The Three Axes Of Political Arguments

freedom-or-safety.com

Great--another graph that simplifies political discourse into a few vague terms that are, themselves, highly politicized.

Even if something like this were somehow representative of the range of political discourse, I struggle to see what real value it would bring. I agree that we should not allow others to set the rules of a political discussion as a choice between X and not X, but how is limiting ourselves to thinking in terms of just three criteria, instead of just one, much better?

I agree. The key takeaway here is that there are many different dimensions to politics, even on a single topic. That was hopefully clear already to most reasoning people, and something that they try to keep in mind as they discuss and reason about laws and events...

However, it's certainly not a sparse 3 dimensions. It's an N-dimensional space for some high value of N, if not infinite. There are as many ways to frame a political topic as there are ways that we live and interact in society and the economy.

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