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<|begin_of_text|><|im_start|>system You convert citation and fulltext information from an article into a well-formatted html block. Your responses are always valid html only with no clarification. The html must include - A tag in <h4> that expresses the main argument of the evidence - A citation that makes it easy to find the original source - The full text reformatted in html, with underlining. This can be done with <u> and <mark> tags. - Always ensure tags are properly closed. <|im_end|> <|im_start|>user citation: Marriott 12 – (2012, David, PhD in literature from the University of Sussex, Professor of the History of Consciousness at UC-Santa Cruz, “3. Black Cultural Studies,” Years Work Crit Cult Theory, 20 (1): 37-66) fulltext: In the concluding pages of Darker Than Blue, Gilroy restates why he finds the ongoing attachment to the idea of race in the US so very unsatisfactory in comparison, say, to the anti-racism of Frantz Fanon: [Fanon’s] ‘audacious commitment to an alternative conception of humanity reconstituted outside “race” […] is something that does not endear Fanon’s work to today’s practitioners of the facile antihumanism and ethnic absolutism so characteristic of life on US college campuses, where class-based homogeneity combines smoothly with deference to racial and ethic particularity and with resignation to the world as it appears. Fanon disappoints that scholastic constituency by refusing to see culture as an insurmountable obstacle between groups, even if they have been racialized. He does not accept the “strategic” award of an essential innocence to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth. Their past and present sufferings confer no special nobility upon them and are not invested with redemptive insights. Suffering is just suffering, and Fanon has no patience with those who would invoke the armour of incorrigibility around national liberation struggles or minority cultures’. (pp. 157–8, my emphasis) Whatever one might think of the cogency of these remarks (if only because the notion of a non-racial life is predicated on the idea that the human can somehow reside ‘outside’ of race, a humanism that would always then be constitutively compromised by the racism at its frontier), the question of whether US culture can ever escape racial antagonism is the primary focus of Frank B. Wilderson III’s powerful Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, as part of a more general reading of US film culture. And indeed Fanon’s anti-philosophical philosophical critique of racial ontology (historically blacks were seen as part of existence but not, as yet, part of human being, a not-yet that forces Fanon to rethink the teleological form of the human as already and essentially violent in its separation from the state of nature from which it has come) forms a major part of Wilderson’s conception of anti-blackness as the major structural antagonism of US history and culture. It is against the conception that racism could ever be simply contingent to black experience that Wilderson protests, reflecting on the fact that racial slavery has no parallel to other forms of suffering, and perhaps most strikingly social death is the constitutive essence of black existence in the US. In brief, slavery remains so originary, in the sense of what he calls its ‘accumulation and fungibility’ (terms borrowed from Saidiya Hartman), it not only has no ‘analogy’ to other forms of antagonism—Wilderson’s examples are the Holocaust and Native American genocide—there is simply no process of getting over it, of recovering from the loss (as wound, or trauma): as such, slavery remains the ultimate structure of antagonism in the US. Whether at a personal level or at the level of historical process, if ‘black slavery is foundational to modern Humanism’, then any teleological appeal to a humanism beyond racism is doomed from the start (p. 22). The problem with Wilderson’s argument, however, is that it remains of a piece with the manichean imperatives that beset it, and which by definition are structurally uppermost, which means that he can only confirm those imperatives as absolutes rather than chart a dialectical path beyond them, insofar as, structurally speaking, there is no ‘outside’ to black social death and alienation, or no outside to this outside, and all that thought can do is mirror its own enslavement by race. This is not so much ‘afro-pessimism’—a term coined by Wilderson—as thought wedded to its own despair. However, this is also not the entire story of Red, White, and Black, as I hope to show. For example, in Chapter One (‘The Structure of Antagonisms’), written as a theoretical introduction, and which opens explicitly on the Fanonian question of why ontology cannot understand the being of the Black, Wilderson is prepared to say that black suffering is not only beyond analogy, it also refigures the whole of being: ‘the essence of being for the White and non-Black position’ is non-niggerness, consequently, ‘[b]eing can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness, and slavery then as niggerness’ (p. 37). It is not hard when reading such sentences to suspect a kind of absolutism at work here, and one that manages to be peculiarly and dispiritingly dogmatic: throughout Red, White, and Black, despite variations in tone and emphasis, there is always the desire to have black lived experience named as the worst, and the politics of such a desire inevitably collapses into a kind of sentimental moralism: for the claim that ‘Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form’ means merely that the black has to embody this abjection without reserve (p. 38). This logic—and the denial of any kind of ‘ontological integrity’ to the Black/Slave due to its endless traversal by force does seem to reduce ontology to logic, namely, a logic of non-recuperability—moves through the following points: (1) Black non-being is not capable of symbolic resistance and, as such, falls outside of any language of authenticity or reparation; (2) for such a subject, which Wilderson persists in calling ‘death’, the symbolic remains foreclosed (p. 43); (3) as such, Blackness is the record of an occlusion which remains ever present: ‘White (Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity’ (p. 45); (4) and, as an example of the institutions or discourses involving ‘violence’, ‘antagonisms’ and ‘parasitism’, Wilderson describes White (or non-Black) film theory and cultural studies as incapable of understanding the ‘suffering of the Black—the Slave’ (they cannot do so because they are erroneously wedded to humanism and to the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, which Wilderson takes as two examples of what the Afro-pessimist should avoid) (p. 56); as a corrective, Wilderson calls for a new language of abstraction, and one centrally concerned with exposing ‘the structure of antagonisms between Blacks and Humans’ (p. 68). Reading seems to stop here, at a critique of Lacanian full speech: Wilderson wants to say that Lacan’s notion of the originary (imaginary) alienation of the subject is still wedded to relationality as implied by the contrast between ‘empty’ and ‘full’ speech, and so apparently cannot grasp the trauma of ‘absolute Otherness’ that is the Black’s relation to Whites, because psychoanalysis cannot fathom the ‘structural, or absolute, violence’ of Black life (pp. 74; 75). ‘Whereas Lacan was aware of how language “precedes and exceeds us”, he did not have Fanon’s awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks’ (p. 76). The violence of such abjection—or incapacity—is therefore that it cannot be communicated or avowed, and is always already delimited by desubjectification and dereliction (p. 77). Whence the suspicion of an ontology reduced to a logic (of abjection). Leaving aside the fact that it is quite mistaken to limit Lacan’s notion of full speech to the search for communication (the unconscious cannot be confined to parole), it is clear that, according to Wilderson’s own ‘logic’, his description of the Black is working, via analogy, to Lacan’s notion of the real but, in his insistence on the Black as an absolute outside Wilderson can only duly reify this void at the heart of universality. The Black is ‘beyond the limit of contingency’—but it is worth saying immediately that this ‘beyond’ is indeed a foreclosure that defines a violence whose traces can only be thought violently (that is, analogically), and whose nonbeing returns as the theme for Wilderson’s political thinking of a non-recuperable abjection. The Black is nonbeing and, as such, is more real and primary than being per se: given how much is at stake, this insistence on a racial metaphysics of injury implies a fundamental irreconcilability between Blacks and Humans (there is really no debate to be had here: irreconcilability is the condition and possibility of what it means to be Black). This argument could be illustrated at many points in Red, White, and Black, which all interconnect. Wilderson is concerned, for example, to argue that a Marxian ontology of labour and/or commodity form is philosophically inadequate for reading black accumulation and fungibility: this idea, which is not altogether new, is supported by a lengthy reading of the film Monster’s Ball (Chapter Four (‘Monster’s Ball’) and is perhaps the most valuable part of his book in its illustration of the links between race, violence, contingency, and death). Other chapters offer critiques of what Wilderson calls ‘empathetic’ as against ‘analytical’ cinema, with the former offering ‘sentimental apologies for structural violence’, rather than ‘paradigmatic analyses’ of black suffering (p. 341). It is not at all clear how this argument differs from film theory’s opposition between a cinema of distraction and a socially engaged cinema: it seems to me that this theory of the filmwork describes quite precisely the distinction between analysis and empathy Wilderson is trying to make (and unsettle). However, unlike film theory, Wilderson’s attempt to preserve the distinction seems to work with an unquestioned notion of film spectatorship—i.e. either seduced or interrogated—which means that the theory of cinema he puts forth somewhat undermines his more general claim that film theory can never understand black suffering. It is also a little strange that a work so concerned with the chasm between ‘Human life and Black death’ should indict cinema for its ‘efforts to reassert relational logic’, but nowhere mentions how the very form of this reproach relies on reasserting the endless non-relational absence of Blackness (and thereby reducing the history and politics of race to a logic of non-relationality) (p. 340). This transcendentalizing of black suffering is fundamentally absolutist (and, once again, moralistic) in effect if not in intention. In the final sentences of the book, Wilderson asks, ‘How does one deconstruct life?’ It remains a pivotal question. But perhaps, after all, the more urgent task is not how to deconstruct life, but to grasp the necessarily-perverse logic of racial determinations of suffering? Red, White, and Black is a thought-provoking study of racial ontology which, whatever its limitations, is a powerful invocation of why blackness just is death, a death-in-life which has no analogy or synonym but which, for the same reason, must be thought differently for blackness to live.<|im_end|> <|im_start|>assistant <h4>Affirming the conditions of possibility for anti-racism is a better starting point for <u>political praxis</h4><p></u><strong>Marriott 12</strong> – (2012, David, PhD in literature from the University of Sussex, Professor of the History of Consciousness at UC-Santa Cruz, “3. Black Cultural Studies,” Years Work Crit Cult Theory, 20 (1): 37-66)</p><p>In the concluding pages of Darker Than Blue, Gilroy restates why he finds the ongoing attachment to the idea of race in the US so very unsatisfactory in comparison, say, to the anti-racism of Frantz Fanon: [Fanon’s] ‘audacious commitment to an alternative conception of humanity reconstituted outside “race” […] is something that does not endear Fanon’s work to today’s practitioners of the facile antihumanism and ethnic absolutism so characteristic of life on US college campuses, where class-based homogeneity combines smoothly with deference to racial and ethic particularity and with resignation to the world as it appears. Fanon disappoints that scholastic constituency by refusing to see culture as an insurmountable obstacle between groups, even if they have been racialized. He does not accept the “strategic” award of an essential innocence to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth. Their past and present sufferings confer no special nobility upon them and are not invested with redemptive insights. Suffering is just suffering, and Fanon has no patience with those who would invoke the armour of incorrigibility around national liberation struggles or minority cultures’. (pp. 157–8, my emphasis) Whatever one might think of the cogency of these remarks (if only because the notion of a non-racial life is predicated on the idea that the human can somehow reside ‘outside’ of race, a humanism that would always then be constitutively compromised by the racism at its frontier), <u>the question of <mark>whether US</mark> culture <mark>can</mark> ever <mark>escape racial antagonism is the</mark> primary <mark>focus</mark> of</u> Frank B. <u>Wilderson</u> III’s powerful <u>Red, White, and Black</u>: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms, as part of a more general reading of US film culture. And indeed <u>Fanon’s anti-philosophical philosophical critique of racial ontology</u> (historically blacks were seen as part of existence but not, as yet, part of human being, a not-yet that forces Fanon to rethink the teleological form of the human as already and essentially violent in its separation from the state of nature from which it has come) <u>forms a major part of Wilderson’s conception of anti-blackness as the major structural antagonism of US history and culture</u>. It is against the conception that racism could ever be simply contingent to black experience that Wilderson protests, reflecting on the fact that racial slavery has no parallel to other forms of suffering, and perhaps most strikingly social death is the constitutive essence of black existence in the US. <u>In brief, <mark>slavery remains so originary</u></mark>, in the sense of what he calls its ‘accumulation and fungibility’ (terms borrowed from Saidiya Hartman), <u>it not only has no ‘analogy’</u> to other forms of antagonism—Wilderson’s examples are the Holocaust and Native American genocide—<u><strong><mark>there is</mark> simply <mark>no</mark> process of <mark>getting over it</strong></mark>, of recovering from the loss</u> (as wound, or trauma): as such, slavery remains the ultimate structure of antagonism in the US. Whether at a personal level or at the level of historical process, if ‘black slavery is foundational to modern Humanism’, then any teleological appeal to a humanism beyond racism is doomed from the start (p. 22). <u><strong><mark>The problem</mark> with Wilderson’s argument</u></strong>, however, <u><strong><mark>is that it remains of a piece with the manichean imperatives that beset it</u></strong></mark>, and which by definition are structurally uppermost, <u><mark>which</mark> means that <strong>he <mark>can only confirm those imperatives</strong> as absolutes <strong>rather than chart a dialectical path beyond them</u></strong></mark>, insofar as, structurally speaking, <u><mark>there is no ‘outside’</mark> to black social death and alienation</u>, or no outside to this outside, <u>and all that thought can do is mirror its own enslavement by race</u>. <u><strong><mark>This is not so much ‘afro-pessimism’</u></strong></mark>—a term coined by Wilderson—<u><strong><mark>as thought wedded to its own despair</u></strong></mark>. However, this is also not the entire story of Red, White, and Black, as I hope to show. For example, in Chapter One (‘The Structure of Antagonisms’), written as a theoretical introduction, and which opens explicitly on the Fanonian question of why ontology cannot understand the being of the Black, <u>Wilderson is prepared to say that black suffering is not only beyond analogy, it also refigures the whole of being</u>: ‘the essence of being for the White and non-Black position’ is non-niggerness, consequently, ‘[b]eing can thus be thought of, in the first ontological instance, as non-niggerness, and slavery then as niggerness’ (p. 37). <u>It is not hard when reading such sentences to suspect a kind of absolutism at work here, and one that manages to be peculiarly and dispiritingly dogmatic</u>: <u>throughout Red, White, and Black, despite variations in tone and emphasis, <mark>there is always the desire to have black lived experience named as the worst, and</mark> <strong>the politics of <mark>such a desire inevitably collapses into</mark> a kind of <mark>sentimental moralism</u></strong></mark>: for the claim that ‘Blackness is incapacity in its most pure and unadulterated form’ means merely that the black has to embody this abjection without reserve (p. 38). <u><mark>This</mark> logic</u>—<u>and the <strong><mark>denial of any kind of ‘ontological integrity’</strong> to the Black/Slave</mark> due to its endless traversal by force <strong><mark>does seem to reduce ontology to logic</strong>, namely</mark>, a logic <mark>of non-recuperability</u></mark>—<u>moves through the following points</u>: (1) <u>Black non-being is not capable of symbolic resistance</u> and, as such, falls outside of any language of authenticity or reparation; (2) <u>for such a subject, which Wilderson persists in calling ‘death’, the symbolic remains foreclosed</u> (p. 43); (3) <u>as such, Blackness is the record of an occlusion which remains ever present</u>: ‘White (Human) capacity, in advance of the event of discrimination or oppression, is parasitic on Black incapacity’ (p. 45); (4) <u>and, as an example of the institutions or discourses involving ‘violence’, ‘antagonisms’ and ‘parasitism’, Wilderson describes White</u> (or non-Black) film <u>theory</u> and cultural studies <u>as incapable of understanding the ‘suffering of the Black</u>—<u>the Slave’</u> (they cannot do so <u><strong>because they are erroneously wedded to humanism</u></strong> and to the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, which Wilderson takes as two examples of what the Afro-pessimist should avoid) (p. 56); <u><mark>as a corrective, Wilderson calls for a new language of abstraction</mark>,</u> and one centrally <u><mark>concerned with exposing ‘the structure of antagonisms between Blacks and Humans’</u></mark> (p. 68). <u><strong><mark>Reading seems to stop here</u></strong></mark>, at a critique of Lacanian full speech: Wilderson wants to say that Lacan’s notion of the originary (imaginary) alienation of the subject is still wedded to relationality as implied by the contrast between ‘empty’ and ‘full’ speech, and so apparently cannot grasp the trauma of ‘absolute Otherness’ that is the Black’s relation to Whites, because psychoanalysis cannot fathom the ‘structural, or absolute, violence’ of Black life (pp. 74; 75). ‘Whereas Lacan was aware of how language “precedes and exceeds us”, he did not have Fanon’s awareness of how violence also precedes and exceeds Blacks’ (p. 76). <u>The violence of such abjection</u>—or incapacity—is therefore that it <u>cannot be communicated or avowed</u>, and is always already delimited by desubjectification and dereliction (p. 77). <u><strong>Whence the suspicion of an ontology reduced to a logic (of abjection).</u></strong> <u>Leaving aside the fact that <mark>it is</mark> <strong>quite <mark>mistaken to limit</mark> Lacan’s notion of <mark>full speech to</mark> the search for <mark>communication</u></strong></mark> (the unconscious cannot be confined to parole), it is clear that, according to Wilderson’s own ‘logic’, his description of the Black is working, via analogy, to Lacan’s notion of the real but, <u><strong>in his <mark>insistence on the Black as an absolute outside</mark> Wilderson <mark>can only</mark> duly <mark>reify this void at the heart of universality</u></strong>. <u>The Black is ‘beyond the limit of contingency’</u></mark>—<u><mark>but</u></mark> it is worth saying immediately that <u><strong><mark>this ‘beyond’</mark> is indeed a foreclosure that defines a violence whose traces <mark>can only be thought violently</u></strong></mark> (that is, analogically), and whose nonbeing returns as the theme for Wilderson’s political thinking of a non-recuperable abjection. The Black is nonbeing and, as such, is more real and primary than being per se: given how much is at stake, this insistence on a racial metaphysics of injury implies a fundamental irreconcilability between Blacks and Humans (there is really no debate to be had here: irreconcilability is the condition and possibility of what it means to be Black). This argument could be illustrated at many points in Red, White, and Black, which all interconnect. Wilderson is concerned, for example, to argue that a Marxian ontology of labour and/or commodity form is philosophically inadequate for reading black accumulation and fungibility: this idea, which is not altogether new, is supported by a lengthy reading of the film Monster’s Ball (Chapter Four (‘Monster’s Ball’) and is perhaps the most valuable part of his book in its illustration of the links between race, violence, contingency, and death). Other chapters offer critiques of what Wilderson calls ‘empathetic’ as against ‘analytical’ cinema, with the former offering ‘sentimental apologies for structural violence’, rather than ‘paradigmatic analyses’ of black suffering (p. 341). It is not at all clear how this argument differs from film theory’s opposition between a cinema of distraction and a socially engaged cinema: it seems to me that this theory of the filmwork describes quite precisely the distinction between analysis and empathy Wilderson is trying to make (and unsettle). However, unlike film theory, Wilderson’s attempt to preserve the distinction seems to work with an unquestioned notion of film spectatorship—i.e. either seduced or interrogated—which means that the theory of cinema he puts forth somewhat undermines his more general claim that film theory can never understand black suffering. <u>It is</u> also a little <u>strange that a work so concerned with the chasm between ‘Human life and Black death’ should indict cinema for its ‘efforts to reassert relational logic’, but nowhere mentions how the very form of <mark>this reproach <strong>relies on reasserting the endless non-relational absence of Blackness</u></strong></mark> (and thereby <u><strong><mark>reducing the history and politics of race to a logic of non-relationality</u></strong></mark>) (p. 340). <u><strong><mark>This transcendentalizing of black suffering is fundamentally absolutist</u></strong></mark> (<u><strong><mark>and</mark>, once again, <mark>moralistic</u></strong></mark>) <u><strong><mark>in effect if not in intention</u></strong></mark>. In the final sentences of the book, Wilderson asks, ‘How does one deconstruct life?’ It remains a pivotal question. But perhaps, after all, the more urgent task is not how to deconstruct life, but to grasp the necessarily-perverse logic of racial determinations of suffering? Red, White, and Black is a thought-provoking study of racial ontology which, whatever its limitations, is a powerful invocation of why blackness just is death, a death-in-life which has no analogy or synonym but which, for the same reason, must be thought differently for blackness to live.</p><|im_end|>

