Not sure if this has been used on the circuit, but just ran across this article from June 2011:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/jun/03/e-coli-food-poisoning-outbreak

Its by David Ropeik who has written two books on the nature of risk in society (the later one seems more related the theory of the K), he writes about risk for Psychology Today and the Huffington Post, and introduces himself as the following:

Hi. I am an Instructor at Harvard University and a consultant, teacher, and speaker on risk perception, risk communication, and risk management. I was Instructor of risk communication at the Harvard School of Public Health, and was co-director of the school’s professional education course ‘The Risk Communication Challenge’.

So watching this foodborne E coli outbreak unfold has been instructive. Why, if the actual risk for any given person is so low, does it feel so scary to so many? The study of risk perception has found that uncertainty raises fear. We are uncertain about this risk for two reasons. First, science doesn’t have all the answers, about which foods are risky, where they came from and so on. Second, any invisible/odourless/tasteless risk like this that we can’t detect with our own senses is scary because we don’t know all we need to know to protect ourselves. And in this case there is great uncertainty because of the unknown nature of the organism, and the difficulty in tracking down where it originated. That’s a lot of unknowns, which make the risk scarier.

If you think a risk can happen to you, it doesn’t matter what the numbers say. Many risk communication experts work hard to find clearer ways to help people understand risk numbers, as though that will make us think about those numbers more rationally, but if a risk is only, say, one in a million, but you think you could be the one, you are likely to worry at least a little, because your job is to keep yourself alive, not the other 999,999.

High awareness also increases fear. Subconsciously, the danger-detection systems in the brain give extra weight to information that’s coming in all the time, or that can be readily recalled. This “availability heuristic” then feeds on itself in a positive feedback loop. We pay more attention to information that could mean we are at risk, and the media, in fierce competition with each other to bring us the information we want, feed this appetite, and feed our fears.

These are just three among many specific components of our instinctive risk perception system that can lead to the “perception gap”: the gap between our fears and the facts. This gap presents its own, very real risks. In this case there are a lot of people who aren’t eating vegetables – any vegetables. That’s not good for their health. Hundreds of thousands of people are more worried than necessary, and more worried than normal, and chronic worry produces the myriad damaging health effects of stress (including a weakened immune system, which makes us more vulnerable to the very bacterial infections about which people are worried in the first place).

In addition, this outbreak will cost a huge amount of money, and damage the livelihoods and lives of thousands of people engaged in the produce and food industries across Europe.

I am not criticising people for being irrational about risk. Science has taught us just how inescapably instinctive and emotional the system is. But it is valuable to observe that the way we perceive and respond to risk can itself put us at risk. Understanding that, and understanding the specific elements that make a given risk more or less frightening than the facts alone suggest, is the first step toward avoiding the dangers of the “perception gap”, and making healthier choices for ourselves and for society.

Other assorted thoughts on Schopenhauer:
1. I think Schopenhauers critique is possibly very tied to his culture & moment in time. Here is a short summary from the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy:
2. It also seems tied to his ideas of suffering & fate (determinism). *****
3. Moreover–he has a distinct anti-rationalism. (indeed it seems anti-democratic)
4. It seems odd that he would deprive people of the very thing he had. Also, his hyper-skepticism seems to ignore the value in goals and purpose. It ignores the value in the will. (further, his place in history didn’t allow him to see the place of emergence & self-organization & chaos theory–the role of order amidst the chaos that arose during the 1990s’ and 2000′s.)
5. Also the chaos he saw was the flip side of freedom. (It also seems to me that his critique was more of emotional will than of rational)–it also seems an evolutionary understanding solves many of the problems he suggests.
6. The resulting theory justifies multiple forms of oppression & genocide. You can’t separate Schopenhauer from Hitler and the worst depots in history.

Despite its general precedents within the philosophical family of double-aspect theories, Schopenhauer’s particular characterization of the world as Will, is nonetheless novel and daring. It is also frightening and pandemonic: he maintains that the world as it is in itself (again, sometimes adding “for us”) is an endless striving and blind impulse with no end in view, devoid of knowledge, lawless, absolutely free, entirely self-determining and almighty. Within Schopenhauer’s vision of the world as Will, there is no God to be comprehended, and the world is conceived of as being meaningless. When anthropomorphically considered, the world is represented as being in a condition of eternal frustration, as it endlessly strives for nothing in particular, and as it goes essentially nowhere. It is a world beyond any ascriptions of good and evil.

Schopenhauer’s denial of meaning to the world differs radically from the views of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, all of whom fostered a distinct hope that everything is moving towards a harmonious and just end. Like these German Idealists, however, Schopenhauer also tries to explain how the world that we experience daily, is the result of the activity of the central principle of things. As the German Idealists tried to account for the great chain of being — the rocks, trees, animals, and human beings — as the increasingly complicated and detailed expressions of self-consciousness, Schopenhauer attempts to do the same by explaining the world as gradations of Will’s manifestation.

