guevara

1ac species war

Every day, each and every one of us participates in a war which consists of endless genocide of the non-human. Every year, billions of nonhumans are slaughtered by humans. They are captured, detained, tortured and killed for the sake of consumption. This violence is rendered invisible by a normative understanding of war powers that excuses violence against the non-human as legitimate.

Kochi 9 - Sussex Law School, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK (Tarik, "Species War: Law, Violence and Animals," SAGE Journals)

7. The idea that war and violence sits at the foundation of law and
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horrors I here omit are nevertheless at the center of this lecture." 9
A little while later she states: "Let me say it openly: we
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more historical, and perhaps sociological, discussion of the Law of war.
The term war commonly evokes images of states, armies, grand weapons, battle
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-human animals well inside the framework of religious and moral legitimacy. 12
Of relevance is the practice by which the question of legitimate violence is ordered –
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. Ethics, Humans and Other Animals ( London: Routledge, 2000).

This Western conception of war powers is grounded upon a hierarchy of values that regards nonhuman life as raw material for the preservation of human life.

Kochi 9 - Sussex Law School, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK (Tarik, "Species War: Law, Violence and Animals," SAGE Journals)

The response of the lawyer, international lawyer, politician or philosopher to the account
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of life preferred for preservation within the early modern juridical ordering of war. 

Anthropocentrism has been the foundational model for any and every form of discrimination. Any argument that attempts to claim superiority of the human over the nonhuman rests on the same justifications used by White European males to subjugate other humans

Best 7 – Associate Professor at the University of Texas in the Department of Humanities and Philosophy (Steven, "Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, by Charles Patterson" Journal for Critical Animal Studies, http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/Issue_7/bestpatterson.pdf-http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/Issue_7/bestpatterson.pdf)

While a welcome advance over the anthropocentric conceit that only humans shape human actions,
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over human has deep roots in the oppression of human over animal.1
In this context, Charles Patterson’s recent book, The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment
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resources for human use — collapses under the weight of its logical contradictions.
Patterson lays out his complex holistic argument in three parts. In Part I,
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long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other" –Pythagoras
It is little understood that the first form of oppression, domination, and hierarchy
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slavery and the Holocaust being but two of the more dramatic examples."4
Hierarchy emerged with the rise of agricultural society some ten thousand years ago. In
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pens, cages, collars, ropes, chains, and branding irons.
The domination of animals paved the way for the domination of humans. The sexual
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livestock, and males were castrated and forced to work along with females.
In the fifteenth century, when Europeans began the colonization of Africa and Spain introduced
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inflicted on black slaves were developed and perfected centuries earlier through animal exploitation.
As the domestication of animals developed in agricultural society, humans lost the intimate connections they once had with animals. By the time of Aristotle, certainly, and with the bigoted assistance of medieval theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, western humanity had developed an explicitly hierarchical worldview – that came to be known as the "Great Chain of Being" – used to position humans as the end to which all other beings were mere means.
Patterson underscores the crucial point that the domination of human over human and its exercise
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"swine," "monkeys," "beasts," and "filthy animals."
Once perceived as brute beasts or sub-humans occupying a lower evolutionary rung than
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proven its superiority by bringing the "lower races" under its command.
There are important parallels between speciesism and sexism and racism in the elevation of white
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and stewardship, which however was Judaic moral baggage official Chistianithy left behind.

The first step is a reorientation towards the meaning and language of war. The move to exclude speciesist exploitation from the category of war is the same move of other historical acts of genocide. Our aff demands the recognition of the unending violence against the nonhuman as war.

Kochi 9 - Sussex Law School, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK (Tarik "Species War: Law, Violence and Animals"

The meanings attached to the words we use are significant here. Many of our
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capture and killing so that we humans might not bruise our flesh.13
While such an example appears at first bizarre, it is not out of the
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of non-human animal life. At p. 4 he states:
And before we judge them too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter
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of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit.
 " ’They went like sheep to the slaughter.’ ’They died like animals.’ ’The Nazi butchers killed them.’ Denunciation of the camps reverberates so fully with the language of the stockyard and slaughterhouse that it is barely necessary for me to prepare the ground for the comparison I am about to make. The crime of the Third Reich, says the voice of accusation, was to treat people like animals." 14

Thus, in response to the resolutional question of what constitutes legitimate Presidential violence, Dustin and I advocate for the recognition of species war as violence.

