Politics Discussion Thread January 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.

(Not sure whether this should go here or the Open Thread.)

We frequently discuss the difference between epistemic and instrumental rationality. Most political discussions seem to be "epistemic politics" - what political beliefs to have and why. I see very little discussion of "instrumental politics" - what kind of political actions to take and why. Beyond mind-killing, this is probably the main reason I currently have no interest in politics: I don't have a good conception of what kind of political actions are available to me. How would I go about fixing this?

A while ago I was in an online discussion with someone from an East European country who was demostrating to end the current government.

I asked the person for an article that explains the evils of the government. He told me that I didn't know of an English article that explained the issue in detail.

I told him that instead of being the 10,001st person at protest it would be much more effective to write a English article that explain the evil of the government and submit it to the Guardian's Comment is Free section.

He didn't think he was qualified to write... (read more)

1Emile13y

This probably hardly counts as "political action", but one of the most efficient ways of voting is probably with your feet - move to a place whose policies you like.

0OrphanWilde13y

My general policy is "Most political action is counterproductive; the silent vote is the least likely to engender resistance." That said, I'm probably wrong on this matter. Loud political movements are frequently also effective political movements, even though they do engender high degrees of resistance. The issue is it's hard to identify quiet political movements and evaluate their influence.

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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