Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1AR Discourse Ks
1AR Discourse Ks
1AR Discourse Ks
Word Links
Development, poor, poverty [solutions to], poverty sector, public assistance, terrorism,
terrorist, underclass,
Development
The revolutionary critic must always interrogate the institutions and structures that
reproduce the systemic oppressions of modern society; rejection of the roots of those
structures is a necessary prerequisite to unbiased critique
Landstreicher [Wolfi. Barbaric Thoughts: On a Revolutionary Critique of Civilization, the Anarchist Library. February 8, 2010]
Revolutionary critique is a critique that aims to challenge the present society at its roots in order to create a
rupture with what is and bring about radical social transformation. What else could revolutionary mean? But there are many implications here. First of all, revolutionary
critique is practical. It seeks a method for working itself out in the world, for practically challenging the present social order. In other words, it is part of a real struggle against the world that
exists. For this reason, it also begins from the present. A practical, revolutionary challenge to the present will make use of the past and the future, but will not be defined by them. Rather they are
tools to use in the attack against the present social order. Revolutionary critique is a practice that strives to grasp everything immediately here and now. It involves an ongoing, incisive
examination of the state, capitalist social relationships, class struggle and technological development as we encounter them. Since revolutionary critique aims at a rupture with the present order, it
struggles, a few use the rhetoric of justice and rights, our revolutionary battle has nothing to do with justice or rights or any other value external to us. We want to overturn this reality not
because we want our lives back! Morality belongs to this social order. It has been used
to keep us in our place always backed up by the force of arms. Morality serves well for maintaining what
is, because its final word is always constraint. Since we want to destroy what is, we must also destroy morality especially that which exists within us
because it is unjust or evil or even unfree, but
over and over again
so that we can attack this society without constraint. At the same time, revolutionary critique does not reject principles.[1] Rather it helps us to determine a principled manner for acting
The evaluations of the negative are irrelevant in the face of social critique; the judge should
question the motivations and structures upon which the negative relies, and how those
politics affect the personal lives of the people involved in the round before assuming that
the argumentative assumptions upon which the hypothetical world of the NC rests are true.
No matter the context, the word development evokes the memory of what those
lower in society are not, constructing a form of society where the developing are
inferior
Esteva, (Mexican activist, "deprofessionalized intellectual" and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in the Mexican city of Oaxaca - (Gustavo, The Development Dictionary A Guide
to Knowledge as Power, ed by Wolfgang Sachs, p. 10-11)
development
which it is used. or the precise connotation that the person using it wants to give it, the expression becomes qualified and coloured by
meanings perhaps unwanted. The word always implies a favourable change, a step from the simple
to the complex, from the inferior to the superior, from worse to better. The word indicates that one is doing well because one is
advancing in the sense of a necessary, ineluctable, universal law and toward a desirable goal. The word retains to this day the meaning given to it a century ago by the creator of ecology, Haeckel:
'Development is, from this moment on, the magic word with which we will solve all the mysteries that surround
us or. at least. that which will guide us toward their solution.' But for two-thirds of the people on earth, this positive meaning of the word 'development' - profoundly rooted after two centuries
of its social construction -is a reminder of what they are not. It is a reminder of an undesirable, undignified condition. To escape
from it, they need to be enslaved to others' experiences and dreams.
successfully usurped and transmogrified. A political and philosophical proposition of Marx, packaged the era of development. American-style as a struggle against communism and at the service
succeeded in permeating both the popular and intellectual mind for the rest of the
century. Underdevelopment began, then, on January 20, 1949. On -that day,-two billion people became underdeveloped. In a real sense,
from that time on, they ceased being what they were, in all their diversity, and were transmogrified
into an inverted mirror of others' reality: a mirror that belittles them and sends them off to the end
of the queue, a mirror that defines their identity, which is really that of a heterogeneous and diverse majority, simply in the terms of
a homogenizing and narrow minority
of the hegemonic design of the United States,
Gilbert
, Professor of Political Science and teaches social and cultural anthropology, inter-cultural relations, and the history of development theories at the Graduate Institute of
Development Studies, 2010, Deconstructing Development Discourse, Buzzwords and Fuzzwords, p. 25
The time has come and it is indeed high time to debunk the development buzzword. To do so means that we
must define it properly relying on actual social practices, rather than wishful thinking. We must
be aware of its inclusion in a corpus of beliefs that are difficult to shatter, expose its mischievous
uses, and denounce its consequences. The most important thing, however, is to make it plain that
there is life after development certainly a different one from what we in the privileged regions are used to, but there is no evidence to suggest that we would lose
on such a deal.
