Blake Invitational 1 Kamiak nb aff

Sexual offenders use plea bargains to quickly resolve cases, normalizing sexual crimes.

CSOM n.d. Center for Sex Offender Management. n.d. “Plea Negotiations.” http://www.csom.org/pubs/cap/1/1_1.htm

Many cases involving sex offenses do not proceed to trial; rather, they are commonly resolved through plea negotiations. Plea negotiations can be beneficial in multiple ways, such as promoting the timely resolution of cases, minimizing the likelihood of system–induced trauma for victims and their families, avoiding the potential for a not–guilty verdict at trial, and limiting appellate issues. Despite the advantages, however, certain aspects of plea negotiations must be taken into account when adult and juvenile sex offense cases are involved, namely because of the potential for unanticipated collateral consequences (see, e.g., Cumming and Buell, 1997; Holmgren, 1999; Klotz, Wexler, Sales, and Becker, 1992; NAPN, 1993; Strate et al., 1996). To illustrate, some plea agreements may eliminate the sex offense component of the case (e.g., reducing a charge from forcible rape to aggravated assault), which can inadvertently imply to the victim that the offense was actually less harmful or serious. And when cases involve multiple victims, agreeing to drop some of these charges in exchange for a guilty plea to a more limited set of charges can have the same effect. Furthermore, eliminating the sex offense nature of the crime through plea negotiations can limit the eventual applicability of common sex offender management strategies such as offense–specific treatment, specialized supervision and monitoring strategies, and sex offender registration and community notification laws (Holmgren, 1999; NAPN, 1993). Thus, to the extent possible, plea negotiations should ensure that the sexually abusive aspects of the crime remain visible. The use of Alford and nolo contendere/no–contest pleas in sex offense cases can be similarly problematic (Cumming and Buell, 1997; Klotz et al., 1992; Strate et al., 1996). Typically, when defendants offer a plea of guilty, the factual basis for the plea must be established, whereby the individual must acknowledge in open court the details contained in the allegations or charging document. With Alford pleas, however, criminal defendants are allowed, under certain circumstances, to plead guilty to an offense while maintaining their innocence. And with nolo contendere pleas, defendants agree to accept the consequences for a crime without either admitting or denying the facts of the crime. Much like charge bargaining, these types of plea agreements can invalidate victims’ experiences in sex offense cases. Moreover, because the defendants are not required to acknowledge having committed the offenses for which they ultimately receive convictions, plea agreements of this nature can exacerbate offender denial and minimization, and undermine the treatment and supervision process (Cumming and Buell, 1997; Holmgren, 1999; Klotz et al., 1992). In order to ensure that plea agreements are well–informed and appropriate for both offenders and victims, they must be guided by sufficient information about the defendant, the offense behaviors, and community safety needs (English et al., 1996; Holmgren, 1999; NAPN, 1993; Schafran et al., 2001b). Therefore, prior to engaging in plea negotiations, prosecutors should seek thorough assessments of the defendant (Holmgren, 1999; NAPN, 1993). (For additional information about these and other assessments, see the Assessment section of this protocol.) Generally speaking, it is not recommended that forensic evaluators conduct specialized psychosexual evaluations prior to the adjudication process because of the potential for ethical and other controversies (e.g., self–incrimination, revealing additional undetected offenses that may be charged, undermining the presumption of innocence). However, these evaluations can be potentially useful during the plea negotiation process under prescribed circumstances, such as when all parties agree to the evaluation to facilitate negotiations, or when the prosecution agrees not to file additional charges based on information disclosed during a pre–plea evaluation. Ideally, victims should be consulted prior to reaching plea agreements; this is mandated in many states’ victims’ rights provisions. Furthermore, plea negotiations and alternative disposition recommendations should include requirements that sexually abusive individuals accept responsibility and demonstrate a willingness to fully engage in sex offense–specific treatment (Holmgren, 1999; NAPN, 1993; Schafran et al., 2001a, 2001b). Given the overarching goal of ensuring community safety, prosecutors may decide not to participate in plea negotiations. In the event that they do, judges may choose not to accept such pleas, particularly when defendants deny responsibility, fail to demonstrate treatment amenability, or refuse to cooperate with assessment processes (English, Jones, and Patrick, 2003; Holmgren, 1999; NAPN, 1993). Plea negotiations will remain a common and sometimes necessary case management strategy at this phase in the criminal and juvenile justice process. As such, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges must understand the potential caveats of certain plea bargaining practices with sex offense cases, and ensure that any plea agreements appropriately balance due process, offender accountability, and victims’ needs and interests in a way that promotes effective management efforts.

And this perception leads to more sexual crimes- 2 warrants:

A Plea bargains leads to less rape convictions and more rape.

Williams 10 Bracketed for Clarity Rachel Williams, 3-20-2010, "Fewer rape convictions because plea bargains prevail, report suggests," Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/mar/20/rape-convictions-lady-stern-cps

Hundreds of convictions gained in rape cases are actually for lesser offences, official figures reveal. In her landmark review into the handling of rape cases, Lady Stern suggested this week that there should be greater focus on the fact that of rape cases that got to court, 58 ended in conviction for rape or a related offence. But Ministry of Justice records show that in 2008 only 38 of rape cases won a conviction for rape itself. Alternative convictions were generally for lower offences such as sexual assault or sexual activity with a child under 16 – a much easier charge to prove because consent is not an issue. But they could also include non-sexual crimes such as a violent attack that was part of the incident, although the Crown Prosecution Service said this was highly unlikely to occur. Alternative convictions could come about because of a plea bargain, where a rape or – more likely – attempted rape charge is dropped after a defendant offers to plead guilty to a lesser sexual offence, or because the jury is given two alternative charges and convicts on the lesser one, acquitting the defendant of rape. Campaigners said reducing rape to a less serious offence was a "kick in the teeth" for victims. "The sentence will be lower, the man will be out sooner, and the victim may also get less or even no compensation," said Ruth Hall, of Women Against Rape. "The rapist will be confirmed in his view that he can get away with rape and is more likely to do it again." When a charge of sex with a minor is used instead of rape it can be particularly harrowing for the victim, because it suggests she consented to the activity. The mother of an underage teenage girl who complained she had been raped by a teenage boy but saw him charged with sexual activity with a child said: "She still is judged by others as a result of this charge and the subsequent pathetic sentence."

