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Comment by RiverCrochet | Hacker News Reader

I don't often discuss politics with my niece; we've actually had physical altercations before. But I mustered some courage and brought this up to her, and she had the following to say:

"The two party system forces people who advocate for issue X to also have to advocate for Y and Z, when they may really only care about X. Another factor; the decay of respect of and audiences for traiditional mass media, and the rise of personal "bubble" media such as social media has also forced mass communications to be more personal if one wants to reach people, and various political forces are adapting to the new landscape."

I'm not sure if population density has any effect on political discussions more than discussions in general.

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i think your niece is on to something. I'd like to develop it further.

I think the problem is that when you talk politics, the subject or your position are irrelevant. You can even extend that to what the parties themselves do and say (the american uniparty has been a common complaint for many voters).

Why ? At the core, the issue are the ideas that each party represents, and how those ideas label you immediately with your peers, regardless of what you actually advocate, or what the party line is on a given subject.

Take a statue. The republican position is to not build it. The democrat is to build it. Just having a conversation about the merits of the statue automatically puts you on a spectrum.

If you are against the statue, you must be an uncaring republican. If you are for the statue, you must love doing charity with other people's money.

And so on.

This is in spite of direct evidence that both parties don't seem to care about americans, and the unrestrained use of their tax dollars.

Politics in the USA earns you a label, for free, that is not even accurate or deserved.

I've found that a way to side-step this is to NOT talk about solutions; because solutions are always political; but to talk about problems - and not even the causes of the problems, but the problems themselves. Discuss the problems, and "what would you do" kind of hypotheticals, and you can find common ground with almost anyone.

I do something similar.

First, you need to come to common ground about the diagnosis of the issue. Only then can you start to talk about a prescription. If interlocutors skip the first step, there is no hope of agreeing on the second.

Silly me, here I thought the whole point of politics was to solve problems, when really it's just to endlessly whine about them at teatime.

My godmother and I had an interesting discussion about this. I don't agree with her, but here is what she said:

"The only problem politics can solve is generally preventing competing tribes from killing themselves in physical war.

Politics itself is incapable of solving any other problem, but could be used as a tool to solve your or your tribe's local problems if interference with other tribes is an issue. Solution duration will typically be very linearly dependent upon its amount of energy, motivation, and resources."

I don't agree with the above view, it has a fatalistic view of humanity that I emotionally can't accept, according to my religion anyway (which currently helps me out with food). I think that politics can definitely solve issues, and it solves issues for actual people and not corporations every day. It's just a matter of being a good citizen and contributing when you can.

I think that your niece is absolutely right about this.

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