Fear Kritik - Corey Sunwold
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Americans Are Very Afraid Be afraid, be very afraid Index
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Basics: Critique Brief Shell 2nc Overview w/ extensions 2nr Overview w/ extensions
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Links: Overfishing Global Warming
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Other cool cards: The Media is the Problem Media + Corporations=Exploitation
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Blocks: A2: Perm A2: They contradict w/Impact A2: No Link A2: No alternative A2: No Impact A2: Realism A2: They contradict w/DA
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“We have nothing to fear but fear itself” -1-
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Kritik Brief So this kritik is pretty sweet if you hate mainstream media. A vast majority of the evidence is from this guy named Glassner. Basically the kritik is simple and it comes down to this: Americans are afraid of whatever the media tells them to be afraid of. Being afraid of the oceans is just the newest trend in the media and it’s the only reason the aff wants to do their plan. If we keep in this mindset of being afraid of whatever the media tells us we lose sight of real social problems. Some of these are social inequality, a byproduct of capitalism. I recommend this be run along side cap, statism, or any thing like that that really attacks some of the underlying components of our society. The main problem with this kritik is the link. Most likely you will hit a lot of no link args. If you find a link card elsewhere in the file that fits the case you are hitting better then the one in shell, be sure and swap them otherwise you may find yourself fucked and the block may not help you enough.
Ph34r!!!!!!!
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Shell A. We as Americans live in a society of fear. That fear controls us in many ways. The real problem with this society of fear is that we are never afraid of something that we should be afraid of. Glassner in 99 (Barry Glassner, Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California, “Culture of Fear” copyright 1999) Why are so many fears in the air, and so many of them unfounded? Why, as crime rates plunged throughout the 1990s, did two-thirds of Americans believe they were soaring? How did it come about that by middecade 62 percent of us described ourselves as "truly desperate" about crime-almost twice as many as in the late 1980s, when crime rates were higher? Why, on a survey in 1997, when the crime rate had already fallen for a half dozen consecutive years, did more than half of us disagree with the statement "This country is finally beginning to make some progress in solving the crime problem"? In the late 1990s the number of drug users had decreased by half compared to a decade earlier; almost two-thirds of high school seniors had never used any illegal drugs, even marijuana. So why did a majority of adults rank drug abuse as the greatest danger to America's youth? Why did nine out of ten believe the drug problem is out of control, and only one in six believe the country was making progress? Give us a happy ending and we write a new disaster story. In the late 1990s the unemployment rate was below 5 percent for the first time in a quarter century. People who had been pounding the pavement for years could finally get work. Yet pundits warned of imminent economic disaster. They predicted inflation would take off, just as they had a few years earlier-also erroneouslywhen the unemployment rate dipped below 6 percent. We compound our worries beyond all reason. Life expectancy in the United States has doubled during the twentieth century. We are better able to cure and control diseases than any other civilization in history. Yet we hear that phenomenal numbers of us are dreadfully ill. In 1996 Bob Garfield, a magazine writer, reviewed articles about serious diseases published over the course of a year in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and USA Today. He learned that, in addition to 59 million Americans with heart disease, 53 million with migraines, 25 million with osteoporosis, 16 million with obesity, and 3 million with cancer, many Americans suffer from more obscure ailments such as temporomandibular joint disorders (10 million) and brain injuries (2 million). Adding up the estimates, Garfield determined that 543 million Americans are seriously sick-a shocking number in a nation of 266 million inhabitants. "Either as a society we are doomed, or someone is seriously double-dipping," he suggested. Garfield appears to have underestimated one category of patients: for psychiatric ailments his figure was 53 million. Yet when Jim Windolf, an editor of the New York Observer, collated estimates for maladies ranging from borderline personality disorder (10 million) and sex addiction (11 million) to less well-known conditions such as restless leg syndrome (12 million) he came up with a figure of 152 million. "But give the experts a little time," he advised. "With another new quantifiable disorder or two, everybody in the country will be officially nuts."
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Shell cont. Indeed, Windolf omitted from his estimates new-fashioned afflictions that have yet to make it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association: ailments such as road rage, which afflicts more than half of Americans, according to a psychologist's testimony before a congressional hearing in 1997. The scope of our health fears seems limitless. Besides worrying disproportionately about legitimate ailments and prematurely about would-be diseases, we continue to fret over already refuted dangers. Some still worry, for instance, about "flesh-eating bacteria," a bug first rammed into our consciousness in 1994 when the U.S. news media picked up on a screamer headline in a British tabloid, "Killer Bug Ate My Face." The bacteria, depicted as more brutal than anything seen in modern times, was said to be spreading faster than the pack of photographers outside the home of its latest victim. In point of fact, however, we were not "terribly vulnerable" to these "superbugs," nor were they "medicine's worst nightmares," as voices in the media warned. Group A strep, a cyclical strain that has been around for ages, had been dormant for half a century or more before making a comeback. The British pseudoepidemic had resulted in a total of about a dozen deaths in the previous year. Medical experts roundly rebutted the scares by noting that of 20 to 30 million strep infections each year in the United States fewer than 1 in 1,000 involve serious strep A complications, and only 500 to 1,500 people suffer the flesh-eating syndrome, whose proper name is necrotizing fasciitis. Still the fear persisted. Years after the initial scare, horrifying news stories continued to appear, complete with grotesque pictures of victims. A United Press International story in 1998 typical of the genre told of a child in Texas who died of the "deadly strain" of bacteria that the reporter warned "can spread at a rate of up to one inch per hour."
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Shell cont. B. The aff’s plan is based on the false assumption that there is a major problem with the oceans and the environment. This is just another attempt by the media to start another panic for the betterment of them and their “behind the scene” actors. Caruba in 2001 (Alan Caruba is the author of "A Pocket Guide to Militant Islam",available from the website of The National
Anxiety Center. He writes a weekly column, "Warning Signs", also posted on the site. The Center is a clearinghouse for information about scare campaigns designed to influence public opinion and policy.) From “Desperately trying to scare you in 2002” By Alan Caruba December 31, 2001
Dennis T. Avery, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute and a former senior policy analyst for the US Department of State, recently took note of sanctions applied to Steven R. Arnold, a former researcher at the Tulane University Center for Bioenvironmental Research. The Federal Office of Research Integrity found that Arnold had "committed scientific misconduct by intentionally falsifying the research results published in the Journal Science and by providing falsified and fabricated materials to investigating officials." His punishment? He will be unable to receive federal research funding for five years. Avery called it "one of the most dramatic scientific frauds of modern times," noting that the Tulane Center said it found that various pesticides, safe when tested individually, were 1,000 times more dangerous when tested together. It raised the specter of modern agriculture's chemicals undermining the health of the human population and the natural ecology through a blind spot in our regulatory testing." And it was a lie. This is part of the campaign of endless lies designed to secure the ban of every single pesticide and herbicide that protects human health against insect and rodent predators, and the vast food crops produced by American farmers. In 1996 a book was published, Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival? - A Scientific Detective Story. Written by Theo Colbert, even the author of the book admitted it was based on mere suspicions. It has been cited, however, as proof of yet another bogus threat conjured up by environmentalists. " The book speculated that man-made chemicals were causing ailments ranging from cancer to attention deficit disorder by disrupting our endocrine systems," noted Avery. The book's forward was written by then Vice President Al Gore. When Arnold's falsified research was published in 1996, Carol Browner, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said, "The new study is the strongest evidence to date that combinations of estrogenic materials may be potent enough to significantly increase the risk of breast cancer, prostate cancer, birth defects and other major health concerns." As we now know, there is no such evidence, except that purposely created to further the goal of the environmental movement to end the use of pesticides and herbicides. Beginning with Rachel Carson's bogus and discredited "science" in Silent Spring, this attack on beneficial chemicals has never ceased. In a similar fashion, Michael Bellesile's book, Arming America was seized upon by guncontrol advocates as having demolished "the myth" that individuals have the right to gun ownership. The book asserted that private gun ownership was uncommon in early America. It turns out that the author deliberately misinterpreted Colonial documents, misquoted early federal laws, distorted historical accounts, and cited San Francisco -5-
