Kritik Toolbox Supplement – bfhhr general

death bad

Death ends our ability to actively seek out joy and suffering-

The third benefit derived from competing is the experience of an illusory and aesthetic form of pain—or, more plainly, the agon provides the opportunity to lose. Nietzsche understood suffering and destruction as constitutive of life and thus experiences to be valued, in contrast to those values he believed to be symptomatic of the modern age, the desire for material and spiritual comfort and an aversion to pain of any kind. “Today,” he writes in describing the ancient festivals of punishment in The Genealogy of Morals, “when suffering is always brought forward as the principal argument against existence, as the worst question mark, one does well to recall the ages in which the opposite opinion prevailed because men were unwell to refrain from making suffer and saw in it an enchantment of the first order, a genuine seduction to life.”49 Suffering is, above all, common; it is only made unbearable when it exists unjustified. Thus “what really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering,” and humanity is forced to invent justifications for the pain felt by all (e.g. God, sin).50 The agon was invented, on the one hand, to reduce suffering by channeling the will to power into the arena; but on the other hand, the agon enables the aestheticization of suffering. In competing, the combatant makes a spectacle of striving, and it is a spectacle whether he wins or loses. One loses in the agon on one’s own terms and in a way that befits the artist. One dies the tragic death in the arena, losing and suffering in front of others and in front of one’s opponent. In defeat, the combatant feels the suffering of submission and becomes a slave to the victor – but only in the arena! The agon makes possible the illusory defeat.

Affirming survival doesn’t devalue life – life is complex and malleable and can be celebrated even when it seems oppressive

Fassin 10 [Didier, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, as well as directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, Fall 2010, “Ethics of Survival: A Democratic Approach to the Politics of Life,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Vol 1 No 1, Project Muse]

Conclusion

Survival, in the sense Jacques Derrida attributed to the concept in his last interview, not only shifts lines that are too often hardened between biological and political lives: it opens an ethical space for reflection and action. Critical thinking in the past decade has often taken biopolitics and the politics of life as its objects. It has thus unveiled the way in which individuals and groups, even entire nations, have been treated by powers, the market, or the state, during the colonial period as well as in the contemporary era.

However, through indiscriminate extension, this powerful instrument has lost some of its analytical sharpness and heuristic potentiality. On the one hand, the binary reduction of life to the opposition between nature and history, bare life and qualified life, when systematically applied from philosophical inquiry in sociological or anthropological study, erases much of the complexity and richness of life in society as it is in fact observed. On the other hand, the normative prejudices which underlie the evaluation of the forms of life and of the politics of life, when generalized to an undifferentiated collection of social facts, end up by depriving social agents of legitimacy, voice, and action. The risk is therefore both scholarly and political. It calls for ethical attention.

In fact, the genealogy of this intellectual lineage reminds us that the main founders of these theories expressed tensions and hesitations in their work, which was often more complex, if even sometimes more obscure, than in its reduced and translated form in the humanities and social sciences today. And also biographies, here limited to fragments from South African lives that I have described and analyzed in more detail elsewhere, suggest the necessity of complicating the dualistic models that oppose biological and political lives. Certainly, powers like the market and the state do act sometimes as if human beings could be reduced to “mere life,” but democratic forces, including from within the structure of power, tend to produce alternative strategies that escape this reduction. And people themselves, even under conditions of domination, [End Page 93] manage subtle tactics that transform their physical life into a political instrument or a moral resource or an affective expression.

But let us go one step further: ethnography invites us to reconsider what life is or rather what human beings make of their lives, and reciprocally how their lives permanently question what it is to be human. “The blurring between what is human and what is not human shades into the blurring over what is life and what is not life,” writes Veena Das. In the tracks of Wittgenstein and Cavell, she underscores that the usual manner in which we think of forms of life “not only obscures the mutual absorption of the natural and the social but also emphasizes form at the expense of life.”²² It should be the incessant effort of social scientists to return to this inquiry about life in its multiple forms but also in its everyday expression of the human.

Death bad – non-experience is a negative evil – their evidence doesn’t assume premature death which they cause

Preston and Dixon 7 [Ted, Rio Hondo College, Scott, Minnesota State Community and Technical College, “Who wants to live forever? Immortality, authenticity, and living forever in the present”, Int J Philos Relig (2007) 61:99–117]

