[TeMPOraL]

I agree. And I suspect most political disagreements would be solvable if all participants of a debate approached it in good faith, and were willing to dig into core disagreements about moral issues. The moral disagreements may or may not turn out to be irreconcilable, but there's just so much wiggle room in the implementation details, the details that are objective, that an agreement could be reached regardless.

The main source of problems, however, is that not all participants engage in good faith. Some treat arguments not as tools of truth-seeking, but as instruments of war, trying to win some influence for themselves. Pretty much anything humans create can be gamed by people who start treating it as an instrument to something else; I'm not sure we can even do something about it. Are manipulative people always going to win?

[jadedhacker]

This is not true. If you dig deep as I did with a family member, you get to a question like "So if they can't pay, they should ultimately just die?" and get a hemed and hawed yes.

[tunesmith]

Maybe it's the optimist in me, but if they hemmed and hawed, I'm thinking they might have been internally rocked a bit, and might be subtly changing their view on their own timetable.