Neg - Neg vs K Affs Supplement 2 - Michigan 7 2023 CFMP

Neg V K Affs Supplement 1.0—CFMP
Misc Updates
Academy K
Link—Baudrillard—1NC
The 1AC’s politics that have been forwarded into academia derive from a strange sense of posthumous liberation – They reduce <their impact/theory> into a cinema – to watch and to comment on which turns case because their analysis of history through their lens fails - this is why the 1AC describes themselves as a(n) “<insert>” that merely creates a future futile possibility for change.
Baudrillard 81 (Jean Baudrillard, xx-xx-1981, Simulacra and Simulation: History: A Retro Scenario, pg. 43-44) //damien jiu
In a violent and contemporary period of history (let's say between the two world wars and the cold war), it is myth that invades cinema as imaginary content. It is the golden age of despotic and legendary resurrections. Myth, chased from the real by the violence of history, finds refuge in cinema. Today, it is history itself that invades the cinema according to the same scenario-the historical stake chased from our lives by this sort of immense neutralization, which is dubbed peaceful coexistence on a global level, and pacified monotony on the quotidian level-this history exorcised by a slowly or brutally congealing society celebrates its resurrection in force on the screen, according to the same process that used to make lost myths live again. History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth. It is by virtue of this fact that it takes the place of myths on the screen. The illusion would be to congratulate oneself on this "awareness of history on the part of cinema," as one congratulated oneself on the "entrance of politics into the university." Same misunderstanding, same mystification. The politics that enter the university are those that come from history, a retro politics, emptied of substance and legalized in their superficial exercise, with the air of a game and a field of adventure, this kind of politics is like sexuality or permanent education (or like social security in its time), that is, posthumous liberalization. The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations , and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution-today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions-no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake. Anything serves to escape this void, this leukemia of history and of politics, this hemorrhage of values-it is in proportion to this distress that all content can be evoked pell-mell, that all previous history is resurrected in bulk-a controlling idea no longer selects, only nostalgia endlessly accumulates: war, fascism, the pageantry of the belle epoque, or the revolutionary struggles, everything is equivalent and is mixed indiscriminately in the same morose and funereal exaltation, in the same retro fascination. There is however a privileging of the immediately preceding era (fascism, war, the period immediately following the war-the innumerable films that play on these themes for us have a closer, more perverse, denser, more confused essence). One can explain it by evoking the Freudian theory of fetishism (perhaps also a retro hypothesis). This trauma (loss of referentials) is similar to the discovery of the difference between the sexes in children, as serious, as profound, as irreversible: the fetishization of an object intervenes to obscure this unbearable discovery, but precisely, says Freud, this object is not just any object, it is often the last object perceived before the traumatic discovery. Thus the fetishized history will preferably be the one immediately preceding our "irreferential" era. Whence the omnipresence of fascism and of war in retro-a coincidence, an affinity that is not at all political; it is naive to conclude that the evocation of fascism signals a current renewal of fascism (it is precisely because one is no longer there, because one is in something else, which is still less amusing, it is for this reason that fascism can again become fascinating in its filtered cruelty, aestheticized by retro). History thus made its triumphal entry into cinema, posthumously (the term historical has undergone the same fate: a "historical'' moment, monument, congress, figure are in this way designated as fossils). Its reinjection has no value as conscious awareness but only as nostalgia for a lost referential. This does not signify that history has never appeared in cinema as a powerful moment, as a contemporary process, as insurrection and not as resurrection. In the "real" as in cinema, there was history but there isn't any anymore. Today, the history that is "given back" to us (precisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a relation to a "historical real'' than neofiguration in painting does to the classical figuration of the real. Neofiguration is an invocation of resemblance, but at the same time the flagrant proof of the disappearance of objects in their very representation: hyperreal. Therein objects shine in a sort of hyperresemblance (like history in contemporary cinema) that makes it so that fundamentally they no longer resemble anything, except the empty figure of resemblance, the empty form of representation. It is a question of life or death: these objects are no longer either living or deadly. That is why they are so exact, so minute, frozen in the state in which a brutal loss of the real would have seized them. All, but not only, those historical films whose very perfection is disquieting: Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor, Barry Lyndon, 1900, All the President's Men, etc. One has the impression of it being a question of perfect remakes, of extraordinary montages that emerge more from a combinatory culture (or Mcluhanesque mosaic), oflarge photo-, kino-, historicosynthesis machines, etc., rather than one of veritable films. Let's understand each other: their quality is not in question. The problem is rather that in some sense we are left completely indifferent. Take The Last Picture Show: like me, you would have had to be sufficiently distracted to have thought it to be an original production from the 1950s: a very good film about the customs in and the atmosphere of the American small town. Just a slight suspicion: it was a little too good, more in tune, better than the others, without the psychological, moral, and sentimental blotches of the films of that era. Stupefaction when one discovers that it is a 1970s film, perfect retro, purged, pure, the hyperrealist restitution of 1950s cinema. One talks of remaking silent films, those will also doubtlessly be better than those of the period. A whole generation of films is emerging that will be to those one knew what the android is to man: marvelous artifacts, without weakness, pleasing simulacra that lack only the imaginary, and the hallucination inherent to cinema. Most of what we see today (the best) is already of this order. Barry Lyndon is the best example: one never did better, one will never do better in ... in what? Not in evoking, not even in evoking, in simulating. All the toxic radiation has been filtered, all the ingredients are there, in precise doses, not a single error
AT: Death K
Death reps are good---indifference is the worst form of politics.
