Politics Discussion Thread December 2012

OrphanWilde

I skipped October and November owing to election season, but opening back up:

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 skipped October and November owing to election season, but opening back up:

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.

The speculations referred to what smart observers following carefully the DC chatter believed would happen, not the official public statements. Or rather, it is the impression I got from reading some such observers. This more recent post implies that I was wrong and that a December deal raising taxes is looking plausible after all.

You are making a mistake if you consider journalists to be "smart observers". Just look at science journalism.

Science is even a field where scientists don't have much to gain by deceiving journalists about the true nature of their scientific findings. Politics is on the other hand a field where a lot of actors have a lot to gain by getting journalists to write stories that don't accurately reflect the truth.

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Politics Discussion Thread December 2012

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Politics Discussion Thread December 2012

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