SS+Reparations+-+Day+1+of+tournament


 * P****lan:**
 * The** **United States** **federal government should substantially increase its public health assistance to the so called sub Saharan** **Africa****. The recipients will determine the nature and form of this public health assistance.**


 * Chapter 1: The Apartheid Past**
 * The public health failures in** **Africa** **are a result of ongoing** **US** **colonialism. The** **US** **must address the question of reparations to recognize and reconcile centuries of apartheid.**
 * __Africa__** **__Action__** "Reparations" **__2007 (__**[|http://www.africaaction.org/resources/issues/reparations.php)]

__Today’s massive global inequalities are the direct result of centuries of global apartheid. Africa’s place as the poorest region in the world, now ground-zero of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, is the consequence of a history of oppression, exploitation, discrimination and racism that dates back to the slave trade, and continues today. Reparations are an essential first step to acknowledging and correcting this history and its lingering consequences The call for reparations for Africans and African descendants is based on historical and moral arguments.__ __Africa____’s fate has been determined by patterns of subjugation and exploitation that began with the slave trade and continued through the colonial and neo-colonial eras. These patterns are now perpetuated in the international policies and policy-making processes controlled by the__ __U.S.__ __and other rich countries. The__ __U.S.__ __is historically the greatest beneficiary of global apartheid, and it is the richest country in the history of the world as a result. There is a clear and unique moral, economic and historical debt owed to__ __Africa__ __and its descendants for this history of exploitation and racism, and for its deadly and persistent effects.__ The call for reparations is also supported in international law. It is recognized in international law that those who commit crimes against humanity – the mass enslavement of Africans being acknowledged as such – must make restitution. There are, in fact, many examples in recent history of reparations being paid at the international, national and individual level. The reparations paid by Germany for the Holocaust, and by the U.S. government to Japanese Americans, are just two examples of such a precedent. __Reparations for Africans and African descendants must begin with an acknowledgment that the slave trade and colonialism represented crimes against humanity whose consequences continue to shape the world today____,__ and that an apology is required from those governments that legitimized and benefited from these injustices. Beyond this, compensation is necessary. There is an obligation on the part of the world’s rich countries to support efforts to address the structural inequalities that have resulted from an international economic system built on slavery and colonialism. __As__ __Africa__ __now faces the worst health crisis in human history, the__ __U.S.__ __and other rich countries should support African efforts to defeat HIV/AIDS and poverty. This should be seen as an obligation, and not charity.__ This is an essential first step to reversing the severe impoverishment of African people that has resulted from historical and contemporary international racism and economic exploitation. __Reparations should be seen as a positive step toward addressing the consequences of centuries of global apartheid.__

Steve **__Miller,__** The Washington Times, September 11, 200**__1__****__.__**
 * And****, the on-going colonial effects on** **Africa****'s public health demands assistance as reparations.**

"We can document, to this day, the economic cost of racially discriminatory policies - from red-lining, to charging more for car financing or insurance policies," Mr [__Rev. Jesse]__ __Jackson__ __wrote. "With the Germans paying reparations to__ __Israel____, the__ __U.S.__ __to the Japanese interned in World War II, the issue of reparations cannot be simply ignored.__ Bush opposes even a serious look at the subject. Most opponents issue shrill denunciations of notion of paying billions to the descendants of slaves. "But the remedy can take many forms," __Mr.__ __Jackson__ __wrote. "With HIV/AIDs spreading through__ __Africa__ __- with projections of 100 million falling victim within five years - **perhaps the best reparations for slavery and colonialism is a** **serious commitment to rebuilding public health systems in**__ **__Africa__****__.__**

M. Shamsul **__Haque__**, PhD in Public Administration from University of Souther Californa, **__1999__** (“Restructuring Development Theories and Policies”)
 * Public Health assistance development is necessary for autonomy from the politico-economic hegemony the counterplan re-entrenches.**



Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Archbishop Desmond **__Tutu__** 5 September 200**__1__** Ecumenical caucus statement at World Conference Against Racism [|http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?id=2442.)]
 * And, this continued colonialism contributes to immeasurable dehumanization and death**