Death might be very bad for the one who is dead. If death deprives him of a lot of pleasure—the pleasure he would have enjoyed if he had not died—the death might be a huge misfortune for someone. More explicitly, death might be extrinsically bad for the one who is dead even though nothing intrinsically bad happens to him as a result. In my view, death would be extrinsically bad for him if his life would have contained more intrinsic value if he had not died then (Ibid, p. 140).¶ This is a tricky issue. On the one hand, someone might claim that even a negative evil has to happen to someone, and the dead person who no longer exists is no longer a “somebody” to experience the evil, so there shouldn’t be any subjective harm. On the other hand, it is a powerful intuition that death deprives the dead of something, somehow. Nagel tries to resolve this problem by claiming that the person who used to exist can be benefited or harmed by death, and tries to show that our intuitions are in harmony with this idea. For instance, he claims we could and would say of someone trapped in a burning building who died instantly from being hit on the head rather than burning to death, that the person was lucky, or better off, for having died quickly.¶ Of course, after dying from the head trauma, there was no one in existence who was spared the pain of burning to death, but Nagel claims that the “him” we refer to in such an example refers to the person who was alive and who would have suffered (Nagel, 1987). Nagel believes the person subjectively benefited, although no subject was there to receive the benefit. It would be easier to understand this objectively in terms of the qualitative assessment of Feldman; however, that is not Nagel’s position. ¶ Similarly, if someone dies before seeing the birth of a grandchild, and there is no life after death, there is no person in existence who is presently being deprived of anything at all, including, of course, births of grandchildren. But the person who was alive and who would have seen it, if not for death, has counterfactually and subjectively missed out on something.¶ The same kind of thing could be said about death as a negative evil. When you die, all the good things in your life come to a stop: no more meals, movies, travel, conversation, love, work, books, music, or anything else. If those things would be good, their absence is bad. Of course, you won’t miss them: death is not like being locked up in solitary confinement. But the ending of everything good in life, because of the stopping of life itself, seems clearly to be a negative evil for the person who was alive and is now dead. When someone we know dies, we feel sorry not only for ourselves but for him, because he cannot see the sun shine today, or smell the bread in the toaster (Ibid, p. 93).¶ This is admittedly a confusing concept: the idea that one can be negatively harmed or benefited even when one does not exist, but it is a concept Nagel claims is intuitively powerful for us, and which Feldman supports. It is confusing because of its counterfactual base; that a subject experiences harm or good even though there is no subject. It is intuitive because we do talk and think in terms of what it would have been for someone to experience. What these two articulations may show is that counterfactuals are being used in different ways, with the intuitive version masking a lot of the work of the counterfactual harm version.¶ In response to the problem of locating when death is a problem for someone, Feldman claims that a state of affairs can be bad for someone regardless of when it occurs: “The only requirement is that the value of the life he leads if it occurs is lower than the value of the life he leads if it does not occur” (Feldman, 1992, p. 152). The comparison is between the respective values of two possible lives. The state of affairs pertaining to someone dying at some particular time, is bad for that person, if “the value-for-her of the life she leads where [that state of affairs] occurs is lower than the value-for-her of the life she would have led if [that state of affairs] had not taken place” (Ibid, p. 155). When is it the case that the value-for-her of her life would be comparatively lower? Eternally. Eternally, as opposed to at any particular moment, because “when we say that her death is a bad for her, we are really expressing a complex fact about the relative values of two possible lives” (Ibid, p. 154). Lives taken as a whole, that is. It seems that Feldman is offering an objective qualitative analysis here, which may be addressing a different component than Nagel’s subjective argument does. If we take the two arguments together, they may offer a rather compelling account of why deprivation is a bad thing in an abstracted sense. We should not forget, however, that a possible life is not a life that is lived or being lived. In that way, they both lose a bit of their intuitive force.¶ In another attempt to undermine the Epicurean argument that death is not a bad thing but one that focuses upon one’s actual desires and interests, we may turn to Nussbaum’s work. Adding to an argument already developed by David Furley, Nussbaum argues that death is bad for the one who dies because it renders “empty and vain the plans, hopes, and desires that this person had during life” (Nussbaum, 1994). As an example, consider someone dying of a terminal disease. Subjectively, the terminally ill person is unaware of this fact, though some friends and family do know. This person plans for a future that, unbeknownst to him, will be denied him, and, to the friends and relatives who objectively know, “his hopes and projects for the future seem, right now, particularly vain, futile, and pathetic, since they are doomed to incompleteness” (Ibid). Moreover, the futility is not removed by removing the knowing spectators. “Any death that frustrates hopes and plans is bad for the life it terminates, because it reflects retrospectively on that life, showing its hopes and projects to have been, at the very time the agent was forming them, empty and meaningless” (Ibid).¶ Nussbaum is making an interesting move here. She is collapsing the subjective and objective views, such that if the agent were aware, his projects would change and mirror reality. He would realize that his interests cannot be realized, and would change his interests, and live out his days with an accurate assessment of his interests and mortality.¶ Nussbaum appreciates this argument because it shows how death reflects back on an actual life, and our intuitions do not depend on “the irrational fiction of a surviving subject” (Ibid, p. 208). This argument is in harmony with Nagel’s claim that death can be bad for someone—even if that someone no longer exists. And, because it is rooted in the feared futility of our current projects, it is not vulnerable to the “asymmetry problem” (i.e., the alleged irrationality of lamenting the loss of possible experience in the future due to “premature” death, but not lamenting the loss of possible experience in the past due to not having been born sooner) since the unborn do not yet have any projects subject to futility. Nussbaum adds, to this argument, however, by appealing to the temporally extended structure of the relationships and activities we tend to cherish.¶ A parent’s love for a child, a child’s for a parent, a teacher’s for a student, a citizen’s for a city: these involve interaction over time, and much planning and hoping. Even the love or friendship of two mature adults has a structure that evolves and deepens over time; and it will centrally involve sharing futuredirected projects. This orientation to the future seems to be inseparable from the value we attach to these relationships; we cannot imagine them taking place in an instant without imagining them stripped of much of the human value they actually have. . . . Much the same, too, can be said of individual forms of virtuous activity. To act justly or courageously, one must undertake complex projects that develop over time; so too for intellectual and creative work; so too for athletic achievement. . . . So death, when it comes, does not only frustrate projects and desires that just happen to be there. It intrudes upon the value and beauty of temporally evolving activities and relations. And the fear of death is not only the fear that present projects are right now empty, it is the fear that present value and wonder is right now diminished (Ibid, p. 208–209).¶ This argument also helps to explain our intuition that death is especially tragic when it comes prematurely. While we might grieve the death of someone at any age, it seems especially bad when it is a child, or a young adult, that died. We sometimes explicitly state this in terms of the deceased having “so much left to do,” or having their “whole lives ahead of them.” It is not that death is unimportant when it is the elderly who die, but that, in many cases, the elderly have already had a chance to accomplish goals they have set for themselves. Indeed, many times those who face impending death with tranquility are those who can say, of themselves, that they have already lived a long, full life—while the elderly who most lament death are those who regret what they have failed to do in the time they had.

ctp

Baudrillard’s politics fragment the left – destroy coalitions necessary for material change

Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics – MIT, ‘95

(Noam, http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html)

A final point, something I've written about elsewhere (e.g., in a discussion in Z papers, and the last chapter of Year 501). There has been a striking change in the behavior of the intellectual class in recent years. The left intellectuals who 60 years ago would have been teaching in working class schools, writing books like "mathematics for the millions" (which made mathematics intelligible to millions of people), participating in and speaking for popular organizations, etc., are now largely disengaged from such activities, and although quick to tell us that they are far more radical than thou, are not to be found, it seems, when there is such an obvious and growing need and even explicit request for the work they could do out there in the world of people with live problems and concerns. That's not a small problem. This country, right now, is in a very strange and ominous state. People are frightened, angry, disillusioned, skeptical, confused. That's an organizer's dream, as I once heard Mike say. It's also fertile ground for demagogues and fanatics, who can (and in fact already do) rally substantial popular support with messages that are not unfamiliar from their predecessors in somewhat similar circumstances. We know where it has led in the past; it could again. There's a huge gap that once was at least partially filled by left intellectuals willing to engage with the general public and their problems. It has ominous implications, in my opinion.

