Is kicking into full gear, you can find it on their newly redesigned web page here
Category Archives: Evidence/Research
Heg Bad Articles
One of the important arguments to win when going for heg bad is a solvency takeout- not that the plan doesn’t boost hegemony, but that hegemony doesn’t reduce conflict. Here is a link to a sick cato article that has a bunch of links to other good articles in it on this point. So good it could be a blinders K card…
Most in Washington still embraces the notion that America is, and forever will be, the world’s indispensable nation. Some scholars, however, questioned the logic of hegemonic stability theory from the very beginning. A number continue to do so today. They advance arguments diametrically at odds with the primacist consensus. Trade routes need not be policed by a single dominant power; the international economy is complex and resilient. Supply disruptions are likely to be temporary, and the costs of mitigating their effects should be borne by those who stand to lose — or gain — the most. Islamic extremists are scary, but hardly comparable to the threat posed by a globe-straddling Soviet Union armed with thousands of nuclear weapons. It is frankly absurd that we spend more today to fight Osama bin Laden and his tiny band of murderous thugs than we spent to face down Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao. Many factors have contributed to the dramatic decline in the number of wars between nation-states; it is unrealistic to expect that a new spasm of global conflict would erupt if the United States were to modestly refocus its efforts, draw down its military power, and call on other countries to play a larger role in their own defense, and in the security of their respective regions.
But while there are credible alternatives to the United States serving in its current dual role as world policeman / armed social worker, the foreign policy establishment in Washington has no interest in exploring them. The people here have grown accustomed to living at the center of the earth, and indeed, of the universe. The tangible benefits of all this military spending flow disproportionately to this tiny corner of the United States while the schlubs in fly-over country pick up the tab.
Cool feature of “General Onefile” database
There is a button on the right side that says “download as mp3” which you can use to download a computer voice reading the article.
K answers wave 1
Topics covered
-top level nonsense like value to life/ontology etc
-security
-IR Fem
-china threat
-zizek
-schmitt
Big thanks to all those who emailed in cards/files/cites
Excellent New Terrorism Impact Card
In response to the “bad cards” post about the popular “Corsi 2005” impact to terrorism, many readers requested suggestions for different cards that could be read to support the same basic argument. This is a difficult task; it is unlikely that a terrorist attack—even one using a nuclear device—would result in the extinction of humanity. But if that’s the argument you want to make, Akshay Bhushan from Greenhill School has cut an excellent card that he was nice enough to share here on The 3NR. Defenders of the Corsi evidence now have no excuse to continuing reading that card.
Nuclear terrorism is an existential threat—it escalates to nuclear war with Russia and China.
Robert Ayson, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies: New Zealand at the Victoria University of Wellington, 2010 (“After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 7, July, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via InformaWorld)
Updated Journal List and Google Reader Bundle
The Crowdsourced List of Critical IR and Critical Security Studies Journals has been updated to include links to most of the publications that have been recommended. I have also created a Google Reader Bundle that includes all of the listed journals as well as several others that I think will be helpful when researching the 2010-2011 military/police presence topic. You’ll still need to access the journals/articles through a subscribing institution, but this way you’ll be notified whenever a new issue is posted. If anyone has suggestions for adding new journals to the bundle, please let me know.
Keep Sending in K answers
The consolidated K answer project has gotten a lot of good responses with a few people in particular going above and beyond and contributing quite a bit.
But there is always more to do! Please email in any contribution you can- cards, cites, books/articles that look good.
Especially for the sort of stock K args that cross over to many different K’s like
-predictions fail
-value to life
-ontology/epistemology/methodology
-reps/language key
-serial policy failure/error replication
-defenses of empiricism and qualifications
-root cause
-terminal extinction impacts like modernity/rationality/technology/neoliberalism/militarism/biopower cause extinction
deathtothek@gmail.com
The Forer Effect and K impacts
From wikipedia:
The Forer effect (also called the Barnum Effect after P.T. Barnum‘s observation that “we’ve got something for everyone”) is the observation that individuals will give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically for them, but are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, and some types of personality tests.
A related and more generic phenomenon effect is that of subjective validation.[1] Subjective validation occurs when two unrelated or even random events are perceived to be related because a belief, expectancy, or hypothesis demands a relationship. Thus people seek a correspondence between their perception of their personality and the contents of a horoscope.
An article quoted on the dish today has a more specific application
The tendency to believe vague statements designed to appeal to just about anyone is called the Forer Effect, and psychologists point to this phenomenon to explain why people fall for pseudoscience like biorhythms, iridology and phrenology or mysticism like astrology, numerology and tarot cards.
The Forer Effect is part of larger phenomenon psychologists refer to as subjective validation, which is a fancy way of saying you are far more vulnerable to suggestion when the subject of the conversation is you.
How does this relate to K impacts? Read on to find out
K answers produced by the multitude
In a few of the podcasts I have mentioned that one of the reasons the K is so successful is that over the years people have spent a ton of time refining their evidence/arguments so that now a K debater going for the cap K has the best evidence on each issue produced by thousands of hours of college and high school debaters working (in isolation but ultimately cooperatively) on their own files.
Bill and I are going to attempt to replicate a similar process this summer and produce answers to some common K arguments that incorporate the best possible evidence for each issue. Our goal is not to try and eradicate the K by making answers so good its impossible to win on it, but to foster better debates by reducing the disparity in quality between neg evidence and aff answers.
My Bad- error in security k file
There is a big error in one of the cards in the security K file I posted.
On page 26 “AT: DA To Alt/Threats Real” the card from Rule 10 is actually 2 cards that I accidentlly smushed together with the elim hard returns macro. Half way down you can see in the small text it says “Hegemony advantage makes the perm impossible- this card will end them”. That should of been a tag to a separate card for the text that follows. In between that section and the section above it text has been omitted.
The text in between should read:
Sometimes recourse to force is inevitable. In international affairs, as in civil life, some particularly destructive personalities and processes can only be blocked with coercion. Confronted by mass killings, unilateral invasion, imminent threat to one’s own territory, widespread ethnic cleansing, and other preventable disasters, all nations should be prepared to act together in response. And the United States should play its part—no more, no less.
But let us never believe the neocons and their allies, for whom all interventions are of a piece. That was the appeal of the liberal hawks, as they canvassed for support for the war at its outset: if you liked American-sponsored peacekeeping in Bosnia, what objection could there be to a reprise of that operation in Iraq? By now, nearly everyone realizes what more thoughtful commentators noted in 2002. The aims and the scale of military efforts were vastly different in these two cases. The Bosnian operation aimed at separating antagonists, stopping massive ethnic cleansing, and forcing the Bosnian Serbs into a peace agreement. The invasion of Iraq sought extirpation of an entrenched regime, followed by top-to-bottom remaking of the country’s political institutions and practices.
Decisions to invoke military force should never be easy. But it is easy to cite a few basic [End Page 86] standards. Obviously, authentic self-defense provides compelling reason for force. Aggressive pre-emption of possible future antagonists does not. Similarly, truly multilateral efforts to quell evident humanitarian emergencies—mass killings, widespread ethnic cleansing, avoidable starvation, and epidemics—should win our support. By contrast, we should look with utmost suspicion on military projects touted with grandiose and speculative future payoffs—”wars to end all wars,” efforts to “nudge” whole regions to adopt new forms of government, or to “drain the swamp” of future terrorists. By now, we should all know better.
A corrected version of the file is here
hat tip- Thomas Hodgman for the correction