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.

There are probably lots of examples of coffee-table "damned leeches, living off my tax-dollars" conversation getting proven wrong, or at least grossly simplified, but this is probably one of the most damning examples.

There really ought to be a means of conveying information like this to the public, en masse. News outlets have stories like this on their websites, though I haven't found any live TV reports. Just imagine how any political debate down in the United States would go if every rhetorical comment and argument was shot down with articles like this, on both sides. In fact, there ought to be a repository for scientific findings that have immediate political and sociological consequences.

In fact, there ought to be a repository for scientific findings that have immediate political and sociological consequences.

A few years back, Aaron Swartz & Peter Eckersley tried this with a website called Science That Matters (now down), which revealed a couple of potential problems with this idea.

The first is pretty minor: the people running the repository might stop updating it after a while. STM got updated quite a lot through 2007, a couple of times in 2008, and never again after that.

The second is that scientific findings might not be as weigh... (read more)

0buybuydandavis13y

If this was intended as a response to me, I don't see the relevance to what I said. As for the lead story, that's been going around for a long time, and don't really see the relevance to most US political discussions. Childhood lead exposure can cause developmental problems leading to adult behavioral changes. Believable to me.