asteroid da

The aff’s rejection of truth claims causes the collapse of science and take-over by neoconservatives

Berube, 11 [Michael, Paterno Family Professor in Literature and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches cultural studies and American literature, “ The Science Wars Redux,” Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Issue #19, Winter 2011 http://democracyjournal.org/article2.php?ID=6789&limit=3000&limit2=4500&page=3]

But what of Sokal’s chief post-hoax claim that the academic left’s critiques of science were potentially damaging to the left? That one, alas, has held up very well, for it turns out that the critique of scientific “objectivity” and the insistence on the inevitable “partiality” of knowledge can serve the purposes of climate-change deniers and young-Earth creationists quite nicely. That’s not because there was something fundamentally rotten at the core of philosophical anti-foundationalism (whose leading American exponent, Richard Rorty, remained a progressive Democrat all his life), but it might very well have had something to do with the cloistered nature of the academic left. It was as if we had tacitly assumed, all along, that we were speaking only to one another, so that whenever we championed Jean-François Lyotard’s defense of the “hetereogeneity of language games” and spat on Jürgen Habermas’s ideal of a conversation oriented toward “consensus,” we assumed a strong consensus among us that anyone on the side of heterogeneity was on the side of the angels. But now the climate-change deniers and the young-Earth creationists are coming after the natural scientists, just as I predicted–and they’re using some of the very arguments developed by an academic left that thought it was speaking only to people of like mind. Some standard left arguments, combined with the left-populist distrust of “experts” and “professionals” and assorted high-and-mighty muckety-mucks who think they’re the boss of us, were fashioned by the right into a powerful device for delegitimating scientific research. For example, when Andrew Ross asked in Strange Weather, “How can metaphysical life theories and explanations taken seriously by millions be ignored or excluded by a small group of powerful people called ‘scientists’?,” everyone was supposed to understand that he was referring to alternative medicine, and that his critique of “scientists” was meant to bring power to the people. The countercultural account of “metaphysical life theories” that gives people a sense of dignity in the face of scientific authority sounds good–until one substitutes “astrology” or “homeopathy” or “creationism” (all of which are certainly taken seriously by millions) in its place. The right’s attacks on climate science, mobilizing a public distrust of scientific expertise, eventually led science-studies theorist Bruno Latour to write in Critical Inquiry: Entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth...while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we meant? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for good? Why, indeed? Why not say, definitively, that anthropogenic climate change is real, that vaccines do not cause autism, that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and that Adam and Eve did not ride dinosaurs to church? At the close of his “Afterword” to "Transgressing the Boundaries," Sokal wrote: No wonder most Americans can’t distinguish between science and pseudoscience: their science teachers have never given them any rational grounds for doing so. (Ask an average undergraduate: Is matter composed of atoms? Yes. Why do you think so? The reader can fill in the response.) Is it then any surprise that 36 percent of Americans believe in telepathy, and that 47 percent believe in the creation account of Genesis? It can’t be denied that some science-studies scholars have deliberately tried to blur the distinction between science and pseudoscience. As I noted in Rhetorical Occasions and on my personal blog, British philosopher of science Steve Fuller traveled to Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005 to testify on behalf of the local school board’s fundamentalist conviction that Intelligent Design is a legitimate science. “The main problem intelligent design theory suffers from at the moment,” Fuller argued, “is a paucity of developers.” Somehow, Fuller managed to miss the point–that there is no way to develop a research program in ID. What is one to do, examine fossils for evidence of God’s fingerprints?

Key to solve inevitable asteroid impact

Hirshon, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 7/11/’8 (Bob, http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/sci_update.php?DocID=354)

You probably haven't been up nights worrying about an asteroid hitting the Earth, but that's okay. A handful of scientists like Dr. Wie are doing the job for you—and they actually might be able to do something to prevent it. 

Although there are no known asteroids on a collision course with Earth right now, in the (very) long run, it's only a matter of time before one hits. It's happened many times in the past. The most famous impact happened about 65 million years ago, when an asteroid 6 to 10 kilometers in diameter slammed into Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, setting off an explosion equivalent to 100 trillion tons of TNT—over 6 billion times as powerful as the nuclear bomb that leveled Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Among other things, the impact incinerated everything within hundreds of miles, set off gigantic tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, and ejected dust and debris into the sky that blocked the sun for years. The majority of species on Earth at the time, including the dinosaurs, were killed off by this catastrophic event. Luckily, humans weren't around yet. 

However, the human race dodged a bullet in the form of another impact just a century ago. On June 30, 1908, a massive explosion in the sky obliterated some 80 million trees in the remote forests of Siberia, Russia. Scientists believe the explosion was a meteor or comet, much smaller than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, which burned up several miles above the Earth's surface. Because the Earth rotates, had the object struck about five hours later, it may have completely destroyed St. Petersburg, Russia's capital at the time. 

Since then, scientists have learned that meteors and comets burn up in the atmosphere surprisingly often, but most of the time the fireworks are too small and distant to notice. Recent estimates suggest that the object that exploded over Siberia may have been as little as 40 meters (131 feet) in diameter, and that objects that size may strike the Earth, on average, once every few hundred years. In the past, similar impacts may have gone unnoticed because they happened over the oceans or unpopulated areas. However, just one impact on a populated area could be devastating, and the spread of the human population across the Earth's land mass grows with each passing year. 

As you heard, there are several possible strategies for deflecting an asteroid. One is to blow it up in space with a nuclear weapon. This may be the most effective approach, since it could completely vaporize the asteroid—but it might merely shatter the asteroid into hundreds or thousands of fragments, some of which could still be large enough to cause damage. Another possible strategy is to strike the asteroid with an object like an unmanned satellite, and knock it off course like a billiard ball. Finally, a large, heavy spacecraft could be sent to use its own gravitational pull to tow the asteroid slowly out of Earth's path. This strategy would require a long time to execute, but it could potentially work on clusters of space rubble that couldn't be deflected by other means. 

Of course, nobody wants to test these ideas for the first time on a potential doomsday asteroid. Computer models provide the easiest means to test hypotheses, but practical experiments are in the works as well: the European Space Agency, for example, is preparing an experimental asteroid deflector mission called Don Quijote. The mission will involve two spacecraft: one to fly up to an asteroid and assess its mass, shape, and gravity field, and another to strike the rock at just the right place and time to set it off course. 