B Plea bargaining allows child molesters and pedophiles to serve marginal prison time at no cost and leads to more pedophilia.

Gil 17 Corsey, Gil, 17. “Prosecutor Outraged after 'Lenient' Plea Deal on Pedophile Priest Falls Through.” WDRB 41 Louisville News, 11 May 2017, www.wdrb.com/story/35405911/prosecutor-outraged-after-lenient-plea-deal-on-pedophile-priest-falls-through.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- He's both a convicted pedophile and a priest, and on Thursday Father Joseph Hemmerle was set to confess to molesting a second young boy."We spent weeks hammering out a plea agreement," said Special Prosecutor Leilani Martin. "It was signed."

They Continue:

The attorney also refused to answer any questions from WDRB News outside the courthouse. The deal he turned down offered two years to serve for sex abuse and sodomy but no new prison time as Hemmerle's already behind bars. He's serving a 10-year sentence for child sex abuse charges dating back to the 1970s when he served at Camp Tall Trees. Thursday's case also stems from accusations at the camp. Taking it to trial, Hemmerle faces up to life in prison if convicted. "You can see how lenient the plea agreement was and how forgiving my victim was willing to be," Martin said. "He just wanted to give the guy a chance of resuming his life, and all he wanted him to do was admit he'd done some wrong. That was it." Technically, Fr. Hemmerle is still a catholic priest -- just suspended from ministry. The abrupt reversal left prosecutors angry and stunned. "I am disappointed with how it went today because it was an opportunity for the system to work exactly the way everybody wants it to work," Martin said. "It was an opportunity for justice and mercy to happen at the same time." This plea agreement would have greatly changed Hemmerle's story as he's been steadfast about being falsely accused. For example, during a sentencing hearing in February Hemmerle said, "I state again under oath that I am innocent of all these charges." Martin said she's not pulling the deal off the table, but she is prepared to go in trial on, May 18.

And, sexual abuse negatively affects the entire physiology of the survivors— not a single part of them is untouched.

FCS n.d. Brackets for Clarity (Family Crisis Services, “Effects of Sexual Assault,” FCS, n.d.,

Sexual assault is a personal and destructive crime. Its effects on you and your loved ones can be psychological, emotional, and/or physical. They can be brief in duration or last a very long time. It is important to remember that there is not one "normal" reaction to sexual assault. Therefore, your individual response will be different depending on your personal circumstances. In this section, we explain some of the more common effects that sexual assault victims may experience. There are many emotional and psychological reactions that victims of rape and sexual assault can experience. One of the most common reactions of these is depression. The term "depression" can be confusing since many of the symptoms are experienced by people as normal reactions to events. At some point or another, everyone feels sad or "blue." This also means that recognizing depression can be difficult since the symptoms can easily be attributed to other causes. These feelings are perfectly normal, especially during difficult times. PTSD is not a rare or unusual occurrence, in fact, many people experience PTSD as a result of a traumatic experience such as rape or sexual assault. Some survivors of sexual assault may get so depressed that they think about ending their own life. Suicidal thoughts should be taken very seriously.

This drives them into a life of drug abuse, mass suicide rates, and crime— o/ws neg impacts.

Wood 12, David. “Combat Veterans With PTSD, Anger Issues More Likely To Commit Crimes: New Report.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 9 Oct. 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/09/veterans-ptsd-crime-report_n_1951338.html.

The study of 1,388 combat veterans was completed by a group of researchers led by forensic psychologist Eric B. Elbogen of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Medicine. The researchers found that about 23 percent of those with PTSD and high irritability had been arrested for a criminal offense. Among all of the combat veterans studied, including those with and without combat trauma, 9 percent had been arrested since their combat deployment.

They continue:

The finding that a combination of PTSD and high irritability can lead to criminal misbehavior is important because the treatment for PTSD provided to veterans by the VA and others often doesn’t include therapy designed specifically to reduce irritability, Elbogen told The Huffington Post. Apart from his work at UNC-Chapel Hill, Elbogen is a researcher and clinician at the VA’s Mid-Atlantic Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center in Durham, N.C.

Thus the plan: Resolved: Plea bargaining ought to be abolished for individuals charged with sexual crimes in the United States Criminal Justice System.

ETS 14 Eureka Times-Standard. “No more plea deals for sex offenders.” Eureka Times-Standard, Eureka Times-Standard, 2 Aug. 2014

Why do judges and DAs cook up an alternative universe in which rape is used as a bargaining chip? Do they misunderstand the seriousness of the crime? Are they busy with "more important" cases? Traditionally a rape victim has no voice in the plea bargain and no right to pursue her assaulters as she deems fit. In the most basic terms, plea deals are between the prosecutor and defense that the judge must agree to accept for it to go forward. What justice is there for a rape survivor when the offender gets off easy and never has to acknowledge his crime? Is it fair that a victim must live with issues about intimacy and trust for the remainder of her life? Using rape as a negotiating tool sends a dangerous message to sex criminals and child predators, too. It tells them that the sexual abuse of a female by a male is not actually a serious crime. But according to the FBI, rape is the nation's second most violent crime, trailing only murder. After the occurrence of rape, a victim can experience a multitude of emotional and mental effects that make the reporting process difficult, from shock and anxiety to denial and fear. Sexually assaulting a person is about as close as you can come to killing them. Negotiating with rapists must stop. The only way to accomplish this is to allow victims to have more involvement in plea bargain cases and insist that judges and DAs impose harsher penalties. Letting sexual predators off with a light sentence is a horrific injustice to those who suffer at their hands and forced to live with it every day. Rape victims should have the right to pursue their assaulters as they deem fit and our courts need to ensure that all perpetrators of sex crimes are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

The plan solves- 2 warrants

A Plea bargains let offenders get off with minimal punishment, which increases the likelihood that they’ll become repeat offenders.

