Good Faith Debating Will Save You

[JMHX]

I didn't want to write this post, but I feel the need given some of the messages I've received and the comments I've gotten about the state of political discussion here.

Hello, I'm JMHX. How are you? I'd like to talk to you about politics by way of telling you a bit about myself. I've been working campaigns and elections since the 2000 Indiana Gubernatorial election, when I was a young buck intern. I pulled up roots, moved to Washington, D.C., completed two degrees and postponed a third in progress, worked alongside a former United States Senator from Indiana as his policy analyst in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, headed the Communications shop for a U.S. Congressman from Indiana and transitioned to public policy and lobbying at a large social media company before taking my current position as the head of Strategic Political Communication at a large PR firm in the center of the city. Now I work mainly with banks and financial services firms looking for a voice on the Hill.

I'm a Democrat active in Virginia politics, recently elected to a very local position. Being from Indiana, I run on the conservative end of the Democratic spectrum. I'm a free-trader and an investor sympathetic to a restructuring of the tax code, especially where double-taxed dividends come in. I'm here to tell you to cut the bullshit:

- Everyone here, Democrat and Republican and Socialist and Marxist, Libertarian and Green and Constitution Party, needs to start debating in good faith with each other. You're online handles on a low-population political board. Stop being so goddamn prideful of your points and actually try to listen to the individual writing their point. If you're going to counter them, I challenge you to do it without profanity or personal attacks. I'm guilty of some of this, because man, seeing the same argument repeated ad infinitum is really, really frustrating.

- Accept flaws in your candidate, regardless of your personal convictions. The number one rule of political analysis is intellectual honesty. If you can't accurately accept when your guy lost a debate or fucked up a policy (or, more importantly, if you don't understand what the goals of the candidate are going IN to the debate or policy), you're going to give dreadful analysis. Not everything in national politics is about the outright win. There are very few knockout punches. Just deal with it. I can guarantee there's practically no partisan screaming between Democratic and Republican analysts when the cameras are off. They're surprisingly honest.

- Stop making sweeping claims off of relatively limited data. This is something my free-trader friends do a lot. Recognize the limitations of scholarly research and, most of all, political polls. We're in a Wild West era as far as polling is concerned, and as you can tell from the huge range of polls out there, it's really risky to stake one's argument on a poll, which is itself just a snapshot of a window in the past. If you're going to debate something, best stick with defendable claims instead of sweeping generalizations about an entire country, party, economic sector or culture.

- Delete your first rebuttal. You know that sentence you banged out in anger after Warforger or Korriken said something you think is just so liberal/conservative? Delete it. Stop for a few minutes and think about how you can phrase the rebuttal that actually ADDS a discussion point or piece of data. If your rebuttal is a sentence that contains the words "liberal" or "conservative" in an insulting way, I'd advise you look back and rethink.

- Ask. If you don't know how something works, like, say, the international financial system or something, and someone has made a broad claim that uses that system as its backbone, ask them to clarify. Ask for specifics on how it works and how it fits into the argument. As a strategist, I've bamboozled people with big, complex paragraphs before. They were meaningless. They threw in words like "federal reserve inflation adjustment bond issues," which means nothing, but it got me a vote on Dodd/Frank. Sometimes the best way to get an opponent to back down isn't to move the debate forward, but to pause it on that issue and provide better understanding of a system than they have.

I want to debate with you bros, but this is entirely too personal and rancorous right now. Y'all need to calm down a bit and realize this should be fun. If you look at it from my perspective, having been on and off the Politics forum since I was in high school many moons ago, a lot of the good, quality debate on here prepped me for the fast-thinking I have to do in my job. It sounds silly, but it's true.

Also: Obama ~288 Electorals. Callin' it.

[lapis]

Listen to this man. Listen to all that he has said to you. His messages are timeless :D

[JMHX]

At 10/23/12 12:44 PM, lapis wrote: Listen to this man. Listen to all that he has said to you. His messages are timeless :D

I stand by everything in that post.