Tournament: UMKC | Round: 2 | Opponent: Iowa Shearer-Long | Judge: Murray
You don’t wait for someone to admit they need therapy before you decide that they do. We’ve always done this. We set out the framework and we require that people fit into it. Something is wrong with you. You should fix it. We have this persistent, fucked up need to affix problems to persons other than ourselves.

The thing about persistent, fucked up needs is that they tend naturally toward absurdity. So here’s an interesting series of pictures: Psychiatrists and social workers and people with counseling degrees in hangers, in bunkers, standing on Air Force runways. Communicating, which is widely believed to be the first step in a long series of steps leading to a whole new paradigm of mental health for a thing that we’re still beginning to understand is capable of a recognizable mentality.

This might be a terrible idea. But it’s an idea and we’re all having it, like a kind of consensual hallucination. So in the end it’s pretty hard to say what’s therapeutic and what isn’t. What matters is that in the end we all might feel better about everything.

You can’t put a drone on a couch. An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle does not need tissues. The tools of the trade are removed and for the most part there’s no comfortably controlled office environment. Bright sunlight isn’t conducive to cognitive behavioral therapy, or so the generally received wisdom goes. But you have to work with what you’ve got. A hanger bay can be made more comfortable with a couch, at least, for you. You ask for a standing lamp. This is fairly ludicrous, but. Well. All of it is, so where’s the line?

This is something we need to do.

So you ask, How have you been feeling? And you ask, Do you have trouble rebooting? And you ask, Do you experience difficulty preparing yourself for missions?

How did killing thirty three people, twelve of whom were children, make you feel in the morning?

Did you find yourself altering your flight path for reasons you couldn’t identify?

Do you take unnecessary risks?

The heads-up display registers responses, such as there are. You scan each carefully for any indication of emotional distress. You take copious notes. You bill the government five hundred dollars an hour. The taxpayers go to bed with the warm, fluffy reassurance that someone somewhere is still suffering for what no one wants to do but what no one wants to stop doing, either.

(Sunny Moraine, 2013/06/03, “All the Literati Keep an Imaginary Friend,” Murmuration, http://murmurationfestival.tumblr.com/post/
52062545981/ all-the-literati-keep-an-imaginary-friend)

Chapter One is the Predator Empire

In the age of the Drone, military violence is conceived as a relationship between things – the drone in the sky, and its targets on the ground – rather than between people. The drone takes on the status of an autonomous subject to absolve us of responsibility, to do the things no one else wants to, yet no one is willing to stop.

Akhter and Shaw, 2012 (Majed Akhter, Professor of Geography and Development at University of Arizona, and Ian Graham Ronald Shaw, Professor at the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan, Antipode Vol 44, #4, 2012, http://www.academia.edu/2201329/The_Unbearable_Humanness_of_Drone_ Warfare_in_FATA_Pakistan

The power exercised through drones simultaneously projects power outward, and folds space inward, bringing distant geographies under the gaze of US military planners. This form of knowledge production exposes the entire world to an unaccountable apparatus of surveillance.

Shaw, 13 (2013, Ian, “Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare,” Routledge, http://www.academia.edu/2125232/Predator_Empire_The_Geopolitics_of_U.S._Drone_Warfare)
Do you take unnecessary risks?

So: Do you find yourself wishing to make direct contact?

Do you dream about the people you watch? (This is assuming dreams but we find it’s easier to do that from the start, so anyway.)

When they get hurt or die, how does that make you feel?

Sympathy with the enemy is a terrifying prospect. Yes, of course they’re the enemy, they’re all the enemy, everyone we watch and pull into the cold scrutiny of a constant gaze is thereby made the enemy, and sometimes they are the enemy and sometimes the enemy is here as well but always there is that line between us and them and the line is clear and existent even if we can’t always tell where it is.

But this is what we expect.

So we fear sympathy with the enemy. It should comfort us that, in this context, such a thing no longer seems like a present danger. But you ask all your questions and you take all your notes and you can’t escape the feeling that you’re looking for it with the kind of zeal and hopefulness with which someone searches for treasure, or for evidence of a tremendously important truth.

You want the danger to be there because the danger is something you can understand.

Chapter Two is the Episteme of Targeting

Against the backdrop of this fetishization, it’s worthwhile to remember that the drone is nothing new. It’s only the latest and most refined incarnation of a logic that runs throughout the Western episteme, in which “to be” is “to be targeted.”

Akhter and Shaw, 2012 (Majed Akhter, Professor of Geography and Development at University of Arizona, and Ian Graham Ronald Shaw, Professor at the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan, Antipode Vol 44, #4, 2012, http://www.academia.edu/2201329/The_Unbearable_Humanness_of_Drone_ Warfare_in_FATA_Pakistan)

This targeting logic extends far beyond the military apparatus, into every field of Western knowledge production. Debate is no exception – debaters are trained to view the world as drones do, absorbing knowledge through a unidirectional gaze that leaves their own subject positions unquestioned.
Our Affirmative is meant to interrogate the way we as debaters have contributed to the targeting episteme. From the way we frame the world as a dangerous place requiring regulation and control, to the insistence on analyzing without ever being analyzed, watching without being watched, traditional debate replicates the knowledge production of the Predator Empire. If targeting logic is responsible for drone warfare then we should be asking ourselves how our own community has contributed to the creation of the Predator Empire.

Chow, 2006 (Rey Chow, Professor of Literature at Duke, Age of the World Target, pg. 46-49, 2006)

That brings us to ‘This week in the Drone War!, presented by Dronestream, a twitter feed dedicated to reporting every US drone strike. (twitter.com/dronestream)

Sep 6, 2013: A US drone fired missiles at a house, killing six people.

Official: Death toll may rise

Aug 31, 2013: At least 4 people died by drone.

Official: We do not know the identity of those killed.

Aug 30, 2013: Hours after Qaid’s marriage, two US drones launched missiles at his car, killing up to six people.

Chapter Three is Storytelling
How are we to learn about the topic, to craft scholarship about it, without succumbing to the same logic of visibility, targeting, and destruction that the drone itself embodies? Part of the answer lies in changing the way we tell stories. Art and fiction are important tools in liberating our political imaginary from the tyranny of the targeting episteme. 