Extinction

Lt. Colonel Kunich, Staff Judge Advocate, 50th Space Wing, Falcon Air Force Base, ’97 (John C., “Planetary Defense: The Legality of Global Survival,” Air Force LR, 41 A.F. L. Rev. 119, lexis)

The prospect of large exogenous objects crashing into Earth is, quite unfortunately, not science fiction. As hinted at by the near-misses previously described, it has happened many times during our planet's known history, and there is every reason to believe that it will happen again. Clear scientific evidence currently exists of approximately 140 "hypervelocity impact craters" on Earth, and this number is increasing by about 3 to 5 new craters each year. 9 As indicated in the Table in the appendix to this article, these craters are found in virtually every part of the globe, with many located within areas in the United States and Western Europe that are now heavily populated. It is reasonable to presume that a large number of impacts remain undiscovered, because these impacts would have occurred in oceans and [*121] seas or in relatively inaccessible terrestrial areas such as Siberia or the interior of Greenland or Alaska. Given that a great preponderance of the Earth's surface is covered by water, there is no reason to believe that these regions have received any less than their proportionate share of impacts. In many cases of an ocean strike from space, the only evidence we would be likely to have would be an otherwise unexplained tsunami or tidal wave. For most of the known impact craters, we can only estimate the nature of the collision from what remains of the crater after erosion, human activity, and other factors have taken their toll. The size of these impact craters ranges up to 200 kilometers in diameter or more; it is likely that many of these were once much larger. 10 Moreover, some extremely destructive incidents may not have involved actual contact with the Earth; a space object may explode in the atmosphere prior to "landing," with nonetheless devastating effects on the planet from the shock wave and collateral phenomena. 11 It is difficult to estimate with much confidence the frequency with which Earth has been struck. The problem is partially due to the probability of many impacts occurring in water and remote land regions, or prematurely terminating in mid-air explosion. Also, the obscuring effects of erosion and other processes may render many small craters unrecognizable over time. There is an ongoing debate within the scientific community on several key points: (1) the rate at which this planet has been hit; (2) whether that rate has increased in more recent times; and (3) whether there have been periods of greatly intensified impact activity. 12 Irrespective of the ultimate resolution of these controversies, it is beyond dispute that planet Earth has experienced hundreds of collisions with large objects from space. Moreover, there is no reason to presume that these events are forever relegated exclusively to the distant past. Comparatively small-scale, yet still phenomenally destructive strikes have occurred quite recently. For example, on June 8, 1908, a pale blue fireball appeared in the Siberian sky, moving rapidly northward. The object exploded about 6 kilometers above the forest, creating a column of flame and smoke more than [*122] 20 kilometers high. 13 Although no crater was formed, the blast caused the destruction of more than 2,000 square kilometers of Siberian forest in the Tunguska region. This immense area was flattened and burned by the superheated air and the shock wave that literally was felt around the world. It is believed that the source of this devastation was a stony asteroid about 80 meters in diameter, hurtling toward Earth at Mach 45. When it entered the atmosphere at this incredible velocity, it created a shock wave in front of it, which resulted in a pressure gradient that eventually blew the asteroid apart. 14 With this recent, relatively minor incident in mind, the probable consequences of more major collisions will be explored. Currently, astronomers estimate that at least 200 asteroids are in orbits that cross the Earth's orbit, and the number of such known asteroids is rapidly increasing as detection methods improve. 15 Most of these asteroids are larger than 500 meters in diameter (several times larger than the Tunguska asteroid) and would cause massive damage if they were to collide with this planet. In [*123] addition, long-period comets, 16 although less numerous than asteroids, pose a significant threat due to their greater velocities relative to Earth. 17 The history of life on Earth includes several devastating periods of mass extinction 18 during which the vast majority of species then in existence became extinct within a relatively short span of time. 19 The best known of these mass extinctions found the dinosaurs tumbling all the way from their throne as the kings of all living things to the bone pile of archeological history. 20 No less significant, however, were the extinction spasms that wiped out approximately 70 and 90 percent of marine species, respectively. 21 Even the species that survived often experienced catastrophic reductions in their populations. Several scientific studies have linked mass extinctions to collisions between Earth and large objects from space. The hypothesis that these extinction spasms were caused by these collisions and their aftermaths is supported (1) by the discovery of the now well-documented large impact event at the [Cretaceous/Tertiary] boundary...; (2) by calculations relating to the catastrophic nature of the environmental effects in the aftermath of large impacts; (3) by the discovery of several additional layers of impact debris or possible impact material at, or close to, geologic boundary/extinction events; (4) by evidence that a number of extinctions were abrupt and perhaps catastrophic; and (5) by the accumulation of data on impact craters and astronomical data on comets and asteroids that provide estimates of collision rates of such large bodies with the Earth on long time scales. 22 [*124] There are at least six mass extinctions that have been linked with large impacts on Earth from space. 23 But how and why did these impacts have such a profoundly devastating effect on such a vast spectrum of living things? Some scientists maintain that the greatest natural disasters on Earth have been caused by impacts of large asteroids and comets. Although rare compared to "ordinary" floods and earthquakes, they are infinitely more dangerous to life. There are several reasons for this. Initially, of course, a giant object hitting the Earth at spectacular, hypersonic velocity would utterly destroy the local area around the impact. An explosive release of kinetic energy as the object disintegrates in the atmosphere and then strikes the Earth generates a powerful blast wave. The local atmosphere can be literally blown away. If the impact falls on ocean territory, it may create a massive tidal wave or tsunami, with far-reaching effects. 24 When tsunamis strike land, their immense speed decreases, but their height increases. It has been suggested that tsunamis may be the most devastating form of damage produced by relatively small asteroids, i.e., those with diameters between 200 meters and 1 kilometer. "An impact anywhere in the Atlantic Ocean by an asteroid more than 400 meters in diameter would devastate the coasts on both sides of the ocean with tsunami wave runups of over 60 meters high." 25 Horrific as such phenomena are, they are dwarfed by a potentially far greater hazard. The impact of a sufficiently large object on land may cause a blackout scenario in which dust raised by the impact prevents sunlight from reaching the surface [of the Earth] for several months. Lack of sunlight terminates photosynthesis, prevents creatures from foraging for food, and leads to precipitous temperature declines... Obviously even much [*125] smaller impacts would have the potential to seriously damage human civilization, perhaps irreparably. 26 In addition to the dust raised from the initial impact, smoke and particulate matter from vast, uncontrollable fires may greatly exacerbate this blackout effect. A large space object generates tremendous heat, regardless of whether it is destroyed in the atmosphere or physically hits the surface of the Earth. 27 These fires can reach far beyond the impact area, due to atmospheric phenomena associated with the entry of a huge, ultra-high speed object. 28 A huge mass of dust, smoke, and soot lofted into Earth's atmosphere could lead to effects similar to those associated with the "nuclear winter" theory, 29 but on a much larger, much more deadly scale. Such effects are now widely believed to have been a major factor contributing to the mass extinction spasms. 30 These cataclysmic effects may have been worsened still further by other collateral phenomena associated with the impact. For example, acid rain, pronounced depletion of the ozone layer, and massive injections of water vapor into the upper atmosphere may be indirect effects, each with its own negative consequences for life on Earth. 31 It is true that destructive impacts of gigantic asteroids and comets are extremely rare and infrequent when compared with most other dangers humans face, with the [*126] intervals between even the smallest of such events amounting to many human generations... No one alive today, therefore, has ever witnessed such an event, and indeed there are no credible historical records of human casualties from impacts in the past millennium. Consequently, it is easy to dismiss the hazard as negligible or to ridicule those who suggest that it be treated seriously. 32 On the other hand, as has been explained, when such impacts do occur, they are capable of producing destruction and casualties on a scale that far exceeds any other natural disasters; the results of impact by an object the size of a small mountain exceed the imagined holocaust of a full-scale nuclear war... Even the worst storms or floods or earthquakes inflict only local damage, while a large enough impact could have global consequences and place all of society at risk... Impacts are, at once, the least likely but the most dreadful of known natural catastrophes. 33 What is the most prudent course of action when one is confronted with an extremely rare yet enormously destructive risk? Some may be tempted to do nothing, in essence gambling on the odds. But because the consequences of guessing wrong may be so severe as to mean the end of virtually all life on planet Earth, the wiser course of action would be to take reasonable steps to confront the problem. Ultimately, rare though these space strikes are, there is no doubt that they will happen again, sooner or later. To do nothing is to abdicate our duty to defend the United States, and indeed the entire world, and place our very survival in the uncertain hands of the false god of probabilities. Thus, the mission of planetary defense might be considered by the United States at some point in time, perhaps with a role played by the military, including the United States Air Force.