Martin 12 Kyle Martin, Staff Writer, 2-11-2012, "Many break law again after first offender sex crime plea," Augusta Chronicle, http://chronicle.augusta.com/news-metro-crime-courts/2012-02-11/many-break-law-again-after-first-offender-sex-crime-plea

Of the 84 people given first offender status for sex crimes in the past 11 years in Richmond County, one-third committed new crimes before their probation expired, an Augusta Chronicle database shows. Some of those new offenses were sex crimes: rape, public indecency and child molestation. Georgia law doesn’t allow first offender status for some sex crimes, including sodomy, incest and child molestation, but records show defendants are allowed to plead to lesser offenses that do qualify for it, such as misdemeanor sexual battery. First offender status allows a person to walk away without the stain of a felony conviction if he or she completes probation or a prison sentence without any violations. District Attorney Ashley Wright said that generally plea bargains are allowed for lesser sex crimes when the evidence isn’t strong or the witnesses are small children who prosecutors are reluctant to place on the witness stand. Louis Hameed, for instance, was charged with aggravated child molestation because a 13-year-old girl gave him oral sex when he was 17. Because they were close in age, Hameed was allowed to plead to a lesser charge. He successfully completed probation and is not a registered sex offender. In another case, William Mark Richardson was charged with aggravated sexual battery but pleaded guilty to misdemeanor false imprisonment. He was one of four defendants accused of inserting a toilet plunger handle into the rectum of a fellow inmate at Augusta’s Youth Detention Center. The victim later gave conflicting statements as to whether penetration occurred, so the prosecutor settled on an agreement with the defense. “They exercised good judgment, and I’m OK with it,” Wright said of her staff. However, some cases come back to haunt prosecutors and open questions about why they were granted first offender status. Gerald Wayne Smith was arrested in 2003 on charges of assaulting three women. An indictment accused him of choking a woman and ordering her to take her clothes off; forcing another woman to give him oral sex; and abducting a third woman who was threatened with murder and forced to perform oral sex. Smith pleaded guilty midway through his trial to two lesser offenses of false imprisonment. He had a prior arrest as a peeping Tom, but that charge was dropped, so he qualified for first offender status. He was given 10 years of probation. Five years later, in 2008, Smith and Tommy Middleton were accused of raping a woman. Smith pleaded guilty to rape and received a six-year sentence, with four years of probation. Middleton received one year in prison and seven years of probation for his Alford plea, which acknowledges a guilty verdict is likely and is treated as a guilty plea by the courts. Forty-five percent of the 84 first offenders listed in the Chronicle database received more than one probation revocation during their sentence. This could be the result of committing a new crime, not complying with court-ordered counseling, not notifying a probation officer of a new address or not paying fines. The rest succesfully completed probation, and most are not on the sex offender registry. One such case is that of Eldrige Bronson, who was indicted on a statutory rape charge at age 18 in 2004 for having sex with a female younger than 16. A year later, he pleaded guilty and received 10 years of probation as a first offender. That probation was terminated early in 2007, and he is not on the registry.

B Plea bargains in sexual assault cases obstructs justice, which continues the perception of sexual crime as “normal”— this prevents survivors from attaining closure and moving on.

ETS 2 Eureka Times-Standard, 8-2-2014, "No more plea deals for sex offenders," No Publication, http://www.times-standard.com/article/ZZ/20140802/NEWS/140808593

Studies show that convicted rapists often spend an extremely short amount of time behind bars. A 45-year-old California soccer coach was sentenced to one year in prison after pleading no contest to raping one of his players while she was drunk and unconscious; A Washington attorney got four defendants off with zero jail time after they raped a 15-year-old-girl; A Montana District Judge sentenced a former high school teacher to 30 days in lockup for raping a 14-year-old student, who later killed herself. The judge stated that the victim was "older than her chronological age" and "as much in control of the situation" as the teacher. An Alabama man was convicted of raping his neighbor when she was 14 and had his 40-year prison sentence suspended in full. The light sentences were all a result of plea deals. Why do judges and DAs cook up an alternative universe in which rape is used as a bargaining chip? Do they misunderstand the seriousness of the crime? Are they busy with "more important" cases? Traditionally a rape victim has no voice in the plea bargain and no right to pursue assaulters as she deems fit. In the most basic terms, plea deals are between the prosecutor and defense that the judge must agree to accept for it to go forward. What justice is there for a rape survivor when the offender gets off easy and never has to acknowledge crime? Is it fair that a victim must live with issues about intimacy and trust for the remainder of her life? Using rape as a negotiating tool sends a dangerous message to sex criminals and child predators, too. It tells them that the sexual abuse of a female by a male is not actually a serious crime. But according to the FBI, rape is the nation's second most violent crime, trailing only murder. After the occurrence of rape, a victim can experience a multitude of emotional and mental effects that make the reporting process difficult, from shock and anxiety to denial and fear. Sexually assaulting a person is about as close as you can come to killing them.

UV

1 Survivors of sexual crimes are rendered invisible — their discussions are silenced because of social pressures — the discussion of the aff is uniquely key.