<|begin_of_text|><|im_start|>system You convert citation and fulltext information from an article into a well-formatted html block. Your responses are always valid html only with no clarification. The html must include - A tag in <h4> that expresses the main argument of the evidence - A citation that makes it easy to find the original source - The full text reformatted in html, with underlining. This can be done with <u> and <mark> tags. - Always ensure tags are properly closed. <|im_end|> <|im_start|>user citation: Arthur Waldron, Spring 2014. Lauder Professor of International Relations in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, and an FPRI Senior Fellow. “China’s ‘Peaceful Rise’ Enters Turbulence,” Orbis 58.2, 164–181. fulltext: Why is China, stronger and richer than she has ever been in history, making a turn toward a military posture that is at odds with her economic interests? It clearly jeopardizes the great advances she has made in the last thirty years. Yet, this is not an easy question to answer. Those with knowledge of history will recognize that being wealthy [fu ን] and militarily strong [qiang ᒝ] are conditions regularly considered both indispensable and complementary. Moreover, China today compares herself not with any real state from which she may be descended, but with an idealized, glorious China and a mythical golden age during which she was preeminent in the world. The belief is widespread that blame for the loss of this status is to be laid not so much at the feet of China or her rulers, as it is to be attributed to foreign invasions, rapaciousness, imperialistic alienation of territory, and so forth—particularly during the “century of humiliation,” that extends back from the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949 to Anglo-Chinese wars that began in 1839.22 Adding to the magnitude of China’s imagined loss, is her forfeiture, as is widely believed in China, of a pivotal and central place in the Asian world order: As former Ambassador John Van Antwerp MacMurray put it, in a celebrated memorandum presented to the State Department in 1935, China was the “sun” to which the relations of other states were merely “planetary.”23 Just as official Chinese writing presents her territorial claims as nothing more than the recovery of lost bits of her former empire, so her political rise is simply a return to her traditional position. So, puzzling as it may be to foreign observers, schooled in ideas drawn from European history, such as “balance of power,” and “counter-hegemonic coalitions,” the idea of a “peaceful rise” fits well in Chinese thought. The true history of the states that rose and fell on the easternmost part of the Eurasian land mass, and were grouped by subsequent historians as “dynasties” legitimate or illegitimate, is quite different. However, today Chinese believe that their present polity is descended from a long line of predecessors that were leaders of Asia by virtue of their civilizational and, to a lesser degree, military superiority. It is true, moreover, that in dynastic times, various states entered into “tributary” relations with states in what today is China, though what exactly this meant is difficult to specify exactly. According to this scheme, which derives from traditional dynastic histories and was assembled as a general theory by the eminent Chinese scholar and diplomat Jiang Tingfu and his Oxford student John King Fairbank, the Chinese emperor in his capital was the highest source of political and cultural legitimacy in the world. Rulers of other states acknowledged this fact by sending tributary emissaries, who would prostrate themselves before the Chinese emperor and declare fealty, while receiving in return legitimate investiture, reign title, calendar, and lavish gifts.24 Scholars have long known that the tributary system never really existed. China dealt on equal terms with Persia, with the Mongols, and with others. The concept is, as the late Harvard Professor Lien-sheng Yang pointed out, a “myth.”25 But what kind of myth is it exactly today, and intended for whom? In traditional times it was a myth designed for a domestic audience. Internal order in China depended upon every Chinese accepting the unlimited authority of the emperor. Europe can show similar examples of authority in the past, but not in the present. For the process of democratization and constitutionalization of European regimes has shifted the basis of regime legitimacy domestically away from authority and hierarchy to popular consent. This process simultaneously has brought increasing equality in international relations to the world. For China, however, the myth arguably will not disappear so long as the domestic need for it continues: in other words, as long as Chinese regime legitimacy continues to be based on authority and hierarchy—as it is in the People’s Republic of China—and not on constitutional democracy. Today’s Chinese government sees its task as restoring the country to its natural and historical status, a process of which attaining hegemony is an important component. Indeed, in today’s China this restoration is quantified precisely. Thus, a recent academic study concluded that the state had recaptured exactly 65.3 percent of her former glory, though without stating how that figure had been determined.26 Particularly to be noted is that Chinese tradition furthermore dictates that this restoration will—or should be—peaceful. Effortless attainment has always been one aspect by which the legitimacy of rule is known. A ruler who followed the way of the true king [wang dao ₺㆏] would never need to use force. His moral example and cultural superiority would be enough to give order to his realm. The proof text is the classical account of how the Zhou dynasty [ca. 1046-256 BCE] overthrew the corrupt Shang [ca. 1600-1046 BCE] at the semi-legendary battle of the Wilderness of Mu [Muye ’㊁] in 1045 BC. According to the Classic of Documents, the Shang troops “would offer no opposition to our army. Those in front inverted their spears and attacked those behind them, till they fled, and the blood flowed [. . .].” The victory was achieved by the working of Zhou virtue on the Shang forces. The empire was restored in the same way: King Wu of Zhou “had only to let his robes fall down, and fold his hands, and the empire was orderly ruled.27 Edward L. Shaughnessy observes that this battle represented at the time perhaps only the replacement—through force of arms—of one local power by another, but for later Chinese it came to illustrate the irrepressible will of Heaven turning its mandate from one state, the rulers of which had grown distant from the people, to another state blessed with virtuous rulers.28 For an educated Chinese until the last century, Muye would have been the most familiar and paradigmatic of all battles. In China, the expectation it expresses: namely, of the attainment of maximal goals by the use of minimal means, is still influential. This expectation of minimal force is evident in traditional Chinese works on the military, as well, although these were taboo to the Confucians, and are evident in current Chinese military thinking as well. Thus, the German word Gewalt, meaning force, occurs eight times in just the two paragraphs in which Clausewitz defines war. By contrast, in the entire 13 chapters of the Chinese military classic Sun Zi’s Art of War the Chinese character meaning force [li ജ] is used only nine times. The Chinese writers about war defined not destruction but disorganization, paralysis, and psychological domination of the enemy as their goal. “To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles” as Sun Zi (ca. 544-496 BCE) famously asserted “is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.29 Today, if doctrine and propaganda are any guide, China still intuitively accepts such concepts. She envisions a series of small local wars in Asia to be won quickly and at low cost, by a combination of brilliant strategy and high-technology weapons: “fought rapidly and decided rapidly” [suzhan sujue ㅦᚩㅦ᳿] concepts closely akin to tradition.30 Arguably, then, what strategists would call a faulty “theory of victory”— meaning the story that a belligerent tells itself about what it will do, and then what the opponent will do, in a sequence that will lead the belligerent to success—is one the foundation of China’s otherwise puzzlingly optimistic approach to the use of force.<|im_end|> <|im_start|>assistant <h4>China is pursuing a revisionist strategy despite economic ties --- their perception of their ability to win conflicts determines the likelihood of their use of force. </h4><p>Arthur <strong>Waldron</strong>, Spring <strong>2014</strong>. Lauder Professor of International Relations in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, and an FPRI Senior Fellow. “China’s ‘Peaceful Rise’ Enters Turbulence,” Orbis<u><strong> 58.2, 164–181.</p><p></strong>Why is <mark>China</mark>, <strong>stronger and richer</strong> than she has ever been in history, <mark>making a turn toward a military posture</mark> <mark>that</mark> <strong><mark>is at odds with</strong></mark> her <mark>economic interests</mark>?</u> It clearly jeopardizes the great advances she has made in the last thirty years. Yet, this is not an easy question to answer. Those with knowledge of history will recognize that being wealthy [fu ን] and militarily strong [qiang ᒝ] are conditions regularly considered both indispensable and complementary. Moreover, <u><mark>China</mark> today <mark>compares</mark> <mark>herself</mark> not with any real state from which she may be descended, but <strong><mark>with an idealized</strong></mark>, <strong><mark>glorious China and a mythical golden age</strong></mark> during which she was preeminent in the world</u>. The belief is widespread that blame for the loss of this status is to be laid not so much at the feet of China or her rulers, as it is to be attributed to foreign invasions, rapaciousness, imperialistic alienation of territory, and so forth—particularly during the “century of humiliation,” that extends back from the foundation of the People’s Republic in 1949 to Anglo-Chinese wars that began in 1839.22 <u>Adding to the magnitude of China’s imagined loss, is her forfeiture, as is widely believed in China, of a pivotal and central place in the Asian world order</u>: As former Ambassador John Van Antwerp MacMurray put it, in a celebrated memorandum presented to the State Department in 1935, China was the “sun” to which the relations of other states were merely “planetary.”23 <u>Just as official <mark>Chinese writing presents her territorial claims as</mark> <strong>nothing more than <mark>the recovery of</strong></mark> lost bits of her former <strong><mark>empire</strong></mark>, so <strong>her political rise</strong> is simply a return to her traditional position</u>. So, puzzling as it may be to foreign observers, schooled in ideas drawn from European history, such as “balance of power,” and “counter-hegemonic coalitions,” the idea of a “peaceful rise” fits well in Chinese thought. The true history of the states that rose and fell on the easternmost part of the Eurasian land mass, and were grouped by subsequent historians as “dynasties” legitimate or illegitimate, is quite different. However, today Chinese believe that their present polity is descended from a long line of predecessors that were leaders of Asia by virtue of their civilizational and, to a lesser degree, military superiority. It is true, moreover, that in dynastic times, various states entered into “tributary” relations with states in what today is China, though what exactly this meant is difficult to specify exactly. According to this scheme, which derives from traditional dynastic histories and was assembled as a general theory by the eminent Chinese scholar and diplomat Jiang Tingfu and his Oxford student John King Fairbank, the Chinese emperor in his capital was the highest source of political and cultural legitimacy in the world. Rulers of other states acknowledged this fact by sending tributary emissaries, who would prostrate themselves before the Chinese emperor and declare fealty, while receiving in return legitimate investiture, reign title, calendar, and lavish gifts.24 Scholars have long known that the tributary system never really existed. China dealt on equal terms with Persia, with the Mongols, and with others. The concept is, as the late Harvard Professor Lien-sheng Yang pointed out, a “myth.”25 But what kind of myth is it exactly today, and intended for whom? In traditional times it was a myth designed for a domestic audience. Internal order in China depended upon every Chinese accepting the unlimited authority of the emperor. Europe can show similar examples of authority in the past, but not in the present. For the process of democratization and constitutionalization of European regimes has shifted the basis of regime legitimacy domestically away from authority and hierarchy to popular consent. This process simultaneously has brought increasing equality in international relations to the world. <u>For China</u>, however, <u><mark>the</mark> <mark>myth</mark> arguably <strong><mark>will not disappear so long as </mark>the domestic need for it continues</strong>: in other words, as long as <strong><mark>Chinese regime legitimacy continues</strong></mark> to be based on authority and hierarchy</u>—as it is in the People’s Republic of China—<u>and not on constitutional democracy. Today’s <strong><mark>Chinese government sees its task as restoring the country to its natural and historical status</u></strong></mark>, <u>a process of which attaining hegemony is an important component</u>. Indeed, in today’s China this restoration is quantified precisely. Thus, a recent academic study concluded that the state had recaptured exactly 65.3 percent of her former glory, though without stating how that figure had been determined.26 <u>Particularly to be noted is that Chinese tradition furthermore dictates that this restoration will—or should be—peaceful</u>. Effortless attainment has always been one aspect by which the legitimacy of rule is known. A ruler who followed the way of the true king [wang dao ₺㆏] would never need to use force. His moral example and cultural superiority would be enough to give order to his realm. The proof text is the classical account of how the Zhou dynasty [ca. 1046-256 BCE] overthrew the corrupt Shang [ca. 1600-1046 BCE] at the semi-legendary battle of the Wilderness of Mu [Muye ’㊁] in 1045 BC. According to the Classic of Documents, the Shang troops “would offer no opposition to our army. Those in front inverted their spears and attacked those behind them, till they fled, and the blood flowed [. . .].” The victory was achieved by the working of Zhou virtue on the Shang forces. The empire was restored in the same way: King Wu of Zhou “had only to let his robes fall down, and fold his hands, and the empire was orderly ruled.27 Edward L. Shaughnessy observes that this battle represented at the time perhaps only the replacement—through force of arms—of one local power by another, but for later Chinese it came to illustrate the irrepressible will of Heaven turning its mandate from one state, the rulers of which had grown distant from the people, to another state blessed with virtuous rulers.28 For an educated Chinese until the last century, Muye would have been the most familiar and paradigmatic of all battles. In China, the expectation it expresses: namely, of the attainment of maximal goals by the use of minimal means, is still influential. <u><mark>This expectation</mark> of minimal force <mark>is evident in</mark> traditional <strong><mark>Chinese works on the military</u></strong></mark>, as well, although these were taboo to the Confucians, and are evident in current Chinese military thinking as well. Thus, the German word Gewalt, meaning force, occurs eight times in just the two paragraphs in which Clausewitz defines war. By contrast, in the entire 13 chapters of the Chinese military classic Sun Zi’s Art of War the Chinese character meaning force [li ജ] is used only nine times. The Chinese writers about war defined not destruction but disorganization, paralysis, and psychological domination of the enemy as their goal. “To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles” as Sun Zi (ca. 544-496 BCE) famously asserted “is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.29 Today, if doctrine and propaganda are any guide, <u><strong><mark>China</u></strong></mark> still intuitively accepts such concepts. She <u><strong><mark>envisions a series of small local wars in Asia to be won quickly and at low cost</u></strong></mark>, <u><mark>by a combination of brilliant strategy and high-technology weapons</u>:</mark> “<u><strong><mark>fought rapidly and decided rapidly</u></strong></mark>” [suzhan sujue ㅦᚩㅦ᳿] <u>concepts closely akin to tradition</u>.30 Arguably, then, <u>what strategists would call <strong><mark>a faulty “theory of victory</strong></mark>”— meaning the story that a belligerent tells itself about what it will do, and then what the opponent will do, in a sequence that will lead the belligerent to success—<strong><mark>is</strong></mark> one <strong><mark>the foundation of China’s</strong></mark> otherwise puzzlingly optimistic approach to the <strong><mark>use of force.</p></u></strong></mark><|im_end|>

<|begin_of_text|><|im_start|>system You convert citation and fulltext information from an article into a well-formatted html block. Your responses are always valid html only with no clarification. The html must include - A tag in <h4> that expresses the main argument of the evidence - A citation that makes it easy to find the original source - The full text reformatted in html, with underlining. This can be done with <u> and <mark> tags. - Always ensure tags are properly closed. <|im_end|> <|im_start|>user citation: Eric Gomez 15, an independent analyst and recent Master’s graduate of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He is working to develop expertise in regional security issues and U.S. military strategy in East Asia, with a focus on China, 8-6-2015, "Deep Accommodation: The Best Option for Preventing War in the Taiwan Strait," Center for International Maritime Security, http://cimsec.org/deep-accommodation-best-option-preventing-war-taiwan-strait/18128 *brackets for clarity* fulltext: History has shown that emerging great powers and established or declining great powers are likely to fight major wars in order to determine the balance of power in the international system. There is considerable fear that the U.S. and China are heading towards great power conflict. As Christopher Layne argues, there are “several important — and unsettling — parallels between the Anglo-Germany relationship during the run-up to 1914 and the unfolding Sino-American relationship.” The headline-grabbing dispute in the South China Sea offers an excellent example of one of the several flashpoints that could spark a larger conflict between the U.S. and China. But the probability of great power conflict between the U.S. and China can be reduced if the two states can find ways to better manage interactions in flashpoint areas. The oldest flashpoint, and the area most important for Chinese domestic politics, is the Taiwan Strait. In 1972, the Shanghai Communique stated that the so-called Taiwan question was the most important issue blocking the normalization of relations between the U.S. and China. This question has yet to be solved, mostly because Taiwan has been able to deter attack through a strong indigenous defense capability backed up by American commitment. The status quo in the Taiwan Strait will be unsustainable as China continues to improve its military capabilities and adopt more aggressive military strategies. If the U.S. wants to avert a war with China in the Taiwan Strait, it must start looking for an alternative to the status quo. Taiwan’s strategy of economic accommodation with China under the Ma Ying-jeou administration has brought about benefits. The U.S. should encourage Taiwan to deepen its military and political accommodation with China. This would be a difficult pill for Taiwan to swallow, but it could offer the most sustainable deterrent to armed conflict in the Taiwan Strait. For years, Taiwan’s de facto independence from China has relied on a qualitatively superior, defense-focused military that could prevent the landing of a large Chinese force on the island. The growing power of the Chinese military, especially its naval and missile forces, has begun eroding this qualitative advantage. Indeed, some observers have already concluded that “the days when [Taiwan] forces had a quantitative and qualitative advantage over [China] are over.” Taiwan still possesses a formidable military and could inflict high costs on an attacking Chinese force, but ultimately American intervention would likely be necessary to save Taiwan from a determined Chinese attack. Military intervention by the U.S. on the behalf of Taiwan would be met with formidable Chinese resistance. China’s anti-access/area denial [A2/AD] strategy complicates the U.S.’s ability to project power in the Taiwan Strait. China’s latest maritime strategy document, released in May of this year, states that China’s navy will start shifting its focus further offshore to include open seas protection missions. Such a shift implies an aspirational capability to keep intervening American forces away from Taiwan. American political leaders have not given up on Taiwan, and the 2015 U.S. National Military Strategy places a premium on reassuring allies of America’s commitments. However, the fact that China’s improving military capabilities will make an American military intervention on behalf of Taiwan more and more costly must not be ignored. The best option for preventing a war in the Taiwan Strait is deepening the strategy of accommodation that Beijing and Taipei have already started. According to Baohui Zhang, accommodation “relies on expanding common interests, institutionalizing dialogues, promoting security confidence-building and offering assurances to establish mutual trust.” The Ma Ying-jeou administration in Taiwan has tried to use accommodation as a way to lock in the status quo and avoid conflict, but their efforts have been met with more and more popular backlash in Taiwan. China’s military strategy document does acknowledge that “cross-Taiwan Straits relations have sustained a sound momentum of peaceful development, but the root cause of instability has not yet been removed.” If Taiwan is serious about accommodation as a means of deterring military conflict, then it should cease purchasing military equipment from the U.S. Stopping the arms purchases would send a clear message to Beijing that Taiwan is interested in deeper accommodation. A halt in arms sales would also benefit U.S.