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Shell cont. records that experts agree were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. The willingness to lie regarding environmental issues was revealed in December when it was found that federal and state wildlife biologists had planted false evidence of a rare cat species in two national forests, the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and Wenatchee National Forest in Washington State. This is the same forest area that the Earth Liberation Front has recently boasted of "spiking" trees in order to do injury to lumberjacks culling trees for purposes of forest management. Now comes another report of "bio-fraud" where a Washington State fish and wildlife biologist is alleged to have asked a taxidermist for grizzly bear hair samples in March of last year. The use of such hair samples could have been used to taint a study of grizzly bear habitat, ultimately affecting recreation, timber, mining, road construction and other uses of throughout the State. Officials are beginning to wonder just how much of this kind of deliberate deception has been at work at the state and federal level to achieve the environmental goals of shutting down essential industries and the recreational use of public lands. One is reminded of the "Spotted Owl" hoax that devastated the timber industry throughout the Pacific Northwest. The cascade of lies about everything environmental should, by now, have convinced the public that US government officials responsible for setting national policies and environmental groups seeking to determine what those policies should be cannot be trusted. The public, however, has rarely paid any attention to anything other than the lies published by a compliant and complacent mainstream media that has fully adopted the goals of the environmental and animal rights movements. The costs of these policies are astronomical. Billions of dollars are wasted on wasteful programs said to "protect" the environment. Billions of dollars are going to be allocated to States and environmental groups to put more and more land aside from any use. Late on the evening of December 20th, the Senate, without any public debate or a recall vote, passed S-990, The American Wildlife Enhancement Act of 2001. We will never know who voted for this act. This was the same tactic used to pass the UN Convention on Desertification. Now $600 million in taxpayer dollars will be given out for "the acquisition of an area of land or water that is suitable or capable of being made suitable for feeding, resting or breeding by wildlife." Translation: Any property can be designated for virtual seizure. One can only pray the President will veto this full-scale attack on property rights in America. This is how environmental groups achieve their goals. They are goals based in a consuming hatred of humankind and its need for food and shelter. They are goals that are intended to undermine and destroy America's economic power, based on access to its vast natural resources. They are goals intended to strip Americans of the most fundamental right of self-defense. They are the goals of those who believe they are morally superior to you and I, and therefore have the right to subvert the truth to achieve total control over our lives and our nation. While Americans look to the Middle East and elsewhere, fearful of terrorist organizations intent on harming our lives and our society, they continue to ignore the internal enemies who, by stealth and deception, work to destroy the progress of real science that protects and extends our lives, and to undermine our most fundamental Constitutional protections. If we lose this struggle, it will be because of our inertia and indifference. The environmentalists, animal rights, and gun control advocates are counting on that. In the political year ahead, their closest allies will be the Democratic Party. -6-
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Shell Cont. C. Being afraid of the wrong things can send us as a whole into a panic. This panic can cause society to look away from the real problems. Glassner 99 (Barry Glassner, Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California, “Culture of Fear” copyright 1999) We had better learn to doubt our inflated fears before they destroy us. Valid fears have their place; they cue us to danger. False and overdrawn fears only cause hardship. Even concerns about real dangers, when blown out of proportion, do demonstrable harm. Take the fear of cancer. Many Americans overestimate the prevalence of the disease, underestimate the odds of surviving it, and put themselves at greater risk as a result. Women in their forties believe they have a 1 in 10 chance of dying from breast cancer, a Dartmouth study found. Their real lifetime odds are more like 1 in 250. Women's heightened perception of risk, rather than motivating them to get checkups or seek treatment, can have the opposite effect. A study of daughters of women with breast cancer found an inverse correlation between fear and prevention: the greater a daughter's fear of the disease the less frequent her breast self-examination. Studies of the general population-both men and womenfind that large numbers of people who believe they have symptoms of cancer delay going to a doctor, often for several months. When asked why, they report they are terrified about the pain and financial ruin cancer can cause as well as poor prospects for a cure. The irony of course is that early treatment can prevent precisely those horrors they most fear. Still more ironic, if harder to measure, are the adverse consequences of public panics. Exaggerated perceptions of the risks of cancer at least produce beneficial by-products, such as bountiful funding for research and treatment of this leading cause of death. When it comes to large-scale panics, however, it is difficult to see how potential victims benefit from the frenzy. Did panics a few years ago over sexual assaults on children by preschool teachers and priests leave children better off? Or did they prompt teachers and clergy to maintain excessive distance from children in their care, as social scientists and journalists who have studied the panics suggest? How well can care givers do their jobs when regulatory agencies, teachers' unions, and archdioceses explicitly prohibit them from any physical contact with children, even kindhearted hugs? Was it a good thing for children and parents that male day care providers left the profession for fear of being falsely accused of sex crimes? In an article in the Journal of American Culture, sociologist Mary DeYoung has argued that day care was "refeminized" as a result of the panics. "Once again, and in the time-honored and very familiar tradition of the family, the primary responsibility for the care and socialization of young children was placed on the shoulders of low-paid women," she contends. We all pay one of the costs of panics: huge sums of money go to waste. Hysteria over the ritual abuse of children cost billions of dollars in police investigations, trials, and imprisonments. Men and women went to jail for years "on the basis of some of the most fantastic claims ever presented to an American jury," as Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal demonstrated in a series of investigative articles for which she became a Pulitizer Prize finalist in 1996. Across the nation
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Shell Cont. expensive surveillance programs were implemented to protect children from fiends who reside primarily in the imaginations of adults. The price tag for our panic about overall crime has grown so monumental that even law-and-order zealots find it hard to defend. The criminal justice system costs Americans close to $100 billion a year, most of which goes to police and prisons. In California we spend more on jails than on higher education. Yet increases in the number of police and prison cells do not correlate consistently with reductions in the number of serious crimes committed. Criminologists who study reductions in homicide rates, for instance, find little difference between cities that substantially expand their police forces and prison capacity and others that do not. The turnabout in domestic public spending over the past quarter century, from child welfare and antipoverty programs to incarceration, did not even produce reductions in fear of crime. Increasing the number of cops and jails arguably has the opposite effect: it suggests that the crime problem is all the more out of control. Panic-driven public spending generates over the long term a pathology akin to one found in drug addicts. The more money and attention we fritter away on our compulsions, the less we have available for our real needs, which consequently grow larger. While fortunes are being spent to protect children from dangers that few ever encounter, approximately 11 million children lack health insurance, 12 million are malnourished, and rates of illiteracy are increasing. I do not contend, as did President Roosevelt in 1933, that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." My point is that we often fear the wrong things. In the 1990s middle-income and poorer Americans should have worried about unemployment insurance, which covered a smaller share of workers than twenty years earlier. Many of us have had friends or family out of work during economic downturns or as a result of corporate restructuring. Living in a nation with one of the largest income gaps of any industrialized country, where the bottom 40 percent of the population is worse off financially than their counterparts two decades earlier, we might also have worried about income inequality. Or poverty. During the mid- and late 1990s 5 million elderly Americans had no food in their homes, more than 20 million people used emergency food programs each year, and one in five children lived in poverty-more than a quarter million of them homeless.
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Shell Cont. D. When society does not look at the real problems it has, those problems can become enourmous and it will allow for the real cause of all of the death and destruction to further itself until it becomes too late. Glassner in 99 (Barry Glassner, Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California, “Culture of Fear” copyright 1999) All told, a larger proportion of Americans were poor than three decades earlier. One of the paradoxes of a culture of fear is that serious problems remain widely ignored even though they give rise to precisely the dangers that the populace most abhors. Poverty, for example, correlates strongly with child abuse, crime, and drug abuse. Income inequality is also associated with adverse outcomes for society as a whole. The larger the gap between rich and poor in a society, the higher its overall death rates from heart disease, cancer, and murder. Some social scientists argue that extreme inequality also threatens political stability in a nation such as the United States, where we think of ourselves not as "haves and have nots" but as "haves and will haves." "Unlike the citizens of most other nations, Americans have always been united less by a shared past than by the shared dreams of a better future. If we lose that common future," the Brandeis University economist Robert Reich has suggested, "we lose the glue that holds our nation together." The combination of extreme inequality and poverty can prove explosive. In an insightful article in U.S. News & World Report in 1997 about militia groups reporters Mike Tharp and William Holstein noted that people's motivations for joining these groups are as much economic as ideological. The journalists argued that the disappearance of military and blue-collar jobs, along with the decline of family farming, created the conditions under which a new breed of protest groups flourished. "What distinguishes these antigovernment groups from, say, traditional conservatives who mistrust government is that their anger is fueled by direct threats to their livelihood, and they carry guns," Tharp and Holstein wrote. That last phrase alludes to a danger that by any rational calculation deserves top billing on Americans' lists of fears.
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Shell cont. E. Finally the alternative is to reject the aff plan which feeds into the panic started by the media, begin a movement to reform the media, and begin addressing social issues which truly matter such as social inequality and poverty. We will be happy to clarify any of this in CX.