unfalsifiable

Their theory is unfalsifiable

Hughes, 6/1/’89

(Robert, “The Patron Saint of Neo-Pop,” New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1989/jun/01/the-patron-saint-of-neo-pop/?page=1)

Typical of these are his ideas about simulation versus reality. Like the famous map imagined by Luis Borges, so large and detailed that it would neatly cover the real territory it purports to describe, the grid of signs has become a complete “simulacrum” made up of smaller simulacra, all “media-determined.” The simulacrum is all we have and there is nothing below it. “Simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.” Baudrillard is no friend of Ockham’s razor: he wants to multiply simulacra forever in order to push reality out of sight. It is like a sci-fi fantasy: we have been taken over. You may look, walk, and talk like Captain Kirk, but I, unlike everyone else on the ship, know that you are an alien, a simulacrum. Baudrillard’s American fans revel in this, perhaps because his apocalyptic view of mass media excites a deep vein of snobbery in them while his oracular tone stirs memories of heroes of the Sixties, like Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. This replacement of real things and actual relationships by their simulacra is what Baudrillard calls “hyperrealization.” It lets him take a wonderfully lofty view of the relations between fact and illusion, for it denies the possibility of experiencing anything except illusion. In doing so it drifts away from sense, reminding one that Baudrillard’s scheme is only a hypothesis and, despite the sweeping confidence with which he unfurls it, not a very convincing one at that. For instance, nobody would deny that Americans are immensely influenced by television. But it is by no means clear just how this influence works, whether it acts on everyone to the same degree or in the same way, whether the Box “substitutes” for reality when it is on, how far it meditates consciousness: in short, how passive the public is. Baudrillard seems to imagine it is completely so—no ifs, ands, or buts. On the other hand it may be, pace Baudrillard, that millions of people are fairly sophisticated about the relations between reality and what they see on the Box; they are quite capable of sifting its truncated and overvivid exhortations, of blanking the commercials and sorting through the trash. But since this would impede the march of his apocalyptic generalizations about the dictatorship of signs, Baudrillard will have none of it. Here we all are in America, 260 million of us, passively caught in the webs of electronic maya, as incapable of discrimination as of skepticism. No one is smart or willing enough to see past the image haze of media. It’s hard to say which is worse: Baudrillard’s absolutism, his sophomoric nihilism, or his disdain for empirical sense. It is, like the argument of a Flat-Earther, circular and shamelessly ready to say anything, no matter how contrary to common experience, to save its system. Thus for Baudrillard in “The Precession of Simulacra,” Disneyland—that Delphi or Shangri-La of the French intellectual in search of America—is more than tourists think: it is not simply an amusing, cartoony panegyric on certain popular American icons like Family, Innocence, and the Future. In his view it’s not that Disneyland is a metaphor of America, but that America is a metaphor of Disneyland: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland…. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it is no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of the false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. The Disneyland imaginary [sic] is neither true nor false; it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Only two people in the world, it seems, have been privy to this electrifying fact about America—Uncle Walt and Jean Baudrillard; and it may be that Disney, le grand simulateur, didn’t quite grasp what he was doing when he “set up” his “deterrence machine” full of ducks, pirates, and Coca-Cola. The rest of us have been stumbling around America, bumping into these rejuvenated fictions from sea to simulated sea, mistaking them for the real thing. Silly us, we thought that political events might have substance, but Baudrillard puts us straight: they, too, are simulacra. Watergate was merely an “imaginary…scandal-effect,” the “same scenario as Disneyland,” for there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods are employed by the CIA and the Washington Post journalists)…. Watergate is not a scandal: this is what must be said at all cost, for this is what everyone is concerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, a moral panic as we approach the primal (mise-en-)scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality—this is what is scandalous.