-Chinese relations by removing a “major stumbling block for developing bilateral military-to-military ties.” This is certainly a very controversial proposal, and would likely be very difficult to sell to the Taiwanese people, but as I’ve already explained the status quo is becoming more and more untenable. There are two important things to keep in mind about this proposal which mitigate fears that this is some kind of appeasement to China. First, halting U.S. arms sales does not mean that Taiwan’s self-defense forces would cease to exist. China may be gaining ground on Taiwan militarily, but the pain that Taiwan could inflict on an attacking force is still high. China may be able to defeat Taiwan in a conflict, but the losses its military would take to seize the island would significantly hamper its ability to use its military while it recovers from attacking Taiwan. Second, there is an easily identifiable off-ramp that can be used by Taiwan if the policy is not successful. Stopping arms purchases is meant to be a way of testing the water. If the Chinese respond positively to the decision by offering greater military cooperation with Taiwan or some form of political concessions then Beijing signals its commitment to the accommodation process. On the other hand, if the Chinese refuse to follow through and meet Taiwan halfway then Beijing signals that it is not actually committed to accommodation. Taiwan would then resume purchasing American weapons with the knowledge that it must find some other way to prevent conflict. Accommodation by giving up American arms sales is a tough pill for Taiwan to swallow, but it simply does not have many other viable alternatives to preventing conflict. Taiwan could pursue acquiring nuclear weapons, but this would be met by American opposition and would likely trigger a pre-emptive attack by China if the weapons program were discovered. Taiwan could try to avert conflict by increasing military spending to forestall, but this would be difficult to sustain so long as China’s economy and military spending is also growing. Analysts at CSBA have argued for deterrence through protraction, which advocates employing asymmetric guerrilla-style tactics to prevent China from achieving air and sea dominance. This has the highest likelihood of success of the three alternatives mentioned in this paragraph, but it still relies on intervention by outside powers to ultimately save the day. Taiwan’s military deterrent will not be able to prevent a Chinese attempt to change the status quo by force for much longer. Any conflict in the Taiwan Strait would likely involve a commitment of U.S. forces and could lead to a major war between the U.S. and China. Accommodation could be the best worst option that Taiwan, and the U.S., has for preventing a war with China. Announcing an end to American weapons purchases could bring Taiwan progress on negotiations with China if successful while still providing off-ramps that Taiwan could take if unsuccessful. I admit, the idea of accommodation does have its flaws, and more work needs to be done to flesh out this idea. I hope that this idea of deep accommodation will add to the discussion about the management of the Taiwan Strait issue. The status quo won’t last forever, and a vigorous debate will be needed to arrive at the best possible solution.<|im_end|> <|im_start|>assistant <h4>Ending arms sales is key---other options fail because China cares about Taiwan way more than the US does. </h4><p>Eric <strong>Gomez 15,</strong> an independent analyst and recent Master’s graduate of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He is working to develop expertise in regional security issues and U.S. military strategy in East Asia, with a focus on China, 8-6-2015, "Deep Accommodation: The Best Option for Preventing War in the Taiwan Strait," Center for International Maritime Security, http://cimsec.org/deep-accommodation-best-option-preventing-war-taiwan-strait/18128 *brackets for clarity*</p><p><u><strong>History has shown that emerging great powers and established or declining great powers are likely to fight major wars in order to determine the balance of power </u></strong>in the international system. There is considerable fear that the U.S. and China are heading towards great power conflict. As Christopher Layne argues, <u><strong>there are “several important — and unsettling — parallels between the Anglo-Germany relationship during the run-up to 1914 and the unfolding Sino-American relationship.”</u></strong> The headline-grabbing dispute in the South China Sea offers an excellent example of one of the several flashpoints that could spark a larger conflict between the U.S. and China. <u><strong>But the probability of great power conflict between the U.S. and China can be reduced if the two states can find ways to better manage interactions in flashpoint areas. <mark>The</mark> oldest <mark>flashpoint</mark>, and the area <mark>most important for Chinese</mark> domestic <mark>politics</mark>, <mark>is</mark> the <mark>Taiwan</mark> Strait. I</u></strong>n 1972, the Shanghai Communique stated that the so-called Taiwan question was the most important issue blocking the normalization of relations between the U.S. and China. This question has yet to be solved, mostly because Taiwan has been able to deter attack through a strong indigenous defense capability backed up by American commitment. <u><strong>The status quo in the Taiwan Strait will be unsustainable as China continues to improve its military capabilities</u></strong> <u><strong>and adopt more aggressive military strategies</u></strong>. <u><strong><mark>If the U.S. wants to avert</mark> a <mark>war</mark> with China <mark>in the</mark> Taiwan <mark>Strait, it must</mark> start <mark>look</mark>ing <mark>for an</mark> <mark>alternative</mark> to the status quo</u></strong>. Taiwan’s strategy of economic accommodation with China under the Ma Ying-jeou administration has brought about benefits. The U.S. should encourage Taiwan to deepen its military and political accommodation with China. This would be a difficult pill for Taiwan to swallow, but it could offer the most sustainable deterrent to armed conflict in the Taiwan Strait. For years, Taiwan’s de facto independence from China has relied on a qualitatively superior, defense-focused military that could prevent the landing of a large Chinese force on the island. <u><strong>The growing power of the Chinese military, especially its naval and missile forces, has begun eroding this qualitative advantage. Indeed, some observers have already concluded that “the days when [Taiwan] forces had a quantitative and qualitative advantage over [China] are over</u></strong>.” Taiwan still possesses a formidable military and could inflict high costs on an attacking Chinese force, but ultimately American intervention would likely be necessary to save Taiwan from a determined Chinese attack. <u><strong>Military intervention by the U.S. on the behalf of Taiwan would be met with formidable Chinese resistance. China’s anti-access/area denial [A2/AD] strategy complicates the U.S.’s ability to project power in the Taiwan Strait.</u></strong> China’s latest maritime strategy document, released in May of this year, states that China’s navy will start shifting its focus further offshore to include open seas protection missions. Such a shift implies an aspirational capability to keep intervening American forces away from Taiwan. American political leaders have not given up on Taiwan, and the 2015 U.S. National Military Strategy places a premium on reassuring allies of America’s commitments. However, the fact that China’s improving military capabilities will make an American military intervention on behalf of Taiwan more and more costly must not be ignored. <u><strong><mark>The best option </mark>for preventing a war in the Taiwan Strait <mark>is deepening</mark> the strategy of <mark>accommodation</mark> that Beijing and Taipei have already started</u></strong>. <u><strong>According to Baohui Zhang, accommodation “relies on expanding common interests, institutionalizing dialogues, promoting security confidence-building and offering assurances to establish mutual trust</u></strong>.” The Ma Ying-jeou administration in Taiwan has tried to use accommodation as a way to lock in the status quo and avoid conflict, but their efforts have been met with more and more popular backlash in Taiwan. China’s military strategy document does acknowledge that “cross-Taiwan Straits relations have sustained a sound momentum of peaceful development, but the root cause of instability has not yet been removed.” <u><strong>If <mark>Taiwan</mark> is serious about accommodation as a means of deterring military conflict, then it <mark>should cease purchasing military equipment</mark> from the U.S</u></strong>. Stopping the arms purchases would send a clear message to Beijing that Taiwan is interested in deeper accommodation. <u><strong><mark>A halt in</mark> arms <mark>sales would</mark> also <mark>benefit</mark> U.S.-Chinese relations by removing a </u></strong>“<u><strong>major stumbling block for developing <mark>bilateral military-to-military ties</u></strong></mark>.” This is certainly a very controversial proposal, and would likely be very difficult to sell to the Taiwanese people, but as I’ve already explained the status quo is becoming more and more untenable. There are two important things to keep in mind about this proposal which mitigate fears that this is some kind of appeasement to China. First, <u><strong>halting U.S. arms sales does not mean that Taiwan’s self-defense forces would cease to exist</u></strong>. <u><strong>China may be gaining ground on Taiwan militarily, but <mark>the pain</mark> that <mark>Taiwan could inflict on an attacking force is</mark> still <mark>high</mark>.</u></strong> <u><strong>China may be able to defeat Taiwan in a conflict, but the losses its military would take to seize the island would significantly hamper its ability to use its military while it recovers</u></strong> from attacking Taiwan. <u><strong>Second, there is an easily identifiable off-ramp that can be used by Taiwan if the policy is not successful.</u></strong> <u><strong>Stopping arms purchases is meant to be a way of testing the water. If the Chinese respond positively</u></strong> to the decision <u><strong>by offering</u></strong> greater military <u><strong>cooperation</u></strong> with Taiwan <u><strong>or some form of political</u></strong> <u><strong>concessions</u></strong> <u><strong>then Beijing signals its commitment to the accommodation process</u></strong>. On the other hand, <u><strong>if the Chinese refuse to follow through and meet Taiwan halfway then Beijing signals that it is not actually committed to accommodation</u></strong>. Taiwan would then resume purchasing American weapons with the knowledge that it must find some other way to prevent conflict. <u><strong>Accommodation by giving up American arms sales is a tough pill for <mark>Taiwan</mark> to swallow, but it simply <mark>does not have</mark> many <mark>other viable alternatives to preventing conflict</u></strong></mark>. Taiwan could pursue acquiring nuclear weapons, but this would be met by American opposition and would likely trigger a pre-emptive attack by China if the weapons program were discovered. <u><strong>Taiwan could try to avert conflict by increasing military spending to forestall, but this would be difficult to sustain so long as China’s economy and military spending is also growing</u></strong>. Analysts at CSBA have argued for deterrence through protraction, which advocates employing asymmetric guerrilla-style tactics to prevent China from achieving air and sea dominance. This has the highest likelihood of success of the three alternatives mentioned in this paragraph, but it still relies on intervention by outside powers to ultimately save the day. <u><strong>Taiwan’s military deterrent will not be able to prevent a Chinese attempt to change the status quo by force for much longer</u></strong>. <u><strong>Any conflict in the Taiwan Strait would likely involve a commitment of U.S. forces and could lead to a major war between the U.S. and China</u></strong>. <u><strong>Accommodation could be the best worst option that Taiwan, and the U.S., has for preventing a war with China. Announcing <mark>an end to</mark> American weapons <mark>purchases could bring Taiwan progress on negotiations with China</mark> if successful while still providing off-ramps that Taiwan could take if unsuccessful</u></strong>. I admit, the idea of accommodation does have its flaws, and more work needs to be done to flesh out this idea. I hope that this idea of deep accommodation will add to the discussion about the management of the Taiwan Strait issue. The status quo won’t last forever, and a vigorous debate will be needed to arrive at the best possible solution. </p><|im_end|>

<|begin_of_text|><|im_start|>system You convert citation and fulltext information from an article into a well-formatted html block. Your responses are always valid html only with no clarification. The html must include - A tag in <h4> that expresses the main argument of the evidence - A citation that makes it easy to find the original source - The full text reformatted in html, with underlining. This can be done with <u> and <mark> tags. - Always ensure tags are properly closed. <|im_end|> <|im_start|>user citation: Robinson 14 (William I. – Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin American Studies, @ UC-Santa Barbara] [Global Capitalism: Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism] The World Financial Review) fulltext: Cyclical, Structural, and Systemic Crises Hence my concept of global crisis is broader than financial. There are multiple and mutually constitutive dimensions – economic, social, political, cultural, ideological and ecological, not to mention the existential crisis of our consciousness, values and very being. There is a crisis of social polarisation, that is, of social reproduction. The system cannot meet the needs or assure the survival of millions of people, perhaps a majority of humanity. There are crises of state legitimacy and political authority, or of hegemony and domination. National states face spiraling crises of legitimacy as they fail to meet the social grievances of local working and popular classes experiencing downward mobility, unemployment, heightened insecurity and greater hardships. The legitimacy of the system has increasingly been called into question by millions, perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is facing expanded counter-hegemonic challenges. Global elites have been unable counter this erosion of the system’s authority in the face of worldwide pressures for a global moral economy. And a canopy that envelops all these dimensions is a crisis of sustainability rooted in an ecological holocaust that has already begun, expressed in climate change and the impending collapse of centralised agricultural systems in several regions of the world, among other indicators. By a crisis of humanity I mean a crisis that is approaching systemic proportions, threatening the ability of billions of people to survive, and raising the specter of a collapse of world civilisation and degeneration into a new “Dark Ages.”2 This crisis of humanity shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises but there are also several features unique to the present: 1. The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction. Global capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a way as to threaten to bring about what would be the sixth mass extinction in the known history of life on earth.3 This mass extinction would be caused not by a natural catastrophe such as a meteor impact or by evolutionary changes such as the end of an ice age but by purposive human activity. According to leading environmental scientists there are nine “planetary boundaries” crucial to maintaining an earth system environment in which humans can exist, four of which are experiencing at this time the onset of irreversible environmental degradation and three of which (climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss) are at “tipping points,” meaning that these processes have already crossed their planetary boundaries. 2. The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented, as is the concentration of the means of global communication and symbolic production and circulation in the hands of a very few powerful groups. Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. At the same time we have arrived at the panoptical surveillance society and the age of thought control by those who control global flows of communication, images and symbolic production. The world of Edward Snowden is the world of George Orwell; 1984 has arrived; 3. Capitalism is reaching apparent limits to its extensive expansion. There are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism, de-ruralisation is now well advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. Capitalism must continually expand or collapse. How or where will it now expand? 4. There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a “planet of slums,”4 alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to destruction - to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This includes prison-industrial and immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent policing, militarised gentrification, and so on; 5. There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists refer to as a “hegemon,” or a leading nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and stabilise the system. The spread of weapons of mass destruction and the unprecedented militarisation of social life and conflict across the globe makes it hard to imagine that the system can come under any stable political authority that assures its reproduction. Global Police State How have social and political forces worldwide responded to crisis? The crisis has resulted in a rapid political polarisation in global society. Both right and left-wing forces are ascendant. Three responses seem to be in dispute. One is what we could call “reformism from above.” This elite reformism is aimed at stabilising the system, at saving the system from itself and from more radical responses from below. Nonetheless, in the years following the 2008 collapse of the global financial system it seems these reformers are unable (or unwilling) to prevail over the power of transnational financial capital. A second response is popular, grassroots and leftist resistance from below. As social and political conflict escalates around the world there appears to be a mounting global revolt. While such resistance appears insurgent in the wake of 2008 it is spread very unevenly across countries and regions and facing many problems and challenges. Yet another response is that I term 21st century fascism.5 The ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global working class – such as white workers in the North and middle layers in the South – that are now experiencing heightened insecurity and the specter of downward mobility. It involves militarism, extreme masculinisation, homophobia, racism and racist mobilisations, including the search for scapegoats, such as immigrant workers and, in the West, Muslims. Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy and xenophobia, embracing an idealised and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture normalises and glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with domination that is portrayed even as heroic. The need for dominant groups around the world to secure widespread, organised mass social control of the world’s surplus population and rebellious forces from below gives a powerful impulse to projects of 21st century fascism. Simply put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy cannot easily be containe d through consensual mechanisms of social control. We have been witnessing transitions from social welfare to social control states around the world. We have entered a period of great upheavals, momentous changes and uncertainties. The only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity along the lines of a 21st century democratic socialism, in which humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature.<|im_end|> <|im_start|>assistant <h4>Capitalism causes environmental destruction– and turns case </h4><p><strong>Robinson 14</strong> (William I. – Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin American Studies, @ UC-Santa Barbara] [Global Capitalism: Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism] The World Financial Review)</p><p>Cyclical, Structural, and Systemic Crises </p><p>Hence my concept of global crisis is broader than financial. <u>There are multiple and mutually constitutive dimensions – economic, social, political, cultural, ideological and ecological, not to mention the existential crisis of our consciousness</u>, values and very being. There is a crisis of social polarisation, that is, of social reproduction. <u>The system cannot meet the needs</u> or assure the survival <u>of millions of people</u>, perhaps a majority of humanity. There are crises of state legitimacy and political authority, or of hegemony and domination. National states face spiraling crises of legitimacy as they fail to meet the social grievances of local working and popular classes experiencing downward mobility, unemployment, heightened insecurity and greater hardships. <u>The legitimacy of the system has increasingly been called into question by millions</u>, <u>perhaps</u> even <u>billions</u>, of people around the world, <u>and is facing</u> <u><strong>expanded counter-hegemonic challenges</u></strong>. Global elites have been unable counter this erosion of the system’s authority in the face of worldwide pressures for a global moral economy. <u>And a canopy that envelops all these dimensions is a crisis of sustainability rooted in</u> an ecological holocaust that has already begun, expressed in <u><mark>climate change and </mark>the</u> <u><strong>impending <mark>collapse of </mark>centralised <mark>agricultural systems</u></strong></mark> in several regions of the world, among other indicators. By <u>a crisis of humanity</u> I mean a crisis that is approaching systemic proportions, <u><mark>threatening the ability of billions of people to survive</mark>, and raising the specter of a collapse of world civilisation</u> and degeneration into a new “Dark Ages.”2 This crisis of humanity shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises but there are also several features unique to the present: 1. <u><strong><mark>The system is fast reaching the ecological limits</u></strong></mark> <u>of its reproduction. Global capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a way as to threaten to bring about what would be <mark>the sixth mass extinction</u></mark> in the known history of life on earth.3 This mass extinction would be caused not by a natural catastrophe such as a meteor impact or by evolutionary changes such as the end of an ice age but by purposive human activity. According to leading environmental scientists <u>there are nine</u> “<u><mark>planetary boundaries</u></mark>” <u>crucial to maintaining an earth system environment in which humans can exist, <strong>four of which <mark>are experiencing</u></strong></mark> at this time <u><strong>the onset of <mark>irreversible</mark> environmental <mark>degradation</u></strong></mark> <u>and three of which</u> (<u>climate change</u>, the <u>nitrogen cycle</u>, <u>and biodiversity loss)</u> <u>are at “tipping points</u>,” meaning that these processes have already crossed their planetary boundaries. 