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.

What are you ethical injunctions? They seem all important to evaluating your view of government, as without them, you're granting unlimited license to the government to make "positive impacts".

Honestly, I don't think I can answer that off the cuff. I'll try to get back to you on that later, but as Eugine Nier already pointed out, such things are highly susceptible to loophole exploitation. I certainly wouldn't plan to establish a government on a set of restrictions that I've only spent a few minutes formulating (It's not as if I have a ready set worked out in case it comes up in a political discussion, because I don't think there's any realistic way I'll ever be in a position to meaningfully affect the implementation of a new system of government.)

I do think, though, that the usual libertarian conception of rights is not a good way to narrow down issues that I care about (when it comes to protecting our country from attack, for instance, there are government initiatives I would pay for them to stop doing, not just because they're ineffective but because trying to address those issues at all sends a bad message which even the best case outcome of those initiatives doesn't make worthwhile) and I think most people care about some issues which they are not effectively able to address without outside intervention due to coordination problems.

I hope you do get back to me.

When you have an answer on your ethical injunctions, please elaborate them in terms of "who does what to whom". That's where the rubber meets the road.

The whole Dictatorship of the Proletariat could have been punctured with a simple question - "How exactly is that supposed to work?" When you get down to concrete individuals, you see quickly that individuals have different interests. "We" aren't going to be the Dictator. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

I certain

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