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2NC Overview w/extensions Now for the overview of the Fear Kritik: First off, extend our A card. Our society is based on fear. Whether it is fear of terrorism, fear of ocean pollution, fear of school violence, etc. This fear of whatever can lead to us doing whatever it takes to prevent whatever we are afraid of happening at the expense of everything around us. We as a people need to address the real issues at hand and not just believe whatever the media feeds to us. Second, extend our B card. The media isn’t out to give us the most current information, they are out to profit themselves and the people backing them. The aff’s plan is a byproduct of this system which tries to instill fear into the masses. The aff is scared out of there mind that we might lose a species of fish simply because the media has fed them tons of exaggerated information that is so far from the truth we can’t look to it as true evidence. Third, extend our C card. As seen in the A card the media instills fear of things that don’t matter into the masses. That fear will grow quickly into complete hysteria if not a nationwide panic. This panic makes us so narrow minded that we lose sight of the real issues and we let them grow. Fourth extend our D card. Letting the real issues grow and grow can have disastrous consequences. If we continue to let things such as social inequality grow our political system begins to be at risk of complete instability to the point of which special interest groups can take control and do whatever they want with our government. Also if we lose political stability we lose the democratic system which we as Americans love and cherish. Fifth, extend our alternative. In order to solve the problem of fear and panic in our society and to prevent real social issues from becoming to large to control we must act in a movement to reform the media so that they will stop putting out such biased, exaggerated, if not made up information which sends us into hysteria. We must also begin looking at the real problems of our society such as social inequality which as our D card shows can risk the system holds us together. Finally, you must vote Neg. If you vote aff you give in to the panic that was made by the media in order to profit themselves and other “behind the scene” actors. This panic does and will continue to prevent people from - 11 -
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Overview cont. seeing the problems with our society and instead become afraid of made up threats. Vote neg for social change and to keep our country stable and at peace with itself and others.
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2NR Overview w/extensions Now for a general overview of the Fear Kritik: First off, we clearly link to the Aff case. The aff case is full of information put out by the media and its evil corporate sponsors to profit themselves. Also look to the reasoning of why the want to do that plan. They are scared of their minds that the loss of some fish species will lead to the collapse of one entire ecosystem which will then lead to the extinction of the entire world. This is all exaggerated if not made up information which cannot be looked to as the truth. We must reject this type of media influence and force them to give us the truth, not what they and their corporate sponsors think we should know Secondly, our impact outweighs. They are full out impacts that are made up by the system we are advocating against and thus will not happen. Also, even if it were true there is only a chance that their impacts will happen. Our impacts are not only real, but will happen. The only reason they think that social inequality is not that bad of a thing is because they have been filled up with the panic and fear put out by the media we are trying to change. You must vote to fight real impacts that will happen unless the alternative takes place and not vote to stop impacts that are unreal and exaggerated. Thirdly, you must vote to fight real impacts that will happen unless the alternative takes place and not vote to stop impacts that are unreal and exaggerated.
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Links Overfishing is just the newest fear that the media is instilling into Americans Fumento in 96 (Michael Fumento, Science columnist for Scripps-Howard, “Population action tells a fishy story about fish supply” Copyright 1996, http://www.fumento.com/bomis20.html)
"A burgeoning population and the growing demand for seafood may make fish unavailable to nearly a billion of the world's poor in the next century, says a new report." If you read USA Today or any number of other papers that carried a similar story, you probably believe that. Which is too bad because the report, issued by the pro-population control Population Action International is just one big, well, fish story. There's one huge problem with the report. See if you can pick it out by reading between the lines of report co-author Robert Engelman. "We're up against the wall," he said. "Since the end of the 80s, we've been catching the same amount of wild fish around the world, [but] there are about 90 million more people every year." Did you notice the qualifying word: "wild"? Yes, the statement is true for wild fish but completely ignores the role of farmed fish, called "aquaculture." Looking at data provided in a 1995 United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization publication, "The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture," we see that for the earliest year provided (1984) there were 51,105 thousand tons of wild fish caught with 6,933 thousand tons raised on farms. Wild fish capture peaked out in 1989 and has dropped slightly to 56,470 thousand tons by 1993, but aquaculture continued growing like gangbusters to 15,800 tons by 1993. Combining both types of fish, there was far from a decline but rather a 24% increase in the nine-year period, fueled by a 128% growth in aquaculture. At the same time world population increased by only 16%. Unless you just happen to hate fish, that's a mighty nice "wall" we're up against. Far from running out of the slimy things, we're practically swimming in them. Unfortunately, neither USA Today nor some of the other papers that carried the story bothered to mention aquaculture. In fact, nobody who carried the story allowed any criticism of the report at all. The Population Action International study does mention the growing aquaculture industry, saying it "compensates somewhat for declines in fish catches." It even depicts a chart showing its phenomenal growth. But it downplays the industry, saying "Cultivation of fish has so far proven too costly to provide large amounts of food to poor people." But the aforementioned U.N. publication, using the same data as Population Action International, says otherwise. "The balance of 31 million tons in the supplies of food fish required by the year 2010 would have to come from aquaculture, which has been expanding at a rate of one million tons a year, increasing to almost two million tons in 1993." Meanwhile, to continue feeding the world at the same rate would require "an overall average annual increase of less than one million tons a year." While Population Action says, "There is little prospect for major expansion of aquaculture in Africa, the U.N. report says aquaculture's phenomenal "growth should continue, recognizing the significant potential of increased farmed fish production in Africa and Latin America." (Emphasis mine.) Yet, the real powerhouse could be the
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United States. So far all of North America produces only 3.7% of the world's aquaculture. The United States produces less than a 16th of China's output. The reason is that Americans are not big fish eaters and that, exactly opposite of what Population Action is telling us, those who are big fish eaters are finding or growing a plentiful supply. But if that ever changes, America's ingenious farming know-how combined with abundant lakes and waterways will combine to make us not just the breadbasket but also the fishbasket of the world. What we're seeing is a rapid transition from depending on wild fish to raising our own which parallels civilization's movement from hunting and gathering to husbanding animals and raising crops. The very reason that fish farming is catching on so rapidly is that it is so much cheaper and more efficient than setting out in boats and hoping for good fortune. Less romantic perhaps, but them's the breaks. The problem with all the population control groups and individual gurus like Paul Ehrlich is that they first decided they were against population growth and have spent the entire time since then trying to find evidence to justify their position, rather than forming their position based on the evidence. The result has been a stream of nonsense that essentially began with Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb which told us that "the battle to feed humanity is over." In fact, except for the occasional politically-inspired famine such as Ethiopia's, humanity is much better fed today than it was in 1968. Man's ingenuity in providing new food supplies has readily outpaced his growth in population growth. Now, even as population growth is already slowing on its own, we're beginning a new era of genetically-designed foods that will make even progress to date look anemic. My advice to the population controllers: If you don't like having more people around in the same sense a lot of American just don't like eating fish, then simply say so. Quit concocting false evidence to scare everyone who doesn't share your taste.
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Links Global warming is full of falsified and exaggerated claims. The media continues to try and send us into a complete panic over it yet there is hardly any true factual evidence to support it. Singer in 97 (Mr. Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and president of the Science & Environmental Policy Project in Fairfax, Va., is author of "Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming's Unfinished Debate" (Independent Institute, 1997).) The Sky Isn't Falling and the Sea Isn't Rising By S. Fred Singer Copyright 1997 Dow Jones & Co., Inc. Global-warming devotees have been making alarmist predictions about the rising sea levels they think will follow an increase in the earth's average temperatures. The horror stories include the flooding of low-lying coastal areas, the disappearance of island nations, the inundation of America by environmental refugees, and an exponential explosion in insurance claims. Activists apparently don't realize that the much-ballyhooed climate models that predict global warming cannot make any quantitative predictions at all about sea levels. They also don't realize that informed speculation about rising sea levels has been steadily falling. Initial estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency projected that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would cause sea levels to rise by between 80 and 120 inches. By 1990 these estimates had been reduced by 75%. In 1996 a United Nations science advisory panel predicted a rise of only 15 to 22 inches by 2100-still based on shaky assumptions. Even these much smaller estimates are cause for skepticism, because changes in sea level are notoriously difficult to measure, and reliable information is hard to come by. All historical data are based on tide gauges, mainly on the shorelines of Northern Europe and North America. Long-term sea level trends must be extracted after adjusting for waves, storm surges and tidal variations. Scientists must also contend with the fact that the land surface may be rising or falling. Some land surfaces, in Scandinavia for example, are rebounding after being compressed by the weight of glaciers. Other land areas are subsiding, as petroleum or ground water is pumped out. Nevertheless, climate specialists have constructed a corrected "global" sea-level record; it shows that sea levels have been rising at the rate of about seven inches per century. Is this rise connected to climate? Not likely. The best estimates based on geologic data indicate that this has been going on for several centuries--a period in which the global climate has fluctuated significantly. Rather, the current thinking is that the steady rise in sea levels is connected to slow tectonic changes in the shape of the ocean basin--which human beings, of course, can do nothing about. Calculations of any climate effect on sea levels must take account of this more or less steady rise. The next question is how global warming, if it occurs, would affect sea levels. On the one hand, a warmer climate would melt mountain glaciers and cause a thermal expansion of ocean water, accelerating sea levels' rise. But on the other hand, more water would evaporate from the surface of warmer oceans, leading to more rainfall, and--over Greenland and the Antarctic--to greater accumulation of snow and ice. This process essentially thickens the polar ice caps, thus lowering sea levels. The problem has been to find whether the sea levels' rising or lowering would have a greater impact. This is a question that cannot be answered by - 16 -
LC Debate FEAR Sunwold theory, or by computer models. To produce an accurate conclusion, we have to examine data. Fortunately, we do have data from a relatively rapid global warming that occurred between about 1900 and 1940, as the climate recovered from a cool period called the Little Ice Age. Neither the Little Ice Age nor the warming that followed are ascribed to human influences; many scientists believe they were caused by subtle changes in the sun's radiation. In any case, data from the warming of 1900-1940 shows a drop in sea levels, while the subsequent cooler period shows a sea-level rise. This effect is even more pronounced in comparisons of sea-level changes with sea-surface temperatures in the tropics, where most of the oceans' evaporation occurs. These findings support the hypothesis that ice accumulation in the polar regions may have a greater impact on sea levels than do the melting of glaciers and the thermal expansion of ocean water. Support for this view also comes from concurrent but as yet incomplete measurements of ice accumulation at certain locations in Greenland and the Antarctic. Contrary to activists' claims, what's clear is that global warming--if it takes place--would slow any rise in sea levels. Although more study is needed, this striking result should at least give pause to the Association of Small Island States and other groups that are pressing industrialized nations to adopt drastic reductions in fossil fuel use in order to avoid the global warming "catastrophe" so dear to the environmentalist lobby.