2. <u><strong>The magnitude of the means of violence and</u></strong> social <u><strong>control is unprecedented</u></strong>, <u>as is the concentration of the means of global communication and symbolic production</u> and circulation in the hands of a very few powerful groups. <u>Computerised wars</u>, <u>drones</u>, <u>bunker-buster bombs</u>, <u>star wars</u>, and so forth, <u>have changed the face of warfare</u>. <u><strong><mark>Warfare has become normalised and sanitised</u></strong></mark> <u>for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression.</u> At the same time we have arrived at the <u><strong>panoptical surveillance society</u></strong> and the age of thought control <u>by those who control global flows of communication</u>, images and symbolic production. The world of Edward Snowden is the world of George Orwell; 1984 has arrived; 3. <u>Capitalism is reaching apparent limits to its extensive expansion. There are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism, de-ruralisation is now well advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified</u>, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. <u><strong><mark>Capitalism must continually expand or collapse</strong></mark>.</u> How or where will it now expand? 4. <u>There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a “planet of slums,”</u>4 <u><strong><mark>alienated from the productive economy</u></strong></mark>, <u>thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated <mark>systems of social control and</u></mark> to <u><mark>destruction</u></mark> -<u> to <mark>a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion</u></mark>. <u>This includes prison-industrial and immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent policing, militarised gentrification</u>, and so on; 5. <u>There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based system of political authority.</u> <u><strong>Transnational state apparatuses</u></strong> are incipient and <u><strong>have not been able to play the role of</u></strong> what social scientists refer to as a “<u><strong>hegemon</u></strong>,” or a leading nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and stabilise the system. <u>The spread of</u> <u><strong>w</u></strong>eapons of <u><strong>m</u></strong>ass <u><strong>d</u></strong>estruction <u>and the unprecedented militarisation of social life and conflict across the globe makes it hard to imagine that the system can come under any stable political authority that assures its reproduction. </u>Global Police State How have social and political forces worldwide responded to crisis? The crisis has resulted in a rapid political polarisation in global society. Both right and left-wing forces are ascendant. Three responses seem to be in dispute. One is what we could call “<u>reformism from above</u>.” This elite reformism is <u>aimed at stabilising the system</u>, at saving the system from itself and <u><strong>from more radical responses from below</u></strong>. Nonetheless, in the years following the 2008 collapse of the global financial system it seems <u>these reformers are unable</u> (or unwilling) <u>to prevail over the power of transnational financial capital</u>. A second response is popular, <u><strong>grassroots and leftist resistance from below</u></strong>. <u>As social and political conflict escalates</u> around the world <u>there appears to be a mounting global revolt</u>. While such resistance appears insurgent in the wake of 2008 it is spread very unevenly across countries and regions and facing many problems and challenges. Yet another response is that I term 21st century fascism.5 <u>The ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries.</u> In broad strokes, <u>this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global working class</u> – <u>such as white workers</u> in the North and middle layers in the South – <u>that are now experiencing heightened insecurity and the specter of downward mobility. <mark>It involves militarism</u></mark>, <u><strong><mark>extreme masculinisation</u></strong></mark>, <u><strong><mark>homophobia</u></strong></mark>, <u><strong><mark>racism and racist mobilisations</u></strong></mark>, <u><strong><mark>including the search for scapegoats</u></strong></mark>, <u>such as immigrant workers and</u>, in the West, <u>Muslims. </u>Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying ideologies, often <u>involving race/culture supremacy</u> <u>and xenophobia</u>, embracing an idealised and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture normalises and glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, <u>generates a fascination with domination that is portrayed even as heroic</u>. <u>The need for dominant groups</u> around the world <u>to secure</u> widespread, organised mass <u>social control of the world’s surplus population and rebellious forces from below gives a</u> <u><strong>powerful impulse</u></strong> <u>to projects of 21st century fascism</u>. Simply put, the <u>immense structural inequalities</u> of the global political economy <u>cannot easily be containe d through consensual mechanisms of social control</u>. We have been witnessing transitions from social welfare to social control states around the world. <u>We have entered a period of great upheavals, momentous changes and uncertainties. <mark>The</u></mark> <u><strong><mark>only viable solution</u></strong></mark> to the crisis of global capitalism <u><mark>is a</u></mark> <u><strong><mark>massive redistribution</u></strong></mark> <u><mark>of wealth </mark>and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity along the lines of a 21st century democratic socialism</u>, <u>in which humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature</u>.</p><|im_end|>

<|begin_of_text|><|im_start|>system You convert citation and fulltext information from an article into a well-formatted html block. Your responses are always valid html only with no clarification. The html must include - A tag in <h4> that expresses the main argument of the evidence - A citation that makes it easy to find the original source - The full text reformatted in html, with underlining. This can be done with <u> and <mark> tags. - Always ensure tags are properly closed. <|im_end|> <|im_start|>user citation: Wallach 17 Wendell Wallach (wendell.wallach@yale.edu) is a Senior Advisor to The Hastings Center and Chairs Technology and Ethics Studies at the Yale University Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. His latest book is A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond Our Control. Toward a Ban on Lethal Autonomous Weapons: Surmounting the Obstacles. Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), Vol. 60, No. 5. May 2017. -CAT fulltext: Unlike most other weapons that have been banned, some uses of LAWS are perceived as morally acceptable, if not morally obligatory. The simple fact that LAWS can be substituted for and thus save the lives of one’s own soldiers is the most obvious moral good. Unfortunately, this same moral good lowers the barriers to initiating new wars. Some nations will be emboldened to start wars if they believe they can achieve political objectives without the loss of their troops. It is unclear whether armed military robots should be viewed as weapon systems or weapon platforms, a distinction that has been central to many traditional arms control treaties. Range, payload, and other features are commonly used in arms control agreements to restrict the capabilities of a weapon system. A weapon platform can be regulated by restricting where it can be located. For example, agreements to restrict nuclear weapons will specify number of warheads and the range of the missiles upon which they are mounted, and even where the missiles can be stationed. With LAWS, what is actually being banned? Arms control agreements often focus on working out modes of verification and inspection regimes to determine whether adversaries are honoring the ban. The difference between a lethal and non-lethal robotic system may be little more than a few lines of code or a switch, which would be difficult to detect and could be removed before or added after an inspection. Proposed verification regimes for LAWS6 would be extremely difficult and costly to enforce. Military strategists do not want to restrict their options, when that of bad actors is unrestricted. LAWS differ in kind from the various weapon systems that have to date been banned without requiring an inspection regime. Consider, for example, the relatively recent bans on blinding lasers or anti-personnel weapons, which are often offered as a model for arms control for LAWS. These bans rely on representatives of civil society, non-governmental organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, to monitor and stigmatize violations. So also will a ban on LAWS. However, blinding lasers and anti-personnel weapons were relatively easy to define. After the fact, the use of such weapons can be proven in a straightforward manner. Lethal autonomy, on the other hand, is not a weapon system. It is a feature set that can be added to many, if not all, weapon systems. Furthermore, the uses of autonomous killing features are likely to be masked. LAWS will be relatively easy to assemble using technologies developed for civilian applications. Thus their proliferation and availability to non-state actors cannot be effectively stopped. In forging arms-control agreements definitional distinctions have always been important. Contentions that definitional consensus cannot be reached for autonomy or meaningful human control, that LAWS depend upon advanced AI, and that such systems are merely a distant speculative possibility repeatedly arose during the April discussion at the U.N. in Geneva, and generally served to obfuscate, not clarify, the debate. A circular and particularly unhelpful debate has ensued over the meaning of autonomy, with proponents and opponents of a ban struggling to establish a definition that serves their cause. For example, the U.K. delegation insists that autonomy implies near humanlike capabilities and anything short of this is merely an automated weapon. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots favors a definition where autonomy is the ability to perform a task without immediate intervention from a human. Similarly, definitions for meaningful human control range from a military leader specifying a kill order in advance of deploying a weapon system to having the real-time engagement of a human in the loop of selecting and killing a human target. The leading military powers contend that they will maintain effective control over the LAWS they deploy. But even if we accept their sincerity, this totally misses the point. They have no means of ensuring that other states and nonstate actors will follow suit. More is at stake in these definition- al debates than whether to preemp- tively ban LAWS. Consider a Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog loaded with explo- sives, and directed through the use of a GPS to a specific location, where it is programmed to explode. Unfortunate- ly, during the time it takes to travel to that location, the site is transformed from a military outpost to a makeshift hospital for injured civilians. A strong definition for meaningful human con- trol would require the location be giv- en a last-minute inspection before the explosives could detonate. Big Dog, in this example, is a dumb LAW, which we should perhaps fear as much as specu- lative future systems with advanced intelligence. Dumb LAWS, however, do open up comparisons to widely de- ployed existing weapon systems, such as cruise missiles, whose impact on an intended target military leaders have little or no ability to alter once the missile has been launched. In other words, banning dumb LAWS quickly converges with other arms control campaigns, such as those directed at limiting cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.5 States will demand a defini- tion for LAWS that distinguishes them from existing weapon systems. Delegates at the CCW are cognizant that in the past (1990s) they failed at banning the dumbest, most indiscrim- inate, and autonomous weapons of all, anti-personnel mines. Nevertheless, anti-personnel weapons (land mines) were eventually banned during an in- dependent process that led up to the Mine Ban or Ottawa Treaty; 162 coun- tries have committed to fully comply with that treaty.g f See, for example, the U.S. Department of De- fense Directive 2000.09 entitled, “Autonomy in Weapon Systems.” The Directive is dated No- vember 21, 2012 and signed by Deputy Secretary of Defense, Ashton B. Carter, who was appoint- ed Secretary of Defense by President Obama on December 5, 2014; http://bit.ly/1myJikF g The U.S., Russia, and China are not signatories to the Ottawa Treaty, although the U.S. has pledged to largely abide by its terms. A second failure to pass restric- tions on the use of a weapon systems, whose ban has garnered popular sup- port, might damage the whole CCW ap- proach to arms control. This knowledge offers the supporters of a ban a degree of leverage presuming: the ban truly has broad and effective public support; LAWS can be distinguished from exist- ing weaponry that is widely deployed; and creative means can be forged to de- velop the framework for an agreement. A 10-Point Plan Many of the barriers to fitting a ban on LAWS into traditional approaches to arms control can be overcome by adopting the following approach. 1. Rather than focus on establishing a bright line or clear definition for lethal autonomy, first establish a high order moral principle that can garner broad support. My candidate for that principle is: Machines, even semi-intelligent machines, should not be making life and death decisions. Only moral agents should make life and death decisions about humans. Arguably, something like this principle is already implicit, but not explicit, in existing international humanitarian law, also known as the laws of armed conflict (LOAC). A higher order moral principle makes explicitly clear what is off limits, while leaving open the discussion of marginal cases where a weapon system may or may not be considered to be making life and death decisions. 2. Insist that meaningful human control and making a life and death decision requires the real-time authorization from designated military personnel for a LAW to kill a combatant or destroy a target that might harbor combatants and non-combatants alike. In other words, it is not sufficient for military personnel to merely delegate a kill order in advance to an autonomous weapon or merely be “on-the-loop” of systems that can act without a real time go-ahead. 3. Petition leaders of states to declare that LAWS violate existing IHL. In the U.S. this would entail a Presidential Order to that effect. 4. Review marginal or ambiguous cases to set guidelines for when a weapon system is truly autonomous and when its actions are clearly the extension of a military commander’s will and intention. Recognize that any definition of autonomy will leave some cases ambiguous. 5. Underscore that some present and future weapon system will occasionally act unpredictably and most LAWS will be difficult if not impossible to test adequately. 6. Present compelling cases for banning at least some, if not all, LAWS. In other words, highlight situations in which nearly all parties will support a ban. For example, no nation should want LAWS that can launch nuclear warheads. 7. Accommodate the fact that there will be necessary exceptions to any ban. For example, defensive autonomous weapons that target unmanned incoming missiles are already widely deployed. These include the U.S. Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System and Israel’s Iron Dome. 8. Recognize that future technological advances may justify additional exceptions to a ban. Probably the use of LAWS to protect refugee non-combatants would be embraced as an exception. Whether the use of LAWS in a combat zone where there are no non-combatants should be treated as an exception to a ban would need to be debated. Offensive autonomous weapon systems that do not target humans, but only target, for example, unmanned submarines, might be deemed an exception. 9. Utilize the unacceptable LAWS to campaign for a broad ban, and a mechanism for adding future exceptions. 10. Demand that the onus of ensuring that LAWS will be controllable, and that those who deploy the LAWS will be held accountable, lies with those parties who petition for, and deploy, an exception to the ban.<|im_end|> <|im_start|>assistant <h4>A ban is feasible; our solvency advocate<strong>:</h4><p>Wallach 17</p><p></strong>Wendell Wallach (wendell.wallach@yale.edu) is a Senior Advisor to The Hastings Center and Chairs Technology and Ethics Studies at the Yale University Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. His latest book is A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond Our Control. Toward a Ban on Lethal Autonomous Weapons: Surmounting the Obstacles. Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), Vol. 60, No. 5. May 2017. -CAT</p><p>Unlike most other weapons that have been banned, <u>some uses of LAWS are perceived as morally acceptable</u>, if not morally obligatory. The simple fact that <u>LAWS can be substituted for and thus save the lives of one’s own soldiers is the most obvious moral good. Unfortunately, this same moral good lowers the barriers to initiating new wars</u>. <u>Some nations will be emboldened to start wars if they believe they can achieve political objectives without the loss of their troops</u>. It is unclear whether armed military robots should be viewed as weapon systems or weapon platforms, a distinction that has been central to many traditional arms control treaties. Range, payload, and other features are commonly used in arms control agreements to restrict the capabilities of a weapon system. A weapon platform can be regulated by restricting where it can be located. For example, agreements to restrict nuclear weapons will specify number of warheads and the range of the missiles upon which they are mounted, and even where the missiles can be stationed. With LAWS, what is actually being banned? Arms control agreements often focus on working out modes of verification and inspection regimes to determine whether adversaries are honoring the ban. The difference between a lethal and non-lethal robotic system may be little more than a few lines of code or a switch, which would be difficult to detect and could be removed before or added after an inspection. Proposed verification regimes for LAWS6 would be extremely difficult and costly to enforce. Military strategists do not want to restrict their options, when that of bad actors is unrestricted. <u><mark>LAWS differ in kind from</mark> the various <mark>weapon systems that have to date been banned </mark>without requiring an inspection regime.</u> Consider, for example, the relatively recent bans on blinding lasers or anti-personnel weapons, which are often offered as a model for arms control for LAWS. These bans rely on representatives of civil society, non-governmental organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, to monitor and stigmatize violations.<u> So also will a ban on LAWS. However, blinding lasers and anti-personnel weapons were relatively easy to define. After the fact, the use of such weapons can be proven in a straightforward manner. <mark>Lethal autonomy</mark>, on the other hand, <mark>is not a weapon system</mark>. <mark>It is a feature set that can be added to many, if not all,</mark> <mark>weapon systems</mark>. Furthermore, the uses of autonomous killing features are likely to be masked. LAWS will be relatively easy to assemble using technologies developed for civilian applications. Thus their proliferation and availability to non-state actors cannot be effectively stopped</u>. In forging arms-control agreements definitional distinctions have always been important. Contentions that definitional consensus cannot be reached for autonomy or meaningful human control, that LAWS depend upon advanced AI, and that such systems are merely a distant speculative possibility repeatedly arose during the April discussion at the U.N. in Geneva, and generally served to obfuscate, not clarify, the debate. A circular and particularly unhelpful debate has ensued over the meaning of autonomy, with proponents and opponents of a ban struggling to establish a definition that serves their cause. For example, the U.K. delegation insists that autonomy implies near humanlike capabilities and anything short of this is merely an automated weapon. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots favors a definition where autonomy is the ability to perform a task without immediate intervention from a human. Similarly, definitions for meaningful human control range from a military leader specifying a kill order in advance of deploying a weapon system to having the real-time engagement of a human in the loop of selecting and killing a human target. <u>The leading military powers contend that they will maintain effective control over</u> the <u>LAWS</u> they deploy. <u><mark>But</mark> even if we accept their sincerity, this totally misses the point. They have no means of ensuring that other states and nonstate actors will follow suit.