Patrick 10/14. Wendy L. Patrick, Ph. D. “Sexual Harassment Victims Suffer in Silence: Here´s Why” https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/why-bad-looks-good/201710/sexual-harassment-victims-suffer-in-silence-here-s-why

Sexual harassment is an invisible epidemic because it is severely underreported. Having spent years prosecuting sex crimes, I can share that both research and practice demonstrates that particularly when the suspect and victim are well acquainted, delayed disclosure is closer to the rule than the exception. This is true in some cases even when the victim does not fear the loss of his or her career. Feelings of confusion, guilt, shame, and divided loyalties often result in an unwillingness to report the exploitive behavior immediately after the incident, if at all. Research corroborates the fact that victims are less likely to report sexual assault when they have a close relationship, either personal or professional, with the perpetrator. A study by Bicanic et al. entitled “Predictors of delayed disclosure of rape in female adolescents and young adults,” (2015) found that victims who delayed disclosure of rape were less likely to report the crime to law enforcement or use medical services than victims who disclosed earlier.i They also identified several factors that affected victim disclosure. They found delayed disclosure to be more common among adolescents than young adults, victims who were threatened, penetrated versus assaulted, and victims who were close with their assailant. Yet the reluctance to report acquaintance abuse does not end in young adulthood—particularly when the abuse occurs in the workplace. Cases like Harvey Weinstein´s reveal that the reluctance to report abuse by a colleague or especially a superior remains a significant problem. As victims suffer in silence, the toxic workplace environment takes its physical, emotional, and often financial toll—in terms of absenteeism, and eventually attrition, which can impact future career prospects.

2 Debater’s cognitive biases overestimate high impact scenarios – basic math means you can round the probability of their impacts to almost zero before I even answer the disad.

Nate Cohn 13, covers elections, polling and demographics for The Upshot, a Times politics and policy site. Previously, he was a staff writer for The New Republic. Before entering journalism, he was a research assistant and Scoville Fellow at the Stimson Center “Improving the Norms and Practices of Policy Debate,” Nov 24, http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php/topic,5416.0.html

