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 generally find it worthwhile to separate the action-motivating aspects of a framework from the universal-acceptance aspects.

That is, if I endorse the privilege framework because I believe it effectively motivates right action according to my values better than the alternatives, then one option is to embrace it and act accordingly. If my belief is correct, one consequence of that will be that I am more reliably motivated to act rightly by my values. If I also talk about my actions and my motivations for those actions, I will provide evidence of that to others, thereby encouraging them to also embrace the privilege framework (at least, insofar as they share my values, and possibly even if they don't).

In the meantime, they won't, and (as you say) we won't be perfectly efficient. Hysteresis is like that.

The advantage of hysteresis is that if it turns out I'm wrong and the privilege framework doesn't optimally motivate right action, there's a greater chance of collecting evidence of that truth before we've collectively invested too much in a suboptimal practice.

Given how often we're wrong about stuff, that seems like a worthwhile advantage to preserve.

I could probably word that more succinctly as "Practice beats proselytizing."

I generally find it worthwhile to separate the action-motivating aspects of a framework from the universal-acceptance aspects.

Whatever happened to the corresponding-to-reality aspect?

0TimS13y

Some of my motive is reducing inferential distance. Some of the response to daenerys' recent post on female experiences was essentially "I didn't realize that type of harm was occurring." Ideally, having a useful framework will help others notice those types of harms more easily. Also, I think there's a certain amount of hypocrisy inherent in some anti-feminist frameworks. To use a totally different example, I expect most Republicans in the US House of Representatives hate Alinsky, but they sure seem to have learned his lesson that procedural rules benefit the status quo - and therefore, those who oppose the status quo have less reason to respect them.

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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