</u> More is at stake in these definition- al debates than whether to preemp- tively ban LAWS. Consider a Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog loaded with explo- sives, and directed through the use of a GPS to a specific location, where it is programmed to explode. Unfortunate- ly, during the time it takes to travel to that location, the site is transformed from a military outpost to a makeshift hospital for injured civilians. A strong definition for meaningful human con- trol would require the location be giv- en a last-minute inspection before the explosives could detonate. Big Dog, in this example, is a dumb LAW, which we should perhaps fear as much as specu- lative future systems with advanced intelligence. Dumb LAWS, however, do open up comparisons to widely de- ployed existing weapon systems, such as cruise missiles, whose impact on an intended target military leaders have little or no ability to alter once the missile has been launched. In other words, banning dumb LAWS quickly converges with other arms control campaigns, such as those directed at limiting cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.5 States will demand a defini- tion for LAWS that distinguishes them from existing weapon systems. Delegates at the CCW are cognizant that in the past (1990s) they failed at banning the dumbest, most indiscrim- inate, and autonomous weapons of all, anti-personnel mines. Nevertheless, anti-personnel weapons (land mines) were eventually banned during an in- dependent process that led up to the Mine Ban or Ottawa Treaty; 162 coun- tries have committed to fully comply with that treaty.g f See, for example, the U.S. Department of De- fense Directive 2000.09 entitled, “Autonomy in Weapon Systems.” The Directive is dated No- vember 21, 2012 and signed by Deputy Secretary of Defense, Ashton B. Carter, who was appoint- ed Secretary of Defense by President Obama on December 5, 2014; http://bit.ly/1myJikF g The U.S., Russia, and China are not signatories to the Ottawa Treaty, although the U.S. has pledged to largely abide by its terms. A second failure to pass restric- tions on the use of a weapon systems, whose ban has garnered popular sup- port, might damage the whole CCW ap- proach to arms control. This knowledge offers the supporters of a ban a degree of leverage presuming: the ban truly has broad and effective public support; LAWS can be distinguished from exist- ing weaponry that is widely deployed; and creative means can be forged to de- velop the framework for an agreement. A 10-Point Plan <u>Many of <mark>the barriers to</mark> fitting <mark>a ban on LAWS</mark> into traditional approaches to arms control <mark>can be overcome by</mark> adopting the following approach. <mark>1.</mark> Rather than focus on establishing a bright line or clear definition for lethal autonomy, first <mark>establish a</mark> high order <mark>moral principle that can garner broad support</mark>. My candidate for that principle is: Machines, even semi-intelligent machines, should not be making life and death decisions. Only moral agents should make life and death decisions about humans. Arguably, something like this principle is already implicit, but not explicit, in existing international humanitarian law, also known as the laws of armed conflict (LOAC). A higher order moral principle makes explicitly clear what is off limits, while leaving open the discussion of marginal cases where a weapon system may or may not be considered to be making life and death decisions. <mark>2.</mark> <mark>Insist that </mark>meaningful human control and making <mark>a life and death decision requires </mark>the <mark>real-time authorization from </mark>designated <mark>military personnel </mark>for a LAW to kill a combatant or destroy a target that might harbor combatants and non-combatants alike. In other words, it is not sufficient for military personnel to merely delegate a kill order in advance to an autonomous weapon or merely be “on-the-loop” of systems that can act without a real time go-ahead. <mark>3.</mark> Petition leaders of states to declare that LAWS violate existing IHL. In the U.S. this would entail <mark>a Presidential Order</mark> to that effect. <mark>4.</mark> <mark>Review </mark>marginal or <mark>ambiguous cases to set guidelines </mark>for when a weapon system is truly autonomous and when its actions are clearly the extension of a military commander’s will and intention. Recognize that any definition of autonomy will leave some cases ambiguous. <mark>5.</mark> <mark>Underscore that</mark> some present and future weapon system will occasionally act unpredictably and most <mark>LAWS will be difficult </mark>if not impossible <mark>to test </mark>adequately. <mark>6.</mark> <mark>Present compelling cases </mark>for banning at least some, if not all, LAWS. In other words, highlight situations in which nearly all parties will support a ban. For example, no nation should want LAWS that can launch nuclear warheads. <mark>7.</mark> <mark>Accommodate </mark>the fact that there will be necessary <mark>exceptions </mark>to any ban. For example, defensive autonomous weapons that target unmanned incoming missiles are already widely deployed. These include the U.S. Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System and Israel’s Iron Dome. <mark>8.</mark> <mark>Recognize that future tech</mark>nological advances <mark>may justify additional exceptions </mark>to a ban. Probably the use of LAWS to protect refugee non-combatants would be embraced as an exception. Whether the use of LAWS in a combat zone where there are no non-combatants should be treated as an exception to a ban would need to be debated. Offensive autonomous weapon systems that do not target humans, but only target, for example, unmanned submarines, might be deemed an exception. <mark>9.</mark> Utilize the unacceptable LAWS to <mark>campaign for a broad ban, </mark>and a mechanism for adding future exceptions. <mark>10.</mark> Demand that <mark>the onus of </mark>ensuring that LAWS will be <mark>control</mark>lable, and that those who deploy the LAWS will be held accountable, <mark>lies with those </mark>parties <mark>who petition for</mark>, and deploy, <mark>an exception </mark>to the ban</u>.</p><|im_end|>

<|begin_of_text|><|im_start|>system You convert citation and fulltext information from an article into a well-formatted html block. Your responses are always valid html only with no clarification. The html must include - A tag in <h4> that expresses the main argument of the evidence - A citation that makes it easy to find the original source - The full text reformatted in html, with underlining. This can be done with <u> and <mark> tags. - Always ensure tags are properly closed. <|im_end|> <|im_start|>user citation: John Asafu-Adjaye 15, associate professor of economics at the University of Queensland, et al., April 2015, “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” http://www.ecomodernism.org/s/An-Ecomodernist-Manifesto.pdf fulltext: At the same time, human flourishing has taken a serious toll on natural, nonhuman environments and wildlife. Humans use about half of the planet’s ice-free land, mostly for pasture, crops, and production forestry. Of the land once covered by forests, 20 percent has been converted to human use. Populations of many mammals, amphibians, and birds have declined by more than 50 percent in the past 40 years alone. More than 100 species from those groups went extinct in the 20th century, and about 785 since 1500. As we write, only four northern white rhinos are confirmed to exist.¶ Given that humans are completely dependent on the living biosphere, how is it possible that people are doing so much damage to natural systems without doing more harm to themselves?¶ The role that technology plays in reducing humanity’s dependence on nature explains this paradox. Human technologies, from those that first enabled agriculture to replace hunting and gathering, to those that drive today’s globalized economy, have made humans less reliant upon the many ecosystems that once provided their only sustenance, even as those same ecosystems have often been left deeply damaged.¶ Despite frequent assertions starting in the 1970s of fundamental “limits to growth,” there is still remarkably little evidence that human population and economic expansion will outstrip the capacity to grow food or procure critical material resources in the foreseeable future.¶ To the degree to which there are fixed physical boundaries to human consumption, they are so theoretical as to be functionally irrelevant. The amount of solar radiation that hits the Earth, for instance, is ultimately finite but represents no meaningful constraint upon human endeavors. Human civilization can flourish for centuries and millennia on energy delivered from a closed uranium or thorium fuel cycle, or from hydrogen-deuterium fusion. With proper management, humans are at no risk of lacking sufficient agricultural land for food. Given plentiful land and unlimited energy, substitutes for other material inputs to human well-being can easily be found if those inputs become scarce or expensive.¶ There remain, however, serious long-term environmental threats to human well-being, such as anthropogenic climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, and ocean acidification. While these risks are difficult to quantify, the evidence is clear today that they could cause significant risk of catastrophic impacts on societies and ecosystems. Even gradual, non-catastrophic outcomes associated with these threats are likely to result in significant human and economic costs as well as rising ecological losses.¶ Much of the world’s population still suffers from more-immediate local environmental health risks. Indoor and outdoor air pollution continue to bring premature death and illness to millions annually. Water pollution and water-borne illness due to pollution and degradation of watersheds cause similar suffering.¶ 2¶ Even as human environmental impacts continue to grow in the aggregate, a range of long-term trends are today driving significant decoupling of human well-being from environmental impacts.¶ Decoupling occurs in both relative and absolute terms. Relative decoupling means that human environmental impacts rise at a slower rate than overall economic growth. Thus, for each unit of economic output, less environmental impact (e.g., deforestation, defaunation, pollution) results. Overall impacts may still increase, just at a slower rate than would otherwise be the case. Absolute decoupling occurs when total environmental impacts — impacts in the aggregate — peak and begin to decline, even as the economy continues to grow.¶ Decoupling can be driven by both technological and demographic trends and usually results from a combination of the two.¶ The growth rate of the human population has already peaked. Today’s population growth rate is one percent per year, down from its high point of 2.1 percent in the 1970s. Fertility rates in countries containing more than half of the global population are now below replacement level. Population growth today is primarily driven by longer life spans and lower infant mortality, not by rising fertility rates. Given current trends, it is very possible that the size of the human population will peak this century and then start to decline.¶ Trends in population are inextricably linked to other demographic and economic dynamics. For the first time in human history, over half the global population lives in cities. By 2050, 70 percent are expected to dwell in cities, a number that could rise to 80 percent or more by the century’s end. Cities are characterized by both dense populations and low fertility rates.¶ Cities occupy just one to three percent of the Earth’s surface and yet are home to nearly four billion people. As such, cities both drive and symbolize the decoupling of humanity from nature, performing far better than rural economies in providing efficiently for material needs while reducing environmental impacts.¶ The growth of cities along with the economic and ecological benefits that come with them are inseparable from improvements in agricultural productivity. As agriculture has become more land and labor efficient, rural populations have left the countryside for the cities. Roughly half the US population worked the land in 1880. Today, less than 2 percent does.¶ As human lives have been liberated from hard agricultural labor, enormous human resources have been freed up for other endeavors. Cities, as people know them today, could not exist without radical changes in farming. In contrast, modernization is not possible in a subsistence agrarian economy.¶ These improvements have resulted not only in lower labor requirements per unit of agricultural output but also in lower land requirements. This is not a new trend: rising harvest yields have for millennia reduced the amount of land required to feed the average person. The average per-capita use of land today is vastly lower than it was 5,000 years ago, despite the fact that modern people enjoy a far richer diet. Thanks to technological improvements in agriculture, during the half-century starting in the mid-1960s, the amount of land required for growing crops and animal feed for the average person declined by one-half.¶ Agricultural intensification, along with the move away from the use of wood as fuel, has allowed many parts of the world to experience net reforestation. About 80 percent of New England is today forested, compared with about 50 percent at the end of the 19th century. Over the past 20 years, the amount of land dedicated to production forest worldwide declined by 50 million hectares, an area the size of France. the “forest transition” from net deforestation to net reforestation seems to be as resilient a feature of development as the demographic transition that reduces human birth rates as poverty declines.¶ Human use of many other resources is similarly peaking. The amount of water needed for the average diet has declined by nearly 25 percent over the past half-century. Nitrogen pollution continues to cause eutrophication and large dead zones in places like the Gulf of Mexico. While the total amount of nitrogen pollution is rising, the amount used per unit of production has declined significantly in developed nations.¶ Indeed, in contradiction to the often-expressed fear of infinite growth colliding with a finite planet, demand for many material goods may be saturating as societies grow wealthier. Meat consumption, for instance, has peaked in many wealthy nations and has shifted away from beef toward protein sources that are less land intensive.¶ As demand for material goods is met, developed economies see higher levels of spending directed to materially less-intensive service and knowledge sectors, which account for an increasing share of economic activity. This dynamic might be even more pronounced in today’s developing economies, which may benefit from being late adopters of resource-efficient technologies.¶ Taken together, these trends mean that the total human impact on the environment, including land-use change, overexploitation, and pollution, can peak and decline this century. By understanding and promoting these emergent processes, humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the Earth — even as developing countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty ends.<|im_end|> <|im_start|>assistant <h4>Growth sustainable---technology removes dependence on nature and solves resource scarcity </h4><p>John Asafu-<u><strong>Adjaye 15</u></strong>, associate professor of economics at the University of Queensland, et al., April 2015, “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” http://www.ecomodernism.org/s/An-Ecomodernist-Manifesto.pdf</p><p>At the same time, <u><strong>human flourishing has taken a serious toll on natural, nonhuman environments and wildlife</u></strong>. <u><strong>Humans use</u></strong> about <u><strong>half of the planet’s ice-free land, mostly for pasture, crops, and production forestry. Of the land once covered by forests, 20 percent has been converted to human use. </u></strong>Populations of many mammals, amphibians, and birds have declined by more than 50 percent in the past 40 years alone. More than 100 species from those groups went extinct in the 20th century, and about 785 since 1500. As we write, only four northern white rhinos are confirmed to exist.¶ Given that humans are completely dependent on the living biosphere, <u><strong>how is it possible that people are doing so much damage to natural systems without doing more harm to themselves?</u></strong>¶ <u><strong>The role that technology plays in reducing humanity’s dependence on nature explains this paradox</u></strong>. <u><strong>Human technologies,</u></strong> from those that first enabled agriculture to replace hunting and gathering, to those that drive today’s globalized economy, <u><strong>have made humans less reliant upon the many ecosystems that once provided their only sustenance, even as those same ecosystems have often been left deeply damaged.¶ Despite frequent assertions</u></strong> starting in the 1970s <u><strong>of fundamental “limits to growth,” <mark>there is </mark>still remarkably <mark>little evidence</mark> that <mark>human population and economic expansion will outstrip</mark> the capacity to grow food or procure critical material <mark>resources</u></strong></mark> in the foreseeable future.¶ <u><strong>To the degree to which there are fixed physical <mark>boundaries to </mark>human <mark>consumption</mark>, they <mark>are so theoretical as to be</mark> functionally <mark>irrelevant</u></strong></mark>. The amount of solar radiation that hits the Earth, for instance, is ultimately finite but represents no meaningful constraint upon human endeavors. Human civilization can flourish for centuries and millennia on energy delivered from a closed uranium or thorium fuel cycle, or from hydrogen-deuterium fusion. <u><strong>With proper management, <mark>humans are at no risk of lacking </mark>sufficient agricultural <mark>land</mark> for food</u></strong>. Given plentiful land and unlimited energy, <u><strong><mark>substitutes for</mark> other material <mark>inputs</mark> to human well-being <mark>can easily be found</mark> if those inputs become scarce or expensive</u></strong>.¶ <u><strong>There remain</u></strong>, however, <u><strong>serious long-term environmental threats</u></strong> to human well-being, <u><strong>such as anthropogenic climate change</u></strong>, stratospheric <u><strong>ozone depletion, and ocean acidification. While these risks are difficult to quantify</u></strong>, the evidence is clear today that <u><strong>they could cause significant risk of catastrophic impacts on societies and ecosystems</u></strong>. Even gradual, non-catastrophic outcomes associated with these threats are likely to result in significant human and economic costs as well as rising ecological losses.¶ <u><strong>Much of the world’s population still suffers from more-immediate local environmental health risks</u></strong>. Indoor and outdoor <u><strong>air pollution continue to bring premature death and illness to millions annually</u></strong>. <u><strong>Water pollution and water-borne illness due to pollution and degradation of watersheds cause similar suffering.¶ </u></strong>2¶ <u><strong><mark>Even as</mark> human <mark>environmental impacts</mark> continue to <mark>grow</mark> in the aggregate, a range of <mark>long-term trends are </mark>today <mark>driving</mark> significant <mark>decoupling</mark> of human well-being from environmental impacts.¶ Decoupling occurs in</u></strong> both <u><strong>relative and absolute terms. Relative decoupling means that human <mark>environmental impacts rise</mark> at a <mark>slower</mark> rate <mark>than</mark> overall <mark>economic growth</u></strong></mark>. Thus, <u><strong>for each unit of economic output, less environmental impact</u></strong> (e.g., deforestation, defaunation, pollution) <u><strong>results</u></strong>. Overall impacts may still increase, just at a slower rate than would otherwise be the case. <u><strong>Absolute decoupling occurs when total environmental impacts</u></strong> — impacts in the aggregate — <u><strong>peak and begin to decline, even as the economy continues to grow.¶ Decoupling can be driven by both technological and demographic trends</u></strong> and usually results from a combination of the two.¶ <u><strong><mark>The growth rate of the</mark> human <mark>population has </mark>already <mark>peaked</u></strong></mark>. <u><strong>Today’s population growth rate is one percent per year, down from its high point</u></strong> of 2.1 percent <u><strong>in the 1970s. Fertility rates in countries containing more than half of the global population are now below replacement level. Population growth today is primarily driven by longer life spans and lower infant mortality</u></strong>, not by rising fertility rates. Given current trends, <u><strong>it is very possible that the size of the human population will peak this century and then start to decline.¶ Trends in population are inextricably linked to other demographic and economic dynamics</u></strong>. For the first time in human history, over half the global population lives in cities. By 2050, 70 percent are expected to dwell in cities, a number that could rise to 80 percent or more by the century’s end. <u><strong>Cities are characterized by both dense populations and low fertility rates.¶ Cities occupy just one to three percent of the Earth’s surface and yet are home to nearly four billion people</u></strong>. As such, <u><strong><mark>cities</mark> both <mark>drive</mark> and symbolize the <mark>decoupling</mark> of humanity from nature, <mark>performing</u></strong></mark> far <u><strong><mark>better than rural economies in</mark> providing efficiently for material needs while <mark>reducing environmental impacts</u></strong></mark>.¶ The growth of cities along with the economic and ecological benefits that come with them are inseparable from improvements in agricultural productivity.<u><strong> As agriculture has become more land and labor efficient, rural populations have left the countryside for the cities. Roughly half the US population worked the land in 1880. Today, less than 2 percent does.¶ As human lives have been liberated from hard agricultural labor, enormous human resources have been freed up for other endeavors</u></strong>. Cities, as people know them today, could not exist without radical changes in farming. In contrast, modernization is not possible in a subsistence agrarian economy.¶ These improvements have resulted not only in lower labor requirements per unit of agricultural output but also in lower land requirements. This is not a new trend: rising harvest yields have for millennia reduced the amount of land required to feed the average person. The average per-capita use of land today is vastly lower than it was 5,000 years ago, despite the fact that modern people enjoy a far richer diet. <u><strong>Thanks to technological improvements in agriculture, during the half-century starting in the mid-1960s, the amount of land required for growing crops and animal feed for the average person declined by one-half.¶ <mark>Agricultural intensification</mark>, along with the move away from the use of wood as fuel, <mark>has allowed</mark> many parts of the world to experience <mark>net reforestation</u></strong></mark>. About 80 percent of New England is today forested, compared with about 50 percent at the end of the 19th century. Over the past 20 years, the amount of land dedicated to production forest worldwide declined by 50 million hectares, an area the size of France. the “forest transition” from net deforestation to net reforestation seems to be as resilient a feature of development as the demographic transition that reduces human birth rates as poverty declines.¶ <u><strong><mark>Human use of </mark>many <mark>other resources is </mark>similarly <mark>peaking</mark>. The amount of <mark>water need</mark>ed<mark> for the average diet has declined</mark> by nearly 25 percent over the past half-century.</u></strong> Nitrogen pollution continues to cause eutrophication and large dead zones in places like the Gulf of Mexico. While the total amount of nitrogen pollution is rising, the amount used per unit of production has declined significantly in developed nations.¶ Indeed, <u><strong>in contradiction to the often-expressed fear of infinite growth colliding with a finite planet, demand for many material goods may be saturating as societies grow wealthier</u></strong>. Meat consumption, for instance, has peaked in many wealthy nations and has shifted away from beef toward protein sources that are less land intensive.¶ <u><strong>As demand for material goods is met, developed economies see higher levels of spending directed to materially less-intensive service and knowledge sectors, which account for an increasing share of economic activity. This dynamic might be even more pronounced in today’s developing economies, which may benefit from being late adopters of <mark>resource-efficient tech</mark>nologies.¶ </u></strong>Taken together, <u><strong>these <mark>trends mean</mark> that <mark>the total </mark>human <mark>impact on the environment</mark>, including land-use change, overexploitation, and pollution, <mark>can peak and decline this century</u></strong></mark>. By understanding and promoting these emergent processes, <u><strong>humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the Earth</u></strong> — <u><strong>even as developing countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty ends.</p></u></strong><|im_end|>