Voting aff acknowledges the existence of species war and the hidden war powers that legislate its existence. We must reject the hierarchy of species and the notion that violence against the nonhuman is legitimate.

Kochi 9 - Sussex Law School, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK (Tarik, "Species War: Law, Violence and Animals," SAGE Journals)

Although species war remains largely hidden because it is not seen as war or even
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its moment of foundation, as a generator, as a motor. 7

Understanding violence only in human terms reifies violent anthropocentric values – the affirmative is a claim to recognize species war and reconceptualize the human subject

Collard 13—Geography Department at the University of British Columbia ~modified for ableist language, modifications denoted by brackets~
(Rosemary-Claire, "Apocalypse Meow", Capitalism Nature Socialism, 24:1, 35-41, dml)

It is an easy point to make, that apocalypse is defined in almost totally
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and are increasingly being shown to be far less particular than we imagined.

Understanding how the value of the nonhuman shapes violence is critical to a disavowal of the human subject and a new form of being

Collard 13—Geography Department at the University of British Columbia
(Rosemary-Claire, "Apocalypse Meow", Capitalism Nature Socialism, 24:1, 35-41, dml)

While what counts as human shifts dramatically in time and space, what remains for
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subject. We might have to get naked in front of our pets.
’’A true political space,’’ writes Swyngedouw (2010b, 194), ’’
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neglects how these very subversions and exclusions are the order’s condition of being.
But if the political is precisely, as Swyngedouw (2010b) suggests, the
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consider precisely how this material and symbolic category remains untroubled in such misanthropy. 

The 1AC is an act of assuming a traitorous identity. The dynamics of different forms of privilege posits us all as in positions of both the oppressor and oppressed. In the species war, we are all human oppressors complicit with a cycle of tortuous violence. The only feasible solution is to work against the structures of our own culture, we must question the human subject. This does not mean we deny our identities or claim unity with the oppressed, but it does mean we adopt an ethic that attempts to minimize our own domination.

Plumwood 2 – (Val, "Environmental Ethics", p.205-6)

There are, I have suggested, multiple bases for critical solidarity with nature.
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relationship to the other in a more or less open-ended way.

The ballot should decide between competing advocacies. Debates about war powers should not merely concern legal rules, but also the way our normative prescriptions of value infuse the law with meaning.

Kochi 09 - Sussex Law School, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK (Tarik, "Species War: Law, Violence and Animals," SAGE Journals)

In everyday speech, in the words of the media, politicians, protestors,
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that of Gesetz which refers more closely to positive or black letter laws.
1 To focus upon the broader category of the Law of war is to put
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these traditions have ordered how we understand the legitimate use of violence. 2

Tournament: fullerton | Round: 2 | Opponent: msu bs | Judge: woodward

We’ll set the stage with a quote from Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove—

He ~Clemenceau~ said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. 

50 years later, General Jack D. Ripper’s words still hold weight within contemporary nuclear politics.  Listening to our military officials, one might get the idea that nuclear decisionmaking is too important to be left to public deliberation—it instead is characterized by the centralization of classified information within a unitary executive and its subordinates.

This regime of secrecy demands further investigation.  The nuclear presidency is directly threatened by the potential of dissensus to undermine its authority and thus establishes rhetorical conditions that foreclose democratic deliberation.  Any counter-hegemonic approach must begin from that moment of rhetorical and deliberative closure—any other strategy keeps nuclear policy in the hands of elites.

Taylor 7—University of Colorado-Boulder
(Bryan, "’The Means to Match Their Hatred’: Nuclear Weapons, Rhetorical Democracy, and Presidential Discourse", Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 4, Shadows of Democracy in Presidential Rhetoric (Dec., 2007), pp. 667-692, dml)

Liberal scholars and other commentators who assess the relationship between nuclear weapons and democracy balance
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how that process yields rhetoric that undermines the possibility of robust democratic speech.
To varying degrees, these critiques all assert a fundamental incompatibility between nuclear weapons and
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"has made truly informed consent an impossibility" (emphasis in original).
These critiques grow more valuable as they conceptualize the relationships between rhetoric, democracy,
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the demos itself was conscripted and disciplined as an element in this apparatus:
The continuous task of the president and his subordinates is to make their essentially incredible
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Stegenga 1988, 89, emphasis in original; see also Bok 1989)
Clarifying this condition helps us to conceptualize nuclear weapons as an ontological tangle of discursive
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1984) famous critique, sole—function of those weapons as rhetoric.
This interdependency between security and rhetoric is further clarified in argu ments conceptualizing nuclear weapons
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for the state to normalize nuclear weapons as a familiar and legitimate icon.

