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.

SJ = abbreviation for "social justice."

The discussion here appears to be talking about "privilege" in a way that looks, from the outside of the conversation, like the use of the term "privilege" by both participants is based on attempting to reverse-engineer its theoretical structure from the way it's used online by social justice activists.

The idea of "privilege", as an academic notion within critical theories, does not boil down to "the thing that when you see it, you should call it out." Exploring and unpacking the idea may or may not come with exhortations to any particular course of action; this is especially so in the case of texts where the idea is being formulated, criticized, elaborated upon or revisited. That isn't even necessarily implied.

On the other hand it's very common to the use of the term by a certain subset of online activists, and it seems like for a lot of LWers group is their first or primary exposure to the idea. The result is akin to talking about socialism in general, by modelling it in terms of the Red Guard youth movement during China's Cultural Revolution.

Here was my attempt at a brief articulation, early in this conversation. I'm trying not to just reverse engineer from social justice blogging. But if I screwed things up, I'm open to suggestion.

I agree that privilege isn't inherently unjust. It just turns out that certain kinds of privilege are antithetical to my terminal values - and calling out appears to be the best response.

On the other hand it's very common to the use of the term by a certain subset of online activists, and it seems like for a lot of LWers group is their first or primary exposur

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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