Wear, 2020
(Michael – President and CEO @ Center for Christianity & Public Life, “A Politics Worse than Death,” 10 July 2020, https://breakingground.us/a-politics-worse-than-death/)
This year, our politics has been riveted by death. The COVID-19 virus has been a blunt reminder of a truth we try so desperately to avoid: that death is coming for us all. Yet the solidarity that might be inspired by this knowledge has been challenged by the renewed realization that death is not colorblind in America, whether it comes to the racial disparities of the pandemic or the deadly violence against black people at the hands of the state. What do we do when death comes to our politics? Whose death matters in our politics? Of course, death has always been tied to politics. In fact, some would argue that politics itself is a response to death, and our desire to ward it off. Violence unto death has been an engine of economic development. Violence is so pervasive in political affairs that the development of tools of violence so extraordinary so as to ensure the annihilation of entire communities of people have been hailed as victories for peace. It is conventional wisdom among much of the foreign-policy establishment that the threat of violent death as a result of nuclear warfare is an acceptable and wise tool for peace and protection. Many are reckoning with the fact that, as a society, we have made a similar bargain domestically: the ever-present specter of death for some at the hands of law enforcement is an acceptable cost for the security we believe violence provides for us. This violence is necessary, some think, because they never anticipate that it will fall on them. This violence is acceptable because it happens only with the legitimacy we grant it, not by our own hands. Framed in such striking terms, I am tempted to judge this bargain quite harshly. Indeed, I am tempted to judge us harshly for making it. But perhaps such a judgment is too easy. It is difficult to count deaths averted, especially in such a violent world. What violence has been avoided because of the deterrence of the nuclear bomb, or of the death penalty? If physical death is not just inevitable but an imperative, perhaps our politics needs to plan for it, to consider it, to redirect it as long as possible. One feels vulnerable even expressing such doubts, but what hubris to refuse to even consider the utility of the nuclear bomb or the electric chair, even if you seek to abolish both, as I do. Perhaps the nuclear bomb has saved my life. Perhaps lethal injection has saved yours. Might ending either only lead to misery of a different sort, death by other hands? How do we weigh these possibilities? Whose death matters? In a discourse centered on privilege, it’s tempting to draw a clear dividing line between the powerful and the downtrodden on questions of death and violence. We might assume that only the powerful are content with such “necessary” violence, and that the downtrodden would do away with it if they could. But the powerful often fly above death, unaware it lies just beneath the cover of the clouds. The downtrodden can view death as a matter of practicality, a potential source of order and safety, however unreliable, amid chaos. But here is the real distinction: For death to come to the powerful, it almost always has to come for the powerless first. To reach the palace, an opposing army must first make its way through the slums. For the powerful, their death is often everyone’s death. For the unnoticed and unnoteworthy, death comes like a thief in the night. A fundamental privilege, certainly, is the privilege to stave off death, to die knowing every appropriate measure was taken to protect your life. A pandemic like the one we are enduring now cuts through these typical divides. While the burden of the COVID-19 virus has not fallen equally on all, it is striking how it has forced a kind of solidarity. It is easy to mock celebrities complaining about stay-at-home orders while they sip cocktails in their exotic swimming pools, but I can’t really think of anything other than COVID-19 that has forced me to adjust in my life, that has also forced bank CEOs and movie stars to adjust as well, particularly over such a sustained period of time and over such a geographic spread. The powerful sometimes have unique reasons to fear death because of their power, but COVID-19 has caused powerful people to fear death simply because they are human. There is a certain unity in this. For a moment, at least, it seemed as though we were ready as a country to meet the moment. A Pew study in March found that 89 percent of Americans were following news about COVID-19 very (51 percent) or fairly (38 percent) closely. In April, an overwhelming majority (80 percent) of the American people supported stay-at-home orders, knowing and bearing their cost. This pandemic has brought governance, especially state and local governance, back into the center of a politics dominated by personality, identity, and movements. I was struck on a recent walk as I passed by a series of local government signs urging me to protect myself and others. Local government, which mostly fades into the background in my life, now brought to the fore. A March NBC/Wall Street Journal survey showed about three-quarters of registered voters had confidence in state and local government to deal with the outbreak of the virus. Congress, which has evaded responsibility for much in recent years, actually acted to pass a significant, if flawed, relief bill on a bipartisan basis. Perhaps the pandemic would prove that some seemingly intractable political problems were not so intractable after all. This is the story I would love to see and tell. Instead, while we should not ignore the bright spots, I do not believe death has jolted us out of anything. Yes, we have had a politics