Nov PF Topic

Okay my opponent didn't give a tongue twister but honestly, who cares? I am not a fascist unlike some 'progessive' debaters on this site so I believe that relentlessly attacking one mistake is a waste of time.Also, hope you like the worst krtik written of all time :) There is tons of literature against this so I hope that you can forgive me My partner and I negate the resolved: in response to the current crisis, a government should prioritise the humanitarian needs of refugees over its national interests. Observation 1. The resolution is saying “in response to the current crisis”. Because of a lack of clarification, we contend that the current crisis is the global crisis of not providing humanitarian aid to the needs of refugees. Observation 2. The group, Global Humanitarian Assistance, reports, 2015, that the main purpose of providing humanitarian aid is to save lives. Therefore, if we can show that saving lives is something bad, then none of the other effects that providing aid can be justified when met with something bad. Saving lives is an a priori to any of the benefits that the affirmation offers, or, we need to consider this before all else. Observation 3. The purpose of life is two-pronged: to continue life’s own existence and to provide a means for future existence. To say that death is bad is to say, necessarily, that ending the chain of life at its second purpose is bad - this is to say that if we allow death then it is bad because it ends future life as well as current. Contention 1. The affirmation’s obsession with life and preventing death is a heteronormative stance on the way that we see the world. Lee Edelman, professor of English at Tuft’s University, writes in his book ”No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive” (pg. 74-76) in 2004: This conflation of homosexuality with the radical negativity of sinthomosexuality continues to shape our social reality despite the well intentioned efforts of many, gay and straight alike, to normalize queer sexualities within a logic of meaning that finds realization only in and as the future. When the New York Times Magazine, for example, published in 1998 an issue devoted to the status items specific to various demographic groups, Dan Savage found in a baby’s gurgle the music to soothe the gay male beast: ”Gay parents,” he wrote, ”are not only making a commitment to our political future, but to the future, period.... And many of us have decided that we want to fill our time with something more meaningful than sit-ups, circuit parties and designer drugs. For me and my boyfriend, bringing up a child is a commitment to having a future. And considering what the last I5 years were like, perhaps that future is the ultimate status item for gay men.” The messenger here may be a gay man, but the message is that of compulsory reproduction as inscribed on the anti-abortion billboard I mentioned in chapter I: choose life, for life and the baby and meaning hang together in the balance, confronting the lethal counterweight of narcissism, AIDS, and death, all of which spring from commitment to the meaningless eruptions of jouissance associated with the ”circuit parties” that gesture toward the circuit of the drive. This fascism of the baby’s face, which encourages parents, whether gay or straight, to join in a rousing chorus of ”Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” suggests that if few can bring up a child without constantly bringing it up -as if the future secured by the Child, the one true access to social security, could only be claimed for the other’s sake, and never for one’s own- then that future can only belong to those who purport to feel for the other (with all the appropriative implications that such a ”feeling far” suggests). It can only belong to those who accede to the fantasy of a compassion by which they shelter the infant future from sinthomosexuals , who offer it none, seeming, instead, to literalize one of Blake’s queerest Proverbs of Hell: ”Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” 13 Who would side with such ”gravediggers of society” over the guardians of its future? Who would opt for the voiding of meaning over Savage’s ”something more meaningful”? What might Leonard teach us about turning our back on what hangs in the balance and deciding -despite the rhetoric of compassion, futurity, and life-to topple the scales that are always skewed, to put one’s foot down at last, even if doing so costs us the ground on which we, like all others, must stand? Contention 2. Heteronormative stances like these cause violence by excluding the non-normalised queer and making him ”Other”. Gust Yep, Karen Lovaas and John Elia, professors at the University of San Francisco, in their publication ”Journal of Homosexual Studies”, volume 45, No. 2/3/4, in 2004, write: xiii In this passage, Simmons vividly describes the devastating pervasiveness of hatred and violence in her daily life based on being seen, perceived, labeled, and treated as an “Other.” This process of othering creates individuals, groups, and communities that are deemed to be less important, less worthwhile, less consequential, less authorized, and less human based on historically situated markers of social formation such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and nationality. Othering and marginalization are results of an “invisible center” (Ferguson, 1990, p. 3). The authority, position, and power of such a center are attained through normalization in an ongoing circular movement. Normalization is the process of constructing, establishing, producing, and reproducing a taken-for-granted and all-encompassing standard used to measure goodness, desirability, morality, rationality, superiority, and a host of other dominant cultural values. As such, normalization becomes one of the primary instruments of power in modern society (Foucault, 1978/1990). Normalization is a symbolically, discursively, psychically, psychologically, and materially violent form of social regulation and control, or as Warner (1993) more simply puts it, normalization is “the site of violence” (p. xxvi). Perhaps one of the most powerful forms of normalization in Western social systems is heteronormativity. Through heteronormative discourses, abject and abominable bodies, souls, persons, and life forms are created, examined, and disciplined through current regimes of knowledge and power (Foucault, 1978/1990). Heteronormativity, as the invisible center and the presumed bedrock of society, is the quintessential force creating, sustaining, and perpetuating the erasure, marginalization, disempowerment, and oppression of sexual others. Basically what these authors are saying is that the fervent belief that we should save life is a heteronormative stance on viewing morals- and heteronormativity is the complete marginalization of a large group of people. They say that heteronormativity is a form of social control over a group of people, which leads to tyranny and heightened conflict between people. To normalise the queer (or, to put it another way, to make them heterosexual or ’normal’), is the very start of conflict. Oppression only exists when we have the fervent belief that we need to save lives in order to continue the human species (something incompatible with large-scale homosexuality) - end oppression and end marginalisation by voting neg today because if you vote aff, then you are necessarily attempting to save lives, something heteronormative at its core. Thank you.