Afropessimism considered false

    The afro pess K is false.  Badly false.  It is incorrect, untrue, wrong, erroneous, fallacious, faulty, flawed, distorted, inaccurate, inexact, imprecise, invalid, unfounded, untruthful, and fictitious.  It reaches levels of nonsense that the politics DA can only aspire to.  And I hope to demonstrate why it is wrong.  

    So, what does afro pess say (very simply, as it's explained in debate).  It makes two basic claims.  

1 The world can't improve for black people.  

2 We should not be hopeful, because hope is bad.  

    Several things stand out about this.  One first point is that, even if true, it is insufficient to justify a negative ballot.  We can consider this most easily with an analogy.  Consider a policy that prohibited bombing an area of Pakistan that did not have black people.  This policy is plausibly a good thing, despite not benefitting black people.  Why?  Because there are people other than black people who can be helped by policy.  Thus, even if the affs policy does not help black people, it can still be a good thing.  

    We can unpack both claims made by afro pessimism.  Both are false.  The first claim that the world can't improve for black people is very clearly false.  Laws can improve life for black people, reducing lead poisoning and other pollution.  Why should we think this is the case?  Well for one, we have a lot of evidence pointing to improvements.  Second, we have a very straightforward causal explanation; pollution hurts black people.  Laws reduce pollution, making black people's lives better.  Other laws do whatever else the law does that is generally good.  

    Why is improvement impossible according to afro pessimism? (I also plan on answering certain other justifications for the impossibility of political improvements in this article because there's no need to make it into two different articles.  Sue me).  

    One justification relates to the three pillars (when life gives you lemons, invoke a tripartite structure of pillars).  This claims that blackness is subject to natal alienation, gratuitous violence, and general dishonor.  Natal alienation is separation from one's home, gratuitous violence involves being the victim of horrendous violence that goes far beyond what is instrumentally necessary for the aims of the violent actor, and general dishonor involves the existence of anti black cultural tropes.  K teams will often assert that you've dropped the pillars (what can I say, pillars are heavy), and that MAKES IT GG, EASY NEG BALLOT, COLD CONCESSION (never a room temperature concession), GAME OVER, AND GIVES THE JUDGE THE ABILITY TO SIGN THEIR BALLOT AFTER THE 2NR.  However, this warrant for ontology, much like the pseudoscientific principles used by charlatans to advocate alternative medicine (the kind of medicine that doesn't work), the three pillars of afro pessimism are sufficiently ill defined to not establish much of a justification.  

    Let's take a parallel case: that of Jews in the United States.  There are horrendous acts of anti semitic violence against Jews.  There are some anti-semitic stereotypes.  Many Jewish families, such as mine, were forcibly expelled during the pogroms.   However, these factors do not make it impossible for the quality of life of Jewish people to improve.  This is because the three pillars merely describe bad things that are occurring, they do not moot all improvements.  Wilderson argues against this analogy, saying "Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the Dead (the Muselmann) among them; the Dead have the Blacks among them."  However, while this demonstrates a difference, it is not clear why this moots possible improvements.  This just seems like special pleading.  Additionally, we can avoid the disanalogy by considering the Jews of Israel.  Jews of Israel started to exist as a result of the holocaust.  Their identity was born out of the holocaust.  This does not, however, moot all improvements.  

    The problem with the three pillar justification is several fold.  First, there is no coherent causal account by which it operates.  Suppose that the government passes a law that bans fracking.  Let's grant that fracking is very bad and causes a lot of pollution.  How exactly do these three pillars precisely offset the gains caused by the harms of fracking.  There is literally no human on earth who knows precisely the environmental effect of any law.  Thus, how are all of the benefits of the law precisely offset, making them cause no improvement.  If the aff prevents 10,000 people from getting lung cancer, what is the mechanism by which it causes a precisely calibrated amount of anti black violence to cause equal harm to the benefit of 10,000 people no longer getting lung cancer.  Any account of this requires invoking literal magic.  In fact, replace the words three pillars with the word magic and you get a similarly detailed understanding of how the policy would be bad.  

    A second problem arises; the three pillars are not well defined.  What is the threshold for natal alienation or gratuitous violence?  If there was one act of gratuitous violence each year worldwide against a certain ethnic group, would they be subject to gratuitous violence?  What if each year there was one act of gratuitous violence against sephardic jews, and I'm an ashkenazi jew?  Does that count?  How about natal alienation.  Suppose that my grandparents were pressured off their land from the pogroms.  Am I natally alienated?   What if they left as a result of a civil war?  What if they left as a result of religious persecution 2000 years ago?  Would that count?  For general dishonor, how much general dishonor does there need to be?  Do atheists meet the bar? Many people won't vote for them.  This is just a classic example of a mysterious answer to a not very mysterious question.   

    Third, why do the three pillars prevent all improvements?  The existence of them seems very bad, but it does not moot all improvements?  

    Teams will argue that the three pillars cause social death, the condition of people not accepted as fully human by wider society.  This runs into its own list of problems.  First, what is the threshold for social death?  There are some anti semites who think I'm not fully human.  Am I socially dead?  What if it was 11% of the population who thought that; then would I be socially dead?  These categories are once again very ill defined.  

    Second, it's not clear why social death prevents all improvements.  Slaves in ancient rome were socially dead, but laws banning them from being forced to fight lions were still plausibly good for them.  Nonhuman animals in factory farms today are socially dead, but laws banning them from being ground up alive are still good things.  Again, there is no spooky ghost in the machine preventing all progress.  

    Third, there is no overarching conception of anti blackness.  There are certainly many racist people.  However, there is no single totalizing conception that explains every single action taken towards black people.  When a racist discriminates against black people they’re not embodying some deeper metaphysical structure, they’re taking an individual anti black action that can be changed.  We use terms about metaphysics to describe broad classes of action, but it is a description of the actions, not a causal explanation of why and how they take place.  