<|begin_of_text|><|im_start|>system You convert citation and fulltext information from an article into a well-formatted html block. Your responses are always valid html only with no clarification. The html must include - A tag in <h4> that expresses the main argument of the evidence - A citation that makes it easy to find the original source - The full text reformatted in html, with underlining. This can be done with <u> and <mark> tags. - Always ensure tags are properly closed. <|im_end|> <|im_start|>user citation: Sherwin, 15—New York Law School (Richard, “Too Late for Thinking: The Curious Quest for Emancipatory Potential in Meaningless Affect and Some Jurisprudential Implications”, Law, Culture and the Humanities 1–13, October 13, 2015, dml) fulltext: In the history of western culture we can point to three historic moments of epistemological de-centering. The Copernican revolution taught humanity that we do not dwell at the center of the universe. The Freudian revolution taught us that the ‘‘I’’ is a lonely island besieged on all sides by a raging sea of irrational, unconscious forces. Then quantum theory taught us that the universe is indeterminate: subject to uncanny chance operations. Affect theory, perhaps as an extension of the Darwinian evolutionary account of selective adaptation, humbles rationalist pretensions further by subordinating mind to material, bio-chemical processes. If thinking is always an after-thought, an after-the-fact construction, then we can never reliably account for how we’ve actually been affected by things and others in the world around us. How oppressive never to escape the grip of contingent social constructs. How depressing, if endless deconstruction yields only more fragmentation. Surely something must abide, some Higgs Boson-like elementary particle that can withstand deconstruction’s powerful blows. Is there anything real enough to withstand critique? Is there any basis left to hope for emancipation from the destabilizing mutability of human fabrication? In Brian Massumi’s view, there is. As he puts it: “The world always already offers degrees of freedom ready for amplification.”22 This takes us to the heart of the vitalist/ liberation impulse, namely: “escape from crystallized power structures.”23 In Massumi’s writings, affect operates as a cipher – a black box into which he can pack his emancipatory ideal.24 (“‘Affect’ is the word I use for ‘hope.’”25) What Massumi does not and perhaps cannot, or simply does not care to do is formulate a coherent basis for political judgment. While he at some points expresses a preference for “caring” and “belonging,”26 he offers no basis in affect theory for why those forms of behavior are preferable to other perhaps more intense alternatives, such as “anger” and “shock,” which he also embraces.27 But choices must be made. As Martha Nussbaum has noted, a society that cultivates conditions of anger and disgust, for example, is different from one that promotes empathy, dignity, and love.28 Massumi is enamored of the anti-structural,29 the spontaneous emergent process that Deleuze called “pure immanence.” But with affective intensity as his ultimate value30 Massumi remains trapped in a double bind. No critical judgment is forthcoming so long as intensity may be amplified.31 Because of this Massumi cannot coherently critique manifestly oppressive political structures (such as futurism, Nazism, and other intensity-fueled political regimes). How could he if the masses have opted to embrace such regimes for the intensity they provide? Massumi’s resistance to making judgments is consistent with his theory, which minimizes to the vanishing point the human capacity for choice. For Massumi, the very notions of ‘‘individual will’’ and ‘‘subjective reflection’’ are a fiction. (“There is no individual outside its own trans-individual becoming.”32) Body is always conditioning mind – presumably without our conscious awareness. In the end, “events decide.”33 What could human freedom mean under such conditions? The upshot is plain: in Massumi’s politics of affect, human freedom loses its capacity to signify. Choices are a fiction, and in any event no apparent normative basis exists for affirming, much less institutionalizing a preferred set of power structures. Affective intensity lacks structure by definition. Indeed, that is its appeal. (“Intensity is a value in itself.”34) But as Anthony Kronman has eloquently argued, without coherent structures, the legal, political, and cultural conditions necessary for the meaningful exercise of freedom (including political judgment) are unlikely to emerge – and if they do, they are unlikely to be sustainable.35 The latter point is borne out by the very political events that Massumi identifies as exemplary of his theory. If the “Arab Spring” and the “Occupy Movement”36 illustrate anything it is the effervescence of political action based on spontaneous intensity. In the absence of adequate political structures, this kind of political action is destined to pass with the next day’s tide. The emancipatory cri du coeur that can be heard echoing in the work of cultural theorists like Massumi may have landed on “trans-individual” affect as the intensive Higgs Boson wave-particle of political science. Its indeconstructability promises freedom from subjective and cultural contingency – the prison house of “crystallized power structures.” But there is a price to be paid. The radical devaluation of reflective consciousness produces a species of freedom that signifies nothing. Perhaps this is what it is like to embrace a Zeitgeist of “de-humanism.”37 In Massumi’s politics of affect we can discern the impetus for ‘‘vitalist/liberation’’ ideology. As Ben Anderson writes: “There is always already an excess [affect] that power must work to recuperate but is destined and doomed to miss. It is that excess that is central to the creativity of bio-political production and thus the power of naked life.”38 Affect in this sense is “a movement of creative production” that always eludes capture. And this is what conveys a sense of its emancipatory power.39 The intensity of affect liberates us from bondage to contingent cultural entanglement. Corporeal ontology precedes cultural epistemology. This move away from the centrality of cognition marks the demise not only of identity politics, but of identity itself, perhaps even of psychology.40 Simply stated, affect theorists like Massumi romanticize the unknowable “fluid materiality of excitable networks” as a way of disrupting familiar social and cultural hierarchies.41 In so doing, they elevate raw process over social and cultural regimentation and subjugation. It is the neurobiological equivalent of Rousseau’s primitive origin of society, an updated version of the Romantics’ myth of enchantment. If only questions about freedom and responsibility for shared values, justice included, could be resolved by so simple an expedient as the vitalist/liberation category shift from human agency to ‘‘trans-individual affective process.’’ Much can be learned about the various forms of political violence that affective intensity has assumed over the course of human history. But one needn’t take the historical path to discern trouble for Massumi’s emancipatory project. One can start with neuroscience itself.42 Theorists like Massumi play down (as they must) a variety of obstacles that stand in the way of affective emancipation: from the constraints of evolution to the biological programming of the amygdala itself.43 Indeed, what constitutes ‘‘fearfulness,’’ for example, depends upon programming the amygdala based on a habituated pattern of external stimuli.44 There are other problems as well. For instance, a great deal of uncertainty surrounds the question of how communication occurs among different levels of the mind/body complex. As Steve Pile writes, for theorists like Massumi “affect is defined in opposition to cognition, reflexivity, consciousness and humanness.”45 Feelings, on the other hand, occupy a space between non-cognitive affect and highly socialized emotions. Feelings in this sense are pre-cognitive (“a response to transpersonal affects”).46 Our response to affects personalizes them. Through feelings we associate affects with the subject who experiences them. For their part, emotions reflect a shift from pre-cognitive subjectivity to the cognitive domain of socially constructed experience.47 Emotions, in this sense, are how I interpret what I’m feeling through language and other representational or cultural symbolic practices. Affect theorists like Massumi insist that my choices and perhaps even my feelings may turn out to have nothing to do with the affect my body has already processed without my knowing it. This view preserves the purity of affective intensity by keeping it free of subjective or social significance. If you are in the ‘‘vitalist/liberation’’ camp of affect theory along with Massumi, affect can never be symbolized, which means it can never be cognized. Affect, in this view, is always beyond consciousness. It’s like the dark matter that makes up the universe: we know it’s there, we just can’t say anything about it. The problem for ‘‘vitalist/liberation’’ theorists like Massumi is that they want to eat their cake and have it too. Affects for them are ciphers – free-ranging radicals incapable of signifying. Yet, at the same time, many of these same theorists engage in searing critiques of those “in power” who use mass media along with other instrumentalities of affective manipulation for purposes of enhancing social or political control.48 The difficulty is this: If affect is being actively engineered to manipulate people’s behavior – whether in the form of habits of consumption, political judgments, or jury verdicts – it is incumbent upon the theorists to account for how exactly this manipulation is being carried out. As Pile cogently notes, how are the agents of affective manipulation able to “know the unknowable” sufficiently well to control their course and impact in society?49 Thrift’s recourse to metaphors such as “pipes and cables” is hardly sufficient to bear the burden of scientific explanation. Indeed, the nomenclature that has emerged to account for the engineering of affect – ranging from “affect flow between bodies,” “transmissions,” and “contagion”50 – all seem to suffer from the same fundamental lack of explanatory power. If we cannot know what affects are, it stands to reason that we cannot know how to control their flow and impact in society.<|im_end|> <|im_start|>assistant <h4>Affect isn’t a basis for politics </h4><p><strong>Sherwin, 15<u></strong>—New York Law School (Richard, “Too Late for Thinking: The Curious Quest for Emancipatory Potential in Meaningless Affect and Some Jurisprudential Implications”, Law, Culture and the Humanities 1–13, October 13, 2015, dml)</p><p></u>In the history of western culture we can point to three historic moments of epistemological de-centering. The Copernican revolution taught humanity that we do not dwell at the center of the universe. The Freudian revolution taught us that the ‘‘I’’ is a lonely island besieged on all sides by a raging sea of irrational, unconscious forces. Then quantum theory taught us that the universe is indeterminate: subject to uncanny chance operations. <u>Affect theory</u>, perhaps as an extension of the Darwinian evolutionary account of selective adaptation, <u><strong>humbles rationalist pretensions</u></strong> further <u>by subordinating mind to material, bio-chemical processes. <mark>If thinking is always an after-thought</mark>, an after-the-fact construction, then <mark>we <strong>can never reliably account</strong> for how we’ve <strong>actually been affected</strong></mark> by things and others in the world around us</u>. How oppressive never to escape the grip of contingent social constructs. How depressing, if endless deconstruction yields only more fragmentation. Surely something must abide, some Higgs Boson-like elementary particle that can withstand deconstruction’s powerful blows. Is there anything real enough to withstand critique? Is there any basis left to hope for emancipation from the destabilizing mutability of human fabrication? In Brian Massumi’s view, there is. As he puts it: “The world always already offers degrees of freedom ready for amplification.”22 This takes us to the heart of the vitalist/ liberation impulse, namely: “escape from crystallized power structures.”23 <u>In Massumi’s writings, <mark>affect operates as <strong>a</mark> cipher</u></strong> – <u>a <mark>black box</mark> into which he can pack his emancipatory ideal</u>.24 (“‘Affect’ is the word I use for ‘hope.’”25) What <u><mark>Massumi</u></mark> does not and perhaps <u><mark>cannot</u></mark>, or simply does not care to do is <u><mark>formulate <strong>a</mark> coherent <mark>basis for political judgment</u></strong></mark>. While <u>he</u> at some points <u>expresses</u> a <u>preference for “caring” and “belonging</u>,”26 <u>he offers <strong>no basis</strong> in affect theory for why those forms of behavior are preferable to other <strong>perhaps more intense alternatives</u></strong>, such as “anger” and “shock,” which he also embraces.27 <u>But <strong>choices must be made</u></strong>. As Martha Nussbaum has noted, <u>a society that cultivates conditions of anger and disgust</u>, for example, <u>is different from one that promotes empathy, dignity, and love</u>.28 <u>Massumi is enamored of the anti-structural</u>,29 <u>the spontaneous emergent process</u> that Deleuze called “pure immanence.” But <u>with affective intensity as his ultimate value</u>30 <u>Massumi remains <strong>trapped in a double bind</strong>. No critical judgment is forthcoming <strong>so long as intensity may be amplified</u></strong>.31 <u>Because of this Massumi <strong>cannot coherently critique manifestly oppressive political structures</strong> (such as futurism, Nazism, and other intensity-fueled political regimes</u>). <u><mark>How could he if the masses have opted to embrace such regimes</mark> <strong>for the intensity they provide</strong>? </u>Massumi’s resistance to making judgments is consistent with his theory, which minimizes to the vanishing point the human capacity for choice. For Massumi, <u>the very notions of ‘‘individual will’’ and ‘‘subjective reflection’’ are a fiction</u>. (“There is no individual outside its own trans-individual becoming.”32) <u>Body is always conditioning mind – presumably without our conscious awareness. In the end, “events decide.”</u>33 <u><strong>What could human freedom mean under such conditions</strong>? </u>The upshot is plain: <u>in Massumi’s politics of affect, human freedom <strong>loses its capacity to signify</strong>. Choices are a fiction, and</u> in any event <u>no apparent normative basis exists for <strong>affirming</strong>, much less <strong>institutionalizing</strong> a preferred set of power structures. <mark>Affective intensity <strong>lacks structure by definition</u></strong></mark>. Indeed, that is its appeal. (“Intensity is a value in itself.”34) But as Anthony Kronman has eloquently argued, <u>without <strong>coherent structures</strong>, the <strong>legal</strong>, <strong>political</strong>, and <strong>cultural conditions</strong> necessary for the <strong>meaningful exercise of freedom</strong> (including <strong>political judgment</strong>) are <strong>unlikely to emerge</strong> – and if they do, they are <strong>unlikely to be sustainable</strong>.</u>35 The latter point is borne out by the very political events that Massumi identifies as exemplary of his theory. <u>If the “Arab Spring” and the “Occupy Movement</u>”36 <u>illustrate anything it is the <strong>effervescence</strong> of political action based on <strong>spontaneous intensity</strong>. In the absence of <strong>adequate political structures</strong>, this kind of political action is destined to pass with the next day’s tide</u>. The emancipatory cri du coeur that can be heard echoing in the work of cultural theorists like Massumi may have landed on “trans-individual” affect as the intensive Higgs Boson wave-particle of political science. Its indeconstructability promises freedom from subjective and cultural contingency – the prison house of “crystallized power structures.” But there is a price to be paid. <u>The radical devaluation of reflective consciousness produces a species of freedom that signifies nothing</u>. Perhaps this is what it is like to embrace a Zeitgeist of “de-humanism.”37 In Massumi’s politics of affect we can discern the impetus for ‘‘vitalist/liberation’’ ideology. As Ben Anderson writes: “There is always already an excess [affect] that power must work to recuperate but is destined and doomed to miss. It is that excess that is central to the creativity of bio-political production and thus the power of naked life.”38 <u>Affect in this sense is “a movement of creative production” that always eludes capture. And this is what conveys a sense of its emancipatory power</u>.39 The intensity of affect liberates us from bondage to contingent cultural entanglement. Corporeal ontology precedes cultural epistemology. This move away from the centrality of cognition marks the demise not only of identity politics, but of identity itself, perhaps even of psychology.40 Simply stated, <u><mark>affect theorists</u></mark> like Massumi <u><mark>romanticize the unknowable “fluid materiality</mark> of excitable networks” as a way of disrupting familiar social and cultural hierarchies</u>.41 In so doing, <u>they elevate raw process over social and cultural regimentation and subjugation</u>. It is the neurobiological equivalent of Rousseau’s primitive origin of society, an updated version of the Romantics’ myth of enchantment. <u><strong>If only</strong> questions about freedom and responsibility for shared values, justice included, could be resolved by <strong>so simple an expedient</strong> as the</u> vitalist/liberation category <u>shift from human agency to ‘‘trans-individual affective process</u>.’’ <u>Much can be learned about <strong>the various forms of political violence</strong> that affective intensity has assumed over the course of human history</u>. But one needn’t take the historical path to discern trouble for Massumi’s emancipatory project. One can start with neuroscience itself.42 <u><mark>Theorists</mark> </u>like Massumi <u><mark>play down</u></mark> (as they must) a variety of <u><strong><mark>obstacles</u></strong></mark> that stand <u>in the way of affective emancipation: from the constraints of evolution to the biological programming of the amygdala itself</u>.43 Indeed, <u>what constitutes ‘‘fearfulness</u>,’’ for example, <u>depends upon programming</u> the amygdala <u>based on</u> a habituated pattern of <u><strong>external stimuli</u></strong>.44 There are other problems as well. For instance, a great deal of <u><strong>uncertainty</strong> surrounds the question of how communication occurs among different levels of the mind/body complex</u>. As Steve Pile writes, for theorists like Massumi “affect is defined in opposition to cognition, reflexivity, consciousness and humanness.”45 Feelings, on the other hand, occupy a space between non-cognitive affect and highly socialized emotions. Feelings in this sense are pre-cognitive (“a response to transpersonal affects”).46 Our response to affects personalizes them. Through feelings we associate affects with the subject who experiences them. For their part, emotions reflect a shift from pre-cognitive subjectivity to the cognitive domain of socially constructed experience.47 Emotions, in this sense, are how I interpret what I’m feeling through language and other representational or cultural symbolic practices. <u>Affect theorists</u> like Massumi <u>insist that</u> my <u>choices and</u> perhaps even my <u>feelings may</u> turn out to <u>have <strong>nothing to do</strong> with the affect my body has already processed without my knowing it. This view preserves the <strong>purity of affective intensity</strong> by keeping it <strong>free of subjective or social significance</u></strong>. If you are in the ‘‘vitalist/liberation’’ camp of affect theory along with Massumi, <u>affect can never be symbolized, which means it can never be cognized</u>. Affect, in this view, <u>is</u> always beyond consciousness. It’s <u>like</u> the <u>dark matter</u> that makes up the universe: <u>we know it’s there, <strong>we just can’t say anything about it</u></strong>. <u>The problem for</u> ‘‘vitalist/liberation’’ <u>theorists like Massumi is that <mark>they <strong>want to eat their cake and have it too</strong></mark>. Affects for them are ciphers – free-ranging radicals incapable of signifying. Yet</u>, at the same time, many of <u>these same theorists engage in searing critiques of <mark>those “in power”</mark> who <mark>use</u></mark> mass media along with other instrumentalities of <u><mark>affective manipulation for</mark> purposes of <mark>enhancing social</mark> or political <mark>control</u></mark>.48 <u>The difficulty is this: If affect is being actively engineered to manipulate people’s behavior</u> – whether in the form of habits of consumption, political judgments, or jury verdicts – <u>it is <strong>incumbent</strong> upon the theorists to account for <strong>how exactly this manipulation is being carried out</u></strong>. As Pile cogently notes, <u>how are the agents of affective manipulation able to “know the unknowable” <strong>sufficiently well to control their course and impact in society?</u></strong>49 Thrift’s <u>recourse to metaphors</u> such as “pipes and cables” <u>is hardly sufficient to bear the burden of scientific explanation</u>. Indeed, <u>the nomenclature that has emerged to account for the engineering of affect – ranging from “affect flow between bodies,” “transmissions,” and “contagion</u>”50 – <u>all seem to suffer from <strong>the same fundamental lack of explanatory power</strong>. If we cannot know what affects are, it stands to reason that <strong>we cannot know how to control their flow</strong> and <strong>impact in society</strong>.</p></u><|im_end|>

