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.

The comparison of India to Africa isn't valid because the starting conditions are sufficiently different. Also note that the question is somewhat rhetorical. We de facto do have several kinds of citizen. Can you think of which kinds?

To provide a counter point the Ottoman Millet system seems to have worked pretty well at keeping the peace in that state. Also India is a bad example for your argument for another reason, recall some of the biggest problems the British had there was when they tried to abolish or weaken or even just ignore the traditional caste system.

Informal divides, including ones with consistent disparities of power and wealth, certainly exist everywhere. I'm arguing that it's not clear how government enforcement of them has much point. European countries like Poland or France enforced religious segregation too (Catholic and Orthodox, Catholic and Hugenot), and still had lots of strife along religious lines.

Also India is a bad example for your argument for another reason, recall some of the biggest problems the British had there was when they tried to abolish or weaken or even just ignore the trad

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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