Poverty
Using the word poor to refer to a group of people creates a dualism between the
normal and abnormal between the good and evil. This degenerates to violent
hatred of the target of their NC.
Ross 91 [Thomas, Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh, Georgetown Law Journal, The Rhetoric of Poverty: Their Immorality, Our Helplessness, p. 1513-1528, AD: 5/27/09) JL]
The first rhetorical step, the creation of the abstraction the "poor," is an easily overlooked yet
powerful part of the rhetoric of poverty . We are so used to speaking of the poor as a distinct class that
we overlook the rhetorical significance of speaking this way. By focusing on the single variable of economic
wealth and then drawing a line on the wealth continuum, we create a class of people who are them,
not us. Creating this abstraction is, in one sense, merely a way of speaking. We do this because to speak of the world
in sensible ways we must resort to categories and abstractions. There are meaningful differences
between the circumstances of people below the poverty line and the circumstances of middle class
people, and to ignore these real differences can lead to injustice . n2 Thus, to speak of the "poor" is a sensible way to [*1500] talk. In
the rhetorical context, however, it is also much more. The creation of the category of the "poor", also makes possible the
assertion of their moral weakness. To assert their moral weakness, "they" must exist as a
conceptually distinct group. There is a long history of speaking of the poor as morally weak, or even
degenerate. n3 Thus, when we hear legal rhetoric about the poor, we often hear an underlying message of
deviance: we are normal, they are deviant. Our feelings about their deviance range [*1501] from empathy to violent hatred. Still, even in the
most benevolent view, they are not normal . Their deviance is a product of a single aspect of their lives, their relative wealth position. All other
aspects of their lives are either distorted by the label of deviance or ignored. By creating this class of
people, we are able at once to distinguish us from them and to appropriate normalcy to our lives
and circumstances. The rhetorical assertion of judicial helplessness is also connected to widely shared
and long-standing cultural assumptions about the nature of poverty . This rhetoric depends on the assumption that poverty is
somehow built into the basic structure of our society and system of law. We assume that the eradication of poverty, even if possible in theory, would require the radical transformation of our
The causes of poverty, we assume, are a product of a complex set of factors tied to politics,
culture, history, psychology, and philosophy. Thus, only in a radically different world might poverty
cease to exist. And, whatever the extent of the powers of the Court, radically remaking the world is not one of them. n4
society.
The role of the intellectual is to critically engage and question the negatives method
of knowledge production surrounding poverty. By discussing who the poor are and
what we should do about them, we construct a system of discursive violence that
strips the identified poor of their ability to act and defines their identity. Rejection
is key.
Yapa
[Lakshman, Prof of Geography @ Pennsylvania State, What Causes Poverty? A Post-Modern View, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 86, No. 4 (Dec., 1996), pp. 707728, AD: 5/27/09) JL]
My view of
on developmentfree-market, socialist,
environmentally sustainable, grassroots development, and so on. "[S]uch analyses have generated proposals to modify the current regime of development: ways to improve upon this or that
has at least two meanings: one is the sense of author as subjectas in the academic triangle of subject, object, and discourse. The other sense is more personal: if I were to discuss "poverty" at a
particular place and time, what topics will I choose to examine, what techniques of investigation will I use, what political and moral values will I bring to bear on the research? Important as it is, I
does not treat the poor as a target group; in that sense, this particular academic work will not make any immediate material difference to the lives of the poor, although there is nothing to prevent
institutional arrangements have sometimes focused on segregating the poor putting them in workhouses, for example to keep them away from the rest of us. Sometimes they have been
concerned to normalise the poor giving lessons in budgetary management, good housekeeping, or parenting with the aim of making them more like us. At other times the emphasis has
Discourses may also conditionally empower or give power to poor people. Poor people may be enabled to look for work, to take courses, to receive extra benefits, to keep their children, so
long as they prove that they are the right sort of poor people.