For Schopenhauer, the world that we experience is constituted by objectifications of Will that correspond first, to the general root of the principle of sufficient reason, and second, to the more specific fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason. This generates initially, a basic two-tiered outlook (viz., Will [= reality] vs. objects-in-general [= appearance]), that articulates into a three-tiered outlook (viz., Will [= reality] vs. universal, non-spatio-temporal objects vs. individual, spatio-temporal objects), by further distinguishing between universalistic and individualistic levels within the sphere of objects.

The general philosophical pattern of a single world-essence that initially manifests itself as a multiplicity of abstract essences, which, in turn, manifest themselves as a multiplicity of physical individuals is found throughout the world. It is characteristic of Neoplatonism (c. third century, C.E., as represented by Plotinus [204–270]), and it is also characteristic of the Buddhist Three Body Doctrine [trikaya] of the Buddha’s manifestation, which is developed in the Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism as represented by Maitreya (270–350), Asanga (375–430) and Vasubandu (400–480).

It continues:

Will’s indirect objectifications appear when our minds continue to apply the principle of sufficient reason beyond its general root such as to introduce the forms of time, space and causality, not to mention logic, mathematics, geometry and moral reasoning. When Will is objectified at this level of determination, the world of everyday life emerges, whose objects are, in effect, kaleidoscopically multiplied manifestations of the Platonic forms, endlessly dispersed throughout space and time.

Since the principle of sufficient reason is — given Schopenhauer’s inspiration from Kant — the epistemological form of the human mind, the spatio-temporal world is the world of our own reflection. To that extent, Schopenhauer says that life is like a dream. As a condition of our knowledge, Schopenhauer believes that the laws of nature, along with the sets of objects that we experience, we ourselves create in way that is not unlike the way the constitution of our tongues invokes the taste of sugar. As Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) states in “The Assayer” (1623), if ears tongues and noses were removed from the world, then odors tastes and sounds would be removed as well.

At this point, what Schopenhauer has developed philosophically is surely interesting, but we have not yet mentioned its more remarkable and memorable aspect. If we combine his claim that the world is Will with his Kantian view that we are responsible for the individuated world of appearances, we arrive at a novel outlook — an outlook that depends heavily upon Schopenhauer’s characterization of the thing-in-itself as Will, understood to be an aimless, blind striving.

Before the human being comes onto the scene with its principle of sufficient reason (or principle of individuation) there are no individuals. It is the human being that, in its very effort to know anything, objectifies an appearance for itself that involves the fragmentation of Will and its breakup into a comprehensible set of individuals. The result of this fragmentation, given the nature of Will, is terrible: it is a world of constant struggle, where each individual thing strives against every other individual thing; the result is a permanent “war of all against all” akin to what Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) characterized as the state of nature.

Kant concludes in the Critique of Pure Reason that we create the laws of nature (CPR, A125). Adding to this, Schopenhauer concludes in The World as Will and Representation that we create the violent state of nature, for he maintains that the individuation that we impose upon things, is imposed upon a blind striving energy that, once it becomes individuated and objectified, turns against itself, consumes itself, and does violence to itself. His paradigm image is of the bulldog-ant of Australia, which when cut in half, struggles in a battle to the death between its head and tail. Our very quest for scientific and practical knowledge creates a world that feasts upon itself.

This marks the origin of Schopenhauer’s renowned pessimism: he claims that as individuals, we are the unfortunate products of our own epistemological making, and that within the world of appearances that we structure, we are fated to fight with other individuals, and to want more than we can ever have. On Schopenhauer’s view, the world of daily life is essentially violent and frustrating; it is a world that, as long as our consciousness remains at that level where the principle of sufficient reason applies in its fourfold root, will never resolve itself into a condition of greater tranquillity. As he explicitly states, daily life “is suffering” (WWR, Section 56) and to express this, he employs images of frustration taken from classical Greek mythology, such as those of Tantalus and the Danaids, along with the suffering of Ixion on the ever-spinning wheel of fire. The image of Sisyphus expresses the same frustrated spirit.

In one sense, Schopenhauer never saw the ways in which western modernity solved some of the problems he seemed to highlight (ie technology solves disease).

They are also in a double-bind–they can’t both claim this genocide evidence and say we don’t advocate government.
I think running a backlash argument of some sort makes a lot of sense.

My guess is they have some critiques of PoMo/Foucault or even micro-p they are packing–but at least it will make for an interesting debate.

You could also impact turn with:
Surveillance bad. Particularly given that we supposedly don’t like the aliens now, the surveilance will only create a mentality of control-over. I think the backlash argument serves to ensure that their link turns don’t solve.