So let me offer another possibility: the problem isn’t the topic, but modern policy debate. The unrealistic scenarios, exclusive focus on policy scholarship, inability to engage systemic impacts and philosophical questions. And so long as these problems characterize modern policy debate, teams will feel compelled to avoid it.¶ It might be tempting to assign the blame to “USFG should.” But these are bugs, not features of plan-focused, USFG-based, active voice topics. These bugs result from practices and norms that were initially and independently reasonable, but ultimately and collectively problematic. I also believe that these norms can and should be contested. I believe it would be possible for me to have a realistic, accessible, and inclusive discussion about the merits of a federal policy with, say, Amber Kelsie. Or put differently, I’m not sure I agree with Jonah that changing the topic is the only way to avoid being “a bunch of white folks talking about nuke war.”¶ The fact that policy debate is wildly out of touch—the fact that we are “a bunch of white folks talking about nuclear war”—is a damning indictment of nearly every coach in this activity. It’s a serious indictment of the successful policy debate coaches, who have been content to continue a pedagogically unsound game, so long as they keep winning. It’s a serious indictment of policy debate’s discontents who chose to disengage. ¶ That’s not to say there hasn’t been any effort to challenge modern policy debate on its own terms—just that they’ve mainly come from the middle of the bracket and weren’t very successful, focusing on morality arguments and various “predictions bad” claims to outweigh. ¶ Judges were receptive to the sentiment that disads were unrealistic, but negative claims to specificity always triumphed over generic epistemological questions or arguments about why “predictions fail.” The affirmative rarely introduced substantive responses to the disadvantage, rarely read impact defense. All considered, the negative generally won a significant risk that the plan resulted in nuclear war. Once that was true, it was basically impossible to win that some moral obligation outweighed the (dare I say?) obligation to avoid a meaningful risk of extinction.¶ There were other problems. Many of the small affirmatives were unstrategic—teams rarely had solvency deficits to generic counterplans. It was already basically impossible to win that some morality argument outweighed extinction; it was totally untenable to win that a moral obligation outweighed a meaningful risk of extinction; it made even less sense if the counterplan solved most of the morality argument. The combined effect was devastating: As these debates are currently argued and judged, I suspect that the negative would win my ballot more than 95 percent of the time in a debate between two teams of equal ability.¶ But even if a “soft left” team did better—especially by making solvency deficits and responding to the specifics of the disadvantage—I still think they would struggle. They could compete at the highest levels, but, in most debates, judges would still assess a small, but meaningful risk of a large scale conflict, including nuclear war and extinction. The risk would be small, but the “magnitude” of the impact would often be enough to outweigh a higher probability, smaller impact. Or put differently: policy debate still wouldn’t be replicating a real world policy assessment, teams reading small affirmatives would still be at a real disadvantage with respect to reality. . ¶ Why? Oddly, this is the unreasonable result of a reasonable part of debate: the burden of refutation or rejoinder, the responsibility of debaters to “beat” arguments. If I introduce an argument, it starts out at 100 percent—you then have to disprove it. That sounds like a pretty good idea in principle, right? Well, I think so too. But it’s really tough to refute something down to “zero” percent—a team would need to completely and totally refute an argument. That’s obviously tough to do, especially since the other team is usually going to have some decent arguments and pretty good cards defending each component of their disadvantage—even the ridiculous parts. So one of the most fundamental assumptions about debate all but ensures a meaningful risk of nearly any argument—even extremely low-probability, high magnitude impacts, sufficient to outweigh systemic impacts. ¶ There’s another even more subtle element of debate practice at play. Traditionally, the 2AC might introduce 8 or 9 cards against a disadvantage, like “non-unique, no-link, no-impact,” and then go for one and two. Yet in reality, disadvantages are underpinned by dozens or perhaps hundreds of discrete assumptions, each of which could be contested. By the end of the 2AR, only a handful are under scrutiny; the majority of the disadvantage is conceded, and it’s tough to bring the one or two scrutinized components down to “zero.”¶ And then there’s a bad understanding of probability. If the affirmative questions four or five elements of the disadvantage, but the negative was still “clearly ahead” on all five elements, most judges would assess that the negative was “clearly ahead” on the disadvantage. In reality, the risk of the disadvantage has been reduced considerably. If there was, say, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform would pass, an 80 percent chance that political capital was key, an 80 percent chance that the plan drained a sufficient amount of capital, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform was necessary to prevent another recession, and an 80 percent chance that another recession would cause a nuclear war (lol), then there’s a 32 percent chance that the disadvantage caused nuclear war. ¶ I think these issues can be overcome. First, I think teams can deal with the “burden of refutation” by focusing on the “burden of proof,” which allows a team to mitigate an argument before directly contradicting its content. ¶ Here’s how I’d look at it: modern policy debate has assumed that arguments start out at “100 percent” until directly refuted. But few, if any, arguments are supported by evidence consistent with “100 percent.” Most cards don’t make definitive claims. Even when they do, they’re not supported by definitive evidence—and any reasonable person should assume there’s at least some uncertainty on matters other than few true facts, like 2+2=4.¶ Take Georgetown’s immigration uniqueness evidence from Harvard. It says there “may be a window” for immigration. So, based on the negative’s evidence, what are the odds that immigration reform will pass? Far less than 50 percent, if you ask me. That’s not always true for every card in the 1NC, but sometimes it’s even worse—like the impact card, which is usually a long string of “coulds.” If you apply this very basic level of analysis to each element of a disadvantage, and correctly explain math (.4*.4*.4*.4*.4=.01024), the risk of the disadvantage starts at a very low level, even before the affirmative offers a direct response. ¶ Debaters should also argue that the negative hasn’t introduced any evidence at all to defend a long list of unmentioned elements in the “internal link chain.” The absence of evidence to defend the argument that, say, “recession causes depression,” may not eliminate the disadvantage, but it does raise uncertainty—and it doesn’t take too many additional sources of uncertainty to reduce the probability of the disadvantage to effectively zero—sort of the static, background noise of prediction.¶ Now, I do think it would be nice if a good debate team would actually do the work—talk about what the cards say, talk about the unmentioned steps—but I think debaters can make these observations at a meta-level (your evidence isn’t certain, lots of undefended elements) and successfully reduce the risk of a nuclear war or extinction to something indistinguishable from zero. It would not be a factor in my decision.¶ Based on my conversations with other policy judges, it may be possible to pull it off with even less work. They might be willing to summarily disregard “absurd” arguments, like politics disadvantages, on the grounds that it’s patently unrealistic, that we know the typical burden of rejoinder yields unrealistic scenarios, and that judges should assess debates in ways that produce realistic assessments. I don’t think this is too different from elements of Jonah Feldman’s old philosophy, where he basically said “when I assessed 40 percent last year, it’s 10 percent now.”¶ Honestly, I was surprised that the few judges I talked to were so amenable to this argument. For me, just saying “it’s absurd, and you know it” wouldn’t be enough against an argument in which the other team invested considerable time. The more developed argument about accurate risk assessment would be more convincing, but I still think it would be vulnerable to a typical defense of the burden of rejoinder. ¶ To be blunt: I want debaters to learn why a disadvantage is absurd, not just make assertions that conform to their preexisting notions of what’s realistic and what’s not. And perhaps more importantly for this discussion, I could not coach a team to rely exclusively on this argument—I’m not convinced that enough judges are willing to discount a disadvantage on “it’s absurd.” Nonetheless, I think this is a useful “frame” that should preface a following, more robust explanation of why the risk of the disadvantage is basically zero—even before a substantive response is offered.¶ There are other, broad genres of argument that can contest the substance of the negative’s argument. There are serious methodological indictments of the various forms of knowledge production, from journalistic reporting to think tanks to quantitative social science. Many of our most strongly worded cards come from people giving opinions, for which they offer very little data or evidence. And even when “qualified” people are giving predictions, there’s a great case to be extremely skeptical without real evidence backing it up. The world is a complicated place, predictions are hard, and most people are wrong. And again, this is before contesting the substance of the negative’s argumenterror—if deemed necessary.¶ So, in my view, the low probability scenario is waiting to be eliminated from debate, basically as soon as a capable team tries to do it.¶ That would open to the door to all of the arguments, previously excluded, de facto, by the prevalence of nuclear war impacts. It’s been tough to talk about racism or gender violence, since modest measures to mitigate these impacts have a difficult time outweighing a nuclear war. It’s been tough to discuss ethical policy making, since it’s hard to argue that any commitment to philosophical or ethical purity should apply in the face of an existential risk. It’s been tough to introduce unconventional forms of evidence, since they can’t really address the probability of nuclear war

UV 2: K

1 Empirics prove the world is better – pessimism is factual nonsense.

Norberg 17 Johan, Senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. “Despite many obstacles, the world is getting better” February 14, 2017.