Links
Words
Speaking of a poverty sector as a thing we can locate creates an inauthentic
understanding of poverty.
Pacchioli 96 [David, Editor for researchers at Penn State, Deconstructing Poverty, June, research/penn state, http://www.rps.psu.edu/jun96/poverty.html, AD: 5/28/09) JL]
Speaking of a "poverty sector," Yapa suggests, creates a simplistic understanding in which the problem -as well as the poor themselves -- can be located (and separated) in physical space. In order to attack poverty
effectively, he argues, we must first "unpack" this kind of language. Thus, he has devoted some of his efforts to debunking basic geographic tools like the
GNP-per-capita map, whose widespread use in classrooms and textbooks "contributes to the myths of poverty and development." Yapa's objections to the GNP-per-capita map are manifold. First,
Public discourse on the underclass glosses over the real causes of poverty,
constructing an image that represented that status as morally reprehensible
Ross 91 [Thomas, Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh, Georgetown Law Journal, The Rhetoric of Poverty: Their Immorality, Our Helplessness, p. 1513-1528, AD: 5/28/09) JL]
The "underclass" thus was a late twentieth century form of the historically [*1508] persistent category, the undeserving poor. And like its historical
antecedents, the idea of the "underclass" seemed to be driven more by ideology than by any attempt accurately to generalize about
the circumstances and nature of poverty in America. Michael Katz contrasted the idea of the underclass and the
reality: [A]s a metaphor, the underclass obscures more than it reveals. It glosses over differences in
condition that require varied forms of help, and it passes lightly over two salient features of poverty
and welfare in America: their widespread and transient character . In the Michigan study, which followed a large sample of
American families for 10 years, . . . [b]oth poverty and welfare use . . . lasted relatively briefly, and children whose parents relied on welfare were no more likely to need public assistance as
adults than were others in the sample. What the study shows, in short, is that poverty is more accurately perceived now, as before in American history, as a point on a continuum rather than a
sharp, clearly demarcated category of social experience. In truth, the forces that push individuals and families into poverty originate in the structure of America's political economy. Some of us
The word poverty carries with it the discursive construction of a way to separate
the rich from the poor. It only helps to stabilize the system of oppression.
Bendix 5 [Daniel, student of political science at the Free University of Berlin/Germany, Development as Discourse, 8/25, http://www.africavenir.com/publications/studentpapers/BendixDevelopmentasDiscourse.pdf, AD: 5/30/09) JL]
Western/Northern domination is not so much based on military or economic might, but on what with Foucault can be called the
economy of truth production. Thus a specific way of looking at poverty and therefore a specific way
of dealing with poverty have emerged in the discourse on development, splitting the complex world
into a poor/underdeveloped and a rich/developed half. This serves the interests of international organisations like the World Bank who can
I have to conclude that
pursue their principles, the moneywise rich people of the world in general, who thus do not have to question their richness and destructing way of life and, of course, international companies who
Claims/Actions
The idea of a solution to end poverty only feeds into the trap of development
which reproduces the case harms
Yapa 96 [Lakshman, Prof of Geography @ Pennsylvania State, What Causes Poverty? A Post-Modern View, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 86, No. 4 (Dec.,
1996), pp. 707-728, AD: 6/17/09) JL]
To resolve the problems of the poor it is first necessary that we abandon the frame of
mind that demands a "solution to the problem," that we entertain a postmodern incredulity toward metanarratives (Lyotard 1979). I believe that
the concept of "a solution to poverty" is a metanarrative in itself. Yet hunger and homelessness are
real; if development is not the answer, then what is? In my view it is simply wrong to equate the terms "development" and
"solution" because they are mutually antagonistic concepts. First we must be willing to entertain the
hypothesis that development creates scarcity (Yapa and Wisner 1995; Sachs 1992; Esteva 1992). If development creates
scarcity, then it cannot be true that lack of development (underdevelop ment) is the cause of poverty.
What is important is to pay careful attention to the way the argument against development is
structured, and to understand the specific details of the critique. Any resolution of the poverty
problem can arise only from knowledge of the details of that critique . Of course, at the same time we must resist
the temptation to tell still another grand narrativethe story of a new societybased on visions of alternative, authentic, or
sustainable development , of "another" development, or even a postdevelopment era. The danger is that since development is a grand
idea to begin with, an "alternative solution" must appear to be equally grand to measure up to the
task.
