Politics Discussion Thread December 2012

OrphanWilde

I skipped October and November owing to election season, but opening back up:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.

I skipped October and November owing to election season, but opening back up:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.

Hypothesis: Academic philosophy (and the humanities in general) is useful as a means of gainfully employing people who otherwise would be predisposed to starting radical social movements.

(Limited) Evidence:

May 1968 protests, which exploded once the university was shut down by the government.
The June Fourth Incident.

Counter-evidence:

Limited evidence that engineers are more likely to be radical Islamic terrorists.

May 1968 protests, which exploded once the university was shut down by the government.

Steve Sailer has been interested in the 1960s and has done some research and speculation, you might want to check out his articles on the matter. Also there was recently some discussion of 1968 on iSteve.

Another theory of the Sixties: Vatican II

A commenter wrote:

I enjoyed your post on Takimag today, as I have appreciated so much of your writing online over the years. What prompts me to write just now is that I too have pondered “the Sixties” for quite some time. I d

... (read more)

0ChristianKl13y

I don't think academic philosophy is good in preventing it's members from starting radical social movements. People like Noam Chomsky do quite a lot of social activism while they hold tenure.

12sixes_and_sevens13y

If it did serve that purpose, it would do so with high volatility. Social unrest is dependent on macroeconomic factors such as unemployment and recession. Assuming humanities degrees are commercially less desirable than the alternatives, you'd be handing a lot of free time to a bunch of revolutionaries at the worst possible moment.