1) Votes are tied to comments inherently
2) People can argue with those comments
3) Eventually, when a consensus may be reached in the follow up comments (by having most objections to an argument downvoted to oblivion I guess)
4) If so, the thread is replaced with a stub that summarizes it (maybe participants can vote on the person who they'd like to summarize the thread)
5) People can go on to argue with that stub
Might be neat. The intent would be to create a system that is more directly acrimonious, with the hope that we could eventually actually snip off tangents and create a high-quality argument on a topic as a community. I don't know if it actually is possible to do enough cat-herding, such that an actual high quality argument is produced, but it would be an interesting experiment.
There are lots of details that would have to be sorted out, for example it would probably be necessary to group posts as "jointly in support of argument(X).point(Y)" in a way that makes it possible to respond to them jointly with a single counterargument, while still keeping the system from devolving into two sides with horns intractably locked.