If someone had told you in 1990 that over the next 25 years world hunger would decline by 40, child mortality would halve, and extreme poverty would fall by three quarters, you’d have told them they were a naive fool. But the fools were right. This is truly what has happened. Even though all the millennium development goals (MDGs) were not met, the world has been a stunning development success over the last 25 years. The most important goal, to halve by 2015 the number living in extreme poverty in 1990, was met five years early. But when we discuss the UN’s new sustainable development goals (SDGs), there is widespread pessimism. International cooperation is not what it used to be, and some leading politicians are actively undermining it. After Brexit, the rise of nationalism in Europe and the election of Donald Trump in the US, suddenly China’s Xi Jinping is not laughed off the Davos stage when he presents himself as the defender of globalisation and international cooperation. Deborah Doane is right to worry that rich countries will spend their energy on domestic affairs and squabbles rather than on the development agenda. Even so, I am optimistic about world development, for the simple fact that we overestimate the need for big pushes to development. Howard Steven Friedman of Columbia University has tried to find out what effect the MDG project had by looking at what happened to MDG indicators before and after September 2000, when they were agreed upon. It turns out that most of the indicators did not experience an acceleration after 2000, they just continued the improvements seen between 1990 and 2000, so in most instances the adoption of the goals did not speed up progress. Where there was an acceleration after 2000, that had usually begun earlier. Food for thought for those who believe that development comes from the top and abroad.

2 Even if politics is bad, scenario analysis of politics is pedagogically valuable- it enhances creativity, deconstructs biases and teaches advocacy skills

Barma et al 16 – (May 2016, Advance Publication Online on 11/6/15, Naazneen Barma, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Brent Durbin, PhD in Political Science from UC-Berkeley, Professor of Government at Smith College, Eric Lorber, JD from UPenn and PhD in Political Science from Duke, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, Rachel Whitlark, PhD in Political Science from GWU, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, “‘Imagine a World in Which’: Using Scenarios in Political Science,” International Studies Perspectives 17 (2), pp. 1-19)

