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.

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.

Quite recently under Obama the EPA did make a decision to limit mercury polution which got opposed by the Republicans.

If you accept that lead should be regulated then why not mercury? The EPA did a pretty good calculation that estimated the costs and benefits of mercury regulation.

2Rukifellth13y

Sorry about that, it wasn't. I misclicked, and the retract button's line crossing seemed even worse than just leaving it there. The relevance to US political discussion is in policy decisions. With the information we have in this article, it's a better long term investment to get rid of lead usage in industrial and commercial settings that risk such exposure, if one is trying to reduce crime in cities, instead of building more prisons, "cracking down on crime", etc.