Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

OrphanWilde

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.

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 downvoted this post because I don't want to see more attention to politics here. I don't see it as an "accepted exception" but as a recent push for more political discussions.

It can be interesting to talk about social issues, but doing this under the explicit heading "politics" header is likely to prime people into paying more attention to the political implications of the topic.

I take the debates that have occurred in these topics so far as evidence that LWers are capable of following the disclaimer. As such, unless it starts bleeding over into other topics, it seems okay. I prefer having a contained place with a disclaimer than to let arguments start getting political in other threads and either derail the thread or get cut off even though an interesting point was being made.

2Multiheaded13y

I disagree that one could talk about any kind of "social issues" whatsoever without it being 100% "political". Politics is what's going on in the polis.

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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