About This Blog

The name of this politics blog, "Reasonable Arguments," is aspirational. I believe that reasonable people can disagree, but also that reasoned arguments can moderate positions and enable people, if not always to find common ground, to at least see the sources of their differences. And that itself can promote further productive discussion.

What I have little tolerance for is the unprincipled or purposely deceptive argument, and those are all to common in today's politics. I believe that people on either side of an issue should be called out when they make claims that they know will be misleading, even if technically true.

In the attempt to sway voters or rally the faithful, I hear far too many of our political leaders presenting issues in all-or-nothing terms. Rarely does any idea lend itself to an uncomplicated, risk-free or monetarily-free solution. As the saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of the good: we don't need to require perfection to make things better. We, and our politicians, shouldn't need to ignore possible downsides to policies and proposals to conclude that, on balance, we should or should not enact or continue various programs.

I think it's important to recognize that what we see is tempered by how we think; we all have preconceptions that affect what we choose to believe and what we don't. But we have the power to at least try to be self-critical, to engage in the imperfect attempt to asses the facts before we come to conclusions. Even the attempt to do so will lead to better political discussion than we have today.

I'm sure my biases will be evident in some of my posts, but I do my best to avoid knee-jerk reactions. I hope others will do the same.