What Are Scenarios and Why Use Them in Political Science? Scenario analysis is perceived most commonly as a technique for examining the robustness of strategy. It can immerse decision makers in future states that go beyond conventional extrapolations of current trends, preparing them to take advantage of unexpected opportunities and to protect themselves from adverse exogenous shocks. The global petroleum company Shell, a pioneer of the technique, characterizes scenario analysis as the art of considering “what if” questions about possible future worlds. Scenario analysis is thus typically seen as serving the purposes of corporate planning or as a policy tool to be used in combination with simulations of decision making. Yet scenario analysis is not inherently limited to these uses. This section provides a brief overview of the practice of scenario analysis and the motivations underpinning its uses. It then makes a case for the utility of the technique for political science scholarship and describes how the scenarios deployed at NEFPC were created. The Art of Scenario Analysis We characterize scenario analysis as the art of juxtaposing current trends in unexpected combinations in order to articulate surprising and yet plausible futures, often referred to as “alternative worlds.” Scenarios are thus explicitly not forecasts or projections based on linear extrapolations of contemporary patterns, and they are not hypothesis-based expert predictions. Nor should they be equated with simulations, which are best characterized as functional representations of real institutions or decision-making processes (Asal 2005). Instead, they are depictions of possible future states of the world, offered together with a narrative of the driving causal forces and potential exogenous shocks that could lead to those futures. Good scenarios thus rely on explicit causal propositions that, independent of one another, are plausible—yet, when combined, suggest surprising and sometimes controversial future worlds. For example, few predicted the dramatic fall in oil prices toward the end of 2014. Yet independent driving forces, such as the shale gas revolution in the United States, China’s slowing economic growth, and declining conflict in major Middle Eastern oil producers such as Libya, were all recognized secular trends that—combined with OPEC’s decision not to take concerted action as prices began to decline—came together in an unexpected way. While scenario analysis played a role in war gaming and strategic planning during the Cold War, the real antecedents of the contemporary practice are found in corporate futures studies of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Raskin et al. 2005). Scenario analysis was essentially initiated at Royal Dutch Shell in 1965, with the realization that the usual forecasting techniques and models were not capturing the rapidly changing environment in which the company operated (Wack 1985; Schwartz 1991). In particular, it had become evident that straight-line extrapolations of past global trends were inadequate for anticipating the evolving business environment. Shell-style scenario planning “helped break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2013, 4). Using scenario thinking, Shell anticipated the possibility of two Arab-induced oil shocks in the 1970s and hence was able to position itself for major disruptions in the global petroleum sector. Building on its corporate roots, scenario analysis has become a standard policymaking tool. For example, the Project on Forward Engagement advocates linking systematic foresight, which it defines as the disciplined analysis of alternative futures, to planning and feedback loops to better equip the United States to meet contemporary governance challenges (Fuerth 2011). Another prominent application of scenario thinking is found in the National Intelligence Council’s series of Global Trends reports, issued every four years to aid policymakers in anticipating and planning for future challenges. These reports present a handful of “alternative worlds” approximately twenty years into the future, carefully constructed on the basis of emerging global trends, risks, and opportunities, and intended to stimulate thinking about geopolitical change and its effects.4 As with corporate scenario analysis, the technique can be used in foreign policymaking for long-range general planning purposes as well as for anticipating and coping with more narrow and immediate challenges. An example of the latter is the German Marshall Fund’s EuroFutures project, which uses four scenarios to map the potential consequences of the Euro-area financial crisis (German Marshall Fund 2013). Several features make scenario analysis particularly useful for policymaking.5 Long-term global trends across a number of different realms—social, technological, environmental, economic, and political—combine in often-unexpected ways to produce unforeseen challenges. Yet the ability of decision makers to imagine, let alone prepare for, discontinuities in the policy realm is constrained by their existing mental models and maps. This limitation is exacerbated by well-known cognitive bias tendencies such as groupthink and confirmation bias (Jervis 1976; Janis 1982; Tetlock 2005). The power of scenarios lies in their ability to help individuals break out of conventional modes of thinking and analysis by introducing unusual combinations of trends and deliberate discontinuities in narratives about the future. Imagining alternative future worlds through a structured analytical process enables policymakers to envision and thereby adapt to something altogether different from the known present. Designing Scenarios for Political Science Inquiry The characteristics of scenario analysis that commend its use to policymakers also make it well suited to helping political scientists generate and develop policy-relevant research programs. Scenarios are essentially textured, plausible, and relevant stories that help us imagine how the future political-economic world could be different from the past in a manner that highlights policy challenges and opportunities. For example, terrorist organizations are a known threat that have captured the attention of the policy community, yet our responses to them tend to be linear and reactive. Scenarios that explore how seemingly unrelated vectors of change—the rise of a new peer competitor in the East that diverts strategic attention, volatile commodity prices that empower and disempower various state and nonstate actors in surprising ways, and the destabilizing effects of climate change or infectious disease pandemics—can be useful for illuminating the nature and limits of the terrorist threat in ways that may be missed by a narrower focus on recognized states and groups. By illuminating the potential strategic significance of specific and yet poorly understood opportunities and threats, scenario analysis helps to identify crucial gaps in our collective understanding of global politicaleconomic trends and dynamics. The notion of “exogeneity”—so prevalent in social science scholarship—applies to models of reality, not to reality itself. Very simply, scenario analysis can throw into sharp relief often-overlooked yet pressing questions in international affairs that demand focused investigation. Scenarios thus offer, in principle, an innovative tool for developing a political science research agenda. In practice, achieving this objective requires careful tailoring of the approach. The specific scenario analysis technique we outline below was designed and refined to provide a structured experiential process for generating problem-based research questions with contemporary international policy relevance.6 The first step in the process of creating the scenario set described here was to identify important causal forces in contemporary global affairs. Consensus was not the goal; on the contrary, some of these causal statements represented competing theories about global change (e.g., a resurgence of the nation-state vs. border-evading globalizing forces). A major principle underpinning the transformation of these causal drivers into possible future worlds was to “simplify, then exaggerate” them, before fleshing out the emerging story with more details.7 Thus, the contours of the future world were drawn first in the scenario, with details about the possible pathways to that point filled in second. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that some of the causal claims that turned into parts of scenarios were exaggerated so much as to be implausible, and that an unavoidable degree of bias or our own form of groupthink went into construction of the scenarios. One of the great strengths of scenario analysis, however, is that the scenario discussions themselves, as described below, lay bare these especially implausible claims and systematic biases.8 An explicit methodological approach underlies the written scenarios themselves as well as the analytical process around them—that of case-centered, structured, focused comparison, intended especially to shed light on new causal mechanisms (George and Bennett 2005). The use of scenarios is similar to counterfactual analysis in that it modifies certain variables in a given situation in order to analyze the resulting effects (Fearon 1991). Whereas counterfactuals are traditionally retrospective in nature and explore events that did not actually occur in the context of known history, our scenarios are deliberately forward-looking and are designed to explore potential futures that could unfold. As such, counterfactual analysis is especially well suited to identifying how individual events might expand or shift the “funnel of choices” available to political actors and thus lead to different historical outcomes (Nye 2005, 68–69), while forward-looking scenario analysis can better illuminate surprising intersections and sociopolitical dynamics without the perceptual constraints imposed by fine-grained historical knowledge. We see scenarios as a complementary resource for exploring these dynamics in international affairs, rather than as a replacement for counterfactual analysis, historical case studies, or other methodological tools. In the scenario process developed for NEFPC, three distinct scenarios are employed, acting as cases for analytical comparison. Each scenario, as detailed below, includes a set of explicit “driving forces” which represent hypotheses about causal mechanisms worth investigating in evolving international affairs. The scenario analysis process itself employs templates (discussed further below) to serve as a graphical representation of a structured, focused investigation and thereby as the research tool for conducting case-centered comparative analysis (George and Bennett 2005). In essence, these templates articulate key observable implications within the alternative worlds of the scenarios and serve as a framework for capturing the data that emerge (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). Finally, this structured, focused comparison serves as the basis for the cross-case session emerging from the scenario analysis that leads directly to the articulation of new research agendas. The scenario process described here has thus been carefully designed to offer some guidance to policy-oriented graduate students who are otherwise left to the relatively unstructured norms by which political science dissertation ideas are typically developed. The initial articulation of a dissertation project is generally an idiosyncratic and personal undertaking (Useem 1997; Rothman 2008), whereby students might choose topics based on their coursework, their own previous policy exposure, or the topics studied by their advisors. Research agendas are thus typically developed by looking for “puzzles” in existing research programs (Kuhn 1996). Doctoral students also, understandably, often choose topics that are particularly amenable to garnering research funding. Conventional grant programs typically base their funding priorities on extrapolations from what has been important in the recent past—leading to, for example, the prevalence of Japan and Soviet studies in the mid-1980s or terrorism studies in the 2000s—in the absence of any alternative method for identifying questions of likely future significance. The scenario approach to generating research ideas is grounded in the belief that these traditional approaches can be complemented by identifying questions likely to be of great empirical importance in the real world, even if these do not appear as puzzles in existing research programs or as clear extrapolations from past events. The scenarios analyzed at NEFPC envision alternative worlds that could develop in the medium (five to seven year) term and are designed to tease out issues scholars and policymakers may encounter in the relatively near future so that they can begin thinking critically about them now. This timeframe offers a period distant enough from the present as to avoid falling into current events analysis, but not so far into the future as to seem like science fiction. In imagining the worlds in which these scenarios might come to pass, participants learn strategies for avoiding failures of creativity and for overturning the assumptions that prevent scholars and analysts from anticipating and understanding the pivotal junctures that arise in international affairs.

