Politics

The politics conference is a place for the exchange of ideas, just like the login banner says. It’s a place to talk about how things are run and how they should be run. It’s a place to learn about what’s going on in the world.

Politics is one of the three things polite people don’t discuss at cocktail parties, because it leads to disputes, arguments, and the occasional bloodshed. It can be emotional stuff, and most of us have strong opinions about the world.

But the discussion of politics, the collision of ideas in the intellectual market, is a necessary and desirable function of any free society. Our ideas aren’t much good unless they can stand up to examination in the heat of argument.

The balance between politeness and conflict is a particularly important one to the politics conference. In a conference like this, it’s as important to keep an open mind and *listen* to other people as it is to put forth your own ideas. In short, we’d like this conference to be a place where people can learn from other people *and* test their own ideas in the arena of words.

And most of all, we’d like people to feel a little more enlightened about the world when they leave.

Hosted by: Hal Royaltey (hal)

Shortcut: go politics