This has been mirrored in debate where the strategic disadvantage of reading a nuclear aff due to topicality evidence written by nuclear elites functions as a form of censorship to deny the intimate relationship between nuclear rhetoric and executive power—refuse this nuclear elitism

Taylor 7—University of Colorado-Boulder
(Bryan, "’The Means to Match Their Hatred’: Nuclear Weapons, Rhetorical Democracy, and Presidential Discourse", Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 4, Shadows of Democracy in Presidential Rhetoric (Dec., 2007), pp. 667-692, dml)

First, there is general agreement that nuclear weapons constitute the extreme case of secrecy
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and inhibit their accountability for neglect, mistakes, fraud, and abuse.
Secrecy is arguably inherent to nuclear weapons. A wartime climate of urgency led to
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accommodate strategic redefinition by officials of its purpose (see also Hales 1997).
Secrecy can thus debilitate the reasoning and moral judgment of nuclear-political actors.
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here involves the role of secrecy in fueling the political fetish of weaponry.
Second, as this discussion of secrecy has introduced, nuclear weapons exemplify centralization as
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hopes of anti-nuclear activists are "dead wrong" (135).
This is a rhetorical matter in that centralization has historically been produced and maintained through
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a broader public accountability was systematically de-emphasized from the top down."
Dahl (1985) argues that guardianship has been the de facto system of U
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nuclear weapons are infused with a solemn morality (Taylor 2007, 205).
The implications of this condition for nuclear democracy generally—and constitutional constraints on presidential
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in war must have the opportunity to consent to their conscription and deployment.

A failure to challenge this centralization of knowledge within the bureaucracy both within and outside debate is disastrous—this consensus implicitly displaces decisionmaking into the hands of elites—this makes nuclear warfare inevitable

Schiappa 3—Department Chair of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota
(Edward, Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning pg 138-139, dml)

Farrell and Goodnight have suggested that the status of deliberative argument is constrained by "
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world, the more likely a nuclear war will be" (134).

The attempt to render nuclear weapons controllable in the hands of bureaucratic elites is a quixotic task that maintains the possibility of collective nuclear suicide.

Masco 12. Joseph Masco, Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, "The Ends of Ends," Anthropological Quarterly Volume 85, Number 4, Fall 2012-http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/anthropological_quarterly/toc/anq.85.4.html, pg. 1118

The scale of destruction detailed in sIOP-62 is a distinctive moment in human
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projec- tions, and fantasies, as well as physics and engineering.
US policymakers have experienced many moments of rupture in their global vision, shocks that
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American fantasies that generated the "missile gap" in the first place.
the corona system was both cutting edge technology and a new form of expressive culture
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combined on military matters but has not yet achieved anything like "security."
The corona system offers us, in Benjamin’s terms, an important oppor- tunity
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-thinking its own cultural terms, expert logics, or institutional practices.
The constant slippages between crisis, expertise, and failure are now well established in
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comprehension from compensation in the minute-to-minute assessment of crisis.
this seems to be a fundamental problem in Us national security cul- ture—
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? What would it take to consider an actual end to such ends?

The President of the United States’ war powers authority over the introduction of nuclear forces into hostilities should be substantially restricted by legislation.

The 1AC establishes a counter-hegemonic structure of deliberation to check executive excess—the president’s ability to set the terms of debate as inaccessible to the public represents the imposition of an authoritarian telos on the future of nuclear policy—our act of dissensus serves as an irruption of a radically unknown nuclear future into the present—this is critical to correct course from an insulated executive characterized by utter ressentiment

Glezos 11—Department of Political Science, University of Victoria
(Simon, "The ticking bomb: Speed, liberalism and ressentiment against the future", Contemporary Political Theory10.2 (May 2011): 147-165, dml)