Solution as Metanarrative.
Security
Terror
Terrorism scholarship is beset by multiple epistemological flaws- no consistent
definition, no primary sources, narrow focus on policy making, and exaggeration of
the threat. The flaws in knowledge production have to be resolved before proper
analysis of the NC can begin; this is a preempt to their offense.
Jackson 8 [Richard(Director at the National Center for Peace and Conflict Studies), 2/14/08, The Study of Terrorism after 11 September 2001: Problems, Challenges and Future
Developments, Political Studies Review, volume: 7, p. 171.184, CPO)
More than seven years after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, the exceptional nature of these crimes
and the subsequent global war on terror continue to generate a vast literature. Research by Andrew Silke
suggests that a new book on terrorism is published every six hours in the English language, and
that on current trends it will soon be the case that over 90 per cent of all terrorism studies literature
will have been published since 2001 (Shepherd, 2007).There are literally thousands of academic books, articles,
reports and PhD dissertations published every year on terrorism in addition to a vast popular cultural and political corpus of terrorism
texts. However, recent reviews of the scholarly literature on terrorism suggest that the field is beset by a
persistent set of conceptual, epistemological, methodological and political normative weaknesses
and challenges (see Burnett and Whyte, 2005; Jackson, 2007a; Jackson et al., 2009; Ranstorp, 2006; Silke, 2004a). Some of the main problems
identified include, but are not limited to: the failure to develop rigorous theories or even to agree on a definition
or set of identifying criteria for the fields primary concept; a reliance on secondary sources and a
failure to undertake primary research, particularly in terms of face-to-face engagement with
terrorists; a narrow focus on a restricted set of topics frequently tailored to the demands of policy
makers for practically useful knowledge; large numbers of new scholars lacking adequate
grounding in the existing literature; and a persistent tendency to treat the current terrorist threat
as unprecedented and exceptional. For the most part, terrorism research that is theoretically and
methodologically sophisticated, intellectually independent, based on primary sources, normatively
sensitised and rooted in the existing literature is, unfortunately, relatively rare.
You as an academic should reject the negative and their terrorizing rhetoric
discursive rejection is the only way to solve the repression of entire cultures and
peoples
Kapitan [Tomis, Professor of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University, Indiana State University, Birzeit University, East Carolina
University, The American University of Beirut, and Bogazici University in Istanbul, editor of Philosophical Perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict,, Archaeology, History, and Culture in Palestine and the Near East. James Sterba, ed., Terrorism and International Justice (Oxford, 2003),
47-66, The Terrorism of Terrorism]
State Department has developed just four basic policy tenets for dealing with terrorism: First, make no concession to terrorists and strike no deals. Second, bring terrorists to justice for their
crimes. Third, isolate and apply pressure on states that sponsor terrorism to force them to change their behavior. Fourth, bolster the counterterrorist capabilities of those countries that work with
acceptance by the general public. 24 There are legitimate ways of responding to terrorist actions without responding with terrorism. Granting that terrorism is wrongful and intolerable, law
enforcement agencies must make every effort to identify, apprehend, and prosecute individuals and organizations responsible for specific terrorist actions. A resort to force should occur only after
the appropriate legal channels have been exhausted, and here one must be careful to target only those for whom one has firm evidence of terrorist activity. But it is a mistake to think of all
terrorism merely as a problem of criminal offense and law enforcement. Persistent terrorism stemming from a given population is indicative of a serious political disorder. As long as the members
of that population are outraged over perceived injustices and decide that terrorism is the only viable form of redress, then mere police action, coupled with a repeated failure to address their
of knowingly furthering terrorism. Should they intend to bring that result, then they are themselves guilty of terrorist actions. Language moulds thought, and thought precipitates action. The
pejorative bias that infects the current employment of terrorism and terrorist discourages a clear moral assessment of political conflicts like that between Israelis and Palestinians. If these
words cannot be used in a consistent and unprejudiced manner, then they are obstacles in the path towards the resolution of such conflicts and stimulators of further violence against civilians.
if terrorism has no place in a civilized world, then the rhetoric of terror has no place in the
civilized discourse of today.
Consequently,