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Originally Posted by Frownland
How would you answer the questions you asked?
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As much as I appreciate this exercise in socratic dialogue, the questions I asked were simply there to illustrate that the question, as you proposed it, was too broad to be practically useful here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Frownland
It was sloppily used tbh, but I meant that the republican versus democrat comparisons are a false dilemma which is something to be avoided. Maybe thinking about it like this will help: you ask people if they want an Xbox, their choices are yes and no, but if you ask people if they want an Xbox or a Playstation, the focus shifts from the value of a console to which one is better or worse. It's meant to obscure.
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I haven't brushed up on my knowledge of logical fallacies lately, but I thought I had a decent understanding of what a false dilemma was, I just wasn't sure exactly how you were applying it to my question - and perhaps I'm still not. If I'm to ask,
"What is the cause of the racial disparity between the Republican party and the Democratic party?",
I'm not presenting any kind of dilemma, false or not - it's not a "this or that" kind of thing, nor am I trying to obscure anything. I'm simply asking for causality of an effect that we see in reality. Right?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Frownland
I also still don't really know what your broader question is.
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I don't know if I could distill it any further than:
"What is the cause of the racial disparity between the Republican party and the Democratic party?"
I expect the answers to this question to be generally similar - something along the lines of: "Democrats have better served the interests of black and hispanic voters" or "Many people in these disparate racial groups are poor/lower-class and Democrats have better served the interests of the poor" - as elph said, it's not exactly a tough question to answer, but I thought that perhaps it could be a springboard into further, more interesting discussions, similar to what you proposed with your question, i.e. "How well have these leaders actually represented their voters - and how would we quantify that?"
Perhaps you conduct your discusssions with your interlocutors differently, but I somewhat prefer to start at ground zero - and carry on discussions from there (generally - when I'm not feeling cynical or sarcastic, that is).