Welsh government commits to making lying in politics illegal
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is a genuinely insane idea and goes against essentially all democratic thought, which always wanted to give political opposition some means of participation.
The underlying problem of lying in politics exists. Banning it is one approach, what about education so that the average voter can recognise lies?
Personally banning things isn’t my cup of tea yet societal it seems to be the easiest, cheapest and laziest solution to most problems.
There's no problem of "fake truths" in politics. It's a recently made-up "problem", used to justify controlling.
Politics is the very process of working out disagreements on what is the truth and what needs to be done. You can't agree on truth in advance.
Politics is the process of lying so well that you can get things your way.
The problem is as old as large scale human societies. There are hundreds upon hundreds of ways those groups have dealt with this problem. Banning lies is the same as criminalizing the opposition, as politics is also a conflict about truth.
Do you believe that a political situation should be allowed to exist where your staunchest political opponents control the definition of truth and gets to prosecute based on that definition? Of course not, it is something so horrifying that it seems reasonable to use violence to prevent it.
How does banning lies criminalise the opposition? Because those in power will claim they lied? That’s why there are courts of law for both parties to state their case.
Defamation cases abound, these being classic examples of people lying about others. It only seems fair to extend that to politics and partly remove the immunity enjoyed by politicians.
Surely, if the people in power have such power that they can force the judicial system concludes that an opponent has lied when there is no proof, then they can already arrest their opponents using a ton of already existing laws. They just need to say "they killed an old lady", and it is done.
Because politics is about finding facts. It is the process of reconciling different viewpoints.
The winner in politics has won on fact finding, the looser lost.
By definition the opposition are liars in the political conflict.
I don't and it is irrelevant.
>How does banning lies criminalise the opposition?
Because politics is about factual disagreements.
>Defamation cases abound, these being classic examples of people lying about others. It only seems fair to extend that to politics and partly remove the immunity enjoyed by politicians.
But the court is politics. That is why we have politics, because people disagree. The political process resolves factual disagreements, criminalizing lies is criminalizing loosing.
I am bewildered reading so many comments that are A-OK with this this proposal prima facie.
Thus, banning "lies" is just a backdoor way of centralizing political power into the entity that gets to decide what is "truth" for legal reasons.
The real problem here is the idea that a political entity can determine "truth". People on average have a huge cognitive blind spot around labels and have a hard time processing the idea that a label can be placed on something and the label can be just... wrong. It sounds great to have a political body label things as "truth" and then punish "lies"... but there is no more connection between the "truth" label they would hand out and the actual truth than exists currently. You're just asking to be told more soothing and subtle lies rather than disturbing and blatent lies, and while that may feel better that's not actually progress.
To be honest, you can see that even today in our culture. As near as I can see there's still a lot of people, even yea verily here on Hacker News, that have not deeply processed the fact that just because something is labelled "misinformation" that means nothing whatsoever as to its truth value. It's nothing more than a particularly successful way for some politicians to label what other politicians say as lies, which they've done since time immemorial, but this one still slips past people's cognitive defenses for some reason, even now. I expect we're past the halfway mark on that one being used up, though.
You could design the law to only target damaging lies, such as false election fraud claims. This increases the bar on the prosecution and makes it harder to get convictions, and will make it so that frivolous lies are less likely to be prosecuted.
I'm less excited about the actual convictions and more excited about the long-run deterrence effect and cultural shift that could happen.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/22/dawn-butler...
> That does not seem controversial
Surely the existence of the news story at the root of this thread is evidence that the particular rule of decorum is controversial? That having liars in power is worse than having people call out those liars?
They can put some protection on that ahead of time. But it's not that different from not having this institution at all and just flooding the media with lies about the opposition since you're not liable. So worst case things stay the same; best case they improve.
Because in most western states it is extremely hard to jail someone for a political crime.
It doesn't happen because the most important thing to a working democracy is a powerful opposition. And in most western countries oppositions have more than enough political power to prevent this.
If your argument is that the judicial system will be captured by the power, then, why is this law a problem: if the judicial system is captured, they can already arrest their opponents by just saying "they rob a bank yesterday".
Politics is about finding facts. The winner, by definition has won in that discussion, the looser has lost. That is what political systems seek to accomplish.
In fact, in Europe, the definition of democracy is more of a system where you accept that there are different opinions and try to work to a consensus even if you are a majority. Due to that, there are rules to protect minorities even if the majority don't like or care for them.
