These are just a couple cards I cut from this article – the first two will be more useful for the asteroids aff I think, but the last one is basically the Tuathail and the Taft-Kaufman card combined, as well as some reverse causal claims
Attempts to critique risk analysis fail and turn the K
Rigakos and Law 9 (George, Assistant Professor of Law at Carleton University, and Alexandra, Carleton University, “Risk, Realism and the Politics of Resistance”, Critical Sociology 35(1) 79-103, dml)
This discourse has provided an important critical counterpoint to the alarming proliferation of technocratic risk thinking that dominates criminal justice planning, insurance practices, and even general governmental activities. On the one hand, such inquiries quite persuasively identify an actuarial logic that threatens to become hegemonic (see Feeley and Simon, 1994) in criminal justice decision-making. On the other hand, certain strands of such thinking actually replace one form of empiricism with another. Rose’s anti-realist proclamation, where he strangely declares, ‘I advocate superficiality, and empiricism of the surface, of identifying the differences in what is said, how it is said, and what allows it to be said and to have an effectivity’ (Rose, 1999: 56–7) is an excellent example. It is strange because the Foucaultian project was supposed to effectively challenge positivism (a goal shared by realists). Theorists working within this genre of thought have explicitly declared their disinterest with any notion of the reality of risk (e.g. O’Malley et al., 1997). In keeping with what they read as an anti-realist positioning by Foucault, from whom they borrow heavily in formulating their analyses, certain governmentality and risk theorists associate any pronouncements about the reality of risks as tantamount to a first step in producing a form of knowledge that they try to avoid. We shall leave aside for a moment critiquing this rendition of Foucault to simply highlight that such theorists do not wish to enter the fray about what is real about risk lest they be perceived as another rival with competing truth claims (cf. Garland, 1997) which they believe they can avoid (e.g. O’Malley, 2001). Presumably, their fear is that such critiques will be used as theories that can lead to totalizing views (e.g. Lyotard, 1979), a common tendency among contemporary analysts in the social sciences (Best and Kelner, 1991; Smart, 1995). The standpoint of some theorists is thus not only epistemologically reserved but by extension ontologically impoverished (Callinicos, 1995). As we argue below, such postmodern approaches to risk theory, while potentially critical, may also have consequences for our understanding of resistance in the context of risk-based governing which bears more careful consideration.
Perm solves – combining theory with risk avoidance allows us to investigate threat construction effectively – some threats are real and we should act on them
Rigakos and Law 9 (George, Assistant Professor of Law at Carleton University, and Alexandra, Carleton University, “Risk, Realism and the Politics of Resistance”, Critical Sociology 35(1) 79-103, dml)
Bhaskar (1975), on the contrary, argues that these social structures are indeed causal agents; they are more than just discursive formations but they are also malleable and transformable. He nonetheless maintains that the natural world is intransitive while the social is both transitive and intransitive. 4 We concede that Harré and Bhaskar present importantly divergent notions of what constitutes a realist (or critical realist) ontology, although both seem committed to the implications for social justice under such understandings. Nonetheless, both brands of realism offer that the natural and social should be distinguished and a relatively different ontological state be offered for each. This has direct implications for risk because mitigation against future harms may be targeted at