Prefer testable claims – theirs are literally impossible to respond to

Arrow, Law – Oklahoma City University, ‘1

(Dennis W, 54 Vand. L. Rev. 2381)

Because Feldman has both criticized my n109 earlier work for not "confronting postmodernism on its own terms" n110 and ["paradoxically"?] recognized that the "style" of my critique is postmodern, n111 I get to deploy the techniques of postmodernism in fashioning my reply (unless, of course, the reciprocity would be excessively "formalistic" and insufficiently flex-o, bend-o, and "situated" n112). So, given my "latent affinity" (in Feldman's assessment) for the postmodern flame(s), n113 here are the rules under which we'll play from here on out: n114

1. I get to lie.

[It won't really be lying, you see. Whatever I say can't be falsified either logically or empirically, because logic's not really a "neutral principle" (but rather one that's political, hegemonic, and phallocentric n115), and because both Feldman and I (on his hypothesis) are "indifferent to" objective reality (which in any event isn't meaningful as anything other than a social construct, n116 and maybe not even then n117).] [*2406]

2. I get to make arguments I don't believe in, purely for their political effect.

[Apparently everybody agrees with this one, from Feldman to Fish. n118]

3. I get to contradict myself at will.

[I can explain away any asserted internal contradiction on too many bases to enumerate, but that include at a minimum: (1) My argument (whatever it is) is really "principled" after all, since the only principles that count are political ones, and purportedly "neutral principles" like consistency are just reactionary "formalism"; n119 (2) Words don't have stable "signifieds," so how can anyone "prove" that whatever I said is a contradiction?; n120 (3) Whatever I said isn't a "contradiction," it's a "paradox"; n121 (4) The attacker hasn't "confronted me on my own terms"; n122 (5) I've been "misinterpreted"; and much, much more. (As the paleo-postmodernist [*2407] Saul Alinsky once counseled, "Make the enemy live up to his own book of rules." n123)]

4. But I get to attack any of my challengers for what I loosely (since logic-at best-is "formalism") characterize as their inconsistencies. n124

[As Stanley Fish notes, "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander requires that you redescribe your enemy as someone like you," n125 and for present (and perhaps many other) purposes, Feldman is not just like me. n126 Besides (Alinsky one more time), "radicals must be . . . sensitive enough to avoid being trapped by their own tactics." n127]

5. If I'm about to get thwacked even under the above "rules" [an impossible hypothetical, to be sure], I get to modify the meaning of my (or for that matter, my opponent's) words so as to change the subject n128 and evade the putout.

[The postmodern "philosopher" Richard Rorty is the acknowledged master of this one, as a thoughtful glance at his "Contingency" book n129 (or much of his other post-conversion writing) will demonstrate. n130]

totalizing

Buardrillard’s totalizing theories marginalizes minorities and justifies massive amounts of violence on the global south

By Andrew Robinson 13 - political theorist and activist (“An A to Z of Theory | Jean Baudrillard and Activism: A critique”;2/7;https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-baudrillard-14/)//pk