__Racism dehumanizes, disempowers, marginalizes and impoverishes human beings. Its systematic and institutional forms have resulted in the death of many peoples, the plunder of resources, and the decimation of communities and nations. Racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerances all work, singularly and collectively, to diminish our common humanity.__ They thrive within the intersections of race, caste, colour, age, gender, sexual orientation, class, landlessness, ethnicity, nationality, language and disability. __The dismantling and eradication of racism requires that we address all its manifestations and historical expressions, especially slavery and colonialism.__ As people of faith, we call on all peoples, non-governmental organizations and governments to earnestly strive to break the cycles of racism and assist the oppressed to achieve self-determination and establish sustainable communities, without violating the rights of others. __The time to dismantle and eradicate racism is now. It is urgent for us__ and our churches __to acknowledge our complicity with and participation in the perpetuation of racism, slavery and colonialism,__ or we are not credible. This acknowledgment is critical because it leads to the necessary acts of apology and confession, of repentance and reconciliation, and of healing and wholeness. __All of these elements form part of redress and reparations that are due the victims of racism, past and present.__

Clarence J. **__Munford__**, Professor, Black Studies and History, University of Guelph (Ontario), **__96__**, Race and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21st Century, p.3 Nicholas **__Soucy__** © 20**__04.__** Historical Lies & Excuses: An Examination of the Illogical Justification for Bigotry http://www.ethicalatheist.com/docs/bigotry_article.html
 * And if we continue this colonialism extinction will be inevitable as genocidal violence engulfs us all.**
 * And, many arguments against action should be considered as nothing more than excuses for racism. The response is to confront racism by acting and taking steps to avoid the excuses.**

As decades pass and as critical evaluation of historical documents is done, more is understood about “truth” with regard to human behavior and actions. __Even a somewhat censored, conservative view of history will still recognize the existence of several forms of hatred and fear in the form of__ homophobia and __racism. Some have attempted to rationalize such attitudes with various arguments.__ A growing concern surrounding such bigotry is how to combat each form. As we know, __racism unfairly discriminates against__ a person or __a people because of the ascribed ethnic status and subsequently, their moral worth__ in society. Similarly, homophobia is the irrational fear and hatred of gays and lesbians for various reasons. __Considering the definitions and substance of racism__ and homophobia, __there can be no moral justification__ for either, even when one evaluates historical context. __Those who argue contrary to this idea are merely making excuses for bigotry.__ Morality is not transient; the Golden Rule perseveres through evolving social conditions. Collectively, people ought to work harder to counter bigotry; rather than highlighting historical “reasons” for prejudice__, the solution should be found by admitting responsibility for choosing immorality, and working to deny this choice in the future.__


 * Chapter 2: We must confront our privilege**

Lucy **__Jarosz__**, University of Washington Department of Geography, 19**__92__**, Geografiska Annaler Series B Human Geography, Vol. 74, No. 2., p. 105-115, JSTOR
 * R****epresentation shapes the way policies towards** **Afri****ca** **are created – representations of** **Africa** **a****s the "Other" justifies** **cultural domination – we must question our framing and representations in the context of** **Africa****.**

Riat **__Abrahamsen__**, Department of Internatino Politics – University of Wales, 200**__5__**, Alternatives 30, Blair's Africa: "The Polics of Securitization of Fear".
 * We must not make excuses, Putting ourselves first continues colonialism****, p****rioritizing the politics of the "here" above the politics of the "elsewhere" perpetuates the cause of violence rather than contributing to their solution.**

//**Even if we didn’t commit the racist acts we still must hold the government responsible because of the economic benefits of colonialism**// //**__Human right watch, 2001__**// //**(**//An Approach to Reparations, [|**http://hrw.org/english/docs/2001/07/19/global285.htm**])

Once the appropriate beneficiaries of reparations can be identified, it is still necessary to determine who should pay the financial component. __People today will ask why they should be held responsible for the crimes of their ancestors.__ __That is why we would focus on the responsibility of governments__. __A government that sponsored or permitted slavery, the slave trade, or other severe racist practices should not, in our view, be allowed to avoid responsibility simply because of the passage of time__. However, even though governments have an intergenerational life, we recognize that to hold them responsible for past crimes is, as a practical matter, to hold today's citizens or taxpayers responsible. We believe __this attribution of responsibility can be justified by reference to the economic benefits that these countries derived from, say, slavery or abusive colonialism - benefits that presumably helped to jumpstart their industrialization and thus continue to the present__. We note that __this rationale would apply even to immigrants who arrived in a beneficiary country after these abusive practices ended, since they, too, presumably have benefited from the advanced economy they joined.__