But failing that, AT THE VERY LEAST can we please have transparency in government? Hiding information is A FAR MORE IMPORTANT ISSUE and it supports lies that get countries into wars via the spy agencies and cover up the failures of the elected officials to deescalate. And later it is “declassified” and “mistakes were made.” Look:
Facts are the subject of political debate. If there is no disagreement about facts politics ceases to exist. It would be just one group saying "I believe A" and another group saying "I believe B", no communication could take place.
On most subjects people would come to an agreement after a while, if they were forced to be honest.
As with any law anyhow, of course there have to be enough judicial safeguards.
This is completely delusional. Genuinely surprised to hear such a ridiculous thing.
See the Speech & Debate Clause.
I think there is a lot of nuance when it comes to determining truth too. In germany for example the AFD is full of climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers. And even when there is a public discourse and plenty of information to discredit their lies, they keep growing in popularity - so even if truth presents itself, it is apparently of little consequence to their political power. And to turn that problem around: I think we are kind of in trouble when truth is primarily determined by democratic consensus and history has a lot of examples to show that. Furthermore for different types of statements truth has fairly different forms. If some politican made up that eating 4000kcal of raw sugar every day is the healthiest way to live and coincidentally his family runs a sugar plant then it's incredibly easy to discredit that based on scientific evidence from mechanistic studies to randomized human control trials. Now this is a case that currently is not handled in the political system and apparently impresses a significant amount of voters. At least from my perspective the lies used in european politics are in their quality not very far from the example given. Now what kind of punishment there should be for lying exactly and in which case I can not say. But leaving it up to the voters is showing to be increasingly fragile imho.
The theater is the political culture war. Millions of human lives will die in the chase for politically charged click bait.
In no sane world should this not be punished severely.
"I see homeless people every day on the way to work, I'm having trouble making ends meet, the economy sucks."
"Fact Check: False, The economy is fine, take a look at NVIDA shares!"
The assertions that "we won" or it is "over" or it was "at very little cost" are all one man's opinions, however.
Lying is apparently a trait that differentiates us from other animals. Humanity is another.
Our societies are still ecosystems, and cannot escape from the rules thereof. Competition, hierarchy, and economic inequality are emergent properties of ecosystems. There's nothing inhumane or immoral about an ecosystem.
It took us ~50,000 years to get to computers. We're not biologically different from humans then. Civilization itself is a new mechanism of transmitting information that dolphins do not possess (because they've not passed the tipping point) which allows transmission and accumulation across generations exponentially faster than DNA and culture (which dolphins do possess). We're also anatomically rather more suited to building things than dolphins.
Btw. guess who has more homeless people Germany or the US.
> this not be punished severely
Punished by whom? Under what authority? Which comes to power how? Until these questions can be answered, there's no point in saying what "should be".
The same way doctors are punished if they are abusing their patients, or drug dealers who are selling drugs, or rioters that burn cars, or ...
No one is going to build a brand new parallel tribunal to just process the infractions on this law, and it will never fly as it is a clear violation of power separation.
If now you are saying that the current judicial system is controlled by the politicians in power, then this law is harmless: they can already arrest their opponent by just saying "they killed an old lady, let's have a trial to see if they are a murderer"
It is just extending the laws that already apply to parliament or judicial system to a broader set of situation easily identifiable. Pretending that it is equivalent to be able to raid a political opponent because they said "that dress doesn't make you look fat" is just ridiculous.
We already deal with these situations, and there are easy and proven solutions to avoid misuse.
What is proposed here is that the truth is decided on a judicial trial based on facts and proofs.
If you think it will not work because the politicians control the judicial system, then this new law is 100% harmless, because they can already very easily arrest their opponent by just saying "they killed an old lady, let's have a trial to see if they are a murderer".
Lawyers are expensive. Lawsuits are painful and time consuming.
If you can tie your opponent up in court - whether they win or lose becomes irrelevant - because you prevented them from spending time and money in the campaign. Further, if you have a friendly (or they have a hated) journalist, now you have coverage and headlines that are negative towards them.
It does not happen, because there is a political cost of the public opinion of doing that.
If indeed your opponent has done nothing wrong, it will be obvious to the public and clear that you are a piece of sh*t. If you have enough power that you don't care about that, then you already have plenty of other ways, way easier and efficient, to get rid of your political opponents.