3 Critique is useless without a concrete alternative that solves for your harms – intellectual stances are worthless.

Bryant 12 Levi Bryant (Professor of Philosophy at Collin College) “A Critique of the Academic Left” 2012 https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/underpants-gnomes-a-critique-of-the-academic-left/

Unfortunately, the academic left falls prey to its own form of abstraction. It’s good at carrying out critiques that denounce various social formations, yet very poor at proposing any sort of realistic constructions of alternatives. This because it thinks abstractly in its own way, ignoring how networks, assemblages, structures, or regimes of attraction would have to be remade to create a workable alternative. Here I’m reminded by the “underpants gnomes” depicted in South Park: The underpants gnomes have a plan for achieving profit that goes like this: Phase 1: Collect Underpants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit! They even have a catchy song to go with their work: Well this is sadly how it often is with the academic left. Our plan seems to be as follows: Phase 1: Ultra-Radical Critique Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Revolution and complete social transformation! Our problem is that we seem perpetually stuck at phase 1 without ever explaining what is to be done at phase 2. Often the critiques articulated at phase 1 are right, but there are nonetheless all sorts of problems with those critiques nonetheless. In order to reach phase 3, we have to produce new collectives. In order for new collectives to be produced, people need to be able to hear and understand the critiques developed at phase 1. Yet this is where everything begins to fall apart. Even though these critiques are often right, we express them in ways that only an academic with a PhD in critical theory and post-structural theory can understand. How exactly is Adorno to produce an effect in the world if only PhD’s in the humanities can understand him? Who are these things for? We seem to always ignore these things and then look down our noses with disdain at the Naomi Kleins and David Graebers of the world. To make matters worse, we publish our work in expensive academic journals that only universities can afford, with presses that don’t have a wide distribution, and give our talks at expensive hotels at academic conferences attended only by other academics. Again, who are these things for? Is it an accident that so many activists look away from these things with contempt, thinking their more about an academic industry and tenure, than producing change in the world? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound! Seriously dudes and dudettes, what are you doing? But finally, and worst of all, us Marxists and anarchists all too often act like assholes. We denounce others, we condemn them, we berate them for not engaging with the questions we want to engage with, and we vilify them when they don’t embrace every bit of the doxa that we endorse. We are every bit as off-putting and unpleasant as the fundamentalist minister or the priest of the inquisition (have people yet understood that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was a critique of the French communist party system and the Stalinist party system, and the horrific passions that arise out of parties and identifications in general?). This type of “revolutionary” is the greatest friend of the reactionary and capitalist because they do more to drive people into the embrace of reigning ideology than to undermine reigning ideology. These are the people that keep Rush Limbaugh in business. Well done! But this isn’t where our most serious shortcomings lie. Our most serious shortcomings are to be found at phase 2. We almost never make concrete proposals for how things ought to be restructured, for what new material infrastructures and semiotic fields need to be produced, and when we do, our critique-intoxicated cynics and skeptics immediately jump in with an analysis of all the ways in which these things contain dirty secrets, ugly motives, and are doomed to fail. How, I wonder, are we to do anything at all when we have no concrete proposals? We live on a planet of 6 billion people. These 6 billion people are dependent on a certain network of production and distribution to meet the needs of their consumption. That network of production and distribution does involve the extraction of resources, the production of food, the maintenance of paths of transit and communication, the disposal of waste, the building of shelters, the distribution of medicines, etc., etc., etc. What are your proposals? How will you meet these problems? How will you navigate the existing mediations or semiotic and material features of infrastructure? Marx and Lenin had proposals. Do you? Have you even explored the cartography of the problem? Today we are so intellectually bankrupt on these points that we even have theorists speaking of events and acts and talking about a return to the old socialist party systems, ignoring the horror they generated, their failures, and not even proposing ways of avoiding the repetition of these horrors in a new system of organization. Who among our critical theorists is thinking seriously about how to build a distribution and production system that is responsive to the needs of global consumption, avoiding the problems of planned economy, ie., who is doing this in a way that gets notice in our circles? Who is addressing the problems of micro-fascism that arise with party systems (there’s a reason that it was the Negri and Hardt contingent, not the Badiou contingent that has been the heart of the occupy movement). At least the ecologists are thinking about these things in these terms because, well, they think ecologically. Sadly we need something more, a melding of the ecologists, the Marxists, and the anarchists. We’re not getting it yet though, as far as I can tell. Indeed, folks seem attracted to yet another critical paradigm, Laruelle. I would love, just for a moment, to hear a radical environmentalist talk about his ideal high school that would be academically sound. How would he provide for the energy needs of that school? How would he meet building codes in an environmentally sound way? How would she provide food for the students? What would be her plan for waste disposal? And most importantly, how would she navigate the school board, the state legislature, the federal government, and all the families of these students? What is your plan? What is your alternative? I think there are alternatives. I saw one that approached an alternative in Rotterdam. If you want to make a truly revolutionary contribution, this is where you should start. Why should anyone even bother listening to you if you aren’t proposing real plans? But we haven’t even gotten to that point. Instead we’re like underpants gnomes, saying “revolution is the answer!”without addressing any of the infrastructural questions of just how revolution is to be produced, what alternatives it would offer, and how we would concretely go about building those alternatives. Masturbation. “Underpants gnome” deserves to be a category in critical theory; a sort of synonym for self-congratulatory masturbation. We need less critique not because critique isn’t important or necessary– it is –but because we know the critiques, we know the problems. We’re intoxicated with critique because it’s easy and safe. We best every opponent with critique. We occupy a position of moral superiority with critique. But do we really do anything with critique? What we need today, more than ever, is composition or carpentry. Everyone knows something is wrong. Everyone knows this system is destructive and stacked against them. Even the Tea Party knows something is wrong with the economic system, despite having the wrong economic theory. None of us, however, are proposing alternatives. Instead we prefer to shout and denounce. Good luck with that.