The notion of a ’rift in time’, and experiences of radical newness, do
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then expresses itself through an attempt to impose a telos on the future.
In this context, the move to increasing executive power takes on a new coloring
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new gibe with the old, to extend the present into the future.
At this point, one might ask why can this job not be carried out
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the future, a move towards government via executive fiat becomes increasingly attractive.
In the case of liberalism then, what we see is an ideology torn between
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campaign premised on ignoring the rule of law, and marginalizing democratic deliberation.
This is not to say that liberalism, or liberal democracies, are inherently doomed
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future and, in at least some way, to embrace speed. 4
This is by no means an easy task, and requires the ability to give
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uncertain future, then we were never truly democrats in the first place.
What is more, far from being inefficient, this reaffirmation to democracy can have
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for additional debate and discussion, thus hopefully avoiding overreaction and unnecessary violence.
With this analysis we begin to see that the apparently urgent rush through deliberation is
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deliberation, is by no means an established fact or a foregone conclusion.

Debate is a uniquely important space for this—the impulse to constrain deliberation within certain rhetorical frames naturalizes the nuclear demophobia at the heart of militaristic policymaking—the impact is endless war—even if they win a nuclear topicality argument, we’ll win our aff is still an important aspect of the topic because nuclear rhetoric is crucial to justify executive power

Taylor 7—University of Colorado-Boulder ~ableist language modified~
(Bryan, "’The Means to Match Their Hatred’: Nuclear Weapons, Rhetorical Democracy, and Presidential Discourse", Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 4, Shadows of Democracy in Presidential Rhetoric (Dec., 2007), pp. 667-692, dml)

Rhetorical scholars thus view speech in democracy as "the medium within which the ethical
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which forecloses the possibility of achieving mutual identification between opponents and thus cooperation.
In his related critique of rhetoric surrounding the global war on terror, Robert Ivie
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authority and autonomy may be rejoined with a full range of democratic voices.
The presidency is a rich site for this inquiry. It is an article of
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of vulnerability (Beasley 2001, 22; Chaloupka 1992; Engelhardt 1998).

Nuclear weapons are fabulously textual—the text is what matters.

Derrida 84—analyst for Fox News
(Jacques, "No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)", Diacritics, Vol. 14, No. 2, Nuclear Criticism (Summer, 1984), pp. 20-31, dml)

Now I shall venture to say that in spite of all appearances this specialty is
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other, we have to reinvent invention or conceive of another "pragmatics."
Third reason. In our techno-scientifico-militaro-diplomatic incompetence, we
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it should come into existence, it would be a grand premiere appearance.
Fourth reason. Since we are speaking of fables, of language, of fiction
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most archaic, the most crudely opinionated psychagogy, the most vulgar psychology.

Tournament: texas | Round: 2 | Opponent: whitman bm | Judge: fisher
We should substantially restrict the President of the United States’ war powers authority over the introduction of nuclear forces into hostilities.

Tournament: fullerton | Round: 5 | Opponent: mary washington mp | Judge: feldman
The United States federal government should substantially increase restrictions on the President of the United States’ war powers authority over the introduction of nuclear Armed Forces into hostilities.

Tournament: districts | Round: 2 | Opponent: nu mp | Judge: henry, young, hennigan

We draw inspiration from Sarah Wenanchak when they writes…

Drones are fictional, Adam Rothstein says. "~T~hey are a cultural characterization of many different things, compiled into a single concept." I think this is persuasive and useful, conceptually, so let this be the assumption from which the rest of the argument proceeds – an expansion on one I’ve briefly explored before.
If drones are fictional, what’s the task of drone fiction? What does fiction
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approach is still meant to be a device by which we approach something.
So drone fiction is the means – possibly the only means – by which we can approach drones. If this is the basic project of drone fiction, we should be able to gauge its success by the degree to which we can approach drones at all. And if that’s the case, this project isn’t done. It’s still getting started.

("Drone Fiction: an expansion", http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/03/22/drone-fiction-an-expansion/,dml) 

And now, a brief message from our sponsors—

The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, no date—jokers
("About the Army", http://www.clownarmy.org/about/about.html)

Roll up, roll up - ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, friends and foes - welcome to the unparalleled, the unexpected, the perfectly paradoxical, the grotesquely beautiful, the new-fangled world of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA).
We are clandestine because we refuse the spectacle of celebrity and we are everyone.
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with greasepaint we give resistance a funny face and become visible once again.
We are insurgent because we have risen up from nowhere and are everywhere. Because
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. Because the key to insurgency is brilliant improvisation, not perfect blueprints.
We are rebels because we love life and happiness more than ’revolution’. Because no
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trade, listen, think and most of all the way they rebel.
We are clowns because what else can one be in such a stupid world.
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deeply. Because a clown can survive everything and get away with anything.