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Other Cool Stuff The media is the problem. The media is the source of all the fears that drive us into our panic. Glassner in 99 (Barry Glassner, Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California, “Culture of Fear” copyright 1999) Any analysis of the culture of fear that ignored the news media would be patently incomplete, and of the several institutions most culpable for creating and sustaining scares the news media are arguably first among equals. They are also the most promising candidates for positive change. Yet by the same token critiques such as Stolberg's presage a crucial shortcoming in arguments that blame the media. Reporters not only spread fears, they also debunk them and criticize one another for spooking the public. A wide array of groups, including businesses, advocacy organizations, religious sects, and political parties, promote and profit from scares. News organizations are distinguished from other fear-mongering groups because they sometimes bite the scare that feeds them. A group that raises money for research into a particular disease is not likely to negate concerns about that disease. A company that sells alarm systems is not about to call attention to the fact that crime is down. News organizations, on the other hand, periodically allay the very fears they arouse to lure audiences. Some newspapers that ran stories about child murderers, rather than treat every incident as evidence of a shocking trend, affirmed the opposite. After the schoolyard shooting in Kentucky the New York Times ran a sidebar alongside its feature story with the headline "Despite Recent Carnage, School Violence Is Not on Rise." Following the Jonesboro killings they ran a similar piece, this time on a recently released study showing the rarity of violent crimes in schools. Several major newspapers parted from the pack in other ways. USA Today and the Washington Post, for instance, made sure their readers knew that what should worry them is the availability of guns. USA Today ran news stories explaining that easy access to guns in homes accounted for increases in the number of juvenile arrests for homicide in rural areas during the 1990s. While other news outlets were respectfully quoting the mother of the thirteen-year-old Jonesboro shooter, who said she did not regret having encouraged her son to learn to fire a gun ("it's like anything else, there's some people that can drink a beer and not become an alcoholic"), USA Today ran an op-ed piece proposing legal parameters for gun ownership akin to those for the use of alcohol and motor vehicles. And the paper published its own editorial in support of laws that require gun owners to lock their guns or keep them in locked containers. Adopted at that time by only fifteen states, the laws had reduced the number of deaths among children in those states by 23 percent.
- 18 -
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
Other Cool Stuff The media and giant corporations work along side each other to benefit themselves at the expense of the masses. Glassner in 2003 (Barry Glassner, Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California, “Professor Barry Glassner, The Man Who Knows About Fear in American Culture” April 10, 2003, http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/04/10_glassner.html) And when we ask that question, it seems to me, it's reasonably clear who is doing the fear-mongering, and it's TV news magazines and news programs that are trying to sell programs to their viewers, advocacy groups that are trying to sell memberships and make some money, lawyers who are selling class-action lawsuits, politicians who win elections by whipping up fear of crime, even when crime rates are way down. And the list goes on and on, all the way to marketers of anti-bacterial soaps and realtors who sell homes in gated communities. And when living in that kind of environment, with so much profit available to those who can manipulate our fears effectively, it's not surprising that we're so fearful.
- 19 -
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
A2: Perm 1. You can’t perm the alternative – There is not true way to do both the plan and the alternative at the same time. The aff cannot do their plan and not do it at the same time. Also if they were to do our alternative they would have to reject all that the media has told them and thus completely reverse their plan. In essence by saying they want to perm it they want to do the alternative. Vote Neg for this. 2. No explanation – The aff did not explain exactly how the perm will work. They simply say we do both. “Do both” could mean a multitude of things. The need to explain their perm in order for us to properly argue it 3. Perm is a shift in advocacy – As the aff they should stick to their case. By being able to shift off of their case they can shift around however they like to get out of our links
- 20 -
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
A2: Contradict w/impact 1. What we advocate is not against impacts in general, it is against the specific impacts given by our opponents – The impacts that are given are illusionary or exaggerated threats produced by the mainstream media. Our impacts are the ones not looked at by the media yet are the most important 2. Impacts are still important in the debate - We still believe that impacts in this round should be closely looked at when judging. Because of this you should vote them down for the over exaggerated impacts they give 3. No abuse – We have not abused anyone in the debate. They still have ground in that they can argue that the ocean really is a big issue which could directly clash with our kritik
- 21 -
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
A2: No link 1. There is a clear link – Ocean destruction is the recent trend in things to be afraid of. The aff wouldn’t want to put in the plan if they weren’t scared out of their minds by the media 2. All of their cards show examples of the media instilling fear 0 Everyone of their cards talk about these horrible tings that will happen if we don’t do something about the oceans 3. Their performance in this round links – They are trying to scare you, as a judge that horrible things will happen unless we act to prevent their impacts. If you let them you start a downward spiral slowly looking less and less from societies real problems and more towards unimportant issues
- 22 -
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
A2: No alternative 1. Our alternative is clear – Reject the aff plan and begin a nationwide movement to promote the change of real issues in society 2. This is realistic – In a free democratic society we as people all have the right to speak our voices. By joining in a movement against social problems people can change whatever they want to 3. Movements solve (insert card)
- 23 -
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
A2: No impact 1. Extend our D card from the 1nc. (give analysis) 2. This impact is real. We live in a world of capitalism where there is a natural social inequality. As this inequality grows, we risk political instability, economic collapse, poverty, and all that goes with poverty 3. Our impact must be looked at first in this debate – Our impact is a real impact. What we advocate has true societal impacts. Also our impacts will happen. This can be seen in the examples given in our D card. And just for the hell of it here’s more examples (read more cards with examples) 4. Impacts that will happen come before impacts that might happen – Cross apply my D card and the (card I just read). These show that our impacts will happen. Al of our opponents impacts are things that might happen. You must look to ours because they are inevitable and our opponents are not. If you don’t you doom the lives of many.