And also, this is not how it works: you cannot start a trial just by labeling an opinion to be an assertion of truth, the same way you cannot start a trial by just saying "I consider that grass blades are human, so my political opponent who has mown their lawn are murderers". You can bring the case to the authorities, but they will be the one deciding if it's an offense or not, and your political opponent will not be tied up in court until then.
You forget that the "authorities" are appointed by politicians.
If you're left-wing, would you be comfortable being tried by someone appointed by Trump?
If you're right-wing, would you be comfortable being tried by someone appointed by Biden?
(Please forgive the US references, I'm not familiar with Welsh politics and don't know the names of politicians who would cause similar fear in political opponents there.)
----
Edit:
Rather than arguing about hypotheticals or foreign equivalents, let's consider a specific case cited in TFA:
> During the debate, the Labour member Alun Davies accused the leader of the Tories in Wales, Andrew RT Davies, of tweeting a “direct lie” earlier on Tuesday that Labour want to pay illegal immigrants £1,600 a month.
In fact, Labour did pay £1,600 a month to certain immigrants who were seeking, but had not yet been granted, asylum. The only "lie" in question is the use of the term "illegal immigrants". That's the kind of blurry political line that Labour wants to criminalize.[1]
And it's a far, far more blurry line than murder. It's almost certain to be decided solely based on the political beliefs of the judge and jury.
I'm not talking about corruption here. I'm talking about the kind of controversial questions where "truth" is really open to debate.
1: https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/wales-is-not-giving-1600-...
"VERDICT: False. The Welsh government ran a pilot project that included financial help for asylum-seeking children, not illegal migrants."
This is what I don't understand: if indeed the authorities are in the pocket of the politicians, how this law change anything, they already have plenty of easier way to attack their opponents.
In US, the mentality is very bad and people may have low morality and ethic. In Europe, being appointed by a politician does not mean you will be their lackey.
But it is not even that: it's not like someone can just say "got you! now you will be trialed by my friend Ben". There are several layers before and after that mean that an accusation is only prosecuted when there is a large consensus that the prosecution is justified.
I know that in US the lines are very blurred because each politician is saying "it's a political trial" even when there is credible ground to investigate, but that's more a question of people being uneducated than a real system. In the large majority of the cases (there is always one or two outliers that don't prove much), every big prosecutions on politicians in US are "normal" and would have happened even in a parallel universe where their political opponents were not touching any judicial string.
Again: if you are claiming that this law will harm opposition, then you are not saying that "human are not neutral", you are saying that everyone involved in the process are magically all aligned in exactly on side. If there are people biased "in the other direction", then they will be biased to say the accused is innocent, and it cancels out.
The politician said that "[the Welsh government is] dishing out £1,600 to anyone who wants to rock up and claim they are crossing the Channel illegally".
As your article states, on the 635 persons who received this money, only 67 were migrant, the 568 others were not migrant at all.
So, no, it's not a blurry line: they had a grant that was targeting children, with 90% of the beneficiaries being good ol' locals, and this politician invented that they are giving 1600 to all illegal migrants that claim they crossed the Channel illegally, which is totally incorrect any ways you turn it around.
You are incorrect when you say "the only incorrect thing is 'illegal'" (you probably just read the last sentence without realizing that they just say that _some_ migrants got the grant): not only this grant is not going to illegal migrant, it is also not going to all migrants (only a small fraction qualifies), and it's not even FOR the migrants, it is for the children, including, in big majority, the local ones. Additionally, the politician said that you can just "rock up and claim you are crossing the Channel illegally" to get this money, which is obviously not true.
On top of that, this politician was contacted to explain to him that this grant was not for migrant and certainly not given by just rocking up, so he was totally aware that it was misleading. But he continued to insist on his fantasy. So, it is also a good example that this law does not target honest mistake, but people who don't care if what they say is misleading or not.
If what you say is just a "blurred line with the truth open to debate", then the following sentence is also "just a blurred line": "the Tories are cutting taxes for people who wants to rock up and claim they are crossing the Channel illegally" just because they indeed proposed to reduce tax in UK. After all, legal migrant will also benefit from this tax cut, and in fact you will not have this cut by "rocking up and claiming you are crossing the Channel illegally", so, by your own standard, this sentence is perfectly fine.