Without further ado, a spectacle—

Arrested Development season 4, episode 14, "Off the Hook", 14:34-15:51

NOTE: Unfortunately, I cannot find an online transcript of this episode.  I’ll work on transcribing it when districts is over, but the episode is available on Netflix for subscribers—for those who aren’t, I’ll provide a summary.  The scene displayed depicts a man who is characterized as naïve and childlike when he is unwittingly recruited to be a drone pilot.  He believes that the targeted killing he engages in is a video game, and as such proves incredible adeptness at it, playing for 47 hours straight.  However, eventually he begins to shoot down civilians in Madrid, and when he is informed that he is actually killing people, he collapses, causing “the army’s first injury to a drone pilot”

As Wanenchak reminded us, drones are nothing more—and nothing less—than a fiction, and we can only speak of them in fiction(ed) terms.  The current fiction of a drone as autonomous—abstracted—independent—renders imperceptible the sovereign behind the curtain while simultaneously constructing the drone itself as the perfect citizen, carrying out the executive’s will so efficiently that the state isn’t even there.  You should be skeptical of any approach that leaves this fiction unquestioned—it’s a state tactic to engender total war into society through making killing more efficient.  And here’s the real horror story—while drones aren’t autonomous now, if we don’t investigate these processes, it’s only a matter of time until they will be.

Thus, the 1AC offers a counter-fiction of drones—and their operators—as a little less than perfect… perhaps even human?

Wanenchak 13—Department of Sociology, University of Maryland
(Sarah, "Drone Obscura", http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/06/19/drone-obscura/, dml)

Both Olivia Rosane and Nathan Jurgenson – as well as many other people, in
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renders drones autonomous. The consequences of this are significant and significantly troubling.
When a drone is autonomous, there is no one to blame, no one
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one can be held responsible for what it does. As Nathan writes:
My worry is that the agency and humanization many grant the drone deflects the intentionality, and thus responsibility, away from those controlling it. Caught in the fascinating ways the drone is "autonomous", we spend far too few words on the overwhelming degree to which the drone is no more autonomous than previous tools of surveillance and/or destruction.
So drones aren’t autonomous. The stories we tell about drones need to reflect that; the best stories are true stories, even when they’re fictional, and our drone fiction needs to tell the truth. But what we also shouldn’t forget is that just because drones – the actual vehicles themselves, and in particular here I’m talking about vehicles designed for use in combat – aren’t autonomous yet doesn’t mean they won’t be.
And in fact this is the true, terrifying goal of the drone, the reason it exists at all: the removal of any obvious humanity from the equation.
This isn’t science fiction. The Global Hawk surveillance UAV currently operates with almost no human operator control except in takeoff and landing. Work on creating a more autonomous drone continues.
The thing about this is that, as Nathan says above, none of it is new, at least not in aim. This has always been what we do when we wage war. One of the identifiers of "total war" is industrialism, the degree of technological sophistication, and the goal of technology in war is almost always to kill more of the enemy while leaving more of one’s own forces intact.
The goal of technology in war is, in other words, to make killing
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obscures – it hides and removes as much as it purports to clarify.
Combat drones are the logical next step in this project. Our common fiction about them erases the people at both ends – the pilots and the casualties. But our fiction is based in something; it always is, that’s what makes it so powerful, but in this case we should be especially careful to make sure that we understand what exactly that base consists of.
On some level we want to remove human agency from drones, yes. That’s why we talk about what we talk about when we talk about drones, why we tell the stories we do. But the thing about fiction is that the line between it and fact is – as all lines are – extremely porous. We should watch what moves.
 

The role of the ballot is to make sovereignty strange—vote aff to foolishly affirm the resolution by clowning targeted killing.

Amoore and Hall 13—Department of Geography, University of Durham AND Department of Politics, University of York
(Louise and Alexandra, "The clown at the gates of the camp: Sovereignty, resistance and the figure of the fool", Security Dialogue 2013 44: 93, dml)

The fool’s madness and wisdom are simultaneously lauded and deplored by sovereign powers. Indeed
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, those between political and bare life, are not complete at all. 