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LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
A2: Realism 1. Non unique- realism exists in the status quo. They might as well just say that they advocate the status quo because their impacts are inevitable 2. No link – look to their cards, non of them mention realism being better then our alternative 3. Realism leads to war – (find card) 4. Realism is a byproduct of the system our critique addresses. The only way to solve for the horrible things realism leads to is to embrace the critique alternative 5. Realism is a horrible arg (find theory) 6. Do not vote for realism – Voting for realism is to allow the oppressive system to continue to instill fear into people as well as justify wars where millions if not billions will die
- 25 -
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
A2: Contradict w/DA 1. No contradiction – Our kritik shows the flaws of the system our opponents work in. our impacts are not exaggerated or illusionary byproducts of an attention hungry media system like our opponents 2. Our DA is legit and goes right along with our kritik – Our DA goes right along in showing the downsides to the system our opponents work through. 3. The impacts of our DA hold – our impacts will happen if the plan is passed. The aff’s impacts were made up by the media to throw the masses into a panic
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FEAR
Americans Are Very Afraid Be afraid, be very afraid Index
1
Basics: Critique Brief Shell 2nc Overview w/ extensions 2nr Overview w/ extensions
2 3 11 13
Links: Overfishing Global Warming
14 16
Other cool cards: The Media is the Problem Media + Corporations=Exploitation
18 19
Blocks: A2: Perm A2: They contradict w/Impact A2: No Link A2: No alternative A2: No Impact A2: Realism A2: They contradict w/DA
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself” -1-
Sunwold
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
Kritik Brief So this kritik is pretty sweet if you hate mainstream media. A vast majority of the evidence is from this guy named Glassner. Basically the kritik is simple and it comes down to this: Americans are afraid of whatever the media tells them to be afraid of. Being afraid of the oceans is just the newest trend in the media and it’s the only reason the aff wants to do their plan. If we keep in this mindset of being afraid of whatever the media tells us we lose sight of real social problems. Some of these are social inequality, a byproduct of capitalism. I recommend this be run along side cap, statism, or any thing like that that really attacks some of the underlying components of our society. The main problem with this kritik is the link. Most likely you will hit a lot of no link args. If you find a link card elsewhere in the file that fits the case you are hitting better then the one in shell, be sure and swap them otherwise you may find yourself fucked and the block may not help you enough.
Ph34r!!!!!!!
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LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
Shell A. We as Americans live in a society of fear. That fear controls us in many ways. The real problem with this society of fear is that we are never afraid of something that we should be afraid of. Glassner in 99 (Barry Glassner, Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California, “Culture of Fear” copyright 1999) Why are so many fears in the air, and so many of them unfounded? Why, as crime rates plunged throughout the 1990s, did two-thirds of Americans believe they were soaring? How did it come about that by middecade 62 percent of us described ourselves as "truly desperate" about crime-almost twice as many as in the late 1980s, when crime rates were higher? Why, on a survey in 1997, when the crime rate had already fallen for a half dozen consecutive years, did more than half of us disagree with the statement "This country is finally beginning to make some progress in solving the crime problem"? In the late 1990s the number of drug users had decreased by half compared to a decade earlier; almost two-thirds of high school seniors had never used any illegal drugs, even marijuana. So why did a majority of adults rank drug abuse as the greatest danger to America's youth? Why did nine out of ten believe the drug problem is out of control, and only one in six believe the country was making progress? Give us a happy ending and we write a new disaster story. In the late 1990s the unemployment rate was below 5 percent for the first time in a quarter century. People who had been pounding the pavement for years could finally get work. Yet pundits warned of imminent economic disaster. They predicted inflation would take off, just as they had a few years earlier-also erroneouslywhen the unemployment rate dipped below 6 percent. We compound our worries beyond all reason. Life expectancy in the United States has doubled during the twentieth century. We are better able to cure and control diseases than any other civilization in history. Yet we hear that phenomenal numbers of us are dreadfully ill. In 1996 Bob Garfield, a magazine writer, reviewed articles about serious diseases published over the course of a year in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and USA Today. He learned that, in addition to 59 million Americans with heart disease, 53 million with migraines, 25 million with osteoporosis, 16 million with obesity, and 3 million with cancer, many Americans suffer from more obscure ailments such as temporomandibular joint disorders (10 million) and brain injuries (2 million). Adding up the estimates, Garfield determined that 543 million Americans are seriously sick-a shocking number in a nation of 266 million inhabitants. "Either as a society we are doomed, or someone is seriously double-dipping," he suggested. Garfield appears to have underestimated one category of patients: for psychiatric ailments his figure was 53 million. Yet when Jim Windolf, an editor of the New York Observer, collated estimates for maladies ranging from borderline personality disorder (10 million) and sex addiction (11 million) to less well-known conditions such as restless leg syndrome (12 million) he came up with a figure of 152 million. "But give the experts a little time," he advised. "With another new quantifiable disorder or two, everybody in the country will be officially nuts."
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LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
Shell cont. Indeed, Windolf omitted from his estimates new-fashioned afflictions that have yet to make it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association: ailments such as road rage, which afflicts more than half of Americans, according to a psychologist's testimony before a congressional hearing in 1997. The scope of our health fears seems limitless. Besides worrying disproportionately about legitimate ailments and prematurely about would-be diseases, we continue to fret over already refuted dangers. Some still worry, for instance, about "flesh-eating bacteria," a bug first rammed into our consciousness in 1994 when the U.S. news media picked up on a screamer headline in a British tabloid, "Killer Bug Ate My Face." The bacteria, depicted as more brutal than anything seen in modern times, was said to be spreading faster than the pack of photographers outside the home of its latest victim. In point of fact, however, we were not "terribly vulnerable" to these "superbugs," nor were they "medicine's worst nightmares," as voices in the media warned. Group A strep, a cyclical strain that has been around for ages, had been dormant for half a century or more before making a comeback. The British pseudoepidemic had resulted in a total of about a dozen deaths in the previous year. Medical experts roundly rebutted the scares by noting that of 20 to 30 million strep infections each year in the United States fewer than 1 in 1,000 involve serious strep A complications, and only 500 to 1,500 people suffer the flesh-eating syndrome, whose proper name is necrotizing fasciitis. Still the fear persisted. Years after the initial scare, horrifying news stories continued to appear, complete with grotesque pictures of victims. A United Press International story in 1998 typical of the genre told of a child in Texas who died of the "deadly strain" of bacteria that the reporter warned "can spread at a rate of up to one inch per hour."
-4-
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
Shell cont. B. The aff’s plan is based on the false assumption that there is a major problem with the oceans and the environment. This is just another attempt by the media to start another panic for the betterment of them and their “behind the scene” actors. Caruba in 2001 (Alan Caruba is the author of "A Pocket Guide to Militant Islam",available from the website of The National
Anxiety Center. He writes a weekly column, "Warning Signs", also posted on the site. The Center is a clearinghouse for information about scare campaigns designed to influence public opinion and policy.) From “Desperately trying to scare you in 2002” By Alan Caruba December 31, 2001
Dennis T. Avery, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute and a former senior policy analyst for the US Department of State, recently took note of sanctions applied to Steven R. Arnold, a former researcher at the Tulane University Center for Bioenvironmental Research. The Federal Office of Research Integrity found that Arnold had "committed scientific misconduct by intentionally falsifying the research results published in the Journal Science and by providing falsified and fabricated materials to investigating officials." His punishment? He will be unable to receive federal research funding for five years. Avery called it "one of the most dramatic scientific frauds of modern times," noting that the Tulane Center said it found that various pesticides, safe when tested individually, were 1,000 times more dangerous when tested together. It raised the specter of modern agriculture's chemicals undermining the health of the human population and the natural ecology through a blind spot in our regulatory testing." And it was a lie. This is part of the campaign of endless lies designed to secure the ban of every single pesticide and herbicide that protects human health against insect and rodent predators, and the vast food crops produced by American farmers. In 1996 a book was published, Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival? - A Scientific Detective Story. Written by Theo Colbert, even the author of the book admitted it was based on mere suspicions. It has been cited, however, as proof of yet another bogus threat conjured up by environmentalists. " The book speculated that man-made chemicals were causing ailments ranging from cancer to attention deficit disorder by disrupting our endocrine systems," noted Avery. The book's forward was written by then Vice President Al Gore. When Arnold's falsified research was published in 1996, Carol Browner, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said, "The new study is the strongest evidence to date that combinations of estrogenic materials may be potent enough to significantly increase the risk of breast cancer, prostate cancer, birth defects and other major health concerns." As we now know, there is no such evidence, except that purposely created to further the goal of the environmental movement to end the use of pesticides and herbicides. Beginning with Rachel Carson's bogus and discredited "science" in Silent Spring, this attack on beneficial chemicals has never ceased. In a similar fashion, Michael Bellesile's book, Arming America was seized upon by guncontrol advocates as having demolished "the myth" that individuals have the right to gun ownership. The book asserted that private gun ownership was uncommon in early America. It turns out that the author deliberately misinterpreted Colonial documents, misquoted early federal laws, distorted historical accounts, and cited San Francisco -5-
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
