Policymaking V. K FW:

ROB: Vote for the team that best liberates the material conditions of the oppressed (or whoever our plan is talking about) through a post fiat policy option.

1. Fiat good

• Levers of power: it allows oppressed individuals to conceive of alternatives to the present. - Problem-solving skills: fiat is a unique tool that allows us to imagine the consequences of a policy without considering their likelihood, which allows us to try a multitude of tools- Symbolic divorement: Disengaging from real material conditions causes us to mourn what doesn’t exist rather than think of a way forward from where we are now – it devolves into fantasizing about a perfect world while the current one crumbles around us - Agency: marginalized people are constructed as powerless in the status quo – they’re seen as people that have to be protected or helped out. Fiat allows people to highlight the possibility of being alive in a system that has deemed you as dead. - Proximal impact framing bad: fiat allows us to consider suffering beyond that of those close to us. - Engagement key: Solving systemic impacts requires dismantling systems, not imagining how great the world would look after they are dismantled – our aff is a prior question to any utopia because it breaks down the violence that stops us from getting there 2. Policy Focus good: Our claim is that a policy focus that resolves for oppression is good not that you have to roleplay as the state – saying the USFG should do something does not mean that you are endorsing the state. If I say that the police shouldn’t shoot black people I’m not saying the police are good. It’s protest, not participation

• Access: Policy focus reduces the emphasis on presentation to the quality of argumentation. That’s good for Presentation – Marginalized individuals- Creativity: defending the topic means you don’t get to read the same aff every round – you have to read something new every round – that incentivizes creative strategies to resolve violence.- Decision-making—not defending a topical government action destroys discussions of public policy which are valuable because they help us make better decisions in all aspects of our lives. There’s a huge swathe of literature about government policy-making. Personal policy-making is highly variable and inaccessible to outsiders- Complexity—public policy decisions are highly complex and consider a litany of external factors which makes us better problem-solvers.3. The state and its organization of power is inevitable: This means it is only a question of how best to engage within them to minimize suffering.

• State inevitable: people biologically desire the state for security so policy analysis is critical for understanding how best to engage it. Otherwise, the state crushes solvency because much like the Spanish revolution those who have the concentration of political power will destroy any revolutionary movements against them. - Power is inevitable: both physical strength or social hierarchies give some people control over others; the only question is developing rules about how to use this power that are good. The state can be used to organize it in a good way with rules that are at least transparent and minimize violence.- Power is a tool: Tools are neutral; whether they’re good or bad is only a question of how they’re used. For example, while states did engage in colonialism, revolutionaries in Cuba seized control of the state apparatus and used it to redistribute wealth to its people and free the economy from colonial control- Particularisms: even if prison in general is bad it might be good to lock up white supremacists4. Engagements with power must be critical and must engage the state: Derrida argues that trying to create completely new systems only hides the harms inherent in them by pretending they break from other dominant modes of thought – the only way to resolve violence is to reveal the way systems perpetuate it and resolve those contradictions

• The Black Panthers: The BPP was only successful because they challenged the state’s authority through a revolutionary politics, centering blackness, leading to self-armament and community solutions to state neglect. - Demands on the state: The BPP made demands on the state via their 10-point program – this was key to revealing the waybs in which the state had failed - Critical imaginations: Imagining a state with an ethical obligation to solve violence that comes first means that we abandon the role of a state being self-defense and deconstruct the state’s paradigm of self-interest – it is a necessary step to resolve the paradigm of self-interest that will reassert itself in any other mode of thought