riveted by death this year, but death has exerted little discernible discipline on our political dysfunction. Rather, our politics has proved capable of forcing even death into its mold. In March, Rusty Reno, the editor-in-chief of First Things, decried the “sentimentalism” and “false god” of saving lives. His article was widely panned on social media, and easy accusations of pro-life hypocrisy were called forth. In May, on Twitter, Reno would share that his view that the “mask culture” was “fear-driven” and that wearing a mask is a “mark of cowardice.” This, too, was not received well on social media. There is a kind of pseudo-Christian narcissism that places on others its own embrace of a calculated risk in determining death’s value. We’ve all seen the folks at protests who claim they’re okay to be out in public because God will protect them. Or the Ohio legislator who invoked the “image of God” as depicted in the human face specifically as the reason he would not wear a mask, and asked, “Is the role of government to protect us from death, which is inevitable? Or is the role of government to radically protect our freedom and our liberty?” Many of us recognize these kinds of sentiments as irresponsible. But perhaps we simply lack theological insight? Perhaps we lack the faith of Christian bravado? Are we not supposed to “reject death’s dominion” as Reno called for us to do? In the eighth chapter of Matthew, we’re told that while Jesus was teaching, a crowd began to surround him, and so Jesus told his disciples that they would take a boat across the nearby lake. Before they could leave, a teacher approached Jesus and said he would follow Jesus wherever he went. Jesus indicated to the man what he was volunteering for, a life on the run. One of Jesus’s disciples asked to bury his father before traveling on with Jesus. Jesus replied, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” “Then,” Scripture tells us, Jesus got into a boat and his disciples followed him. “We better do what he says,” they might have said. “He’s been worth following so far,” they might have reasoned, the implicit question hanging in the air. The passage continues, Suddenly a furious storm came up on the lake, so that the waves swept over the boat. But Jesus was sleeping. The disciples went and woke him, saying, “Lord, save us! We’re going to drown!” He replied, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm. The men were amazed and asked, “What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the waves obey him!” As Dallas Willard suggested in a talk, Jesus is not just reproaching his disciples for fearing that the boat would sink, but for “their thought that if their boat were to sink it would be the end of the world.” In other words, he reproaches them for their overriding fear—of danger, of physical harm, of death—fear to the point of the diminishment of their faith. At another point in Jesus’s ministry, he had been sent word that someone he loved in Judea was sick. Jesus told the disciples who were with him that the sickness would not end in death, but would be an occasion for God’s glory. After two days, Scripture tells us, Jesus said that they were to return to Judea. Jesus’s companions reminded him that he had almost been killed the last time he was in Judea, but he told them Lazarus had died and he was going to see him. Martha and Mary, whom he also loved, were there as well. Andrew told the other disciples that they were to follow Jesus to die as well. When Jesus arrived in Bethany, he was greeted by Martha, who expressed utter confidence that Jesus had the power to prevent Lazarus’s death, and that “even now God will give you whatever you ask.” Jesus tells Martha her brother will rise again, but Martha gives Jesus an out: “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” This understanding of physical death seems like precisely the kind of faith Jesus wanted from the disciples on the boat. When Mary saw Jesus, she fell at his feet, and told him, “Lord, if you had been there, my brother would not have died.” Scripture says that when Jesus “saw Mary weeping . . . he was deeply moved and troubled.” Jesus asked to be taken to Lazarus, and it is when those who had gathered told him “Come and see, Lord,” that Jesus wept. He would, of course, raise Lazarus from the dead. And Jesus and his disciples would not die that day, as the disciples had worried. In the passage of Scripture describing Jesus’s greatest miracle, and his supreme confidence in his Father, Jesus is described as “moved” multiple times, troubled, weeping. What was it that led Jesus to rebuke his disciples on the boat but to weep with those mourning the death of Lazarus? When confronted with death, when is the proper Christian response to proclaim, like Paul, “O death, where is thy sting!,” and when is it to weep, to mourn, to try to avoid death or turn it back? There is a passage in Scripture where Jesus is talking with Simon Peter about death. The way a person interprets this passage can be an indicator of what they think about God and how God views death. Jesus, who had risen from the dead, had joined several of his disciples on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and made them breakfast. After they were fed, he addressed Simon Peter, who had denied that he knew Jesus three times prior to his crucifixion. When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” “Yes, Lord,” he said, “you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.” Again Jesus said, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Take care of my sheep.” The third time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, “Do you love me?” He said, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my sheep. Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then h

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