There are serious limits to Baudrillard’s work, in terms of his hostility to ‘minority’ struggles. Many of his formulations are inadvertently sexist and racist. There are also times when Baudrillard comes across as ableist in his critiques of the therapeutic. There are also times when Baudrillard attacks activism in strong terms: Hippies reproduce capitalist ideology; Feminists displaying images of porn are actually being seductive, against their will; The left is keeping capitalism alive with its moral critiques and its quests for meaning. There are times when it is hard to tell if Baudrillard is a reactionary, attacking the concerns of progressives, or an ultra-left, criticising every rebellion as insufficiently extreme. If one looks past such problems, however, there are important implications in Baudrillard’s work for emancipatory practice. Baudrillard’s work was clearly an influence on Negri’s early work. Ideas such as the reduction of the system to command, the spread of diffuse apparatuses of power and the panic of the system in the face of its own arbitrariness reappear in texts such as Time for Revolution. The idea of the ‘code’ or system functioning as a self-propelled irrational machine is also reminiscent of primitivists such as Fredy Perlman. Baudrillard seems to see the regime of the code as the high-point of civilisation, in an almost anarcho-primitivist sense. Where he differs from such analyses is that he sees the core of civilisation not in technology or the domestication of desire or the ‘political principle’ of state power, but in the denial and suppression of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is partly thinking through the issue of diffuse power. In capitalist and statist social regimes, power is immensely concentrated. He also gives a particular spin to the distinction between expressive and instrumental. We can link the idea of the ‘code’ to preventionism and its impact on protest. As discussed above, Baudrillard’s idea of initiatory groups could also be applied to activist ‘neo-sects’. Baudrillard also offers answers to some of the big questions of today regarding psychological barriers to revolt. The loss of reality might explain why hope for liberation seems so hard to come by, and why revolutionary movements now seem to lack a clear vision of transformation. The Immediatist Potlatch would be an example of gift-exchange as political action. Occupation of the remainders and waste-grounds of cities has been a constant aspect of dissident practice, from Traveller communities such as Dale Farm and shanty-towns in the global South, to reclaimed factories used as squats, to projects such as South Central Farm. Reversibility could also be thought of in terms of vendettas and cost-imposition. These return to the system the power it exercises, reversing it. Another useful way to extend Baudrillard’s work is to cross-read it with Open Marxist views of capitalism as a process which must constantly be reproduced to exist. Simulation is not a finished process. It has to be constantly repeated in order to be kept active. The process of deterrence (or counterinsurgency) is therefore an ongoing process. Baudrillard is often misread as celebrating the end of reference and the triumph of self-referential signs. It is easy to see how this misunderstanding came about, since he advocates outbidding the system in its own disintegration. He doesn’t think it’s possible or desirable to “go back” to production or fixed meanings. But the central point of his work is still anti-capitalist. He sees the system as unable to provide anything referential or emotionally meaningful. He sees it as a kind of totalitarian engine of permanent mobilisation for the empty goal of its own reproduction. Even in his ‘fatalistic’ later works, he remains fiercely opposed to the code and the system. Baudrillard’s critique of Marx is interesting, and I think largely valid. What he puts in place of Marx’s theory is, however, contentious. His recent work gives the impression of a disillusioned Situationist seeking to find an alternative to revolution in a world where none is apparent. As a result, he finds ways to read conformist mass practices as unconscious resistances, irrational systemic functioning and implosion, and so on. Baudrillard is also too prone to conflate system collapse with liberation. There are scenarios of implosion which would not lead to liberation. One might, for instance, think of climate change due to overconsumption as a scenario of system-collapse. This would bring about the end of the code, but also possibly the end of humanity. In some ways, the idea of implosion echoes Sing Chew’s theory of world-system collapse. Based on previous episodes of collapse, Chew argues that the world-system will collapse when it reaches its ecological limits. It won’t explode; it will collapse inwards and break down as the processes which sustain it are reversed. Each ‘civilisation’ is followed by a ‘dark age’. Populations move outwards from cities, power is diffused, and local knowledge replaces global knowledge. This is not quite what Baudrillard has in mind, but similar enough to be suggested as an effect of continued implosion. Or maybe implosion should be compared to the ‘extraordinary communities’ of disaster, to the sudden collapse of the system’s management structures after which people take over their own self-management (as in Argentina), to the fraying round the edges of a system which can no longer secure the code at its more remote limits (as in Africa). Perhaps as the code burns itself up, we will be left occupying wastelands where we are finally free, but at great cost. Hence, an implosive collapse of the system might give rise to a hope for other social forms. It might, after all, be liberation in disguise. What of the crucial concept of ‘symbolic exchange’? Baudrillard’s discussion of symbolic exchange oscillates between three poles. Firstly, it refers to the experience of living in an embedded society, with rituals, exchanges and local knowledges. Secondly, it refers to the crisis-effects of the decomposition of the code, which create symbolic exchange as their effect. Thirdly, it refers to a kind of experience beyond the regime of simulation, through arbitrary connections. The political effects of the process Baudrillard advocates is thus rather ambiguous. Does the rise of symbolic exchange herald a return to embedded forms of social relations, to some kind of modern band or tribe which reproduces aspects of embedded forms, or something else entirely? The recovery of immediacy, connectedness, uncoded relations, ‘exchange’ between signs and the world, are important aspects of disalienation. However, I have issues with the Lacanian view of the subject which underpins Baudrillard’s theory of symbolic exchange. It is possible to endorse Baudrillard’s view of the death of value in capitalism and the creation of a self-reproducing code, without necessarily seeing the alternative in terms of symbolic exchange and death. A wide variety of other theories are attempting the same thing – from ‘anti-civilisation’ theories to Agamben’s ‘whatever-singularity’. It might be more useful to hitch Baudrillard’s critique to a more affirmative theory, than to attempt to follow his ‘fatal’ strategies. Another important aspect of Baudrillard’s work is his awareness of the close relationship between sign-value, status, and conformity. People are held back by their attachment to status. Baudrillard says that the exploited can demand only the minimum, but lower their status and they can demand everything. This observation relates to the rise of exclusion and autonomy in movements of resistance. By becoming autonomous, endorsing a position outside the system and rejecting the competition for status, the ability to resist is reclaimed. We can’t fight capitalism in determinate forms because it no longer has a goal, or determination. But we can fight its ‘secret weapon’: the reproduction of labour as an ideology or imaginary. This might, for instance, be expressed in the refusal of work. One of the areas in which Baudrillard’s work is particularly useful is media critique. Media power allows all kinds of shenanigans in international relations. In Haiti in 2004 for instance, the US could simulate an entire crisis so as to invade and remove Aristide. The media reproduced the US narrative to the letter. In this case, simulation aids the powerful. In Rwanda, according to Peter Uvin, the opposite happened. External attempts to promote civil society led to a simulated civil society, produced by local elites to capture aid flows. Arguably, states in some African countries are themselves simulations, set up to attract external aid. In such cases, relatively marginal groups extract resources through mastery of simulation. Baudrillard also seems to have a sharp sense of the strategic issues facing resistance today. On the one hand, political positions and subjective standpoints are codified as representable and quantifiable: as yes/no options on opinion polls, as particular niche markets susceptible to market research and targeted advertising, as psychological labels conducive to particular drugs or CBT methods, as variables to be added to a Facebook profile, and so on. On the other hand, managerial procedures (classroom management, prison management, parental management, crisis management, protest management) are invented to provide a prior meaning and a predetermined response to each irruptive event. If a dirty protest, then tape up the cell; if a refusal to move, then send in an ‘extraction team’ using ‘pain compliance’, and so on. The effect is that every option available to resisters has already been encoded, given a meaning and a response. This makes the system seem impossible to fight. Its framing of the available options turns it into a kind of habitus, or second nature, which most people don’t even see as a social construct. The code makes it difficult to resist, because any act of resistance is reinscribed, either as another yes/no choice, or as another social problem to be