Rothstein, 13 (Adam Rothstein, Insurgent Activist and Researcher, How to Write Drone Fiction, Jan 20 2013, http://www.thestate.ae/how-to-write-drone-fiction/)

Our project moves between disciplines, ignoring the boundaries of knowledge production that separate politics from art, truth from fiction. This nomadic feminist methodology is critical to recreating our relationship with the Other in a way that isn’t destined to violence.

Braidotti, 97 (Rosi Braidotti, Director of Center for the Humanities at Utrecht, Mothers, Monsters, and Machines, Writing on the body: female embodiment and feminist theory, Pg 75-76)

In the targeting episteme we are all non-non-terrorists, neither guilty nor innocent. We are all the potential threats that our government claims to protect us from, and thus we are all perpetually locked in the crosshairs of the drone. To unbecome the non-non-terrorist we must engage in the inoperativity of the law. Our transdisciplinary performance renders the debate space inoperable, short-circuiting its ability to commit violence.

De Boever, 2006 (Arne De Boever, Professor of American Studies at the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, Overhearing Bartleby: Agamben, Melville, and Inoperative Power, Parrhesia Number 1, 2006, 142-162)

How does it make you feel?

By asking this question you’re setting a very rigid framework within which you can receive sensible answers. You set the discursive terms, with your lived experience and your assumptions about how things look and work. In moments of particular self-honesty you’ll own that this is probably all about assumptions when you get right down to it. You know that there are problems with this. You’ll do it anyway, because this is what we do.

We set the discursive terms. We make them learn our language. We make them meet us all the way and we never ask them what they wanted, because it doesn’t occur to us to wonder if they ever wanted anything to begin with.

But: How does it make you feel?

So you have to wonder if any of us care. And you already know that that isn’t the important part. The important part is that the question gets asked at all.

This entire process is ourselves talking to ourselves. It’s an exercise in massive, masturbatory self-analysis. And while we engage in this self-centered groping, they watch, silent and impassive. To the extent that they give us answers at all, it’s placation. They become the blankness to which we attach anything. They are not self-defining. They allow us that control, a consensual kind of tyranny, a sado-masochistic power exchange. They understand that much. They know what we need to believe. They know what we need.

We always end up telling them everything.

Ten sessions later you’re sobbing on your couch. As a presence, it turns out a drone is comforting. And at least you have tissues.

(Sunny Moraine, 2013/06/03, “All the Literati Keep an Imaginary Friend,” Murmuration, http://murmurationfestival.tumblr.com/post/
52062545981/ all-the-literati-keep-an-imaginary-friend)

Tournament: UMKC | Round: 7 | Opponent: unknown | Judge:
Prologue

You don’t wait for someone to admit they need therapy before you decide that they do. We’ve always done this. We set out the framework and we require that people fit into it. Something is wrong with you. You should fix it. We have this persistent, fucked up need to affix problems to persons other than ourselves.

The thing about persistent, fucked up needs is that they tend naturally toward absurdity. So here’s an interesting series of pictures: Psychiatrists and social workers and people with counseling degrees in hangers, in bunkers, standing on Air Force runways. Communicating, which is widely believed to be the first step in a long series of steps leading to a whole new paradigm of mental health for a thing that we’re still beginning to understand is capable of a recognizable mentality.

This might be a terrible idea. But it’s an idea and we’re all having it, like a kind of consensual hallucination. So in the end it’s pretty hard to say what’s therapeutic and what isn’t. What matters is that in the end we all might feel better about everything.

You can’t put a drone on a couch. An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle does not need tissues. The tools of the trade are removed and for the most part there’s no comfortably controlled office environment. Bright sunlight isn’t conducive to cognitive behavioral therapy, or so the generally received wisdom goes. But you have to work with what you’ve got. A hanger bay can be made more comfortable with a couch, at least, for you. You ask for a standing lamp. This is fairly ludicrous, but. Well. All of it is, so where’s the line?

This is something we need to do.

So you ask, How have you been feeling? And you ask, Do you have trouble rebooting? And you ask, Do you experience difficulty preparing yourself for missions?

How did killing thirty three people, twelve of whom were children, make you feel in the morning?

Did you find yourself altering your flight path for reasons you couldn’t identify?

Do you take unnecessary risks?

The heads-up display registers responses, such as there are. You scan each carefully for any indication of emotional distress. You take copious notes. You bill the government five hundred dollars an hour. The taxpayers go to bed with the warm, fluffy reassurance that someone somewhere is still suffering for what no one wants to do but what no one wants to stop doing, either.

(Sunny Moraine, 2013/06/03, “All the Literati Keep an Imaginary Friend,” Murmuration, http://murmurationfestival.tumblr.com/post/
52062545981/ all-the-literati-keep-an-imaginary-friend)
Chapter One is the Predator Empire
In the age of the Drone, military violence is conceived as a relationship between things – the drone in the sky, and its targets on the ground – rather than between people. The drone takes on the status of an autonomous subject to absolve us of responsibility, to do the things no one else wants to, yet no one is willing to stop.

Akhter and Shaw, 2012 (Majed Akhter, Professor of Geography and Development at University of Arizona, and Ian Graham Ronald Shaw, Professor at the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan, Antipode Vol 44, #4, 2012, http://www.academia.edu/2201329/The_Unbearable_Humanness_of_Drone_ Warfare_in_FATA_Pakistan)

The primary relationship evoked in most discussions of drone warfare is between a drone and its battle?eld of objecti?ed targets, rather than the relationship between the team of technicians operating the drone as agents of American empire and the AND Unmasking the fetish that surrounds drone warfare is critical to our project. But as we have learnt from our research into the FCR and Pakistani constitution, we need more than this to explain its bloody usage in FATA, Pakistan—a region that “invites” a technology able to utilize historical territorial contradictions.

The power exercised through drones simultaneously projects power outward, and folds space inward, bringing distant geographies under the gaze of US military planners. This form of knowledge production exposes the entire world to an unaccountable apparatus of surveillance.

Shaw, 13 (2013, Ian, “Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare,” Routledge, http://www.academia.edu/2125232/Predator_Empire_The_Geopolitics_of_U.S._Drone_Warfare)

Unlike forms of environmental intervention that leave a gigantic “footprint” in the soil of the earth, such as the counterinsurgency pursued in Iraq, the Predator Empire pursues a different kind of spatial biopolitics; a virtual intervention where what is captured is not “hearts and minds” but endless streams of information that are broadcast back to the Homeland AND are exposed to an unaccountable surveillance apparatus that scrutinises their patterns of life from thousands of miles away. Their vulnerability is inseparable from the topological spatial power of the Predator Empire.

