Political discourse has dropped off a cliff. No one could blame people for this. The political problems of today are massive in scale, existential in importance, and often deeply personal.
However, this is keeping anything from being done. This will continue. People will drive their party to take action, which will cause a backlash effect, halting progress in any direction.
Some people believe that the only way forward is the complete breakdown of the social order. These people are waiting for the violence to start. But we have to believe in a better way, or else we will eventually wind right back up where we are. No political system lasts forever, and even if your particular political utopia takes place, it can eventually devolve into what we have now.
What we need to avoid this is better tools - better tools for making decisions, better tools for informing the public, and better tools to direct our area of focus.
One of the things that I believe holding us back on this point is the present-day structure of political disagreements. That is to say - little or no structure at all.
When there are disagreements on a political point, the most productive way, currently, to resolve these disagreements (or at least air them out) is political debate. Ask yourself - is even the most well-run and polite political debate the best way to present an argument for the general public to make an assessment of who is correct for themselves?
First of all, it's nearly impossible to address every argument and piece of evidence provided. Arguments spread out like an infinitely deep tree structure - every argument can have one or more counter-argument, which can all be supported by one or more pieces of evidence, which can all have issues, and all those issues can have counter-points, and all those counter-points can have counter-points, ad infinitum… Even if you could present this in the theoretically perfect debate, and no one could follow it - and even if you could, you would have to look up all the citations for yourself. Even after all that research, there is little way for you to contribute to the argument other than start a whole new debate from scratch, which likely would not be perfect!
I propose that a Wiki-like structure is a more ideal way to structure an argument on any topic.
The initial topic of argument can be laid out with points and supporting arguments from each side. One or more counter-arguments can be li
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