Politics Discussion Thread February 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 have more of a request for an elaboration of the position of others.

In very broad terms, what do you support the government doing? I'm not looking for a list as much as a rule governing your approval.

For example, I'm basically a small government geolibertarian. I'd have the government primarily protect your negative rights, set up laws and courts to resolve disputes as an alternative to the private resort to violence, and as major part of those laws enforce private property as the rules governing enjoying the fruits of your labor, or exchanging those fruits or that labor with others. The geo part comes from the belief that property in natural resources is not similarly justified by labor, and so requires compensation to others if you want sole use of some resource. I'm generally hostile to intellectual property and the mixing of corporate limited liability and free markets.

I'm against the government treating you, your labor, or the fruits of your labor as a resource to draw upon for purposes other than those stated above.

Briefly, I support the government creating rules of the road so that we can live in proximity without violence, otherwise free to pursue our own interests.

The major alternatives I hear from people are approving of whatever the majority decides through free and fair elections, or approving of doing what is good, or the above plus the legally enforced right to a list of "needs", to be supplied by treating others as resources to supply those needs.

I'm requesting that others similarly elaborate what they approve of the government doing, particularly where you approve of different things than I do.

To hijack this thread a bit, please don't upvote or downvote based on agreement with my preferences on government.

I support the government acting as a solver of coordination and lack-of-information problems.

To reuse an example I brought up in another discussion, suppose that a company is using a chemical in some manufacturing process which is highly toxic, and that toxic chemical is making its way into the population in harmful quantities. 0.2% of the population knows about this and understands the danger, and of these, all who do not work for the company oppose the practice. The remaining 99.8% of the population has no opinion.

In such a situation, a boycott is highly... (read more)

1[anonymous]13y

I approve of the government considering and honestly stating the repercussions of their actions rather than acting only on principle and disregarding what their principles do, or considering the repercussions of their actions and then lying about them for political gain. When that occurs and when I've tried to pick through to the actual repercussions of the government policy when it far more often doesn't, then I tend to pick the government representative or policy whose repercussions I like better, bearing in mind the overall trustworthiness from the previous assessment. This is similar to "I approve of government doing what is good" except that there is an obvious counter argument to that "What if the government doing what is good has bad reprecussions?" and I think this formulation attempts to address that.

5ThrustVectoring13y

I think the most important task for the government is to handle oncoming automization in a good way. The current trend with robotics and automization is fewer and fewer workers being necessary for the functioning of society. The end-point as I see it is one of two societies - either the fruits of automization are used to bribe the unemployed masses from rioting, or they're used to wall off safe places so that the people who own and run the robots don't care about riots. Obviously, I'd much rather have the first case than the second.