This means the only logical response to the terror of targeted killing is to laugh—for what else can we do in such a stupid world?

Heath-Kelly 12—Research Fellow, Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick
(Charlotte, "Can We Laugh Yet? Reading Post-9/11 Counterterrorism Policy as Magical Realism and Opening a Third-Space of Resistance", Eur J Crim Policy Res (2012) 18:343–360, dml)

This neutral framing refuses knowledge of conventional understandings of targeted assassination, but is actually
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their capability to ’loiter’ and ’recognise and categorise’; for example:
The Predator, the most commonly used drone in the American arsenal, can loiter
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-made objects," such as improvised explosive devices. (Callam 2010)
If we consider the War on Terror as a magical realist text, then the
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) with the supernatural threat posed by autonomous weaponised robots. For example:
Robots cannot be emotive, cannot hate. A target is a series of ones
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reality? (Ministry of Defence 2011: 5/11–12)
Such a remarkable third space between the neutral policy discourse of technologised death and the supernatural reality of flying ’Terminator’ robots is compounded by apparent fears within the Ministry of Defence that our ’controlling humanity’ might be lost in the transition to automated systems (Ibid: 5/9). Drones are placed, even in the official discourse of internal MoD reports, as blurring the boundaries between the technological paradigm of war fighting and the impending supernatural catastrophe.
Indeed, even the attribution of agency to drones in official discourse can blur the
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—a style we might relate to the literary genre of magical realism.
Finally, the magical of realism of drone strikes can also be seen in situations
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magical realism of drone strikes to their logical conclusion, Ahmad simply states:
Death is clearly not what it used to be. (Ahmad 2011)
This humourous rendering of the magical realist dimension of the War on Terror exposes the
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robot killers. Through ridicule we might re-engage with this paradox.

We end, again, with the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army—

The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, no date—jokers
("About the Army", http://www.clownarmy.org/about/about.html)

We are an army because we live on a planet in permanent war - a
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fail we might succeed with mocking laughter. And laughter needs an echo.
We are circa because we are approximate and ambivalent, neither here nor there, but in the most powerful of all places, the place in-between order and chaos.
RUN AWAY FROM THE CIRCUS
JOIN THE FORCES OF THE CLANDESTINE INSURGENT REBEL CLOWN ARMY

Tournament: usc | Round: 3 | Opponent: james madison lm | Judge: massey
Each year, as an exercise of executive power, the President has granted a ’pardon’ of the life of a turkey on Thanksgiving Day. This ceremonial ritual trivializes life of the nonhuman and reinforce the anthropocentric hierarchy of life.  
Freeman 11 – Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Georgia
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) 

Each Thanksgiving, the President uses his executive powers to publicly pardon the life of
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attitudes, and anxieties about raising and killing billions of animals for food?
Courage?President Obama, center, with daughters Malia, far right, Sasha
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like this – where I pardon a turkey and send it to Disneyland."
Being a smart guy, Obama knows the pardoning is absurd, so let’s explore why.
Its most obvious absurdity is the hypocrisy of the President saving one bird publicly while
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compassion, justice, accountability, honesty, and personal 26 social responsibility.
So what is my suggestion for the White House, then? Do I expect
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leadership, or masculine self-assurance than a principled boycott of meat?

The very idea that the president spares the life of one turkey validates the ’legal’ slaughter of all unpardoned turkeys. This unrestricted authority justifies the infinite power of the state over the lives of its subjects
Smith 11 – teaches philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal. His most recent book is "Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life-http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9463.html." He is a contributing editor of Cabinet Magazine, and writes regularly on his blog-http://www.jehsmith.com/. (Justin, E. November 20^th,"Cruel and Unusual: A President’s ’Pardon’ as Dark Parody" http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/of-course-its-cruel-and-unusual/-http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/of-course-its-cruel-and-unusual/)

You can tell what a nation is like by the way it treats its turkeys.
I am not saying that this slaughter of birds for food is wrong ? not
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pardon is an acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of the system of capital punishment.
Arbitrariness is generally treated, both by supporters and detractors of the death penalty, as a mere glitch in the system, as something that could in principle be worked out. But what this understanding misses is the historical fact that, until very recently, capital punishment was explicitly arbitrary, and openly cruel: its principal reason for being was to set an example of the infinite power of the state over the lives of its subjects.
It is thus not surprising that in most of the Western world, capital punishment
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political culture that rejects arbitrary absolutism and favors human dignity and human rights.