Do you take unnecessary risks?

So: Do you find yourself wishing to make direct contact?

Do you dream about the people you watch? (This is assuming dreams but we find it’s easier to do that from the start, so anyway.)

When they get hurt or die, how does that make you feel?

Sympathy with the enemy is a terrifying prospect. Yes, of course they’re the enemy, they’re all the enemy, everyone we watch and pull into the cold scrutiny of a constant gaze is thereby made the enemy, and sometimes they are the enemy and sometimes the enemy is here as well but always there is that line between us and them and the line is clear and existent even if we can’t always tell where it is.

But this is what we expect.

So we fear sympathy with the enemy. It should comfort us that, in this context, such a thing no longer seems like a present danger. But you ask all your questions and you take all your notes and you can’t escape the feeling that you’re looking for it with the kind of zeal and hopefulness with which someone searches for treasure, or for evidence of a tremendously important truth.

You want the danger to be there because the danger is something you can understand.

Chapter Two is the Episteme of Targeting
Against the backdrop of this fetishization, it’s worthwhile to remember that the drone is nothing new. It’s only the latest and most refined incarnation of a logic that runs throughout the Western episteme, in which “to be” is “to be targeted.”

Akhter and Shaw, 2012 (Majed Akhter, Professor of Geography and Development at University of Arizona, and Ian Graham Ronald Shaw, Professor at the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan, Antipode Vol 44, #4, 2012, http://www.academia.edu/2201329/The_Unbearable_Humanness_of_Drone_ Warfare_in_FATA_Pakistan)

The drone is heralded by the US military as the apex of a targeting logic—accurate, ef?cient, and deadly. This logic traces a distinct genesis. In 1938 Martin Heidegger wrote of the “age of the world picture”, AND consistently breaches its national sovereignty. As retired Pakistani general Talat Masood asks, one assumes rhetorically, “How can you be an ally and at the same time be targeted?” (quoted in Schmitt and Drew 2009, our emphasis). Not only is this territorial contradiction worth highlighting, but so too is the fetishized status of the drone itself as it relates to contemporary geopolitics. But ?rst, we sketch the history of FATA, a region riddled with historical and legal complexities.

This targeting logic extends far beyond the military apparatus, into every field of Western knowledge production. Debate is no exception – debaters are trained to view the world as drones do, absorbing knowledge through a unidirectional gaze that leaves their own subject positions unquestioned.
Our Affirmative is meant to interrogate the way we as debaters have contributed to the targeting episteme. From the way we frame the world as a dangerous place requiring regulation and control, to the insistence on analyzing without ever being analyzed, watching without being watched, traditional debate replicates the knowledge production of the Predator Empire. If targeting logic is responsible for drone warfare then we should be asking ourselves how our own community has contributed to the creation of the Predator Empire.

Chow, 2006 (Rey Chow, Professor of Literature at Duke, Age of the World Target, pg. 46-49, 2006)

Often under the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and documentation, the “scientific” and “objective” production of knowledge during peacetime about the various special “areas” became the institutional practice that substantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as target AND With the end of the cold war and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the United States must hence seek other substitutes for war. As has often been pointed out, drugs, poverty, and illegal immigrants have since become the new targets, which occupy— together with Moslems, Arabs, and communists (that is, Cuba, North Korea, and mainland China)—the status of that ultimate danger to be “deterred” at all costs.

That brings us to ‘This week in the Drone War!, presented by Dronestream, a twitter feed dedicated to reporting every US drone strike. (twitter.com/dronestream)

Sep 6, 2013: A US drone fired missiles at a house, killing six people.

Official: Death toll may rise

Aug 31, 2013: At least 4 people died by drone.

Official: We do not know the identity of those killed.

Aug 30, 2013: Hours after Qaid’s marriage, two US drones launched missiles at his car, killing up to six people.

Chapter Three is Storytelling
How are we to learn about the topic, to craft scholarship about it, without succumbing to the same logic of visibility, targeting, and destruction that the drone itself embodies? Part of the answer lies in changing the way we tell stories. Art and fiction are important tools in liberating our political imaginary from the tyranny of the targeting episteme. 

Rothstein, 13 (Adam Rothstein, Insurgent Activist and Researcher, How to Write Drone Fiction, Jan 20 2013, http://www.thestate.ae/how-to-write-drone-fiction/)

A drone is a literary character–it is an archetype of uncanny and deadly technology, spread out around us in the geopolitical world in such a way that they are nearly invisible to our non-fictional sense of fact, and yet around us all the time in fiction, AND specs, dates, times, and tragic body counts. Meanwhile, that cultural blob that is the drone continues to hover in our consciousness, observing, waiting for its chance to strike.

Our project moves between disciplines, ignoring the boundaries of knowledge production that separate politics from art, truth from fiction. This nomadic feminist methodology is critical to recreating our relationship with the Other in a way that isn’t destined to violence.

Braidotti, 97 (Rosi Braidotti, Director of Center for the Humanities at Utrecht, Mothers, Monsters, and Machines, Writing on the body: female embodiment and feminist theory, Pg 75-76)

The term transdisciplinary can describe one position taken by feminists. Passing in between different discursive fields, and through diverse spheres of intellectual discourse. The feminist theoretician AND redefine the very meaning of thought, I am also suggesting that in time the rules of the discursive game will have to change. Academics will have to agree that thinking adequately about our historical condition implies the transcendence of disciplinary boundaries and intellectual categories.

In the targeting episteme we are all non-non-terrorists, neither guilty nor innocent. We are all the potential threats that our government claims to protect us from, and thus we are all perpetually locked in the crosshairs of the drone. To unbecome the non-non-terrorist we must engage in the inoperativity of the law. Our transdisciplinary performance renders the debate space inoperable, short-circuiting its ability to commit violence.

