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.

LW doesn't have many people in the [critical theory] cluster

Yes, the core problem is that LW lacks this population - and doesn't seem to care.

Your wording [about cutting edge theory] makes me wince a little but I'm not sure if I can unpack why here

Maybe it's a relic of fact that most of my contact with "soft" academics is legal academia.

Legal issues go from non-existent to unsettled to settled. Tenure lies in writing only about unsettled. Cutting edge legal theories are a thing, even for practicing lawyers (I've even got one I'm waiting for the right case to test). Then the caselaw thickens - and your theory is now settled practice or Timecube level crazy.

In short, sorry for making you wince. Well, sorta sorry. :)

Yes, the core problem is that LW lacks this population - and doesn't seem to care.

nod It's pretty synonymous with stuff like the Sokal affair to them.

Maybe it's a relic of fact that most of my contact with "soft" academics is legal academia.

That does go rather a long way toward explaining it, yeah. I come at it from anthropology and linguistics, with a side order each of biology and semiotics, so my go-to ideas about "the progression of theories and the state of the art in this field" are...substantially harder to capture, but b... (read more)

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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