managed. These are challenges which can be met. Baudrillard’s analysis suggests that the system is vulnerable to any act which disregards consequences or is irreducible to the existing frame of possibilities, which is not a “rational action”. This is why the loss of fear has been so central in understanding revolts, from Tahrir Square to Tottenham. In addition, the system remains vulnerable, both to new tactics which it hasn’t thought of yet, and to any event on such a scale that it overwhelms available resources. Just-in-time production has reduced redundancy within systems. The result is that they don’t have the resources to spare, to cope with any events beyond the usual. This is suggested by Baudrillard’s view that the police simply simulate repression. As long as people are broadly conforming, the simulation works. The moment the unexpected happens, the police become unable to repress effectively. If Baudrillard is right, then the slightest thing escaping the system’s rationality is enough to pose a challenge to it. The idea of involution suggests that the system is beginning to fray around the edges. As control is tightened, peripheral areas slip out of control. This phenomenon is widely discussed in relation to the global South. But fraying can also be seen in the system’s apparent incapacity to respond to emergent events, because of just-in-time production and the maintenance of systems lacking redundancy. Something like the August insurrection can spread on the basis of unexpectedness, rapidity and limited police resources. Baudrillard’s theory of deterrence needs to be reconsidered in light of recent events. We have seen in 2011 that it is still possible to create events: the London unrest, the student protests, Occupy, the Wikileaks saga… The system does not actually have the power on the ground to prevent revolts, occupations, movements. Even the system’s vice-like grip on future significations is being partially broken through movements like Occupy, which conveys different future images in its own rhetoric. Anonymous turns the anonymity of statistical indifference into a source of strength, using tactics based on the very vulnerability to excess the system creates – such as distributed denial of service attacks (using an excess of web connections) and leaking of documents (relying on the obscene overexposure of information in the Internet). The difficulty, rather, is in sustaining events and expanding new frames of meaning. The system monopolises and determines the effects of events, and kettles them in time and space. Firstly the system controls the ways in which events are signified to non-participants. Secondly the system, having once faced an event, will prepare in detail to prevent it “next time” – so it is hard for events to become waves. And thirdly, the system unleashes a dreadful wave of repression after each event, attempting to foreclose its irruptive force and restore the pervasiveness of terror. Resultant feelings of futility, anxiety and vulnerability are corrosive of movement-building and of repeated cycles of similar events. The movement of revolt towards a terrain of refusal of meaning is also partly an effect of the system’s move towards coding. The apparent lack of demands in recent waves of social unrest (e.g. the Mark Duggan uprising, the banlieue revolt, the Greek insurrection of 2008, the Occupy movement, summit protests), and even many of today’s “terrorists”, is perhaps a result of the prevalence of the code. The presentation of demands risks reinscription as simply a militant version of a position already encoded within the system. People respond with actions which counterpose their own expressiveness to the code. This is also perhaps why theorising the conditions of possibility for an Event has become such a popular theme in contemporary radical theory. Another possibility could here be added. It is possible, in open-ended surveys, to give responses deemed too complex to be codable. In principle, a more heterogeneous humanity would escape the code through each individual’s irreducibility to prior categories. There are also certain texts, such as Cabal, Argot and Barbarians, which argue for incommunicability as a necessary part of radicalism. The system demands that everything communicate in its terms. Therefore, esoteric language is an effective resistance. Baudrillard’s theory also helps to explain why his appropriation by leftists has been strategically unsuccessful. Collectivist theories such as Negri’s are limited in that they fail to see the overexposure to the social. The masses do not feel a simple lack of the social but an overexposure – both in the pressure to consume sign-values, and in telepresence. Collectivist alternatives open up a vertigo, seeming like more of the same, but even more totalising. Of course, Negri’s alternative would be a disalienated sociality, not a more totalising simulation. But if Baudrillard is right, most people can no longer tell the difference. And the move Negri makes – to attempt to re-socialise what he takes to be an atomised field – is the wrong move to recompose disalienated socialities. It is not a move which leads from the masses, the social ‘obscene’ or overexposed, to a disalienated sociality. Recomposition requires first of all the decomposition of people’s connections to a dominant sociality. People need to rebel against this collectivism as a ‘new individualism’, an emphasis on desire and self-actualisation against the pressure to conform, before alternative social forms based on autonomy can be constructed. Today’s sociality rests on conformity rather than compassion. An authentic sociality can only proceed by rejecting and destroying this basis. At the same time, individuals cannot become free without transforming from a type of subject which internalises the code. The conception of self which is an after-effect of conformity, the neoliberal subject, is as much a barrier to self-liberation as to compassion. One limit to Baudrillard’s theory is his tendency to over-totalise. Baudrillard is talking about tendential processes, but he often talks as if they are totally effective. There are still, for instance, a lot of uncharted spaces, a lot of unexplained events, a lot of things the system can’t handle. While Baudrillard is describing dominant tendencies in the present, these tendencies coexist with older forms of capitalism, in a situation of uneven development. The persistence of the system’s violence is a problem for Baudrillard’s perspective: the smooth regime of neutralisation and inclusive regulation has not ended older modalities of brutality. At times, Baudrillard exaggerates greatly the extent to which the old authoritarian version of capitalism has been replaced by subtle regimes of control. He exaggerates the extent to which contemporary capitalism is tolerant, permissive and ‘maternal’. This may be because his works were mostly written in France in the 1970s-80s, when the dominant ethos was still largely social-democratic. What Baudrillard recognises as the retrograde version of capitalism associated with the right-wing was to return with a vengeance, especially after 911. Another problem is a lack of a Southern dimension. Like many Northern authors, Baudrillard’s approach mainly applies to the functioning of capitalism in the North. The penetration of the code is substantially less in countries where information technology is less widespread. In parts of Africa, even simple coding exercises such as counting votes or recording censuses are extremely difficult. This is for the very reasons of respondent reflexivity which Baudrillard highlights. People will under-record themselves to stay invisible, or over-record themselves to obtain benefits. And without massive resources to put into its bureaucracies, the system is unable to find enough people who will act as transmitters for the code. Instead, people use their power to extract what they can from the system. Explosions still happen regularly in the South. Furthermore, a contracting system ‘forcibly delinks’ large portions of the globe. Its power on the margins is lessened as its power at the core is intensified. As the system becomes ever more contracted and inward-looking, liberated zones may appear around the edges. Without an element of border thinking, Baudrillard tends to exaggerate the system’s completeness and effectiveness. Baudrillard assumes that any excess is everywhere absorbed into the code. He ignores the persistence of borderlands. And when he talks about the South, he admits that the old regime of production might still exist here: people still work seeking betterment; colonial wars are fought to destroy persisting symbolic exchange; Saddam was not playing the Gulf War by the rules of deterrence. The Arab masses are still able to become inflamed by war or non-war; Iran and Iraq can still fight a real war, not a simulated non-war. So perhaps only a minority, only the included layers within the North, are trapped within simulation and the ‘masses’. Perhaps reality has not died, but been displaced to the South. It seems, therefore, premature to suggest that the system has encompassed all of social life in the code. To be sure, its reach has expanded, but it has also forcibly delinked large areas of the globe. The penetration of simulated reality into everyday life varies in its effectiveness. At the limit, as in Somalia, simulated states collapse under their own irrelevance. In other cases, an irrelevant state hovers over a largely autonomous society. And the struggle Baudrillard advocated in his early works against subordination as labour-power is not simply theoretical. In fact, there is a constant war, fought at various degrees of intensity, between the system and its others, especially in highly marginal parts of the global South: Chiapas, Afghanistan, the Niger Delta, Somalia, West Papua, rural Colombia, Northeast India, the Andes… The system continues to be drawn into these conflicts, despite its apparent self-deterrence from total nuclear annihilation.

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