In fact, thank you for bringing this example: this is a good example of how some politicians are stirring fear and hatred based on total fabrications, and it is a good example showing that these politicians should paid the consequences of their actions and be punished.
Can you explain in more detail how the Welsh proposal works along with your sources?
It's like saying "they say they want a new law that reduce car speed to Xmph on those new kind of road, it's crazy, it means that they can fine me if I run too fast on GTA5". It does not mean that I have sources or insider knowledge when I say that it is unrealistic because it never happened with plenty of similar and that if they can do that, why don't they arrest you when you run over pedestrians in GTA5.
Then steel man your argument. Every example you give is a wild far-fetched one that is clearly away from any area of ambiguity or debate.
Challenge yourself by looking at the grey areas and explain where the line should be.
Just to be clear: there are grey areas in the question of "what is the truth", but this is not new, as "what is the truth" is the job of the judicial system since forever. The judicial system is built around that, around the fact that what is true for someone is not always true for someone else and how to find a good balance.
You presume incorrectly both my reasoning and my conclusion.
I believe 100% that they see and understand how this can be misused. That's their intent. They likely believe this is a weapon they can use against their rivals while also believing it can never be turned against them.
From working in DC for 10 years - through PATRIOT, McCain-Feingold, NDAA (various), and more both on the Hill and at Justice - I learned there are two political parties in DC but not the ones you suppose. It's really incumbents/establishment vs challengers. Prior to 2016, most of the other stuff was just noise.
*Btw, you've been explaining judicial procedure to a number of lawyers on this thread. It's amusing but unproductive.
Maybe you see that from the US point of view where politics is reduced to a pathetic childish power fight. But the fact that in US any single law has the potential to oppress people does not mean that in other places, normal laws cannot be a good thing. The problem is not in this law proposal, the problem is that in US the situation is very bad.
edit: also, are you really saying that they want to manipulate and lie to the citizen and that the best way they've found is to ... make lying to the citizen more difficult? They could push for plenty of laws with the excuse of security or helping the economy or ... that can be misuse to attack their opposition without being able to be used against them. Honestly, if indeed they are pushing this law because they will think it's easier for them to lie with this law than without, they probably not smart enough to use it properly and this law is, again, at worst harmless.
Politics exists to resolve factual disputes.
>What is proposed here is that the truth is decided on a judicial trial based on facts and proofs.
Which is literally a totalitarian idea. It removes politics and resolves all questions in a centrally adjudicated bureaucracy.
>If you think it will not work because the politicians control the judicial system
If this law comes into pass they don't. A court can jail a politician for whatever it deems false.
Justice systems are not designed to decide on such broad and open-ended questions that arise in politics all the time. Questions like mask-wearing or not, WMDs in Iraq, Wuhan COVID origins, whether capitalism is harmful or not... does God exist... The list goes on. A much better proposal is to improve public education, fund journalism, enforce transparency in government, separation of corporate lobbying from the state, etc. A final arbiter on "truth" is chilling to democracy, and besides it, violates Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. It's also anti science.
I think the problem in the discussion here is that some people see that _in some cases_ we cannot tell what is true or not, and conclude, incorrectly, that the law we are talking about is pretending that in such case, someone will have to say "it's true" or "it's false". That's ridiculous.
If there is no way to know if it's true or false, THE JUSTICE SYSTEMS WILL SIMPLY SAYS "WE CANNOT TELL, CASE DISMISSED".
This idea that there will be a "final arbiter" that will flip a coin for open-ended question is just really really really stupid: the justice system IS ALREADY EXPOSED TO THAT and does not act in this stupid way.
For all of the examples you have given, there are other laws that would allow people to sue. If someone is forced to wear a mask by their boss, they may try to sue based on "abusive employer" laws. If someone believe the capitalism is harmful, they can certainly sue based on "assault and battery". ... They can try to sue, but they will get their case dismissed, not because the justice has answered the question on mask-wearing or whether capitalism is harmful, but because the justice has concluded it's an open question.
But it is not what the law we are talking about is about. It is not "deciding if X is true or false", it is "had the politician indeed the believable proofs that what they were saying was recognized as truth".
You make 2 errors:
1) you don't understand that the conclusion is not "this is true or this is false", but "this is true, this is false, or this is not possible to tell if it's true or false".