 * All of the reasons why reparations could be impractical just describe the necessity for reparations.**

Martha **Biondi**, member of the Department of African American Studies, **2003** “The Rise of the Reparations Movement”, http://rhr.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/2003/87/5.pdf

Like every single previous movement for racial justice in the United States, __reparations has legions of critics. Many skeptics zero in on the question of a remedy— imagining it as impractical due the scope of the injury, or as a political minefield whose implications and price tag are destined to inflame whites. But these objections simply describe the enormity of the task rather than delegitimize it.__ Reparations advocates and atorneys argue, logically, that __the remedy will flow from the nature of the injury, which powerfully underlines the importance of collecting as much documentation, history, and data as possible__. In this respect, historians and other scholars have never proven so valuable to a social movement. Nevertheless, a variety of creative proposals have been suggested. Some activists have proposed that a reparations settlement be administered through a trust in order to ensure economic and educational development. Some leaders have called for free education or health care, debt relief, tax relief, or other in-kind transfers. To be sure, the outcome and remedy will indicate the sincerity of the process


 * And, our choice of** **Africa** **for a starting point of reparations serves as a metaphor around which larger social struggles can condense—the plan serves as a metaphor for social mobility and a broader critique of domination in the system as a whole.**


 * __Zizek__**, senior researcher at the institute for social studies (ljubljana, slovenia), **__1999__** [slavoj, the ticklish subject, p. 204, 206-209]

__Let us recall the standard example of a popular protest__ (mass demonstration, strike, boycott) directed at a specific point, that is, focusing on a particular demand (‘Abolish that new tax! Justice for the imprisoned! Stop exploiting that natural resource!’…) – __the situation becomes politicized when this particular demand starts to function as a metaphoric condensation of the global opposition against Them, those in power__, __so that the protest is no longer actually just about the demand, but about the universal dimension that resonates in that particular demand__ (for this reason, protesters often feel somehow deceived when those in power against whom their protest was addressed simply accept their demand – as if, in this way, the have somehow frustrated them, depriving them of the true aim of their protest in the very guise of accepting their demand). __What post-politics tends to prevent is precisely this metaphoric universalization of particular demands: post-politics mobilizes the vast apparatus of experts social workers, and so on, to reduce the overall demand__ (complaint) __of a particular group to just this demand, with its particular content – no wonder this suffocating closure gives birth to ‘irrational’ outbursts as the only way to give expression to the dimension beyond particularity__. [(3 PARAGRAPHS LATER)] It is clear that the protesting crowds in the DDR, Poland and the Czech Republic 'wanted something else,’ a utopian object of impossible Fullness designated by a multiplicity of names ('solidarity', 'human. rights', etc.), not what they actually got. There are two possible reactions to this gap between expectations and reality; the best way to capture them is by reference to the well-known opposition between fool and knave. The fool is a simpleton, a court jester who is allowed to tell the truth precisely because the 'performative power' (the sociopolitical efficacy) of his [OR HER] speech is suspended; the knave is the cynic who openly states the truth, a crook who tries to sell the open admission of his crookedness as honesty, a scoundrel who admits the need for illegitimate repression in order to maintain social stability. Following the fall of Socialism, the knave is a neoconservative advocate of the free market, who cruelly rejects all forms of social solidarity as counterproductive sentimentalism; while the fool is a multiculturalist 'radical' social critic who, by means of his ludic procedures destined to 'subvert' the existing order, actually serves as its supplement. With regard to Eastern Europe, a knave dismisses the 'third way' project of //Neues Forum// in the ex-DDR as hopelessly outdated utopianism, and exhorts us to accept cruel market reality; while a fool insists that the copse of Socialism has actually opened up a Third Way, a possibility left unexploited by the Western recolonization of the East. This cruel reversal of the sublime into the ridiculous was, of course, grounded in the fact that there was a double misunderstanding at work in the public (self- )perception of social protest movements (from. Solidarity to //Neues Forum//) in the last years of Eastern European Socialism. On the one hand, there were the attempts of the ruling //nomenklatura// to reinscribe these events in their police/political framework, by distinguishing between 'honest critics' with whom one could discuss matters in a calm, rational, depoliticized atmosphere, and a bunch of extremist provocateurs who served foreign interests.36. The battle was thus not only for higher wages and better conditions, but also – and above all – for the workers to be acknowledged as legitimate partners in negotiating with representatives of the regime – the moment the powers that be were forced to accept this, the battle was in a way already won.37 When these movements exploded in a broad mass phenomenon, their demands for freedom and democracy (and solidarity and…) were also misperceived by Western commentators who saw in them confirmation that the people of the East also want what the people in the West already have: they automatically translated these demands into the Western liberal-democratic notion of freedom (multiparty representational political game cum global market economy). Emblematic to the point of caricature here was the figure of Dan Rather, the American news reporter, on Tiananmen Square in 1989, standing in front of a copy of the Statue of Liberty and claiming that this statue says everything about what the protesting students were demanding (in short, if you scratch the yellow skin of a Chinese, you find an American). What this statue actually stood for was a utopian longing that had nothing to do with the real USA (incidentally, it was the same with the original immigrants to America, for whom the view of the statue stood for a utopian longing that was soon crushed). The perception of the American media thus offered another example of the reinscription of the explosion of what, as we have seen, Etienne Balibar calls égaliberté (the unconditional demand for freedom-equality which explodes any positive order) within the confines of a given order. Are we, then, condemned to the debilitating alternative of choosing between a knave and a fool, or is there a //tertium datur//? Perhaps the contours of this //tertium datur// can be discerned via reference to the fundamental European legacy. When one says 'European legacy', every self-respecting leftist intellectual has the same reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture as such: he reaches for his gun and starts to fire accusations of proto-Fascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism.... Is it possible, however, to imagine a leftist appropriation of the European political tradition? Yes, if we follow Ranciére and identify as the core of this tradition the unique gesture of democratic political subjectivization: it was this politicization proper which re-emerged violently in the disintegration of Eastern European Socialism. From my own political past, I remember how, __after four journalists were arrested and brought to trial by the Yugoslav Army in Slovenia in 1988, I participated in the 'Committee for the protection of the human rights of the four accused'. Officially, the goal of the Committee was simply to guarantee fair treatment for the four accused; however, the Committee turned into the major oppositional political force__, practically the Slovene version of the Czech Civic Forum or East German //Neues Forum//, __the body which co-ordinated democratic opposition, a //de facto// representative of civil society__. The Committee's programme consisted of four items; the first three directly concerned the accused, while the 'devil in the detail', of course, was the fourth item, which said that the Committee wanted to clarify the entire background of the arrest of the four accused, and thus contribute to creating circumstances in which such arrests would no longer be possible – a coded way of saying that we wanted the abolition of the existing Socialist regime. __Our demand 'Justice for the four accused!' started to function as the metaphoric condensation of the demand for the global overthrow of the Socialist regime.__ For that reason, ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓

↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓

__in almost daily negotiations with the Committee, Communist Party officials were always accusing us of a 'hidden agenda', claiming that the liberation of the four accused was not our true goal – that we were 'exploiting and manipulating the arrest and trial for other, darker political goals'__. In short, __the Communists. wanted to play the 'rational' depoliticized game: they wanted to deprive the slogan 'Justice for the four accused!' of its explosive general connotation, and reduce it to its literal meaning, which concerned just a minor legal matter; they cynically claimed that it was we, the Committee, who were behaving 'non-democratically' and manipulating the fate of the accused, using global pressure and blackmailing strategies instead of focusing on the particular problem of their plight__. This is politics proper: the moment in which a particular demand is not simply part of the negotiation of interests but aims at something more, and starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire social space. There is a clear contrast between this subjectivization and today's proliferation of postmodern 'identity politics' whose goal is the exact opposite, that is, precisely the assertion of one's particular identity, of one’s proper place within the social structure. The postmodern identity politics of particular (ethnic, sexual, etc.) lifestyles perfectly fits the depoliticized notion of society, in which every particular group is 'accounted for', has its specific status (of victim) acknowledged through affirmative action or other measures destined to guarantee social justice. __The fact that this kind of justice meted out to victimized minorities requires an intricate police apparatus__ (for identifying the group in question, for punishing offenders against its rights – how legally to define sexual harassment or racial injury?, and so on – for providing the preferential treatment which should compensate for the wrong this group has suffered) is deeply significant: what is usually praised as 'postmodern politics' (the pursuit of particular issues whose resolution must be negotiated within the 'rational' global order allocating its particular component its proper place) __is thus effectively the end of politics proper.__