<|begin_of_text|><|im_start|>system You convert citation and fulltext information from an article into a well-formatted html block. Your responses are always valid html only with no clarification. The html must include - A tag in <h4> that expresses the main argument of the evidence - A citation that makes it easy to find the original source - The full text reformatted in html, with underlining. This can be done with <u> and <mark> tags. - Always ensure tags are properly closed. <|im_end|> <|im_start|>user citation: Winant, UC-Santa Barbara Sociology Professor, 2015 [2015, Howard, The Dark Matter: Race and Racism in the 21st Century,” Critical Sociology 2015, Vol. 41(2) 313–324] fulltext: The World-Historical Shitpile of Race Structural racism – an odious stinkpile of shit left over from the past and still being augmented in the present – has been accumulated by ‘slavery unwilling to die’,4 by empire, and indeed by the entire racialized modern world system. The immense waste (Feagin et al., 2001, drawing on Bataille) of human life and labor by these historically entrenched social structures and practices still confronts us today, in the aftermath of the post-Second World War racial ‘break’. Our antiracist accomplishments have reduced the size of the pile; we have lessened the stink. But a massive amount of waste still remains. So much racial waste is left over from the practice of racial domination in the early days of empire and conquest, to the present combination of police state and liberalism! Indeed it often seems that this enormous and odious waste pinions the social system under an immovable burden. How often have despair and hopelessness overcome those who bore this sorrow? How often have slave and native, peon and maquiladora, servant and ghetto-dweller, felt just plain ‘sick and tired’ (Nappy Roots, 2003), encumbered by this deadening inertia composed of a racial injustice that could seemingly never be budged? How often, too, have whites felt weighed down by the waste, the guilt and self-destruction built into racism and the ‘psychological wage’? Yet racial politics is always unstable and contradictory. Racial despotism can never be fully stabilized or consolidated. Thus at key historical moments, perhaps rare but also inevitable, the sheer weight of racial oppression – qua social structure – becomes insupportable. The built-up rage and inequity, the irrationality and inutility, and the explosive force of dreams denied, are mobilized politically in ways that would have seemed almost unimaginable earlier. Racism remains formidable, entrenched as a structuring feature of both US and global society and politics. Indeed it often seems impossible to overcome. Yet That’s Not the Whole Story We are so used to losing! We can’t see that the racial system is in crisis both in the US and globally. Large-scale demographic and political shifts have overtaken the modern world (racial) system, undermining and rearticulating it. During and after the Second World War a tremendous racial ‘break’ occurred, a seismic shift that swept much of the world (Winant, 2001). The US was but one national ‘case’ of this rupture, which was experienced very profoundly: racial transformations occurred that were unparalleled since at least the changes brought about by the US Civil War. Omi and I (1994) – and many, many others – have proposed that the terrain of racial politics was tremendously broadened and deepened after the War. The increased importance of race in larger political life not only grounded the modern civil rights movement but shaped a whole range of ‘new social movements’ that we take for granted today as central axes of political conflict. In earlier stages of US history it had not been so evident that ‘the personal is political’ – at least not since the end of Reconstruction. From the explicit racial despotism of the Jim Crow era to the ‘racial democracy’ (of course still very partial and truncated) of the present period … : that is a big leap, people. In the modern world there were always black movements, always movements for racial justice and racial freedom. The experience of injustice, concrete grievances, lived oppression, and resistance, both large and small, always exists. It can be articulated or not, politicized or not. These movements, these demands, were largely excluded from mainstream politics before the rise of the civil rights movement after the War. Indeed, after the Second World War, in a huge ‘break’ that was racially framed in crucial ways, this ‘politicization of the social’ swept over the world. It ignited (or reignited) major democratic upsurges. This included the explicitly anti-racist movements: the modern civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement, and the anti-colonial movement (India, Algeria, Vietnam, etc.). It also included parallel, and more-or-less allied, movements like ‘secondwave’ feminism, LGBTQ (née gay liberation) movements, and others. In short, the world-historical upheaval of the Second World War and its aftermath were racial upheavals in significant ways: the periphery against the center, the colored ‘others’ against ‘The Lords of Human Kind’ (Kiernan, 1995). These movements produced: • Demographic, economic, political, and cultural shifts across the planet • The destruction of the old European empires • The coming and going of the Cold War • The rise of the ‘new social movements’, led by the black movement in the US And this is only the start of what could be a much bigger list. A Crisis of Race and Racism? ‘[C]risis’, Gramsci famously wrote, ‘consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass’ (Gramsci, 1971: 276). Using the Gramscian formula, I suggest that there is such a crisis of race and racism. On the one hand, the old verities of established racism and white supremacy have been officially discredited, not only in the US but fairly comprehensively around the world. On the other hand, racially-informed action and social organization, racial identity and race consciousness, continue unchecked in nearly every aspect of social life! On the one hand, the state (many states around the world) now claims to be colorblind, non-racialist, racially democratic; while on the other hand, in almost every case, those same states need race to rule. Consider in the US alone: race and electoral politics, race and social control, race and legal order … Why don’t our heads explode under the pressures of such cognitive dissonance? Why doesn’t manifest racial contradiction provoke as much uncertainty and confusion in public life and political activity as it does in everyday experience? Are we just supposed to pretend that none of this is happening? Can anyone really sustain the view that they are operating in a nonracial, ‘colorblind’ society? The ‘colorblind’ claim is that one should not ‘notice’ race. For if one ‘sees’ race, one wouldn’t be ‘blind’ to it, after all.5 But what happens to race-consciousness under the pressure (now rather intense in the US, anyway) to be ‘colorblind’? Quite clearly, racial awareness does not dry up like a raisin in the sun. Not only does it continue as a matter of course in everyday life, but in intellectual, artistic and scientific (both social and natural) life race continues to command attention.6 ‘Colorblind’ ideologies of race today serve to impede the recognition of racial difference or racial inequality based on claims that race is an archaic concept, that racial inclusion is already an accomplished fact, and so on. Just so, persistent race-consciousness highlights racial differences and particularities. ‘Noticing’ race can be linked to despotic or democratic motives, framed either in defense of coercion, privilege, and undeserved advantage, or invoked to support inclusion, human rights, and social justice (Carbado and Harris, 2008; see also Brown et al., 2003). Obama Is he a mere token, a shill for Wall Street? Or is he Neo, ‘the one’? If neither alternative is plausible, then we are in the realm of everyday 21st-century US politics. This is the territory in which, as Sam Rayburn famously said, ‘There comes a time in the life of every politician when he [sic] must rise above principle.’ Yet Barack Obama has transformed the US presidency in ways we cannot yet fully appreciate. Obama is not simply the first nonwhite (that we know of) to occupy the office. He is the first to have lived in the global South, the first to be a direct descendent of colonized people, the first to have a genuine movement background. Consider: How many community meetings, how many movement meetings did Obama attend before entering electoral politics? But he is no more powerful than any of his predecessors; he is constrained as they were by the US system of rule, by the US racial regime, by structural racism. In addition he is constrained by racism as no other US president has ever been. No other president has experienced racism directly: Moreover, while my own upbringing hardly typifies the African American experience – and although, largely through luck and circumstance, I now occupy a position that insulates me from most of the bumps and bruises that the average black man must endure – I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that during my forty-five years have been directed my way: security guards tailing me as I shop in department stores, white couples who toss me their car keys as I stand outside a restaurant waiting for the valet, police cars pulling me over for no apparent reason. I know what it’s like to have people tell me I can’t do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of swallowed back anger. I know as well that Michelle and I must be continually vigilant against some of the debilitating story lines that our daughters may absorb – from TV and music and friends and the streets – about who the world thinks they are, and what the world imagines they should be. (Obama, 2006: 233) On the other hand: he has a ‘kill list’. All presidents kill people, but Obama is the first systematically and publicly to take charge of these egregious and unconstitutional uses of exceptional powers. In this he echoes Carl Schmitt, the Nazi political theorist, whose famous dictum is ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ (2004 [1922]). The drones, the surveillance, and the numerous right turns of his administration all stand in sharp contradiction not only to his campaign rhetoric, but to the anti-racist legacy of the civil rights movement that arguably put him in office. Obama has not interceded for blacks against their greatest cumulative loss of wealth in US history, the ‘great recession’ of 2008. He has not explicitly criticized the glaring racial bias in the US carceral system. He has not intervened in conflicts over workers’ rights – particularly in the public sector where many blacks and other people of color are concentrated. Obama himself largely deploys colorblind racial ideology, although he occasionally critiques it as well. Beneath this ostensibly postracial view the palpable and quite ubiquitous system of racial distinction and inequality remains entrenched. Though modernized and ‘moderated’, structural racism has been fortified, not undermined, by civil rights reform; Obama is not challenging it, at least not directly. Reframing the Discussion What should we be studying and teaching now? The list of themes I have highlighted here is partial of course, and perhaps impressionistic as well. If the argument I have proposed has any validity, then the ‘dark matter’ of race, which is even more invisible now than it was in the past – in its present ‘post-civil rights’, ‘colorblind’, and even ‘presidential’ forms – continues to exercise its gravitational pull on our politics. It continues to shape what is called (and improperly deprecated as) ‘identity politics’. The ‘dark matter’ takes on new significance as a central feature of neoliberalism, which is enacted today through the deployment of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, ‘states of exception’, state violence, and exclusionary politics – all political practices that rely on racism. Yet the legacy of centuries of resistance to these depredations, the undeniable achievements of anti-racist and ant-imperialist struggles, the extension of democracy – often tortuous and always incomplete – to peoples of color, also exerts a significant political force. Race-based ‘freedom dreams’ (Kelley again) sustain the hope of democracy, inclusion, equality, and justice in the US and elsewhere.<|im_end|> <|im_start|>assistant <h4>The assumptions that racial progress is impossible is both empirically false and risks avoiding methods of political change that can decrease violence significantly </h4><p><strong>Winant, UC-Santa Barbara Sociology Professor, 2015</p><p><u>[2015, Howard, The Dark Matter: Race and Racism in the 21st Century,” Critical Sociology 2015, Vol. 41(2) 313–324]</p><p></u></strong>The World-Historical Shitpile of Race <u><strong>Structural racism – an odious stinkpile of shit left over from the past and still being augmented in the present – has been accumulated</u></strong> by ‘slavery unwilling to die’,4 by empire, and indeed by the entire racialized modern world system. The immense waste (Feagin et al., 2001, drawing on Bataille) of human life and labor by these historically entrenched social structures and practices still confronts us today, in the aftermath of the post-Second World War racial ‘break’. Our <u><strong><mark>antiracist accomplishments have reduced the size of the pile</u></strong></mark>; we have lessened the stink. But a massive amount of waste still remains. So much racial waste is left over from the practice of racial domination in the early days of empire and conquest, to the present combination of police state and liberalism! Indeed <u><strong>it</u></strong> often <u><strong>seems that this enormous and odious waste pinions the social system under an immovable burden</u></strong>. <u><strong>How often have despair</u></strong> and hopelessness <u><strong>overcome those who bore this sorrow</u></strong>? How often have slave and native, peon and maquiladora, servant and ghetto-dweller, felt just plain ‘sick and tired’ (Nappy Roots, 2003), encumbered by this deadening inertia composed of a racial injustice that could seemingly never be budged? How often, too, have whites felt weighed down by the waste, the guilt and self-destruction built into racism and the ‘psychological wage’? Yet <u><strong>racial politics is always unstable and contradictory</u></strong>. <u><strong><mark>Racial despotism can never be fully stabilized or consolidated</u></strong>. <u><strong>Thus at key historical moments,</mark> </u></strong>perhaps <u><strong><mark>rare but also inevitable</mark>, the sheer weight of <mark>racial oppression</mark> – qua social structure – <mark>becomes insupportable</mark>.</u></strong> <u><strong>The built-up <mark>rage and inequity, the irrationality and inutility, and the explosive force of dreams</mark> denied, <mark>are mobilized politically in ways that</mark> would have <mark>seemed</mark> almost <mark>unimaginable earlier.</u></strong> <u><strong>Racism remains</mark> formidable, <mark>entrenched as</mark> a structuring feature of both US and global society and <mark>politics</u></strong></mark>. <u><strong>Indeed it often seems impossible to overcome. Yet <mark>That’s Not the Whole Story</mark> </u></strong>We are so used to losing! We can’t see that the racial system is in crisis both in the US and globally. <u><strong>Large-scale demographic and <mark>political shifts have overtaken the modern</mark> world (<mark>racial) system</mark>, undermining and rearticulating it. <mark>During</mark> and after the <mark>Second World War a tremendous racial ‘break’ occurred, a seismic shift that swept much of the world</u></strong> (</mark>Winant, 2001). <u><strong><mark>The US was but one national ‘case’ of this rupture</u></strong></mark>, which was experienced very profoundly: racial transformations occurred that were unparalleled since at least the changes brought about by the US Civil War. Omi and I (1994) – and many, many others – have proposed that the terrain of racial politics was tremendously broadened and deepened after the War. <u><strong>The increased <mark>importance of race in</mark> larger <mark>political life not only grounded the modern civil rights movement but shaped</mark> a whole <mark>range of ‘new social movements’ that we take for granted today as central axes of political conflict</mark>.</u></strong> In earlier stages of US history it had not been so evident that ‘the personal is political’ – at least not since the end of Reconstruction. <u><strong><mark>From</mark> the explicit <mark>racial despotism of</mark> the <mark>Jim Crow</mark> era <mark>to</mark> the ‘<mark>racial democracy’</mark> (of course <mark>still</mark> very <mark>partial</mark> and truncated) <mark>of the present period … : that is a big leap</mark>, </u></strong>people. In the modern world there were always black movements, always movements for racial justice and racial freedom<u><strong>. The experience of injustice, concrete grievances, lived oppression, and resistance</u></strong>, both large and small, <u><strong>always exists. It can be articulated or not, politicized or not</u></strong>. <u><strong>These movements</u></strong>, these demands, <u><strong>were largely excluded from mainstream politics before the rise of the civil rights movement after the</u></strong> <u><strong>War</u></strong>. Indeed, <u><strong>after the Second World War, in a huge ‘break’ that was racially framed in crucial ways, this ‘politicization of the social’ swept over the world. It ignited</u></strong> (or reignited) <u><strong>major democratic upsurges</u></strong>. <u><strong><mark>This included the explicitly anti-racist movements: the modern civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement, and the anti-colonial movement</mark> (India, Algeria, Vietnam, etc.). <mark>It</mark> also <mark>included parallel</mark>, and more-or-less allied, <mark>movements like ‘secondwave’ feminism, LGBTQ</mark> (née gay liberation) movements, <mark>and others</mark>. </u></strong>In short, <u><strong>the world-historical upheaval of the Second World War and its aftermath were racial upheavals in significant ways: the periphery against the center, the colored ‘others’ against ‘The Lords of Human Kind’</u></strong> (Kiernan, 1995<u><strong>). These movements produced: </u></strong>• <u><strong>Demographic, economic, political, and cultural shifts across the planet</u></strong> • <u><strong><mark>The destruction of the old European empires </u></strong>• <u><strong>The coming and going of the Cold War </u></strong>• <u><strong>The rise of the ‘new social movements’, led by the black movement in the US</u></strong> <u><strong>And this is only the start of what could be a much bigger list</mark>. </u></strong>A Crisis of Race and Racism? ‘[C]risis’, Gramsci famously wrote, ‘consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass’ (Gramsci, 1971: 276). Using the Gramscian formula, I suggest that there is such a crisis of race and racism. <u><strong>On the one hand, the old verities of established racism and white supremacy have been officially discredited, not only in the US but fairly comprehensively around the world. On the other hand, racially-informed action and social organization, racial identity and race consciousness, continue unchecked in nearly every aspect of social life</u></strong>! On the one hand, the state (many states around the world) now claims to be colorblind, non-racialist, racially democratic; while on the other hand, in almost every case, those same states need race to rule. Consider in the US alone: race and electoral politics, race and social control, race and legal order … Why don’t our heads explode under the pressures of such cognitive dissonance? Why doesn’t manifest racial contradiction provoke as much uncertainty and confusion in public life and political activity as it does in everyday experience? Are we just supposed to pretend that none of this is happening? Can anyone really sustain the view that they are operating in a nonracial, ‘colorblind’ society? The ‘colorblind’ claim is that one should not ‘notice’ race. For if one ‘sees’ race, one wouldn’t be ‘blind’ to it, after all.5 But what happens to race-consciousness under the pressure (now rather intense in the US, anyway) to be ‘colorblind’? Quite clearly, racial awareness does not dry up like a raisin in the sun. Not only does it continue as a matter of course in everyday life, but in intellectual, artistic and scientific (both social and natural) life race continues to command attention.6 ‘Colorblind’ ideologies of race today serve to impede the recognition of racial difference or racial inequality based on claims that race is an archaic concept, that racial inclusion is already an accomplished fact, and so on. Just so, persistent race-consciousness highlights racial differences and particularities. ‘Noticing’ race can be linked to despotic or democratic motives, framed either in defense of coercion, privilege, and undeserved advantage, or invoked to support inclusion, human rights, and social justice (Carbado and Harris, 2008; see also Brown et al., 2003). Obama Is he a mere token, a shill for Wall Street? Or is he Neo, ‘the one’? If neither alternative is plausible, then we are in the realm of everyday 21st-century US politics. This is the territory in which, as Sam Rayburn famously said, ‘There comes a time in the life of every politician when he [sic] must rise above principle.’ Yet Barack Obama has transformed the US presidency in ways we cannot yet fully appreciate. Obama is not simply the first nonwhite (that we know of) to occupy the office. He is the first to have lived in the global South, the first to be a direct descendent of colonized people, the first to have a genuine movement background. Consider: How many community meetings, how many movement meetings did Obama attend before entering electoral politics? But he is no more powerful than any of his predecessors; he is constrained as they were by the US system of rule, by the US racial regime, by structural racism. In addition he is constrained by racism as no other US president has ever been. No other president has experienced racism directly: Moreover, while my own upbringing hardly typifies the African American experience – and although, largely through luck and circumstance, I now occupy a position that insulates me from most of the bumps and bruises that the average black man must endure – I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that during my forty-five years have been directed my way: security guards tailing me as I shop in department stores, white couples who toss me their car keys as I stand outside a restaurant waiting for the valet, police cars pulling me over for no apparent reason. I know what it’s like to have people tell me I can’t do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of swallowed back anger. I know as well that Michelle and I must be continually vigilant against some of the debilitating story lines that our daughters may absorb – from TV and music and friends and the streets – about who the world thinks they are, and what the world imagines they should be. (Obama, 2006: 233) On the other hand: he has a ‘kill list’. All presidents kill people, but Obama is the first systematically and publicly to take charge of these egregious and unconstitutional uses of exceptional powers. In this he echoes Carl Schmitt, the Nazi political theorist, whose famous dictum is ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ (2004 [1922]). The drones, the surveillance, and the numerous right turns of his administration all stand in sharp contradiction not only to his campaign rhetoric, but to the anti-racist legacy of the civil rights movement that arguably put him in office. Obama has not interceded for blacks against their greatest cumulative loss of wealth in US history, the ‘great recession’ of 2008. He has not explicitly criticized the glaring racial bias in the US carceral system. He has not intervened in conflicts over workers’ rights – particularly in the public sector where many blacks and other people of color are concentrated. Obama himself largely deploys colorblind racial ideology, although he occasionally critiques it as well. Beneath this ostensibly postracial view the palpable and quite ubiquitous system of racial distinction and inequality remains entrenched. Though modernized and ‘moderated’, structural racism has been fortified, not undermined, by civil rights reform; Obama is not challenging it, at least not directly. Reframing the Discussion What should we be studying and teaching now? The list of themes I have highlighted here is partial of course, and perhaps impressionistic as well. If the argument I have proposed has any validity, then <u><strong>the ‘dark matter’ of race, which is even more invisible now than it was in the past – in its present ‘post-civil rights’, ‘colorblind’, and even ‘presidential’ forms – continues to exercise its gravitational pull on our politics</u></strong>. <u><strong>It continues to shape</u></strong> what is called (and improperly deprecated as) ‘<u><strong>identity politics’. The ‘dark matter’ takes on new significance as a central feature of neoliberalism, which is enacted today through the deployment of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, ‘states of exception’, state violence, and exclusionary politics – all political practices that rely on racism. <mark>Yet the legacy of centuries of resistance to these depredations,</u></strong> <u><strong>the undeniable achievements of anti-racist</mark> and ant-imperialist <mark>struggles, the extension of democracy</mark> – often tortuous and always incomplete – <mark>to peoples of color, also exerts a significant political force</u></strong>. <u><strong>Race-based ‘freedom dreams’</mark> (Kelley again) <mark>sustain the hope of democracy, inclusion, equality, and justice in the US and elsewhere.</p></u></strong></mark><|im_end|>

<|begin_of_text|><|im_start|>system You convert citation and fulltext information from an article into a well-formatted html block. Your responses are always valid html only with no clarification. The html must include - A tag in <h4> that expresses the main argument of the evidence - A citation that makes it easy to find the original source - The full text reformatted in html, with underlining. This can be done with <u> and <mark> tags. - Always ensure tags are properly closed. <|im_end|> <|im_start|>user citation: Grove 15 – Jairus: Associate Professor in PoliSci fulltext: Jairus Grove, 2015, “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” The Encyclopedia of Political Thought // EO Owing its distinction to the long period of intensive scenario planning during the Cold War, the conventionality of conventional warfare meant simply that neither side had crossed the threshold to nuclear conflict. The relatively easy firebreak of “nuclear” or “not nuclear,” however, is no longer operative in policy or academic debates. The category has been further complicated by the success and failure of technological innovation. States possess conventional weapons that in their destructive capacity far exceed the destructiveness of most chemical and biological weapons, and even approach eclipsing some smaller tactical nuclear weapons. The newest generation of fuel air bombs, as used by the USA in the first stages of the 2002 Afghanistan campaign (and then including MOAB, the “Massive Ordnance Air Burst” or “Mother Of All Bombs” ), are massively destructive and rely upon an exothermic chemical reaction that for many seems exotic rather than conventional. Conversely, there have been few breakthroughs in biological weapons research that have produced highly lethal and controllable, and therefore tactical, bioweapons. Bioweapons suffer from many of the same constraints as their natural counterparts in the wild. If a pathogen is sufficiently lethal, incubation time is often short  and so people die too quickly to spread the disease. The 1990s paranoia inspired by graphic depictions of Ebola hemorrhagic fever has not found a foothold in reality. To make such a disease an effective weapon of a state or other strategically minded – not suicidal – group, one has to overcome the difficult although not insurmountable hurdles of weaponizing and delivering biological agents in a way that is not likely to affect one’s own group or constituency. There is also the curious fetishization of the destructive capacity of a singular device. There is a rational basis for thinking that it is important to consider a device as unique when it can inflict the damage of thousands or even millions of tons of TNT, but in the end it is only a matter of packaging. This is particularly true given that the vast amount of scholarly literature on WMD is focused on the rogue possession of a few devices rather than on concerns of all-out nuclear exchange between superpowers. Further, the singular deliverability of a nuclear weapon has not stopped singularly and similarly destructive events from taking place simply because more munitions and more coordination are necessary. The firebombing of Tokyo is accepted by historians as having resulted in as many deaths as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and nearly 30 percent more fatalities than Nagasaki. Given the  destructive capability of conventional weapons and the marked increase of urban population density, conventional bombardments could easily exceed all of the deaths from nuclear weapons in a very short period of time. So why insist on a distinct category of weapons that is, so far, indistinct in its effect? One answer is politics. WMD as a touchstone of international political and security discourses owes much of its capital to the “loose nukes” concern after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the fact that after September 11, 2001, the state was not the only game in town when it came to organizations that could wage war. This was further compounded by the  revelation that, thanks to former Soviet bioweapons director Ken Alibek, the Soviet bioweapons program was vastly larger and more destructive than the global public had known and was not verifiably destroyed at the end of the Cold War. In this respect, the existential threat of WMD is compelling. What is distinctive about some WMD is a series of concentric circles like portability, affordability, and destructiveness. The Venn diagram that results is a set of possible devices that would, because of their exotic nature, pose a significant threat to the countermeasure and deterrent capability of states that thought themselves protected. However, it is somewhat hypocritical to sustain the argument that the mere existence of WMD by this measure ought to constitute an existential threat to global security. After all, headlines rarely read “USA suspected of possessing weapons of mass destruction.” This is despite the fact that the USA, China, Russia, and others with avowed WMD programs have been found possessing chemical stockpiles or  nuclear warheads formerly outlawed by enforceable treaties. Further, extensive freedom of information requests by investigative journalists such as Eric Schlosser have revealed that the US arsenal, thought to follow the strictest safeguards and security protocols, has had hundreds of accidents and near misses with regard to transport and maintenance of nuclear weapons. Despite that now public knowledge, the US nuclear forces are never referred to as weapons of mass destruction. Instead, the USA is described in scholarly and mainstream media contexts as possessing a strategic and tactical “arsenal” of warheads and delivery vehicles. Even in instances of international legal transgression, such as the British violation of the nuclear-free zone in the Falkland Islands established under the Tlatelolco treaty, the stigma of WMD is not used to describe weapons possession by established states. Therefore it maybe be better to think of the  category of WMD as reflecting concerns regarding the ability of nation-states to predictably “control” the weapons in their possession, such as the frequent concerns over Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile, or as a category to describe less territorially bounded organizations that could inflict a level of damage once thought only possible by states. That is, the ability for nonstate organizations to compete directly with states in terms of destructive capability demands that we create a special category for the weapons that make a systemic difference in global security. Seen in this light, WMD is a highly political category in that its conceptual purchase – exotic weapons possessed by exotic actors that do lots of damage – denotes a change in the material capabilities and therefore a change in the hierarchy of actors in the international system, as much as it illustrates the intrinsic properties of the device. In this case, it is the movement from nonpossession to possession that is often more threatening or destabilizing than the existential fact of the weapons’ existence. To put it another way, the munitions and their destructive means are not sufficient to define what a WMD is. The category is dependent upon who comes to possess the weapon and their relative position in the hierarchy of the global order. However, the difference in perception regarding WMD is not exhausted by the power politics of hegemonic state interest. Despite the absolute character of death by any means, certain ways of dying have more affective capital than others. This is especially true among the privileged 3 global North, for whom low- probability, highmagnitude risks gain intensity precisely because concerns like hunger, dysentery, low-intensity warfare, aerial bombings, and drone attacks are not a concern. From the perspective of the millions of civilians on the receiving end of invasions or attacks under the pretext of pre-empting or eliminating WMD, the politicization of exotic weapons likely seems much more threatening than the weapons themselves. After all, the first invasion of Iraq, ten years of UN sanctions, and a second US-led invasion killed more Iraqi civilians than all of Saddam Hussein’s gas attacks by at least two orders of magnitude. We might consider then that the unequal distribution of global violence contributes to an aesthetic-affective dimension of WMD. The exotic nature of the devices and the seemingly unpredictable or unstoppable actors that use them tap into a vast archive of apocalyptic films, discourses, video games, comic books, public awareness campaigns, and iconic images like mushroom clouds, mutated or diseased ravaged bodies, and unknown exotic others; all  of which amplify the degree to which the  technical differences between WMD and other  weapons fall short of capturing the real difference. Real and imagined images of fallout and the bloody effects of invisible contagions all have a haptic quality. That is, they are images charged with the ability to grab us and involve the response of our whole body even if only visually or imaginatively. Whether death by genetically modified disease, nuclear explosion, or nerve agents is actually more painful than affluence-induced death like heart disease is beside the point. These excessive emotional and visceral responses give WMD the power to mobilize whole nations for war in a way that other crises like poverty or global warming are as yet incapable of doing, even if the actual numbers and potential numbers of people killed by these other crises far exceed those killed by WMD.<|im_end|> <|im_start|>assistant <h4>The plan seizes upon the affective capital of nuclear weapons which depoliticizes structural violence, normalizes conventional warfare and securitizes the global south</h4><p><strong>Grove 15</strong> – Jairus: Associate Professor in PoliSci</p><p>Jairus Grove, 2015, “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” The Encyclopedia of Political Thought // EO Owing its distinction to the long period of intensive scenario planning during the Cold War, the conventionality of conventional warfare meant simply that neither side had crossed the threshold to nuclear conflict. The relatively easy firebreak of “nuclear” or “not nuclear,” however, is no longer operative <strong>in policy or academic debates</strong>. The category has been further complicated by the success and failure of technological innovation. States possess conventional weapons that in their destructive capacity far exceed the destructiveness of most chemical and biological weapons, <strong>and even approach eclipsing some smaller tactical nuclear weapons.</strong> The newest generation of fuel air bombs, as used by the USA in the first stages of the 2002 Afghanistan campaign (and then including MOAB, the “Massive Ordnance Air Burst” or “Mother Of All Bombs” ), are massively destructive and rely upon an exothermic chemical reaction that for many seems exotic rather than conventional. Conversely, there have been few breakthroughs in biological weapons research that have produced highly lethal and controllable, and therefore tactical, bioweapons. Bioweapons suffer from many of the same constraints as their natural counterparts in the wild. If a pathogen is sufficiently lethal, incubation time is often short  and so people die too quickly to spread the disease. The 1990s paranoia inspired by graphic depictions of Ebola hemorrhagic fever has not found a foothold in reality. To make such a disease an effective weapon of a state or other strategically minded – not suicidal – group, one has to overcome the difficult although not insurmountable hurdles of weaponizing and delivering biological agents in a way that is not likely to affect one’s own group or constituency. There is also the curious fetishization of the destructive capacity of a singular device. There is a rational basis for thinking that it is important to consider a device as unique when it can inflict the damage of thousands or even millions of tons of TNT, but in the end it is only a matter of packaging<strong>. This is particularly true given that the vast amount of scholarly literature on WMD is focused on the rogue possession of a few devices rather than on concerns of all-out nuclear exchange</strong> between superpowers. Further, the singular deliverability of a nuclear weapon has not stopped singularly and similarly destructive events from taking place simply because more munitions and more coordination are necessary. The <strong>firebombing of Tokyo is accepted by historians as having resulted in as many deaths as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and nearly 30 percent more fatalities than Nagasaki</strong>. Given the  destructive capability of conventional weapons and the marked increase of urban population density, conventional bombardments could easily exceed all of the deaths from nuclear weapons in a very short period of time. So why insist on a distinct category of weapons that is, so far, indistinct in its effect? One answer is politics. WMD as a touchstone of international political and security discourses owes much of its capital to the “loose nukes” concern after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the fact that after September 11, 2001, the state was not the only game in town when it came to organizations that could wage war. This was further compounded by the  revelation that, thanks to former Soviet bioweapons director Ken Alibek, the Soviet bioweapons program was vastly larger and more destructive than the global public had known and was not verifiably destroyed at the end of the Cold War. In this respect, the existential threat of WMD is compelling. What is distinctive about some WMD is a series of concentric circles like portability, affordability, and destructiveness. The Venn diagram that results is a set of possible devices that would, because of their exotic nature, pose a significant threat to the countermeasure and deterrent capability of states that thought themselves protected. However, it is somewhat hypocritical to sustain the argument that the mere existence of WMD by this measure ought to constitute an existential threat to global security. After all, headlines rarely read “USA suspected of possessing weapons of mass destruction.” This is despite the fact that the USA, China, Russia, and others with avowed WMD programs have been found possessing chemical stockpiles or  nuclear warheads formerly outlawed by enforceable treaties. Further, extensive freedom of information requests by investigative journalists such as Eric Schlosser have revealed that the US arsenal, thought to follow the strictest safeguards and security protocols, has had hundreds of accidents and near misses with regard to transport and maintenance of nuclear weapons. Despite that now public knowledge, the US nuclear forces are never referred to as weapons of mass destruction. Instead, the USA is described in scholarly and mainstream media contexts as possessing a strategic and tactical “arsenal” of warheads and delivery vehicles. Even in instances of international legal transgression, such as the British violation of the nuclear-free zone in the Falkland Islands established under the Tlatelolco treaty, the stigma of WMD is not used to describe weapons possession by established states. Therefore it maybe be better to think of the  category of WMD as reflecting concerns regarding the ability of nation-states to predictably “control” the weapons in their possession, such as the frequent concerns over Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile, or as a category to describe less territorially bounded organizations that could inflict a level of damage once thought only possible by states. That is, the ability for nonstate organizations to compete directly with states in terms of destructive capability demands that we create a special category for the weapons that make a systemic difference in global security. Seen in this light, WMD is a highly political category in that its conceptual purchase – exotic weapons possessed by exotic actors that do lots of damage – denotes a change in the material capabilities and therefore a change in the hierarchy of actors in the international system, as much as it illustrates the intrinsic properties of the device. In this case, it is the movement from nonpossession to possession that is often more threatening or destabilizing than the existential fact of the weapons’ existence. To put it another way, the munitions and their destructive means are not sufficient to define what a WMD is. The category is dependent upon who comes to possess the weapon and their relative position in the hierarchy of the global order. However, the difference in perception regarding WMD is not exhausted by the power politics of hegemonic state interest. Despite the absolute character of death by any means, <strong>certain ways of dying have more affective capital than others</strong>. <strong>This is especially true among the privileged 3 global North, for whom low- probability, highmagnitude risks gain intensity precisely because concerns like hunger, dysentery, low-intensity warfare, aerial bombings, and drone attacks are not a concern</strong>. From the perspective of the millions of civilians on the receiving end of invasions or attacks under the pretext of pre-empting or eliminating WMD, the <strong>politicization of exotic weapons likely seems much more threatening than the weapons themselves</strong>. After all, the first invasion of Iraq, ten years of UN sanctions, and a second US-led invasion killed more Iraqi civilians than all of Saddam Hussein’s gas attacks by at least two orders of magnitude. We might consider then that the unequal distribution of global violence contributes to an aesthetic-affective dimension of WMD. The exotic nature of the devices and the seemingly unpredictable or unstoppable actors that use them tap into a vast archive of apocalyptic films, discourses, video games, comic books, public awareness campaigns, and iconic images like mushroom clouds, mutated or diseased ravaged bodies, and unknown exotic others; all  of which amplify the degree to which the  technical differences between WMD and other  weapons fall short of capturing the real difference. Real and imagined images of fallout and the bloody effects of invisible contagions all have a haptic quality. That is, they are images charged with the ability to grab us and involve the response of our whole body even if only visually or imaginatively. Whether death by genetically modified disease, nuclear explosion, or nerve agents is actually more painful than affluence-induced death like heart disease is beside the point. These <strong>excessive emotional and visceral responses give WMD the power to mobilize whole nations for war in a way that other crises like poverty or global warming are as yet incapable of doing, even if the actual numbers and potential numbers of people killed by these other crises far exceed those killed by WMD.</p></strong><|im_end|>

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