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.

Restrictions on procedures can take a lot of shades, but the basic choice of yea or nay is pretty binary. For comparison, Canada also had abortion law determined by the Supreme Court(it was legal but heavily restricted before, and now we have literally the loosest abortion law in the world - there are no restrictions whatsoever), but the issue is nowhere near as controversial. I think the difference has a lot less to do with the Supreme Court, and a lot more to do with the US level of religiosity.

Accepting that a woman, who was raped and has complications with her pregnancy that would mean that she would die if there was no abortion, is a long way from accepting that every pregnant woman in a late stage pregnancy can just decide to have an abortion.

When you start talking rationally about the shade of gray of different laws it also becomes easier to have a rational discourse about the extremes.

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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