Yet, the pardon does not endow freedom—the turkey is placed back in captivity and put to death shortly after.
Fiskesjö 3 – an associate professor of anthropology,specializing in Asian ethnopolitics and related
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, The Death of Teddy’s Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo") 

This curious, apparent non-event takes place just ahead of the uniquely American
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the "National Thanksgiving Turkey" must be picked out of its flock.
A "runner-up" will also always be selected. This bird is
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lengthy preparations, theRose Garden ceremony is over in just a few minutes.
As soon as it is finished, the consequences of thesupreme command of a presidential
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to be explored. (May the archaeologists of the future excavate it21)
The task of these national turkeys, until they are out of sight, is
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publicly "pardoned," but also suffereddeath sooner than we might have expected.)

This annual slaughter of millions of turkeys is only a symptom of a larger system of violence. Every day, each and every one of us participates in a war which is committed to an endless genocide of the non-human. This violence is rendered invisible by the normative understanding of violence which excuses the violence against the non-human as legitimate.
Kochi 9 - Sussex Law School, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK (Tarik, "Species War: Law, Violence and Animals," SAGE Journals)

7. The idea that war and violence sits at the foundation of law and
AND
horrors I here omit are nevertheless at the center of this lecture." 9
A little while later she states: "Let me say it openly: we
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more historical, and perhaps sociological, discussion of the Law of war.
The term war commonly evokes images of states, armies, grand weapons, battle
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be without souls, without reason and without a value that is typically.
ascribed to humans. For example, for Augustine, animals, together with plants, are exempted from the religious injunction "Thou shalt not kill." When considering the question of what forms of killing and violence are legitimate, Augustine placed the killing of non-human animals well inside the framework of religious and moral legitimacy. 12
Of relevance is the practice by which the question of legitimate violence is ordered –
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. Ethics, Humans and Other Animals ( London: Routledge, 2000).

This Western conception of legitimate violence is grounded upon a hierarchy of values which regards nonhuman life as ’raw material’ for the preservation of human life. Our legal system is founded upon the sovereign’s authority to delineate between good and bare life. Those outside the conception of proper political subjects are killed under the guise of legitimate violence.
Kochi 9 - Sussex Law School, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK (Tarik, "Species War: Law, Violence and Animals," SAGE Journals)

The response of the lawyer, international lawyer, politician or philosopher to the account
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of life preferred for preservation within the early modern juridical ordering of war. 

And anthropocentrism has been a foundational model for any and every form of discrimination. Any argument which attempts to claim human superiority over the nonhuman rests on the same justifications used by White European males to subjugate other humans
Best 7 – Associate Professor at the University of Texas in the Department of Humanities and Philosophy (Steven, "Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, by Charles Patterson" Journal for Critical Animal Studies, http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/Issue_7/bestpatterson.pdf-http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/Issue_7/bestpatterson.pdf)

While a welcome advance over the anthropocentric conceit that only humans shape human actions,
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over human has deep roots in the oppression of human over animal.1
In this context, Charles Patterson’s recent book, The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment
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resources for human use — collapses under the weight of its logical contradictions.
Patterson lays out his complex holistic argument in three parts. In Part I,
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long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other" –Pythagoras
It is little understood that the first form of oppression, domination, and hierarchy
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slavery and the Holocaust being but two of the more dramatic examples."4
Hierarchy emerged with the rise of agricultural society some ten thousand years ago. In
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pens, cages, collars, ropes, chains, and branding irons.
The domination of animals paved the way for the domination of humans. The sexual
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livestock, and males were castrated and forced to work along with females.
In the fifteenth century, when Europeans began the colonization of Africa and Spain introduced
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inflicted on black slaves were developed and perfected centuries earlier through animal exploitation.
As the domestication of animals developed in agricultural society, humans lost the intimate connections they once had with animals. By the time of Aristotle, certainly, and with the bigoted assistance of medieval theologians such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, western humanity had developed an explicitly hierarchical worldview – that came to be known as the "Great Chain of Being" – used to position humans as the end to which all other beings were mere means.
Patterson underscores the crucial point that the domination of human over human and its exercise
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"swine," "monkeys," "beasts," and "filthy animals."
Once perceived as brute beasts or sub-humans occupying a lower evolutionary rung than
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proven its superiority by bringing the "lower races" under its command.
There are important parallels between speciesism and sexism and racism in the elevation of white
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and stewardship, which however was Judaic moral baggage official Chistianithy left behind.