    However, much like conspiracy theorists and flat earthers, pess teams will have a grabbag of phenomena that their theory allegedly explains.  They claim is explains the persistence of anti blackness.  However, it is not needed to explain this.  It can be just as easily explained by there being a lot of racism, both interpersonal and systemic, that was particularly prevalent in the past.  Afropess, however, fails to explain numerous phenomena that I'll list below.  

1 Persistent progress that was described earlier, described more by Pinker in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.  

2 The variance of anti blackness across regions in the US.  If it were caused by a spooky static ontological structure one would expect it not to vary by region.  

3 The increases in lifespan for black people.  

4 The improvements in income for black people.  

5 Improved health outcomes for black people.  

6 Racism in literally any other country.  Surely the middle passage didn't single handedly dictate race relations in Australia.  

7 Literally any effect of any policy. 

    Teams will often invoke the libidinal economy, arguing non black people have a desire for black misery that unconscious.  This suffers from it's own problems.  First, even if true it does not prevent all improvement.  People are prejudicated against people who they find physically unattractive.  As David Brooks says "The discriminatory effects of lookism are pervasive. Attractive economists are more likely to study at high-ranked graduate programs and their papers are cited more often than papers from their less attractive peers. One study found that when unattractive criminals committed a moderate misdemeanor, their fines were about four times as large as those of attractive criminals.  Daniel Hamermesh, a leading scholar in this field, observed that an American worker who is among the bottom one-seventh in looks earns about 10 to 15 percent less a year than one in the top third. An unattractive person misses out on nearly a quarter-million dollars in earnings over a lifetime.  The overall effect of these biases is vast. One 2004 study found that more people report being discriminated against because of their looks than because of their ethnicity."  However, this does not mean that the world cannot improve for unattractive people.  Even if there is some inevitable discrimination, that does not prevent all improvements.  Second, there is very good evidence against this; discrimination can be reduced as Pinker and many others have prominently argued.  Third, this is disproven by all the previous evidence of progress.  

     Teams will finally argue that only their theory can explain phenoma such as black people being shot 40 times and are subject to other examples of heinous, over the top violence.  This is false.  Very racist people, or very sadistic people can do these things.  It does not require invoking magic.  To put it another way, we are looking for a theory that accurately accounts for the things that happen, including gratuitous violence.  However, as long as our theory says that some gratuitous violence does happen, we need not add anything else to explain it.  

    An additional problem exists for afropess, specifically against extinction impacts.  Even if we grant that all the things they describe are true now, we have no reason to suspect they'll be true going far in the future.  Imagine cave dwellers trying to forecast what life would  be like in the year 2021.  They would have been laughably off.   If they had made proclamations like "we'll always live in a cave, IT'S GG, THEY'VE CONCEDED THAT CAVES HAVE THREE PILLARS," or "the age of fighting with sticks and stones will never end, see all this fighting we've done with sticks and stones," or "policies will never improve our ability to hunt kangaroo, they're too big and fast," they would have been totally off.  If we expect the world to last for centuries, potentially with AI and space colonization, our predictions in the year 2100 start to look very unlikely to be correct.  

    Finally, pess teams will argue #notoursocialdeath.  They'll say something along the lines of "sure, your aff may make black people's lives better, but does it solve ontology.  No, didn't think so.  Vote neg then, they keep those social structures in place which are bad.  They're just a mere improvement, but they don't rupture ontological structures. 

    This is a pretty amusing instance of the Motte and Bailey trick.  The easily defensible claim is that the aff does not solve all anti blackness.  The less defensible claim is that the aff is not an improvement.  Things can be good even if they don't change ontological structures.  If a policy prevented thousands of people from getting lung cancer, we should do the policy, even if it doesn't rupture ontological structures.  The world does not operate purely as a fiery maelstrom of complex structures which occasionally dissipate, and cause progress.  Progress operates in the decisions made by individuals, the policies that reduce risks of lung cancer.  The 450 million people who don't have malaria as a result of bednet distribution have been greatly helped, even though no ontological structures were disrupted.  The question for this strange view is, "Why the blazes would I accept that an action should only be done if it disrupts ontological structures?  Isn't making people's lives better enough?"  

    Now let's address the second claim made by pess, namely, that hope is bad.  We know that because it's like hollow or whatever, and hollow things are bad.  The claim that hope is bad is laughably contrary to all of the published literature about hope's effects.  

    Pess teams will respond with #notourhope.  They only say political hope is bad.  Not general hope LOL, GAME OVER.  Oh yes, because that is indeed how hope works.  The part of the brain relating to hope sees that you're hopeful, then checks to make sure it's apolitical before reducing risks of heart disease and cancer.  Because hope has to be a no politics zone!  Much like how logs falling on one's head increase risks of death - but only if they're not a political log.  Political logs have the opposite effect.  Additionally, the studies and articles I linked before specifically cited political hope as a major source of hope that is important.  

    Ultimately, afropessimism represents a dizzying array of non-sequitors, bogus claims, obscurantist jargon, and very clear nonsense.  Much like Deepak Chopra, it has a smorgasbord of nonsense, all of which is thrown at the wall, using sophisticated yet ill-understood jargon.  It's puerile tendency to employ ostentatious prolixity (I think highly of those of you who get the joke of this sentence) makes it onerous to contest.  

    However, I have a way of testing this.  For people who think that pess is true, make a bet about some event that you predict will happen based on what afropess says, that other people don't happen.  If you're right, you can make free money.  However, if as I have claimed, afropess can't make correct predictions then it is nonsense.