Shell cont. records that experts agree were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. The willingness to lie regarding environmental issues was revealed in December when it was found that federal and state wildlife biologists had planted false evidence of a rare cat species in two national forests, the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and Wenatchee National Forest in Washington State. This is the same forest area that the Earth Liberation Front has recently boasted of "spiking" trees in order to do injury to lumberjacks culling trees for purposes of forest management. Now comes another report of "bio-fraud" where a Washington State fish and wildlife biologist is alleged to have asked a taxidermist for grizzly bear hair samples in March of last year. The use of such hair samples could have been used to taint a study of grizzly bear habitat, ultimately affecting recreation, timber, mining, road construction and other uses of throughout the State. Officials are beginning to wonder just how much of this kind of deliberate deception has been at work at the state and federal level to achieve the environmental goals of shutting down essential industries and the recreational use of public lands. One is reminded of the "Spotted Owl" hoax that devastated the timber industry throughout the Pacific Northwest. The cascade of lies about everything environmental should, by now, have convinced the public that US government officials responsible for setting national policies and environmental groups seeking to determine what those policies should be cannot be trusted. The public, however, has rarely paid any attention to anything other than the lies published by a compliant and complacent mainstream media that has fully adopted the goals of the environmental and animal rights movements. The costs of these policies are astronomical. Billions of dollars are wasted on wasteful programs said to "protect" the environment. Billions of dollars are going to be allocated to States and environmental groups to put more and more land aside from any use. Late on the evening of December 20th, the Senate, without any public debate or a recall vote, passed S-990, The American Wildlife Enhancement Act of 2001. We will never know who voted for this act. This was the same tactic used to pass the UN Convention on Desertification. Now $600 million in taxpayer dollars will be given out for "the acquisition of an area of land or water that is suitable or capable of being made suitable for feeding, resting or breeding by wildlife." Translation: Any property can be designated for virtual seizure. One can only pray the President will veto this full-scale attack on property rights in America. This is how environmental groups achieve their goals. They are goals based in a consuming hatred of humankind and its need for food and shelter. They are goals that are intended to undermine and destroy America's economic power, based on access to its vast natural resources. They are goals intended to strip Americans of the most fundamental right of self-defense. They are the goals of those who believe they are morally superior to you and I, and therefore have the right to subvert the truth to achieve total control over our lives and our nation. While Americans look to the Middle East and elsewhere, fearful of terrorist organizations intent on harming our lives and our society, they continue to ignore the internal enemies who, by stealth and deception, work to destroy the progress of real science that protects and extends our lives, and to undermine our most fundamental Constitutional protections. If we lose this struggle, it will be because of our inertia and indifference. The environmentalists, animal rights, and gun control advocates are counting on that. In the political year ahead, their closest allies will be the Democratic Party. -6-
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
Shell Cont. C. Being afraid of the wrong things can send us as a whole into a panic. This panic can cause society to look away from the real problems. Glassner 99 (Barry Glassner, Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California, “Culture of Fear” copyright 1999) We had better learn to doubt our inflated fears before they destroy us. Valid fears have their place; they cue us to danger. False and overdrawn fears only cause hardship. Even concerns about real dangers, when blown out of proportion, do demonstrable harm. Take the fear of cancer. Many Americans overestimate the prevalence of the disease, underestimate the odds of surviving it, and put themselves at greater risk as a result. Women in their forties believe they have a 1 in 10 chance of dying from breast cancer, a Dartmouth study found. Their real lifetime odds are more like 1 in 250. Women's heightened perception of risk, rather than motivating them to get checkups or seek treatment, can have the opposite effect. A study of daughters of women with breast cancer found an inverse correlation between fear and prevention: the greater a daughter's fear of the disease the less frequent her breast self-examination. Studies of the general population-both men and womenfind that large numbers of people who believe they have symptoms of cancer delay going to a doctor, often for several months. When asked why, they report they are terrified about the pain and financial ruin cancer can cause as well as poor prospects for a cure. The irony of course is that early treatment can prevent precisely those horrors they most fear. Still more ironic, if harder to measure, are the adverse consequences of public panics. Exaggerated perceptions of the risks of cancer at least produce beneficial by-products, such as bountiful funding for research and treatment of this leading cause of death. When it comes to large-scale panics, however, it is difficult to see how potential victims benefit from the frenzy. Did panics a few years ago over sexual assaults on children by preschool teachers and priests leave children better off? Or did they prompt teachers and clergy to maintain excessive distance from children in their care, as social scientists and journalists who have studied the panics suggest? How well can care givers do their jobs when regulatory agencies, teachers' unions, and archdioceses explicitly prohibit them from any physical contact with children, even kindhearted hugs? Was it a good thing for children and parents that male day care providers left the profession for fear of being falsely accused of sex crimes? In an article in the Journal of American Culture, sociologist Mary DeYoung has argued that day care was "refeminized" as a result of the panics. "Once again, and in the time-honored and very familiar tradition of the family, the primary responsibility for the care and socialization of young children was placed on the shoulders of low-paid women," she contends. We all pay one of the costs of panics: huge sums of money go to waste. Hysteria over the ritual abuse of children cost billions of dollars in police investigations, trials, and imprisonments. Men and women went to jail for years "on the basis of some of the most fantastic claims ever presented to an American jury," as Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal demonstrated in a series of investigative articles for which she became a Pulitizer Prize finalist in 1996. Across the nation
-7-
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
Shell Cont. expensive surveillance programs were implemented to protect children from fiends who reside primarily in the imaginations of adults. The price tag for our panic about overall crime has grown so monumental that even law-and-order zealots find it hard to defend. The criminal justice system costs Americans close to $100 billion a year, most of which goes to police and prisons. In California we spend more on jails than on higher education. Yet increases in the number of police and prison cells do not correlate consistently with reductions in the number of serious crimes committed. Criminologists who study reductions in homicide rates, for instance, find little difference between cities that substantially expand their police forces and prison capacity and others that do not. The turnabout in domestic public spending over the past quarter century, from child welfare and antipoverty programs to incarceration, did not even produce reductions in fear of crime. Increasing the number of cops and jails arguably has the opposite effect: it suggests that the crime problem is all the more out of control. Panic-driven public spending generates over the long term a pathology akin to one found in drug addicts. The more money and attention we fritter away on our compulsions, the less we have available for our real needs, which consequently grow larger. While fortunes are being spent to protect children from dangers that few ever encounter, approximately 11 million children lack health insurance, 12 million are malnourished, and rates of illiteracy are increasing. I do not contend, as did President Roosevelt in 1933, that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." My point is that we often fear the wrong things. In the 1990s middle-income and poorer Americans should have worried about unemployment insurance, which covered a smaller share of workers than twenty years earlier. Many of us have had friends or family out of work during economic downturns or as a result of corporate restructuring. Living in a nation with one of the largest income gaps of any industrialized country, where the bottom 40 percent of the population is worse off financially than their counterparts two decades earlier, we might also have worried about income inequality. Or poverty. During the mid- and late 1990s 5 million elderly Americans had no food in their homes, more than 20 million people used emergency food programs each year, and one in five children lived in poverty-more than a quarter million of them homeless.
-8-
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
Shell Cont. D. When society does not look at the real problems it has, those problems can become enourmous and it will allow for the real cause of all of the death and destruction to further itself until it becomes too late. Glassner in 99 (Barry Glassner, Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California, “Culture of Fear” copyright 1999) All told, a larger proportion of Americans were poor than three decades earlier. One of the paradoxes of a culture of fear is that serious problems remain widely ignored even though they give rise to precisely the dangers that the populace most abhors. Poverty, for example, correlates strongly with child abuse, crime, and drug abuse. Income inequality is also associated with adverse outcomes for society as a whole. The larger the gap between rich and poor in a society, the higher its overall death rates from heart disease, cancer, and murder. Some social scientists argue that extreme inequality also threatens political stability in a nation such as the United States, where we think of ourselves not as "haves and have nots" but as "haves and will haves." "Unlike the citizens of most other nations, Americans have always been united less by a shared past than by the shared dreams of a better future. If we lose that common future," the Brandeis University economist Robert Reich has suggested, "we lose the glue that holds our nation together." The combination of extreme inequality and poverty can prove explosive. In an insightful article in U.S. News & World Report in 1997 about militia groups reporters Mike Tharp and William Holstein noted that people's motivations for joining these groups are as much economic as ideological. The journalists argued that the disappearance of military and blue-collar jobs, along with the decline of family farming, created the conditions under which a new breed of protest groups flourished. "What distinguishes these antigovernment groups from, say, traditional conservatives who mistrust government is that their anger is fueled by direct threats to their livelihood, and they carry guns," Tharp and Holstein wrote. That last phrase alludes to a danger that by any rational calculation deserves top billing on Americans' lists of fears.
-9-
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
Shell cont. E. Finally the alternative is to reject the aff plan which feeds into the panic started by the media, begin a movement to reform the media, and begin addressing social issues which truly matter such as social inequality and poverty. We will be happy to clarify any of this in CX.
