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.

Why do people insist on comparisons to -Viagra- when discussing birth control? Vasectomy would be a better comparison. Of course, it doesn't illustrate the same kind of point, because religious objections to vasectomy do exist

So this is an interesting point but actually reinforces the sorts of claims being made by Xachariah, since the amount of objection to vasectomies is much smaller than the amount of objection to birth control, which is consistent with his hypothesis. But I suspect that in fact the reason vasectomies aren't used as an example are far the same (actual) reason that they don't have nearly as much objection: they aren't that common.

Thinking more about this though, there's another interesting hypothesis that hasn't been discussed yet: the goal might not be punishing a specific gender for having sex, but punishing sex in general. That seems by and large consistent with almost all of the discussed issues here with viagra being possibly a counterexample.

So this is an interesting point but actually reinforces the sorts of claims being made by Xachariah, since the amount of objection to vasectomies is much smaller than the amount of objection to birth control, which is consistent with his hypothesis.

If you're thinking about US politics in 2012, most of the "objection to birth control" was objection to Obama's mandate that insurance companies to fully cover birth control for women, but not men.

1Alsadius13y

Vasectomies(and tube-tying) tend to be used very differently than temporary birth control. Usually they're done either in the context of a married couple who has as many kids as they want, or someone with serious enough medical issues that reproduction would be ill-advised. As such, the impact on casual sex is dramatically different than the impact of the Pill or abortions.

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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