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 think you haven't understood the exact question.

It wasn't exactly analogous, but it wasn't meant as such. If I wanted to do that I would have brought up Creationism among Protestant Americans.

I fundamentally think there are very strong sacredness based feelings around this that are not based on consequences in the real world any more than other kinds of religious thinking is. There obviously are good secular conservative arguments in favour of religious thinking guiding how our society develops though.

I fundamentally think there are very strong sacredness based feelings around this that are not based on consequences in the real world any more than other kinds of religious thinking is.

Throughout the 19th century, there have been leftist thinkers - from moderate and "respectable" ones to hardcore radicals - who either had no problem acknowledging differences in average intelligence, or were even outright racists/white supremacists. E.g., I've read that many American abolitionists either acted xenophobic towards actual black people when they m... (read more)

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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