If you don't want to give an explanation, that's your prerogative. I just expected that if you're going to stand in the way of something very important and fairly non-controversial, for you to have a reason to.
If you don't understand or care about what is on offer, you just shouldn't vote.
So far the opposition has been two people saying they don't like the Constitution as is so they're engaging in the pointless exercise of voting for a nicer version of what already exists, and one person saying he didn't pay any attention and voted nay out of reflex.
I'm glad that most other people have been reasonable, though. This is a good step forward in the goal of consolidation and really, the biggest step, if ratified.
As usual, you have mischaracterized what I said. I see no reason to amend the constitution as it is currently drafted for the sake of amending it. The current text reads just fine. It is up to the people who propose changes to the constitution to tell us why change is necessary. Unless they do that, I will not vote for any proposed change to the constitution.
The burden is NOT on ordinary voters to try to figure out why a constitutional change is supposedly necessary.
What is this goal of consolidation?
If you're going to vote for or against something I do expect you to actually know what the hell something is. Some sort of basic idea. Voting isn't compulsory; you have the choice to pass up the vote if you're uninformed.
I suspect, however, that even if it was thoroughly explained to you, you would vote nay anyway.
Consolidation is a goal of our Administration as an alternative to both doing absolutely nothing to improve the game and instituting or attempting to make radical changes. As part of that goal, PS has tried to work on DoFA reform (though that's sluggish due in part to few people understanding the issue) and we've both worked on consolidating the statute.
The reason for us doing this was because of the fact that our statute and Constitution have been continuously updated and patched over for over 5 years now. Yet we've made no serious effort at cleaning anything up. People are always at a loss at what statute says, as there are often more than a handful of laws on the topic and all either conflict with each other or are so scattered throughout the statute, that it's difficult to tack it all down.
To deal with the statute problem, I wrote two pieces of legislation the Senate dutifully passed: The first was the
First Major Wiki Reform Act that repealed or moved
61 pieces of statute from the main page to a newly created "Repealed Statute" page to easily distinguish between what is current law and what is not current law. It also instituted the new policy of wiki'ing things by
month and Senate session, instead of just the number of the Senates with no specific date.
The second proposal to this effect was the
Omnibus Trade Reorganization & Wiki Consolidation Act which moved 30 pieces of statute to the repealed page and organized all our trade laws into one neat little package. Did you know we had over 30 pieces of trade law scattered throughout the statute? It made determining our trade policies a
nightmare.The Constitution has a similar problem. It's patchwork and old. Pieces of it were repealed or modified years ago and those changes confuse people because you would have to go to the specific Amendment page to find those pages, as the Constitution is rarely updated in a timely manner, and the titles for the Amendments are simple "Amendment No. ___" instead of anything descriptive. For newbies and veterans alike, it makes reading the Constitution difficult and even the Senate has gotten confused at what is actually in force and what isn't in force, both with the Statute and the Constitution.
That's why PS and I proposed, during the Presidential campaign, our rough draft and proposal that we consolidate all Amendments into a new Constitution that roots out all the oudated and repealed parts, so we all know and easily understand what is actually in force. There were no major changes to anything critical. It is just another proposal in our long goal of a consolidated and easier to understand set of game mechanics.
They're small steps we admit, but PS and I recognized before that big changes failed because they had their sights set too high, and in the end, our same crippled statute and constitution remained in place. We took a different approach. Baby steps. By making small and uncontroversial game improvements now, we can improve the game even more later. But even if we didn't, we knew this would be a good thing no matter what.
No secret motives, no evil conspiracies. Just a little polish the game needs after years of rust.
Poll