De Boever, 2006 (Arne De Boever, Professor of American Studies at the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, Overhearing Bartleby: Agamben, Melville, and Inoperative Power, Parrhesia Number 1, 2006, 142-162)

The aim of Agamben’s project, I argue, is to think freedom as law and law as freedom – and thus to think law against (or as different from) sovereign power. This becomes most clear in his literary and philological works. He proposes there an understanding of sovereign power as a force under erasure and tries to think it as a force that would be in place without being in force. He proposes to look at sovereign power as if it was ending, as if it was always also not. To describe this way of looking, Agamben introduces the notion of inoperativity. AND sign the bill. A state of exception was declared; the law was passed. The following day, Baudouin went back to work. These “extraordinary” (as Kalyvas would have it)50 acts of subversion, whether they are committed before, within, or next to the law, show how the thought of inoperativity can also be a political practice.

How does it make you feel?

By asking this question you’re setting a very rigid framework within which you can receive sensible answers. You set the discursive terms, with your lived experience and your assumptions about how things look and work. In moments of particular self-honesty you’ll own that this is probably all about assumptions when you get right down to it. You know that there are problems with this. You’ll do it anyway, because this is what we do.

We set the discursive terms. We make them learn our language. We make them meet us all the way and we never ask them what they wanted, because it doesn’t occur to us to wonder if they ever wanted anything to begin with.

But: How does it make you feel?

So you have to wonder if any of us care. And you already know that that isn’t the important part. The important part is that the question gets asked at all. 

This entire process is ourselves talking to ourselves. It’s an exercise in massive, masturbatory self-analysis. And while we engage in this self-centered groping, they watch, silent and impassive. To the extent that they give us answers at all, it’s placation. They become the blankness to which we attach anything. They are not self-defining. They allow us that control, a consensual kind of tyranny, a sado-masochistic power exchange. They understand that much. They know what we need to believe. They know what we need.

We always end up telling them everything.

Ten sessions later you’re sobbing on your couch. As a presence, it turns out a drone is comforting. And at least you have tissues.

(Sunny Moraine, 2013/06/03, “All the Literati Keep an Imaginary Friend,” Murmuration, http://murmurationfestival.tumblr.com/post/
52062545981/ all-the-literati-keep-an-imaginary-friend)

Tournament: 2013babyjo | Round: 8 | Opponent: Baylor Barron-Evans | Judge: Crowe
Prologue

You don’t wait for someone to admit they need therapy before you decide that they do. We’ve always done this. We set out the framework and we require that people fit into it. Something is wrong with you. You should fix it. We have this persistent, fucked up need to affix problems to persons other than ourselves.

The thing about persistent, fucked up needs is that they tend naturally toward absurdity. So here’s an interesting series of pictures: Psychiatrists and social workers and people with counseling degrees in hangers, in bunkers, standing on Air Force runways. Communicating, which is widely believed to be the first step in a long series of steps leading to a whole new paradigm of mental health for a thing that we’re still beginning to understand is capable of a recognizable mentality.

This might be a terrible idea. But it’s an idea and we’re all having it, like a kind of consensual hallucination. So in the end it’s pretty hard to say what’s therapeutic and what isn’t. What matters is that in the end we all might feel better about everything.

You can’t put a drone on a couch. An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle does not need tissues. The tools of the trade are removed and for the most part there’s no comfortably controlled office environment. Bright sunlight isn’t conducive to cognitive behavioral therapy, or so the generally received wisdom goes. But you have to work with what you’ve got. A hanger bay can be made more comfortable with a couch, at least, for you. You ask for a standing lamp. This is fairly ludicrous, but. Well. All of it is, so where’s the line?

This is something we need to do.

So you ask, How have you been feeling? And you ask, Do you have trouble rebooting? And you ask, Do you experience difficulty preparing yourself for missions?

How did killing thirty three people, twelve of whom were children, make you feel in the morning?

Did you find yourself altering your flight path for reasons you couldn’t identify?

Do you take unnecessary risks?

The heads-up display registers responses, such as there are. You scan each carefully for any indication of emotional distress. You take copious notes. You bill the government five hundred dollars an hour. The taxpayers go to bed with the warm, fluffy reassurance that someone somewhere is still suffering for what no one wants to do but what no one wants to stop doing, either.

(Sunny Moraine, 2013/06/03, “All the Literati Keep an Imaginary Friend,” Murmuration, http://murmurationfestival.tumblr.com/post/
52062545981/ all-the-literati-keep-an-imaginary-friend)

Chapter One is the Predator Empire
In the age of the Drone, military violence is conceived as a relationship between things – the drone in the sky, and its targets on the ground – rather than between people. The drone takes on the status of an autonomous subject to absolve us of responsibility, to do the things no one else wants to, yet no one is willing to stop.

Akhter and Shaw, 2012 (Majed Akhter, Professor of Geography and Development at University of Arizona, and Ian Graham Ronald Shaw, Professor at the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan, Antipode Vol 44, #4, 2012, http://www.academia.edu/2201329/The_Unbearable_Humanness_of_Drone_ Warfare_in_FATA_Pakistan)

The primary relationship evoked in most discussions of drone warfare is between a drone and its battle?eld of objecti?ed targets, rather than the relationship between the team of technicians operating the drone as agents of American empire and the unsuspecting bodies surveilled and slaughtered on the ground in neo-colonial Pakistan. In other words, drone warfare is thought of as a relationship AND The Obama administration’s touting of the drone as the “magical solution” to the “war on terror” is a fetishization that occludes its unbearable humanness. Unmasking the fetish that surrounds drone warfare is critical to our project. But as we have learnt from our research into the FCR and Pakistani constitution, we need more than this to explain its bloody usage in FATA, Pakistan—a region that “invites” a technology able to utilize historical territorial contradictions.

The power exercised through drones simultaneously projects power outward, and folds space inward, bringing distant geographies under the gaze of US military planners. This form of knowledge production exposes the entire world to an unaccountable apparatus of surveillance.

Shaw, 13 (2013, Ian, “Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare,” Routledge, http://www.academia.edu/2125232/Predator_Empire_The_Geopolitics_of_U.S._Drone_Warfare)

Unlike forms of environmental intervention that leave a gigantic “footprint” in the soil of the earth, such as the counterinsurgency pursued in Iraq, the Predator Empire pursues a different kind of spatial biopolitics; a virtual intervention where what is captured is not “hearts and minds” but endless streams of information that are broadcast back to the Homeland. AND , are exposed to an unaccountable surveillance apparatus that scrutinises their patterns of life from thousands of miles away. Their vulnerability is inseparable from the topological spatial power of the Predator Empire.