The presidential pardon is a symbolic act that reinforces the power of the sovereign to exercise power and delineate between good and bare life. The belief in the inevitability of sovereign is flawed; sovereign power is contingent on our acceptance of this power.
Fiskesjö 3 – an associate professor of anthropology,specializing in Asian ethnopolitics and related
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, The Death of Teddy’s Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo") 

The annual presidential pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey in Washington is a full-feathered
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, recreated and perpetu-ated even in our so-called modern states
We have never been modern," writes Bruno Latour. And yes, we must
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as cute oddities that must have beenleft behind long ago. Not so.
Ritual Mercy for the President’s Turkey
The Thanksgiving turkey pardon is a prime example of an act that is only seemingly
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at the strange non-execution of Bird NumberOne, the Thanksgiving Turkey.

The distinction between good and bare life lies at the heart of Western politics. We must challenge the hierarchy between the human and nonhuman or risk unending violence.
Kochi 9 - Sussex Law School, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK (Tarik "Species War: Law, Violence and Animals")

The distinction between bare life and the good life is a legal-political distinction
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The critic of war is thus a critic of war’s norm-alization.

And, we must take an absolute refusal of the hierarchy between human and nonhuman. This is not based on an ethics which refuses to acknowledge difference, but based on the rejection of designating the nonhuman as expendable. Breaking from this anthropocentric lens is critical to breaking down the logical underpinnings of biopolitical violence.
Pugliese 13 – Research Director at Macquarie University (Joseph, "State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones," p.95-97)
*edited gendered language 

Critically, the ’solution’ to this regime of violence is not to shuffle the categories of life up or down the biopolitical hierarchy as this merely reproduces the system while leaving intact the governing power of the biopolitical cut andits attendant violent effects. Reflecting on the possibility of disrupting this biopolitical regime and its hierarchies of life, Agamben writes:
in our culture man has always been the result of a simultaneous division and articulation
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to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension. 21
Precisely because everything is always already at stake in the continued mobilization of biopolitical caesurae
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disavowing this violent a priori, merely reproduces the species war by other means
In order to short-circuit this machine, a deconstructive move is needed,
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liquidated withoutcompunction - without having to think ’in terms of guilt or innocence.

The standpoint of the nonhuman epitomizes the failure with the status quo. Democratic politics has not only ignored the perspective of the non-human, but also supported their abuse and imprisoned any radical dissent. We must open up to the possibility of a new form of politics. The only thing utopian is the naïve belief that the status quo will work.
Calarco 8 – Ph.D, SUNY Binghamton, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fullerton University (Matthew, "Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida" p.95-97)

The reader who takes up careful study of Agamben’s work from this angle, seeking
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, democracy and sovereignty but creating an altogether different form of political life.
Agamben’s work faces two important challenges at this level. On the one hand,
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another though of being with Others that is similar to Agamben’s coming community.
I should say that I find neither of these critical perspectives particularly persuasive and that
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rich historical constructs with the intrinsic potential for extensive and remarkably progressive reforms.
And yet, if the question of the animal were taken seriously here and the
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animal life can be accomplished within the confines of the traditions they use.
Of this political terrain, neohumanist arguments concerning the merits of the democratic tradition have
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reformed as to include and give direct consideration to beings beyond the human? 

Our affirmative is an act of assuming a traitorous identity. The first step is
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does mean that we adopt an ethic that attempts to minimize our own domination
Plumwood 2 – (Val, "Environmental Ethics", p.205-6)

There are, I have suggested, multiple bases for critical solidarity with nature.
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in this way requires avoiding both the arrogance of reading in your own location

 and perspective as that of the other, and the arrogance of assuming that
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relationship to the other in a more or less open-ended way.

Thus, Dustin and I reject the President’s war powers authority over the life of turkeys.