1. TURN- All the historical reasons which negate the argument: victims of war in Iraq and Vietnam….victims of Hitler in Europe…..victims of abuse by cops during the civil rights marches…..victims of sexual harassment and rape. Rachel Carlton’s images in Silent Spring helped ignite the environmental movement. The stories Anita Hill helped raise awareness around sexual harassment. All these images led to transformation–even if slowly (thats the nature of social changes in worldview & government).

2. TURN-Acknowledge the nature of justice. Without a notion of suffering or victimhood before the law there is no restitution or justice.

3. TURN-Acknowledge reality & truth & erode the silence that hides cycles of violence. Without a personal acknowledgment of victimhood there is only a dream reality. Life is good and bad–it isn’t a 24/7 disney world. (you could also key this into impacts of voices vs. silence).

4. TURN-The alternative to victimhood is silence and pushing things under the rug. Lets not talk about the victims of tragedy because that really solves or builds awareness for those problems. Its a pattern that, instead of building awareness builds isolationism, where we don’t find out about the complexity in the world and its problems.

5. NO LINK-
Either:
We acknowledge that out images are partial and not essential or universal. Its only with images of both victimhood and victory that the true reality of the human experience can be told.
OR
We include both victory and victim images–or at least we make possible the later. The link assumes we only include victim images.

6. Often a Performative contradictions–if they have other arguments they almost inevitably involve victims. [insert performative contradiction impacts & voters]

Talk about the images as tools in the toolbox of reform, awareness, and conciousness raising (that being a feminist idea).
The other team is proposing having hammers without nails…we think both are key. In fact, they work together. Its possible you could make stronger arguments–such as awareness of violence is the prerequisite for action–its the gateway to personal and governmental change.

I think Mueller and Mueller have answers in their book–as they are one of the authors of the disaster images argument.

The more nuanced the argument is the harder it is to make these arguments. obviously.

Hopefully this serves as a springboard to more arguments…

They might start small (8 to 12 on the squad)….but aim to do things at scale to get the biggest bang for the buck (with more participation, learning, and community).

This isn’t just spending a ton of time on debate…its spending time efficiently.

2. Kaizen improvement with rebuttal re-does.

3. Practice debates & practice debates with feedback & practice debates with feedback & team re-action.

4. Peer networks on teams. Mentorship. Incentivized by ego.

5. Engage in Moneyball Strategies (coached that deliver 100% motivation or kids that motivate themselves, arguments from outside the topic literature, re-framing a tiny or big aff mid-season, breakdown the essence of arguments, write blocks & know arguments, craft an execute a systemic process, and learn soft skills outside of debate context)

6. Identify the gaps and solve them or create hacks to get around them. Work with partner and/or coach.

7. Ask others in the community for help. It is a community. Also realize you should give something.

8. Learn creativity & critical thinking. Learn writing & rhetoric.

9. Run arguments you are passionate about learning more about.

10. Learn how to creatively “borrow” other arguments from other teams. Cites, theory, etc….

Find 3 or 4 strategies that work for you…..and kill it.

The “self-directed life” is the incredibly powerful idea that is behind the worldwide appeal of the United States. Young people throughout the world find irresistible the prospect of being in the driver’s seat of their own destiny. So, too, the immigrant discovers that America permits him to break free of the constraints that have held him captive, so that the future becomes a landscape of his own choosing.

Try or die for life providing and enhancing services that work
(Dinesh D’Souza, philosopher and political commentator, What’s So Great About America, Townhall Online, July 02, 2007,
http://townhall.com/columnists/dineshdsouza/2007/07/02/whats_so_great_about_america/page/full/ , Downloaded: 12-30-11)
The typical immigrant, who is used to the dilapidated infrastructure, mind-numbing inefficiency, and multi-layered corruption of Third World countries, arrives in America to discover, to his wonder and delight, that everything works: the roads are clean and paper-smooth, the highway signs are clear and accurate, the public toilets function properly, when you pick up the telephone you get a dial tone, you can even buy things from the store and then take them back. The American supermarket is a thing to behold: endless aisles of every imaginable product, 50 different types of cereal, innumerable flavors of ice cream. The place is full of unappreciated inventions: quilted toilet paper, fabric softener, cordless phones, disposable diapers, and roll-on luggage.

So, yes, in material terms America offers the newcomer a better life. Still, the material allure of America does not capture the deepest source of its appeal. Consider how my own life would have been different had I never come to America. I was raised in a middle-class family in Mumbai. I didn’t have luxuries, but I didn’t lack necessities. Materially my life is better in the United States, but the real difference lies elsewhere.

Had I stayed in India, I would probably live my entire existence within a five-mile radius of where I was born. I would undoubtedly have married a woman of my identical caste and religious and socioeconomic background. I would have faced relentless pressure to become an engineer, like my father, or a doctor, like my grandfather. My socialization would have been entirely within my own ethnic community. I would have had a whole set of opinions that could be predicted in advance.