 * And, Err of the side of probable impacts - their so called experts don’t understand the future of political affairs and cannot accurately predict events. They are as accurate as monkey’s throwing dart.**
 * __Menand 2005 (__**Louis ,phd Colombia and Robert M. and Anne T. Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language at [|Harvard University]., The New Yorker, 12-05-2005, http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/051205crbo_books1 ) [O’Brien]

Prediction is one of the pleasures of life. Conversation would wither without it. “It won’t last. She’ll dump him in a month.” If you’re wrong, no one will call you on it, because being right or wrong isn’t really the point. The point is that you think he’s not worthy of her, and the prediction is just a way of enhancing your judgment with a pleasant prevision of doom. Unless you’re putting money on it, nothing is at stake except your reputation for wisdom in matters of the heart. If a month goes by and they’re still together, the deadline can be extended without penalty. “She’ll leave him, trust me. It’s only a matter of time.” They get married: “Funny things happen. You never know.” You still weren’t //wrong//. Either the marriage is a bad one—you erred in the right direction—or you got beaten by a low-probability outcome. It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35), that __people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us.__ __When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either__. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. __The__ __accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones.__ “Expert Political Judgment” is not a work of media criticism. __Tetlock is a psychologist__—he teaches at Berkeley__—and his conclusions are based on a long-term study that he began twenty years ago__. __He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specialized and in areas about which they were not expert. Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in__ __South Africa____? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup?__ Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Would Canada disintegrate? (Many experts believed that it would, on the ground that Quebec would succeed in seceding.) And so on. __By the end of the study, in 2003, the experts had made 82,361 forecasts__. Tetlock also asked questions designed to determine how they reached their judgments, how they reacted when their predictions proved to be wrong, how they evaluated new information that did not support their views, and how they assessed the probability that rival theories and predictions were accurate. __Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something__ (political freedom, economic growth), __or less of something__ __(__repression, recession). __And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities__ (did all the things they said had an //x// per cent chance of happening happen //x// per cent of the time?), __and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive.__ On the first scale, __the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes__—__if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices__. __Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study.__ Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York //Times// in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.” People who are not experts in the psychology of expertise are likely (I predict) to find Tetlock’s results a surprise and a matter for concern. For psychologists, though, nothing could be less surprising. “Expert Political Judgment” is just one of more than a hundred studies that have pitted experts against statistical or actuarial formulas, and in almost all of those studies the people either do no better than the formulas or do worse. In one study, college counsellors were given information about a group of high-school students and asked to predict their freshman grades in college. The counsellors had access to test scores, grades, the results of personality and vocational tests, and personal statements from the students, whom they were also permitted to interview. Predictions that were produced by a formula using just test scores and grades were more accurate__.__ __There are also many studies showing that expertise and experience do not make someone a better reader of the evidence. In one, data from a test used to diagnose brain damage were given to a group of clinical psychologists and their secretaries. The psychologists’ diagnoses were no better than the secretaries’.__ The experts’ trouble in Tetlock’s study is exactly the trouble that all human beings have: we fall in love with our hunches, and we really, really hate to be wrong. Tetlock describes an experiment that he witnessed thirty years ago in a Yale classroom. A rat was put in a T-shaped maze. Food was placed in either the right or the left transept of the T in a random sequence such that, over the long run, the food was on the left sixty per cent of the time and on the right forty per cent. Neither the students nor (needless to say) the rat was told these frequencies. ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓

↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓

The students were asked to predict on which side of the T the food would appear each time. The rat eventually figured out that the food was on the left side more often than the right, and it therefore nearly always went to the left, scoring roughly sixty per cent—D, but a passing grade. The students looked for patterns of left-right placement, and ended up scoring only fifty-two per cent, an F. The rat, having no reputation to begin with, was not embarrassed about being wrong two out of every five tries. But Yale students, who do have reputations, searched for a hidden order in the sequence. They couldn’t deal with forty-per-cent error, so they ended up with almost fifty-per-cent error. __The expert-prediction game is not much different. When television pundits make predictions, the more ingenious their forecasts the greater their cachet. An arresting new prediction means that the expert has discovered a set of interlocking causes that no one else has spotted, and that could lead to an outcome that the conventional wisdom is ignoring__. On shows like “The McLaughlin Group,” these experts never lose their reputations, or their jobs, because long shots are their business. More serious commentators differ from the pundits only in the degree of showmanship. These serious experts—the think tankers and area-studies professors—are not entirely out to entertain, but they are a little out to entertain, and both their status as experts and their appeal as performers require them to predict futures that are not obvious to the viewer. The producer of the show does not want you and me to sit there listening to an expert and thinking, I could have said that. __The expert also suffers from knowing too much: the more facts an expert has, the more information is available to be enlisted in support of his or her pet theories, and the more chains of causation he or she can find beguiling. This helps explain why specialists fail to outguess non-specialists. The odds tend to be with the obvious. Tetlock’s experts were also no different from the rest of us when it came to learning from their mistakes. Most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn’t fit with what they already believe.__ Tetlock found that his __experts used a double standard: they were much tougher in assessing the validity of information that undercut their theory than they were in crediting information that supported__ it. The same deficiency leads liberals to read only //The Nation// and conservatives to read only //National Review//. We are not natural falsificationists: we would rather find more reasons for believing what we already believe than look for reasons that we might be wrong. In the terms of Karl Popper’s famous example, to verify our intuition that all swans are white we look for lots more white swans, when what we should really be looking for is one black swan. Also, people tend to see the future as indeterminate and the past as inevitable__.__ __If you look backward, the dots that lead up to Hitler or the fall of the__ __Soviet Union__ __or the attacks on September 11th all connect. If you look forward, it’s just a random scatter of dots, many potential chains of causation leading to many possible outcomes. We have no idea today how tomorrow’s invasion of a foreign land is going to go; after the invasion, we can actually persuade ourselves that we knew all along. The result seems inevitable, and therefore predictable__. Tetlock found that, consistent with this asymmetry, __experts routinely misremembered the degree of probability they had assigned to an event after it came to pass. They claimed to have predicted what happened with a higher degree of certainty than, according to the record, they really did. When this was pointed out to them, by Tetlock’s researchers, they sometimes became defensive.__ And, like most of us, __experts violate a fundamental rule of probabilities by tending to find scenarios with more variables more likely. If a prediction needs two independent things to happen in order for it to be true, its probability is the product of the probability of each of the things it depends on. If there is a one-in-three chance of //x// and a one-in-four chance of //y//, the probability of both //x// and //y// occurring is one in twelve__. __But we often feel instinctively that if the two events “fit together” in some scenario the chance of both is greater, not less.__ The classic “Linda problem” is an analogous case. In this experiment, subjects are told, “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” They are then asked to rank the probability of several possible descriptions of Linda today. Two of them are “bank teller” and “bank teller and active in the feminist movement.” People rank the second description higher than the first, even though, logically, its likelihood is smaller, because it requires two things to be true—that Linda is a bank teller and that Linda is an active feminist—rather than one. Plausible detail makes us believers. When subjects were given a choice between an insurance policy that covered hospitalization for any reason and a policy that covered hospitalization for all accidents and diseases, they were willing to pay a higher premium for the second policy, because the added detail gave them a more vivid picture of the circumstances in which it might be needed. In 1982, an experiment was done with professional forecasters and planners. One group was asked to assess the probability of “a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983,” and another group was asked to assess the probability of “a Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983.” The experts judged the second scenario more likely than the first, even though it required two separate events to occur. They were seduced by the detail. It was no news to Tetlock, therefore, that experts got beaten by formulas. But he does believe that he discovered something about why some people make better forecasters than other people. It has to do not with what the experts believe but with the way they think. Tetlock uses Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor from Archilochus, from his essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” to illustrate the difference. He says: Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess. A hedgehog is a person who sees international affairs to be ultimately determined by a single bottom-line force: balance-of-power considerations, or the clash of civilizations, or globalization and the spread of free markets. A hedgehog is the kind of person who holds a great-man theory of history, according to which the Cold War does not end if there is no Ronald Reagan. Or he or she might adhere to the “actor-dispensability thesis,” according to which Soviet Communism was doomed no matter what. Whatever it is, the big idea, and that idea alone, dictates the probable outcome of events. For the hedgehog, therefore, predictions that fail are only “off on timing,” or are “almost right,” derailed by an unforeseeable accident. There are always little swerves in the short run, but the long run irons them out. Foxes, on the other hand, don’t see a single determining explanation in history. They tend, Tetlock says, “to see the world as a shifting mixture of self-fulfilling and self-negating prophecies: self-fulfilling ones in which success breeds success, and failure, failure but only up to a point, and then self-negating prophecies kick in as people recognize that things have gone too far.” Tetlock did not find, in his sample, any significant correlation between how experts think and what their politics are. His hedgehogs were liberal as well as conservative, and the same with his foxes. (Hedgehogs were, of course, more likely to be extreme politically, whether rightist or leftist.) He also did not find that his foxes scored higher because they were more cautious—that their appreciation of complexity made them less likely to offer firm predictions. Unlike hedgehogs, who actually performed worse in areas in which they specialized, foxes enjoyed a modest benefit from expertise. Hedgehogs routinely over-predicted: twenty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs claimed were impossible or nearly impossible came to pass, versus ten per cent for the foxes. More than thirty per cent of the outcomes that hedgehogs thought were sure or near-sure did not, against twenty per cent for foxes. The upside of being a hedgehog, though, is that when you’re right you can be really and spectacularly right. Great scientists, for example, are often hedgehogs. They value parsimony, the simpler solution over the more complex. In world affairs, parsimony may be a liability—but, even there, there can be traps in the kind of highly integrative thinking that is characteristic of foxes. Elsewhere, Tetlock has published an analysis of the political reasoning of Winston Churchill. Churchill was not a man who let contradictory information interfere with his idées fixes. This led him to make the wrong prediction about Indian independence, which he opposed. But it led him to be right about Hitler. He was never distracted by the contingencies that might combine to make the elimination of Hitler unnecessary. Tetlock also has an unscientific point to make, which is that ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓

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“__we as a society would be better off if participants in policy debates stated their beliefs in testable forms”—that is, as probabilities—“monitored their forecasting performance, and honored their reputational bets.” He thinks that we’re suffering from our primitive attraction to deterministic, overconfident hedgehogs.__ It’s true that the only thing the electronic media like better than a hedgehog is two hedgehogs who don’t agree. Tetlock notes, sadly, a point that Richard Posner has made about these kinds of public intellectuals, which is that most of them are dealing in “solidarity” goods, not “credence” goods. __Their analyses and predictions are tailored to make their ideological brethren feel good—more white swans for the white-swan camp. A prediction, in this context, is just an exclamation point added to an analysis. Liberals want to hear that whatever conservatives are up to is bound to go badly; when the argument gets more nuanced, they change the channel__. On radio and television and the editorial page, the line between expertise and advocacy is very blurry, and pundits behave exactly the way Tetlock says they will. __Bush Administration loyalists say that their predictions about postwar Iraq were correct, just a little off on timing; pro-invasion liberals who are now trying to dissociate themselves from an adventure gone bad insist that though they may have sounded a false alarm, they erred “in the right direction____”__—not really a mistake at all. The same blurring characterizes professional forecasters as well. __The predictions on cable news commentary shows do not have life-and-death side effects, but the predictions of people in the C.I.A. and the Pentagon plainly do. It’s possible that the psychologists have something to teach those people, and, no doubt, psychologists are consulted. Still, the suggestion that we can improve expert judgment by applying the lessons of cognitive science and probability theory belongs to the abiding modern American faith in expertise.__ As a professional, Tetlock is, after all, an expert, and he would like to believe in expertise. So he is distressed __that political forecasters turn out to be as unreliable as the psychological literature predicted, but heartened to think that there might be a way of raising the standard____.__ The hope for a little more accountability is hard to dissent from. It would be nice if there were fewer partisans on television disguised as “analysts” and “experts” (and who would not want to see more foxes?). But the best lesson of Tetlock’s book may be the one that he seems most reluctant to draw: Think for yourself.

