I must confess that I'm not terribly patient.
Political discussions on the common media (namely Facebook, but I suspect the same is true of other social media) bring in a terrible signal to noise ratio.
Conservatives post the latest Fox News article explaining why they are right, and their Conservative friends post all the ways they agree. Meanwhile, Liberals post the latest Mother Jones article and their Liberal friends post all the ways the article nails it. Sometimes a brave soul crosses the line, charging into a battle they never intended to win, and everyone goes to bed more assured of their positions and even less likely to understand any opposition.
Meanwhile, there are a few thoughtful people across the spectrum whose voices tend to be drowned out. Here, I'm hoping to open discussions about current events (political, social, global) and discuss them in a way that does a few things:
1) Allows everyone participating to understand the varying angles
2) Brings out the nuances that are anathema to both print and broadcast media
3) Leaves space for thoughtfully undecided people to both participate and develop new ideas
4) Gives everyone the ability to articulate and understand (perhaps even while vehemently disagreeing with) opposing or alternate positions.
So, here are the starting point ground rules (prior to input from participants):
1) Your contributions must be thoughtful. Until I can find a way to enable multiple administrators of the blog, I'm going to delete obviously stupid, jingoistic, inflammatory, or unhelpful additions to the dialogue.
2) Don't talk
party politics. I don't care about Democrats or Republicans or Libertarians or Greens or Socialists or anything else. These are shorthand for unthoughtful people to engage in tribal thinking and avoid any real analysis of issues. They are anathema to real understanding and have very little or no place in a discussion between reflective people.
2a) Don't commit the Fallacy of Division-- I hope that many of the people
posting here will represent or develop politically eclectic views that
can't be captured by resorting to political party affiliations.
3) The point isn't to win converts. It's to gain understanding (for
yourself) and provide an understanding of your own position (for
everyone else).
4) Debate, discuss, argue-- dialogue is important, but you're not going to 'win' a conversation here, so don't resort to debate competition tactics of obfuscation, etc.
Be clear. Be Concise.
5) Be willing to question your own assumptions about the issues and their implications. Leave pride in the comments section of HuffPo or Breitbart.
I want this to be a collaborative effort to tease out the fundamental issues at stake in politics, society, and global developments. As such, everything explained above is open for change based on input.