Do you take unnecessary risks?

So: Do you find yourself wishing to make direct contact?

Do you dream about the people you watch? (This is assuming dreams but we find it’s easier to do that from the start, so anyway.)

When they get hurt or die, how does that make you feel?

Sympathy with the enemy is a terrifying prospect. Yes, of course they’re the enemy, they’re all the enemy, everyone we watch and pull into the cold scrutiny of a constant gaze is thereby made the enemy, and sometimes they are the enemy and sometimes the enemy is here as well but always there is that line between us and them and the line is clear and existent even if we can’t always tell where it is.

But this is what we expect.

So we fear sympathy with the enemy. It should comfort us that, in this context, such a thing no longer seems like a present danger. But you ask all your questions and you take all your notes and you can’t escape the feeling that you’re looking for it with the kind of zeal and hopefulness with which someone searches for treasure, or for evidence of a tremendously important truth.

You want the danger to be there because the danger is something you can understand.

Chapter Two is the Episteme of Targeting
Against the backdrop of this fetishization, it’s worthwhile to remember that the drone is nothing new. It’s only the latest and most refined incarnation of a logic that runs throughout the Western episteme, in which “to be” is “to be targeted.”

Akhter and Shaw, 2012 (Majed Akhter, Professor of Geography and Development at University of Arizona, and Ian Graham Ronald Shaw, Professor at the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA, Pakistan, Antipode Vol 44, #4, 2012, http://www.academia.edu/2201329/The_Unbearable_Humanness_of_Drone_ Warfare_in_FATA_Pakistan)

The drone is heralded by the US military as the apex of a targeting logic—accurate, ef?cient, and deadly. This logic traces a distinct genesis. In 1938 Martin Heidegger wrote of the “age of the world picture”, in a classic essay on the split between subject and object. For him, today’s world is conceived, grasped, and conquered as a picture—and what it means “to be” is for the ?rst time de?ned as the objectiveness of representing.   AND . Yet despite the drone’s mounting importance to global warfare, we ?nd its use in FATA, Pakistan of particular signi?cance. Its covert CIA deployments are both publically condemned and privately supported by the Pakistani government as the USA consistently breaches its national sovereignty. As retired Pakistani general Talat Masood asks, one assumes rhetorically, “How can you be an ally and at the same time be targeted?” (quoted in Schmitt and Drew 2009, our emphasis). Not only is this territorial contradiction worth highlighting, but so too is the fetishized status of the drone itself as it relates to contemporary geopolitics. But ?rst, we sketch the history of FATA, a region riddled with historical and legal complexities.
This targeting logic extends far beyond the military apparatus, into every field of Western knowledge production. Debate is no exception – debaters are trained to view the world as drones do, absorbing knowledge through a unidirectional gaze that leaves their own subject positions unquestioned.
Our Affirmative is meant to interrogate the way we as debaters have contributed to the targeting episteme. From the way we frame the world as a dangerous place requiring regulation and control, to the insistence on analyzing without ever being analyzed, watching without being watched, traditional debate replicates the knowledge production of the Predator Empire. If targeting logic is responsible for drone warfare then we should be asking ourselves how our own community has contributed to the creation of the Predator Empire.

Chow, 2006 (Rey Chow, Professor of Literature at Duke, Age of the World Target, pg. 46-49, 2006)

Often under the modest and apparently innocuous agendas of fact gathering and documentation, the “scientific” and “objective” production of knowledge during peacetime about the various special “areas” became the institutional practice that substantiated and elaborated the militaristic conception of the world as target. In other words, despite the claims about the apolitical and disinterested nature of the pursuits of higher learning, activities undertaken under the rubric of area studies, such as language training, historiography, anthropology, economics, political science, and so forth, are fully inscribed in the politics and ideology of war. To that extent, the disciplining, research, and development of so-called academic information are part and parcel of a strategic logic. And yet, if the production of knowledge (with its vocabulary of aims and goals, research, data analysis, experimentation, and verification) in fact shares the same scientific and military premises as war—if, for instance, the ability to translate a difficult language can be regarded as equivalent to the ability to break military codes “know” the other cultures? Can “knowledge” that is derived from the same kinds of bases as war put an end to the violence of warfare, or is such knowledge not simply warfare’s accomplice, destined to destroy rather than preserve the forms of lives at which it aims its focus? As long as knowledge is produced in this self-referential manner, as a circuit of targeting or getting the other that ultimately consolidates the omnipotence and omnipresence of the sovereign “self”/“eye”— the “I”—that is the United States, the other will have no choice but remain just that— a target whose existence justifies only one thing, its destruction by the bomber. As long as the focus of our study of Asia remains the United States, and as long as this focus is not accompanied by knowledge of what is happening elsewhere at other times as well as at the present, such study will ultimately confirm once again the self-referential function of virtual world- ing that was unleashed by the dropping of the atomic bombs, with the United States always occupying the position of the bomber, and other cultures always viewed as the military and information target fields. In this manner, events whose historicity does not fall into the epistemically closed orbit of the atomic bomber— such as the Chinese reactions to the war from a primarily anti-Japanese point of view that I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter—will never receive the attention that is due to them. “Knowledge,” however conscientiously gathered and however large in volume, will lead only to further silence and to the silencing of diverse experiences. This is one reason why, as Harootunian remarks, been, area studies has been since its inception, haunted by “the absence of a definable object”—and by “the problem of the vanishing object.” As Harootunian goes on to argue, for all its investment in the study of other languages and other cultures, area studies missed the opportunity, so aptly provided by Said’s criticism of Orientalism, to become the site where a genuinely alternative form of knowledge production might have been possible. Although, as Harootunian writes, “ Said’s book represented an important intellectual challenge to the mission of area studies which, if accepted, would have reshaped area studies and freed it from its own reliance on the Cold War and the necessities of the national security the challenge was too fundamentally disruptive to the administrative and instrumentalist agendas so firmly routinized in area studies to be accepted by its practitioners. As a result, Said’s attempt to link an incipient neocolonial discourse to the history of area studies was almost immediately belittled, dismissed, and ignored, and his critique, for all its relevance to area studies’ future orientation, simply “migrated to English studies to transform the study of literature into a fullscale preoccupation with identity and its construction.” A long-term outcome of all this, Harootunian suggests, has been the consolidation of a type of postcolonial studies that, instead of fully developing the comparative, interdisciplinary, and multicultural potential that is embedded theoretically in area studies, tends to specialize in the deconstruction of the nature of language, in the amalgamation of poststructuralist theory largely with AngloAmerican literary studies, and in the investigation mostly of former British colonial cultures rather than a substantial range of colonial and semicolonial histories from different parts of the world. On its part, having voluntarily failed to heed Said’s call, area studies can only remain “locked in its own enclaves of knowledge” based on the reproduction of institutional and organizational structures with claims to normativity, while being defensively guarded against the innovations of poststructuralist theory that have radicalized North American humanistic and social scientific learning since the 1970s. As I have already suggested, the truth of the continual targeting of the world as the fundamental form of knowledge production is xenophobia, the inability to handle the otherness of the other beyond the orbit that is the bomber’s own visual path. For the xenophobe, every effort needs to be made to sustain and secure this orbit— that is, by keeping the place of the other-as-target always filled. With the end of the cold war and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the United States must hence seek other substitutes for war. As has often been pointed out, drugs, poverty, and illegal immigrants have since become the new targets, which occupy— together with Moslems, Arabs, and communists (that is, Cuba, North Korea, and mainland China)—the status of that ultimate danger to be “deterred” at all costs. 