- 10 -
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
2NC Overview w/extensions Now for the overview of the Fear Kritik: First off, extend our A card. Our society is based on fear. Whether it is fear of terrorism, fear of ocean pollution, fear of school violence, etc. This fear of whatever can lead to us doing whatever it takes to prevent whatever we are afraid of happening at the expense of everything around us. We as a people need to address the real issues at hand and not just believe whatever the media feeds to us. Second, extend our B card. The media isn’t out to give us the most current information, they are out to profit themselves and the people backing them. The aff’s plan is a byproduct of this system which tries to instill fear into the masses. The aff is scared out of there mind that we might lose a species of fish simply because the media has fed them tons of exaggerated information that is so far from the truth we can’t look to it as true evidence. Third, extend our C card. As seen in the A card the media instills fear of things that don’t matter into the masses. That fear will grow quickly into complete hysteria if not a nationwide panic. This panic makes us so narrow minded that we lose sight of the real issues and we let them grow. Fourth extend our D card. Letting the real issues grow and grow can have disastrous consequences. If we continue to let things such as social inequality grow our political system begins to be at risk of complete instability to the point of which special interest groups can take control and do whatever they want with our government. Also if we lose political stability we lose the democratic system which we as Americans love and cherish. Fifth, extend our alternative. In order to solve the problem of fear and panic in our society and to prevent real social issues from becoming to large to control we must act in a movement to reform the media so that they will stop putting out such biased, exaggerated, if not made up information which sends us into hysteria. We must also begin looking at the real problems of our society such as social inequality which as our D card shows can risk the system holds us together. Finally, you must vote Neg. If you vote aff you give in to the panic that was made by the media in order to profit themselves and other “behind the scene” actors. This panic does and will continue to prevent people from - 11 -
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
Overview cont. seeing the problems with our society and instead become afraid of made up threats. Vote neg for social change and to keep our country stable and at peace with itself and others.
- 12 -
LC Debate
FEAR
Sunwold
2NR Overview w/extensions Now for a general overview of the Fear Kritik: First off, we clearly link to the Aff case. The aff case is full of information put out by the media and its evil corporate sponsors to profit themselves. Also look to the reasoning of why the want to do that plan. They are scared of their minds that the loss of some fish species will lead to the collapse of one entire ecosystem which will then lead to the extinction of the entire world. This is all exaggerated if not made up information which cannot be looked to as the truth. We must reject this type of media influence and force them to give us the truth, not what they and their corporate sponsors think we should know Secondly, our impact outweighs. They are full out impacts that are made up by the system we are advocating against and thus will not happen. Also, even if it were true there is only a chance that their impacts will happen. Our impacts are not only real, but will happen. The only reason they think that social inequality is not that bad of a thing is because they have been filled up with the panic and fear put out by the media we are trying to change. You must vote to fight real impacts that will happen unless the alternative takes place and not vote to stop impacts that are unreal and exaggerated. Thirdly, you must vote to fight real impacts that will happen unless the alternative takes place and not vote to stop impacts that are unreal and exaggerated.
- 13 -
LC Debate
FEAR
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Links Overfishing is just the newest fear that the media is instilling into Americans Fumento in 96 (Michael Fumento, Science columnist for Scripps-Howard, “Population action tells a fishy story about fish supply” Copyright 1996, http://www.fumento.com/bomis20.html)
"A burgeoning population and the growing demand for seafood may make fish unavailable to nearly a billion of the world's poor in the next century, says a new report." If you read USA Today or any number of other papers that carried a similar story, you probably believe that. Which is too bad because the report, issued by the pro-population control Population Action International is just one big, well, fish story. There's one huge problem with the report. See if you can pick it out by reading between the lines of report co-author Robert Engelman. "We're up against the wall," he said. "Since the end of the 80s, we've been catching the same amount of wild fish around the world, [but] there are about 90 million more people every year." Did you notice the qualifying word: "wild"? Yes, the statement is true for wild fish but completely ignores the role of farmed fish, called "aquaculture." Looking at data provided in a 1995 United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization publication, "The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture," we see that for the earliest year provided (1984) there were 51,105 thousand tons of wild fish caught with 6,933 thousand tons raised on farms. Wild fish capture peaked out in 1989 and has dropped slightly to 56,470 thousand tons by 1993, but aquaculture continued growing like gangbusters to 15,800 tons by 1993. Combining both types of fish, there was far from a decline but rather a 24% increase in the nine-year period, fueled by a 128% growth in aquaculture. At the same time world population increased by only 16%. Unless you just happen to hate fish, that's a mighty nice "wall" we're up against. Far from running out of the slimy things, we're practically swimming in them. Unfortunately, neither USA Today nor some of the other papers that carried the story bothered to mention aquaculture. In fact, nobody who carried the story allowed any criticism of the report at all. The Population Action International study does mention the growing aquaculture industry, saying it "compensates somewhat for declines in fish catches." It even depicts a chart showing its phenomenal growth. But it downplays the industry, saying "Cultivation of fish has so far proven too costly to provide large amounts of food to poor people." But the aforementioned U.N. publication, using the same data as Population Action International, says otherwise. "The balance of 31 million tons in the supplies of food fish required by the year 2010 would have to come from aquaculture, which has been expanding at a rate of one million tons a year, increasing to almost two million tons in 1993." Meanwhile, to continue feeding the world at the same rate would require "an overall average annual increase of less than one million tons a year." While Population Action says, "There is little prospect for major expansion of aquaculture in Africa, the U.N. report says aquaculture's phenomenal "growth should continue, recognizing the significant potential of increased farmed fish production in Africa and Latin America." (Emphasis mine.) Yet, the real powerhouse could be the
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United States. So far all of North America produces only 3.7% of the world's aquaculture. The United States produces less than a 16th of China's output. The reason is that Americans are not big fish eaters and that, exactly opposite of what Population Action is telling us, those who are big fish eaters are finding or growing a plentiful supply. But if that ever changes, America's ingenious farming know-how combined with abundant lakes and waterways will combine to make us not just the breadbasket but also the fishbasket of the world. What we're seeing is a rapid transition from depending on wild fish to raising our own which parallels civilization's movement from hunting and gathering to husbanding animals and raising crops. The very reason that fish farming is catching on so rapidly is that it is so much cheaper and more efficient than setting out in boats and hoping for good fortune. Less romantic perhaps, but them's the breaks. The problem with all the population control groups and individual gurus like Paul Ehrlich is that they first decided they were against population growth and have spent the entire time since then trying to find evidence to justify their position, rather than forming their position based on the evidence. The result has been a stream of nonsense that essentially began with Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb which told us that "the battle to feed humanity is over." In fact, except for the occasional politically-inspired famine such as Ethiopia's, humanity is much better fed today than it was in 1968. Man's ingenuity in providing new food supplies has readily outpaced his growth in population growth. Now, even as population growth is already slowing on its own, we're beginning a new era of genetically-designed foods that will make even progress to date look anemic. My advice to the population controllers: If you don't like having more people around in the same sense a lot of American just don't like eating fish, then simply say so. Quit concocting false evidence to scare everyone who doesn't share your taste.
