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 find laws that discriminate based on national origin to be unfair

What is this "fair" thing? Life isn't fair. The governments are responsible to the citizens a single country, not the whole world, so they are unfair to non-citizens when it makes sense economically or politically. The immigration laws will be relaxed once it's in the interests of the country to attract more immigrants and tighten when there are enough. Happens all the time all over the world. You can pretend that this is about human rights, but it's really economics, with a healthy dose of politics.

What is this "fair" thing?

It refers to aspects of behavioral symmetry that the speaker prefers and is willing to use power to enforce in his or her environment of interest. (At very least via an attempt at moral persuasion.)

5BlazeOrangeDeer13y

"Life isn't fair" is one of the least effective arguments I have ever heard, though it is a great example of naturalistic fallacy (this thing is better because it's natural / don't try to mess with the way things are meant to be). I also said why I thought unfairness in this particular case is bad, so I'm down voting.