Anna **__Kurtz__** **__and__** Christopher **__Oscarson__**, Members of National Council of Teachers of English Conference on College, Composition and Communication, **__2003__** ("BookTalk: Revising the Discourse of Hate," ProQuest)
 * And, suppressing phrase like “sub-Saharan” because it is offensive preserves its injurious meaning – only by using the language can space be opened to reconstruct a more humane meaning**

However, Butler also argues that the daily, __repeated use of words owns a space for another, more empowering kind of performance__. __This alternative performance__, Butler insists, __can be "the occasion for something we might still call agency, the repetition of an original subordination for another purpose. one whose future is partially open"__ (p. 38). To __think of words as having an "open" future is to recognize that their authority lies less in their historical than in their present uses__; it is to acknowledge __that people can revise the meaning of words even as we repeat them; it is to embrace the notion that the instability of words opens the possibility that we can use them to (reconstruct a more humane future for ourselves and others__. Because words can be revised, Butler contends that __it would be counterproductive simply to stop using terms that we would deem injurious or oppressive. For when we choose not to use offensive words under any circumstance, we preserve their existing meanings as well as their power to injure__. __If__ as teachers, for instance, __we were simply to forbid the use of speech that is hurtful to__ __LGBT students we would be effectively denying the fact that such language still exists__. __To ignore words in this way__, Butler insists, __won't make them go away__. Butler thus suggests that __we actually use these words in thoughtful conversation in which we work through the injuries they cause__ (p. 1.02). Indeed, Butler insists that if we are to reclaim the power that oppressive speech robs from us, we must use, confront. and interrogate terms like "queer." We must ask how such terms affect both the speaker and the subject, what the purpose of their use is, and how their meaning can be altered to empower those whom they name. Thus, as Butler helps us see, __language is violence, but only if we allow it to be__. She encourages us to believe that words can take on new meanings-ones which forbid stasis, challenge our habits, and open the possibility that teachers and students might be able Lo create spaces for learning in which everyone feels safe.

Salih **__Booker,__** executive director of Africa Action. June 19, 200**__3__** (Who owes whom? AIDS and reparations [|Christian Science Monitor], [|http://www.africaaction.org/desk/csm0306.htm).] The movement for reparations in the US has gained legal ground and political and social momentum in recent years. Several legal cases have been filed against private corporations that benefited from the institution of slavery. Suits soon to be filed will target the culpability of the government for sanctioning this crime against humanity. __The discourse about reparations in this country isn't just about putting a price tag on past injustices and securing payments for individuals. It's about a much broader commitment to investing in social changes that will address the lingering damages of these injustices.__ In Africa, the reparations movement is pursuing similar legal strategies and inspiring a broader mobilization for social justice. In South Africa, the movement for reparations for the apartheid era has led to recent legal cases, filed in the US, against corporations that provided economic support to the apartheid regime. More broadly, __the question of reparations for Africans for centuries of slavery, colonialism, and exploitation requires a comprehensive answer that addresses the consequences of this history. Reparations are, moreover, necessary to enable Africans to meet today's challenges. The greatest challenge facing blacks today throughout the African world is the HIV/AIDS pandemic.__ __Africa__ __is "ground zero" of the global AIDS pandemic,__ home to almost three-quarters of those living with HIV/AIDS worldwide. Here in the US, more than half of all new HIV infections are among blacks. In the Caribbean, infection rates are among the world's highest. __The disproportionate impact of AIDS on blacks is closely related to the history of oppression and discrimination that people of African descent share.__ Vulnerability to AIDS is increased by impoverishment and marginalization, which remain the most important aspects of the continued legacy of slavery and colonialism. __The same racist double standard that justified centuries of discrimination is visible today in the failure of Western policymakers to respond with the urgency that the AIDS pandemic requires.__ The AIDS crisis has become the deadliest manifestation of a system built upon the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and global racism. AIDS is the greatest challenge that people across the African diaspora share, and it makes plain the inseparable nature of the struggles for justice and reparations. While the debate over reparations continues, it must be an immediate priority to address the urgent crisis of HIV/AIDS, which has become the most serious threat to the survival of the black race since the transatlantic slave trade. A real commitment to defeating AIDS must begin with an increase in funding for programs that reach those most affected by this health crisis. In the US, this means greater funding for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) and other initiatives that can respond to the needs of blacks living with HIV/AIDS in poor communities. Internationally, the US must increase its support for the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the multinational organization that will be key to turning the tide of the pandemic in Africa. The US government's shameful failure to provide its promised share of funding for this essential vehicle means the fund faces bankruptcy later this year,
 * Finally****, a discourse of reparations is necessary to breakdown the colonial relationship with Africa, responses should not be to fear spending we can not** **increase taxes or interest rates not reject reparations, rather realize voting aff is to reject all colonialism.**