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.

It wasn't intended as a trap. Part of the point of the hypothetical was that "sword-privilege" is a bit of a silly idea, and not an obvious go-to choice for reasoning about people stabbing other people. I genuinely didn't expect you to put up a defence for it.

As for explanatory mechanisms, I tend to favour explanations from economics and systems-based sciences, as they have a rich catalogue of unusual behaviour patterns that arise from interacting parties being given different choices. I'm generally quite cautious in their application, though, because it doesn't take much for an elegant and aesthetically-pleasing model to be subtly wrong.

As for explanatory mechanisms, I tend to favour explanations from economics and systems-based sciences

Fair enough. As you noted, the risk with any analytical framework is that it intentionally or unintentionally becomes a single variable analysis - and thus useless. My sense is that economics applied to social interactions is particularly at risk for this type of problem - leading either to Marxism or blogosphere ev. psych.

It wasn't intended as a trap. Part of the point of the hypothetical was that "sword-privilege" is a bit of a silly i

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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