That brings us to ‘This week in the Drone War!, presented by Dronestream, a twitter feed dedicated to reporting every US drone strike. (twitter.com/dronestream)

Sep 6, 2013: A US drone fired missiles at a house, killing six people.

Official: Death toll may rise

Aug 31, 2013: At least 4 people died by drone.

Official: We do not know the identity of those killed.

Aug 30, 2013: Hours after Qaid’s marriage, two US drones launched missiles at his car, killing up to six people.

Chapter Three is Storytelling
How are we to learn about the topic, to craft scholarship about it, without succumbing to the same logic of visibility, targeting, and destruction that the drone itself embodies? Part of the answer lies in changing the way we tell stories. Art and fiction are important tools in liberating our political imaginary from the tyranny of the targeting episteme. 

Rothstein, 13 (Adam Rothstein, Insurgent Activist and Researcher, How to Write Drone Fiction, Jan 20 2013, http://www.thestate.ae/how-to-write-drone-fiction/)

A drone is a literary character–it is an archetype of uncanny and deadly technology, spread out around us in the geopolitical world in such a way that they are nearly invisible to our non-fictional sense of fact, and yet around us all the time in fiction, invisibly hiding in the clouds, with as much reality as a paranoid delusion. And yet a drone is a literary character with the actual power to kill. AND And so, we bounce among these areas–the commercialized version of UAV news, the science fiction speculation of drones, and the dry non-fiction of technical specs, dates, times, and tragic body counts. Meanwhile, that cultural blob that is the drone continues to hover in our consciousness, observing, waiting for its chance to strike.
Our project moves between disciplines, ignoring the boundaries of knowledge production that separate politics from art, truth from fiction. This nomadic feminist methodology is critical to recreating our relationship with the Other in a way that isn’t destined to violence.

Braidotti, 97 (Rosi Braidotti, Director of Center for the Humanities at Utrecht, Mothers, Monsters, and Machines, Writing on the body: female embodiment and feminist theory, Pg 75-76)

The term transdisciplinary can describe one position taken by feminists. Passing in between different discursive fields, and through diverse spheres of intellectual discourse. The feminist theoretician today can only be “in transit,” AND time the rules of the discursive game will have to change. Academics will have to agree that thinking adequately about our historical condition implies the transcendence of disciplinary boundaries and intellectual categories.
In the targeting episteme we are all non-non-terrorists, neither guilty nor innocent. We are all the potential threats that our government claims to protect us from, and thus we are all perpetually locked in the crosshairs of the drone. To unbecome the non-non-terrorist we must engage in the inoperativity of the law. Our transdisciplinary performance renders the debate space inoperable, short-circuiting its ability to commit violence.

De Boever, 2006 (Arne De Boever, Professor of American Studies at the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, Overhearing Bartleby: Agamben, Melville, and Inoperative Power, Parrhesia Number 1, 2006, 142-162)

The aim of Agamben’s project, I argue, is to think freedom as law and law as freedom – and thus to think law against (or as different from) sovereign power. This becomes most clear in his literary and philological works. AND 50 acts of subversion, whether they are committed before, within, or next to the law, show how the thought of inoperativity can also be a political practice. 

How does it make you feel?

By asking this question you’re setting a very rigid framework within which you can receive sensible answers. You set the discursive terms, with your lived experience and your assumptions about how things look and work. In moments of particular self-honesty you’ll own that this is probably all about assumptions when you get right down to it. You know that there are problems with this. You’ll do it anyway, because this is what we do.

We set the discursive terms. We make them learn our language. We make them meet us all the way and we never ask them what they wanted, because it doesn’t occur to us to wonder if they ever wanted anything to begin with.

But: How does it make you feel?

So you have to wonder if any of us care. And you already know that that isn’t the important part. The important part is that the question gets asked at all.

This entire process is ourselves talking to ourselves. It’s an exercise in massive, masturbatory self-analysis. And while we engage in this self-centered groping, they watch, silent and impassive. To the extent that they give us answers at all, it’s placation. They become the blankness to which we attach anything. They are not self-defining. They allow us that control, a consensual kind of tyranny, a sado-masochistic power exchange. They understand that much. They know what we need to believe. They know what we need.

We always end up telling them everything.

Ten sessions later you’re sobbing on your couch. As a presence, it turns out a drone is comforting. And at least you have tissues.

(Sunny Moraine, 2013/06/03, “All the Literati Keep an Imaginary Friend,” Murmuration, http://murmurationfestival.tumblr.com/post/
52062545981/ all-the-literati-keep-an-imaginary-friend)

Tournament: UMKC | Round: 2 | Opponent: Iowa Shearer-Long | Judge: Murray
The belief that there can be a single universal system of rules that govern any political space, whether it is the government or the debate community, is always biased toward a particular white, male, heterosexual corporeality. There are no universal subject positions. All knowledge and politics is embodied. Our critique is necessary to open up political space to multiple subjectivities who experience their lived realities differently.  This is also an answer to their education standard.