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Links Global warming is full of falsified and exaggerated claims. The media continues to try and send us into a complete panic over it yet there is hardly any true factual evidence to support it. Singer in 97 (Mr. Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and president of the Science & Environmental Policy Project in Fairfax, Va., is author of "Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming's Unfinished Debate" (Independent Institute, 1997).) The Sky Isn't Falling and the Sea Isn't Rising By S. Fred Singer Copyright 1997 Dow Jones & Co., Inc. Global-warming devotees have been making alarmist predictions about the rising sea levels they think will follow an increase in the earth's average temperatures. The horror stories include the flooding of low-lying coastal areas, the disappearance of island nations, the inundation of America by environmental refugees, and an exponential explosion in insurance claims. Activists apparently don't realize that the much-ballyhooed climate models that predict global warming cannot make any quantitative predictions at all about sea levels. They also don't realize that informed speculation about rising sea levels has been steadily falling. Initial estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency projected that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would cause sea levels to rise by between 80 and 120 inches. By 1990 these estimates had been reduced by 75%. In 1996 a United Nations science advisory panel predicted a rise of only 15 to 22 inches by 2100-still based on shaky assumptions. Even these much smaller estimates are cause for skepticism, because changes in sea level are notoriously difficult to measure, and reliable information is hard to come by. All historical data are based on tide gauges, mainly on the shorelines of Northern Europe and North America. Long-term sea level trends must be extracted after adjusting for waves, storm surges and tidal variations. Scientists must also contend with the fact that the land surface may be rising or falling. Some land surfaces, in Scandinavia for example, are rebounding after being compressed by the weight of glaciers. Other land areas are subsiding, as petroleum or ground water is pumped out. Nevertheless, climate specialists have constructed a corrected "global" sea-level record; it shows that sea levels have been rising at the rate of about seven inches per century. Is this rise connected to climate? Not likely. The best estimates based on geologic data indicate that this has been going on for several centuries--a period in which the global climate has fluctuated significantly. Rather, the current thinking is that the steady rise in sea levels is connected to slow tectonic changes in the shape of the ocean basin--which human beings, of course, can do nothing about. Calculations of any climate effect on sea levels must take account of this more or less steady rise. The next question is how global warming, if it occurs, would affect sea levels. On the one hand, a warmer climate would melt mountain glaciers and cause a thermal expansion of ocean water, accelerating sea levels' rise. But on the other hand, more water would evaporate from the surface of warmer oceans, leading to more rainfall, and--over Greenland and the Antarctic--to greater accumulation of snow and ice. This process essentially thickens the polar ice caps, thus lowering sea levels. The problem has been to find whether the sea levels' rising or lowering would have a greater impact. This is a question that cannot be answered by - 16 -
LC Debate FEAR Sunwold theory, or by computer models. To produce an accurate conclusion, we have to examine data. Fortunately, we do have data from a relatively rapid global warming that occurred between about 1900 and 1940, as the climate recovered from a cool period called the Little Ice Age. Neither the Little Ice Age nor the warming that followed are ascribed to human influences; many scientists believe they were caused by subtle changes in the sun's radiation. In any case, data from the warming of 1900-1940 shows a drop in sea levels, while the subsequent cooler period shows a sea-level rise. This effect is even more pronounced in comparisons of sea-level changes with sea-surface temperatures in the tropics, where most of the oceans' evaporation occurs. These findings support the hypothesis that ice accumulation in the polar regions may have a greater impact on sea levels than do the melting of glaciers and the thermal expansion of ocean water. Support for this view also comes from concurrent but as yet incomplete measurements of ice accumulation at certain locations in Greenland and the Antarctic. Contrary to activists' claims, what's clear is that global warming--if it takes place--would slow any rise in sea levels. Although more study is needed, this striking result should at least give pause to the Association of Small Island States and other groups that are pressing industrialized nations to adopt drastic reductions in fossil fuel use in order to avoid the global warming "catastrophe" so dear to the environmentalist lobby.
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Other Cool Stuff The media is the problem. The media is the source of all the fears that drive us into our panic. Glassner in 99 (Barry Glassner, Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California, “Culture of Fear” copyright 1999) Any analysis of the culture of fear that ignored the news media would be patently incomplete, and of the several institutions most culpable for creating and sustaining scares the news media are arguably first among equals. They are also the most promising candidates for positive change. Yet by the same token critiques such as Stolberg's presage a crucial shortcoming in arguments that blame the media. Reporters not only spread fears, they also debunk them and criticize one another for spooking the public. A wide array of groups, including businesses, advocacy organizations, religious sects, and political parties, promote and profit from scares. News organizations are distinguished from other fear-mongering groups because they sometimes bite the scare that feeds them. A group that raises money for research into a particular disease is not likely to negate concerns about that disease. A company that sells alarm systems is not about to call attention to the fact that crime is down. News organizations, on the other hand, periodically allay the very fears they arouse to lure audiences. Some newspapers that ran stories about child murderers, rather than treat every incident as evidence of a shocking trend, affirmed the opposite. After the schoolyard shooting in Kentucky the New York Times ran a sidebar alongside its feature story with the headline "Despite Recent Carnage, School Violence Is Not on Rise." Following the Jonesboro killings they ran a similar piece, this time on a recently released study showing the rarity of violent crimes in schools. Several major newspapers parted from the pack in other ways. USA Today and the Washington Post, for instance, made sure their readers knew that what should worry them is the availability of guns. USA Today ran news stories explaining that easy access to guns in homes accounted for increases in the number of juvenile arrests for homicide in rural areas during the 1990s. While other news outlets were respectfully quoting the mother of the thirteen-year-old Jonesboro shooter, who said she did not regret having encouraged her son to learn to fire a gun ("it's like anything else, there's some people that can drink a beer and not become an alcoholic"), USA Today ran an op-ed piece proposing legal parameters for gun ownership akin to those for the use of alcohol and motor vehicles. And the paper published its own editorial in support of laws that require gun owners to lock their guns or keep them in locked containers. Adopted at that time by only fifteen states, the laws had reduced the number of deaths among children in those states by 23 percent.
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Other Cool Stuff The media and giant corporations work along side each other to benefit themselves at the expense of the masses. Glassner in 2003 (Barry Glassner, Professor of Sociology at University of Southern California, “Professor Barry Glassner, The Man Who Knows About Fear in American Culture” April 10, 2003, http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/04/10_glassner.html) And when we ask that question, it seems to me, it's reasonably clear who is doing the fear-mongering, and it's TV news magazines and news programs that are trying to sell programs to their viewers, advocacy groups that are trying to sell memberships and make some money, lawyers who are selling class-action lawsuits, politicians who win elections by whipping up fear of crime, even when crime rates are way down. And the list goes on and on, all the way to marketers of anti-bacterial soaps and realtors who sell homes in gated communities. And when living in that kind of environment, with so much profit available to those who can manipulate our fears effectively, it's not surprising that we're so fearful.
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A2: Perm 1. You can’t perm the alternative – There is not true way to do both the plan and the alternative at the same time. The aff cannot do their plan and not do it at the same time. Also if they were to do our alternative they would have to reject all that the media has told them and thus completely reverse their plan. In essence by saying they want to perm it they want to do the alternative. Vote Neg for this. 2. No explanation – The aff did not explain exactly how the perm will work. They simply say we do both. “Do both” could mean a multitude of things. The need to explain their perm in order for us to properly argue it 3. Perm is a shift in advocacy – As the aff they should stick to their case. By being able to shift off of their case they can shift around however they like to get out of our links
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A2: Contradict w/impact 1. What we advocate is not against impacts in general, it is against the specific impacts given by our opponents – The impacts that are given are illusionary or exaggerated threats produced by the mainstream media. Our impacts are the ones not looked at by the media yet are the most important 2. Impacts are still important in the debate - We still believe that impacts in this round should be closely looked at when judging. Because of this you should vote them down for the over exaggerated impacts they give 3. No abuse – We have not abused anyone in the debate. They still have ground in that they can argue that the ocean really is a big issue which could directly clash with our kritik
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A2: No link 1. There is a clear link – Ocean destruction is the recent trend in things to be afraid of. The aff wouldn’t want to put in the plan if they weren’t scared out of their minds by the media 2. All of their cards show examples of the media instilling fear 0 Everyone of their cards talk about these horrible tings that will happen if we don’t do something about the oceans 3. Their performance in this round links – They are trying to scare you, as a judge that horrible things will happen unless we act to prevent their impacts. If you let them you start a downward spiral slowly looking less and less from societies real problems and more towards unimportant issues
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A2: No alternative 1. Our alternative is clear – Reject the aff plan and begin a nationwide movement to promote the change of real issues in society 2. This is realistic – In a free democratic society we as people all have the right to speak our voices. By joining in a movement against social problems people can change whatever they want to 3. Movements solve (insert card)
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A2: No impact 1. Extend our D card from the 1nc. (give analysis) 2. This impact is real. We live in a world of capitalism where there is a natural social inequality. As this inequality grows, we risk political instability, economic collapse, poverty, and all that goes with poverty 3. Our impact must be looked at first in this debate – Our impact is a real impact. What we advocate has true societal impacts. Also our impacts will happen. This can be seen in the examples given in our D card. And just for the hell of it here’s more examples (read more cards with examples) 4. Impacts that will happen come before impacts that might happen – Cross apply my D card and the (card I just read). These show that our impacts will happen. Al of our opponents impacts are things that might happen. You must look to ours because they are inevitable and our opponents are not. If you don’t you doom the lives of many.
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A2: Realism 1. Non unique- realism exists in the status quo. They might as well just say that they advocate the status quo because their impacts are inevitable 2. No link – look to their cards, non of them mention realism being better then our alternative 3. Realism leads to war – (find card) 4. Realism is a byproduct of the system our critique addresses. The only way to solve for the horrible things realism leads to is to embrace the critique alternative 5. Realism is a horrible arg (find theory) 6. Do not vote for realism – Voting for realism is to allow the oppressive system to continue to instill fear into people as well as justify wars where millions if not billions will die
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A2: Contradict w/DA 1. No contradiction – Our kritik shows the flaws of the system our opponents work in. our impacts are not exaggerated or illusionary byproducts of an attention hungry media system like our opponents 2. Our DA is legit and goes right along with our kritik – Our DA goes right along in showing the downsides to the system our opponents work through. 3. The impacts of our DA hold – our impacts will happen if the plan is passed. The aff’s impacts were made up by the media to throw the masses into a panic
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