Prison reform and single-payer healthcare are major issues for me.
Imagine that I decided to use my single-person veto to veto every bill that did not include an acceptable solution to one of those two problems? It sounds like a good idea to force my priorities to the top, right?
Now imagine someone else has a different opinion from mine. They oppose universal healthcare, and want to be "tough on crime." They veto any bill that does include either of those.
All it takes is two people, in a country of over 300 million, to completely shut down the government.
Education doesn't lead to identical opinions, jar. It doesn't lead to better consensus building, or better ability to compromise. People with similar educational backgrounds and intelligence still have differences in opinion, sometimes strongly so.
With a single-person veto, any statistically insignificant person can shut down the entire system regardless of what anyone else wants. You'd need truly 100% participation, there's no room at all for anyone at all to be stubborn.
It's just a pipe dream, jar. It's not even remotely a good idea.
Actually, education can lead to consensus building, in fact it is essential. Part is learning the results of NOT building a consensus.
Says you. For your little plan, you need more than "can," you need "100% always does."
I say this now, you will never get 100% of the population of the nation to agree on anything. All it takes is one idiot, one lunatic, or one person with a strongly held different opinion. One is an awfully small number. There is no amount of education (unless "education" is translated as "using one of my three wishes from that genie") that can guarantee universal buy-in for building consensus regardless of subject matter.
Yes, it may well be a pipe dream, but in the long run, I also believe it is the only hope.
The only hope? Your one solution is the only way to potentially save the political future of the nation?
I think you just proved my point yourself. All it takes is two people who believe they have the "only" solutions, and for those solutions to differ, to freeze the entire system.
Some men just want to watch the world burn, and jar is one of them.
I think jar's just a guy who's gotten really attached to his idea to the point where he's no longer rationally examining the real feasibility of the plan. Happens all the time, it's ironically part of the cause of the very problem his idea is intended to solve.
But impossible solutions aren't a "hope" for anything at all. They're just fantasies.
So? Everyone has beliefs, and some are more valid than others. This belief falls into the realm of impossibility. Are we not to criticize your belief because it's just "your opinion?"
I also said that it was a goal.
Which would be fine if simply working toward the goal would have an effect. Unfortunately, with a single-person veto, you need universal cooperation, not just majority or even super-majority. Partial success results in a deadlocked system, which means you'll never attain the goal, never receive the benefits of the system.
Finally I have not said that I wanted to impose anything on anyone.
Why would that be relevant? You don't have the ability to impose it on anyone, so your desire in that regard is rather moot either way.
You presented an idea. That idea is completely unrealistic as a system of human political government. We criticized that idea based on its very significant and obvious flaws. At what point does whether you support "imposition" of the idea come into play at all?
Oakland is heating up, with groups of anarchists deciding to spray and break windows.
At least some of the protestors tried to stop the vandalism, putting themselves in harms way. The principle of 'The whole World is Watching' applies both ways, but I suspect like the masked police officers, the masked vandals will not be found and prosecuted.
One thing I can be absolutely certain is that as long as we do not work towards that goal we will not achieve that goal.
The "you can't win if you don't play" defense?
Jar, we're not even talking about lottery odds here. The likelihood of gaining sufficient consensus to deal with a single-person veto in a nation of 300+ million on any subject, even with additional undefined "education" (hint: "education" is not a magic word that conveys additional meaning or a mechanism, you need to specify how your "education" is supposed to increase the likelihood of consensus to 100%), is practically zero.
We can't even get 300+ million people to agree that the holocaust was bad. Or that it even [i]happened.[i]
Your single-line responses don;t serve to add to your argument, jar.
We can already do nothing. We're good at doing nothing. We have so much gridlock that it would be our major national export if anyone wanted to buy it.
And if we start early enough in educating the electorate they will learn that to get anything accomplished it will be necessary to build a consensus.
So, we start educating people now ... and in seventy years, when everyone living is dead, we might be prepared for your new political system ... when our present educational system still leaves 10% of people wrong about what seven times eight is? I mean, that's not even a matter of opinion, it's fifty-six. Twenty-nine percent of Americans think that the sun goes round the earth. But you want education to deliver a complete political consensus, such that if we can't reach consensus we can't do anything?
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