Gatens, 97 (Moira Gatens, Professor of Philosophy at Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, Corporeal Representations in/and the Body Politic, Writing on the body: female embodiment and feminist theory, 1997, p. 85-87)

Forclosing intellectual debate under the guise of policy-making cost-benefit analysis cedes control of the public sphere to dominant discourse and drains the space of critical resistance. Only our position challenges expert knowledges and produces critical investigation and open engagement

Biswas ‘7 (Shampa, Assoc. Prof. @ Whitman College, Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as an International Relations Theorist, Millennium - Journal of International Studies)

Obsessive focus on the event of war ignores its structural causes and makes us blind to systems of oppression.

Cuomo, 96 (Cuomo, Professor at the University of Cincinnati, 1996 Chris J., “War is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence,” Hypatia v11, n4, Fall, p. database)

AND, the impact of structural violence is incalculable, and rendered invisible through traditional debate.

Abu-Jamal, 98 (Mumia, award-winning PA journalist, 9/19, http://www.flashpoints.net/mQuietDeadlyViolence.html)

Wanenchak, 13 (March 22, 2013, Sarah, “Drone Fiction: an expansion,” The Society Pages, http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/03/22/drone-fiction-an-expansion/) 

Chatterjee, 09 (Sushmita Chatterjee, Professor of Political Science, Fictive Images and the Feminist Democratic Imagination http://www.amazon.com/Fictive-Images-Feminist-Democratic-Imagination/dp/1249065194)

Tournament: 2013babyjo | Round: 3 | Opponent: Washburn Lake-Kelly | Judge: Evans
Wanenchak, 13 (March 22, 2013, Sarah, “Drone Fiction: an expansion,” The Society Pages, http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/03/22/drone-fiction-an-expansion/) 

Gatens, 97 (Moira Gatens, Professor of Philosophy at Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, Corporeal Representations in/and the Body Politic, Writing on the body: female embodiment and feminist theory, 1997, p. 85-87)

Forclosing intellectual debate under the guise of policy-making cost-benefit analysis cedes control of the public sphere to dominant discourse and drains the space of critical resistance. Only our position challenges expert knowledges and produces critical investigation and open engagement

Biswas ‘7 (Shampa, Assoc. Prof. @ Whitman College, Empire and Global Public Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as an International Relations Theorist, Millennium - Journal of International Studies)

b. Use of the federal government without previous interrogation of its structures guarantees cooption- it’s an implicit agreement with the status quo mode of acting.

Singer, 90 Joseph William, professor of law at Boston University, September, SYMPOSIUM ON THE RENAISSANCE OF PRAGMATISM IN AMERICAN LEGAL THOUGHT: COMMENT: PROPERTY AND COERCION IN FEDERAL INDIAN LAW: THE CONFLICT BETWEEN CRITICAL AND COMPLACENT PRAGMATISM September, 1990 63 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1821

Perm debate—Perm do both.  Cross-apply our Braidotti card from the 1AC.  Specifically—read highlighted sentences.  

Braidotti, 97 (Rosi Braidotti, Director of Center for the Humanities at Utrecht, Mothers, Monsters, and Machines, Writing on the body: female embodiment and feminist theory, Pg 75-76)

Their K is infinitely more anthropocentric because it focuses on humans as the determinant of nature’s health.  The Negative totalizes nature itself, eliminating humans from nature at the convenience of their argument.

Orion, 5 (11/22, reprinted at http://inmedias.blogspot.com/2005/11/real-anthropocentrism.html)

Tournament: 2013babyjo | Round: 5 | Opponent: Pittsburgh Markus-Woodford | Judge: Wash
6. Strategic reversibility checks their impact – their kritik oversimplifies power relations

Campbell, 98 - professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle - 1998 (David, “Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity,” pg. 204-205)

The political possibilities enabled by this permanent provocation of power and freedom can be specified in more detail by thinking in terms of the predominance of the “bio-power” discussed above. AND The deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated.”

7. Power is inevitable – violence is NOT – the 1AC is key to preserve agency
Bevir, 99 – Department of Political Science @ University of Newcastle – 1999 (Mark, “Foucault and Critique:
Deploying Agency against Autonomy, Political Theory, Volume 27 No. 1, Page 65 February 1999, JSTOR)

Perhaps we might say, therefore, that power or pastoral-power recognizes the value of the subject as an agent, whereas violence or discipline attempts to extinguish the capacity of the subject for agency AND will denounce violent social relations and champion instead a society based on a more benign power.
Embracing a nomadic epistemology enables a break from the targeting logic by dissolving the need for an “Other,” and by erasing the discursive framework set by our hegemonic culture.  By engaging in a nomadic discussion, we can create a space that does not have a need for the Other-as-Target, we can create a space that has no space for the Predator Empire.   

Gatens, 97 (Moira Gatens, Professor of Philosophy at Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, Corporeal Representations in/and the Body Politic, Writing on the body: female embodiment and feminist theory, 1997, p. 85-87)

It is not clear to me, taking into account the history of the constitution of this body politic, that it can accommodate anything but the same. I have suggested that AND The most this will achieve is that we would succeed in throwing off the persona of Echo, who speaks but is not heard, only to join Narcissus at the pool.
Their positivism arguments are the manifestations of a desire to control and impose order but ignore the vital processes of representations 

Bleiker, 1 (Humboldt Fellow at the Institutfiir Sozialwissenschaften Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 30, No. 3 p. 521-2)

A slightly different way of conceptualising postmodern approaches would be to draw attention to their aesthetic qualities AND although they do not revolve around the often lamented relativist abyss that allegedly lurks at the centre of postmodern thought.

Their desire to control the drone betrays the negative’s fears of instability and chaos.  Hacking the drone does nothing—instead, the drone is a metaphor for how we approach politics and relate as subjects to the resolution. Their subsequent drive to control international relations, are one reflection of this hegemonic masculinity. Their vision of the limits and possibilities of IR is framed by a projection and universalization of white, masculine, heteronormative identity.

Tickner, 92 (Professor of International Relations at USC, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspective on Achieving Global Security, 1992, http://library.northsouth.edu/Upload/Gender20in20IR.pdf)

Realism's prescriptions for national security, described above, rest on the claims of its scholars that they are presenting a rational, objective assessment of the international system and the behavior of the states that constitute it. AND , this socially constructed type of masculinity has been projected onto the international behavior of states. The violence with which it is associated has been legitimated through the glorification of war.
The negative speaks from a point of racial privilidge.  Drones may not be a threat to you—but many people who are victimized by the US drone warfare do not only NOT want to hack a drone—but don’t want to come within 100 yards of someone who did.  

Shaw, 13 (Ian GR, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, The University of Glasgow, Scotland, “Predator Empire: The Geopolitics of US Drone Warfare,” GeoPolitics, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14650045.2012.749241#.UjDhzST4uO1, BJM)

The debate over whether or not drone strikes are a “success” is usually focused on their ability to target and eliminate “militants AND these stories are important for rehumanising the abstract discourses of security strategy and the bureaucratic spaces of the disposition matrix.

Tournament: 2013babyjo | Round: 8 | Opponent: Baylor Barron-Evans | Judge: Crowe
PIK

Turn – masking – changing the words we use makes their discursive impacts worse
Meisner 1995  Mark, Professor of environmental studies at York University, “Resourcist Language: The Symbolic Enslavement of Nature”

Changing the language we use to talk about non­human nature is not a solution. As I suggested, language is not the problem. Rather, it seems more like a contagious symptom of a deeper and multi-faceted problem that has yet to be fully defined.  AND Consequently, language change and cultural change must go together with social-moral change. It is naive to believe either that language is trivial, or that it is deterministic.

Permutation – do both – the combination shatters discursive oppression

Kurtz 2003 Anna, Chris Oscarson, National Council of Teachers of English Conference on College, Composition and Communication "BookTalk: Revising the Discourse of Hate”

However, Butler also argues that the daily, repeated use of words opens a space for another, more empowering kind of performance. This alternative performance, Butler insists, can be "the occasion for something we might still call agency, AND Thus, as Butler helps us see, language is violence, but only if we allow it to be. She encourages us to believe that words can take on new meanings-ones which forbid stasis, challenge our habits, and open the possibility that teachers and students might be able Lo create spaces for learning in which everyone feels safe.

There is no articulation of how we exclude

Gatens, 97 (Moira Gatens, Professor of Philosophy at Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, Corporeal Representations in/and the Body Politic, Writing on the body: female embodiment and feminist theory, 1997, p. 85-87)

It is not clear to me, taking into account the history of the constitution of this body politic, that it can accommodate anything but the same. AND The most this will achieve is that we would succeed in throwing off the persona of Echo, who speaks but is not heard, only to join Narcissus at the pool.


2AC Colonialism

Cross-apply our word pic answers—they apply here
Permutation resolves it
Resistance to globalization is still gendered
Chow, professor of sociology, 3 – Professor of Sociology at American University (Esther Ngan-ling, former adjunct faculty member in the Center for Asian Studies, “Gender Matters : Studying Globalization and Social Change in the 21st Century”, International Sociology 18, Sep 1, 2003, 455-56)AS
As resistance against globalization is on the rise, AND Defiant nation-states and resistant regional organizations bargain with these global hegemons to address the pressing needs and problems of the South.

Turn—their alt essentializes oppression and racism
Ong, 99 Aihwa Ong, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality, 1999, p. 33-34

More broadly, postcolonial theorists focus on recovering the voices of subjects silenced by patriarchy and colonial rule (The Empire Writes Back is the title of one popular collection); they assume that all contemporary racial, ethnic, and cultural oppressions can all be attributed to Western colonialisms. American appropriations of postcolonial theory have created a unitary discourse of the postcolonial AND This continuum seems to suggest that the further we move in time, the more beholden non-Western countries are to the forms and practices of their colonial past. By and large, anthropologists have been careful to discuss how formerly colonized societies have developed differently in relation to global economic and political dominations and have repositioned themselves differently vis-a-vis capitalism and late modernity. By specifying differences in history, politics, and culture, anthropologists are able to say how the postcolonial formation of Indonesia is quite different from that of India, Nicaragua, or Zaire.



FW
Drones have become the technological symbol of disorder – debate about targeted killing must avoid impossible questions of "drones good or bad" that echo the polarization of status quo political discourse – facts alone will never be enough – instead, we must learn from the complexities surrounding drones and apply them to the concerns of so many about personal security.  AFF is a pre-req to policy-making.
Rothenberg, ’13 Daniel Rothenberg is a professor of practice at the School of Politics and Global Studies, ASU and the Lincoln fellow for Ethics and International Human Rights Law. He is editing a book with Peter Bergen on drones to be published later this year. "What the Drone Debate Is Really About"; May 6, 2013; http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/05/drones_in_the_united_states_what_the_debate_is_really_about.html

The term drone draws attention, elicits passions, and sparks heated discussions. Often the debate about drones flattens the complexity of real policy issues as the questions asked demand impossible answers, “Are drones good or bad?” or “Are you for or against drones?” AND The challenge we face as a society is not simply how to regulate drones (which is clearly necessary) but rather how to learn from the passions they inspire such that we connect serious policy debate on emerging technologies with a respect and acknowledgement for the very real fears of so many.


DA
The threat of apocalypse is fundamental to modern biopolitics, directly underscoring the ability to mobilize and annihilate entire populations.

Coviello, 00 (Peter Coviello, Assistant Professor of English at Bowdoin College, Apocalypse From Now On, 2000)

Perhaps. But to claim that American culture is at present decisively postnuclear is not to say that the world we inhabit is in any way post-apocalyptic AND For a state that would arm itself not with the power to kill its population, but with a more comprehensive power over the patters and functioning of its collective life, the threat of an apocalyptic demise, nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic initiative that can scarcely be done without.

Colonialism
Embracing human finitude makes life calculable, and this calculability allows life to be devalued to the zero-point of holocaust, straight turning their entire case

Dillon, 99 (Dillon, Professor of Politics in Politics and IR at the University of Lancaster (UK), 1999 Michael, “Another Justice,” Political Theory, v27, i2, p. database)

Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability.35 Thus no valuation without mensuration and no mensuration without indexation. AND It knows that neither 'decision' nor responsibility will ever discharge each other in relation to this Otherness. Since undecidable is therefore what 'we' are-or suffer-an ethos may arise governed by the desire continuously to make way for the immeasurable responsibility consequent upon it. Such an ethos, it may then be said-I would want to say-is what distinguishes political life