2) you don't understand that it is not because it is impossible to know if X is true or false that someone cannot lie about X. It is impossible for me to know how old you are, but if I say "I know that calf is 21 years old", then, I'm lying. Even if you are 21 years old, I have lied, because I did NOT know it. And it is easy to prove it, even if you are 21 years old, as you can demonstrate that I'm not in position to even know who you are.
It is not, however, legal to lie when you've sworn in court to not lie, whether or not people get hurt. The rationale for making deliberate lying illegal for politicians is because they're your sworn representatives in government, or vying to be, not because it hurts people. Any number of legal things you can do will result in claims of hurt from other people.
The dishonesty here is just completely disgusting.
"The culture war will result in millions of human deaths" is one hell of a prediction.
It's the culture war because it's not a real war! Casualties from people arguing on the internet are very rare.
Try to think of some of what you hate of your country's politics, or some f* up that recently happened, and you'l easily find out that a prohibition to lie in public statements for politicians would have prevented it.
It invalidates politics as a whole.
If you just imagine some scenarios I think you will quickly see how game-changing it would be (in a positive way).
It invalidates the typical current politics, which is a contest of lies and pretense
I would like to see how they enforce this. It would be nice to sanction deceptions whether by stupidity or deliberation.
On the other hand, I would not want to see somebody sanctioned because in the heat of the moment of a live debate they accidentally misstate some facts or incorrectly draw an inference. In that case the speech is not entirely truthful but there was no intention to deceive either. Debates seek to educate the electorate about a candidates mastery of the subject matter and their ability to qualify their position against a challenged response.
Also who is responsible if you transmit lie somebody told you as a fact.
Many wonder here in Germany if our politicians at the moment are somewhat less able mentally then they should be, but the root cause is their choice of information sources. If you got only people around you telling you one side of he story you do actually still believe that Ukraine is winning.
Lying means knowingly telling the false
(and have a even harder time believing that someone is against the idea)
Whatever is considered, not is, a 'lie' is more or less arbitrary.
UK can't do "midterm" because doesn't have fixed terms of office, just a maximum time between them — general elections can be called whenever the prime minister has a chat with the king about it.
[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/nina-jankowicz-resignation-disinfor...
If we can't trust politicians to tell the truth in public statements then that's the smaller problem. The bigger problem is: what are they doing the rest of the time when not in public? What kinds of decisions are they making and how are they exercising power? Being a liar and being a terrible leader goes hand in hand. This gives the impression of doing something useful when the best case scenario is that awful people can continue to exercise power, they just have to be a bit more careful what they say in public.
The real question is, how do you prevent terrible people from ending up in positions of power. But avoiding that requires changing how people come to power which nobody in power wants to do. So we get red herrings like this instead.
What case be made for perjury to be illegal and deliberate lying by politicians not illegal that doesn't prioritize the judiciary over the electorate? The choice is between rule by appointed elders or democracy, and our sovereignty, the legitimacy of our government, comes from democracy.
Politicians can even pretend to have wildly different interpretations of the facts in order to deceive the public. They had better not admit that they actually know the truth about those facts in their available communications, though.
edit: another benefit in the US would be that if political parties are fixing a primary, which they have every right to do as private organizations, they would not be able to coordinate this with the candidate themselves.
Lying to the electorate is as essential to democracy as lying to a jury is essential to the justice system.
I am kidding, but not entirely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
Usually it's when a politician names an alleged criminal, oligarch, corporation etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_privilege_in_the...
You are right that this suggestion is in opposition to that, in some ways, but it's also worth noting that the way not to be prosecuted is to continue with the strong presumption that lying to parliament is bad.
In practice this law would be more about official communications aimed at the press, where in the recent election we have seen the former government side engage in some pretty egregious lying without consequence, including misusing the work of non-partisan civil service functions.
The way I see it, we either reign in the 'firehose of falsehood' style of electioneering, or we put our future in the hands of the best (ie, worst) liars.
"But if we had laws like this, how would we have ever invaded Iraq and Afghanistan? Would you jail Biden for lying about student loans and pandemic payments, or Obama for lying about Roe v Wade and Guantanamo?! 98% of our politicians would be jailed!!" ... Exactly.
The devil is certainly in the details with something like this - but to say it can't be done (without even trying) is defeatist.
Not lying about Iraq would have been considered a 'lie'.
Those in power decides what is considered a lie or not.
... What?
> Those in power decides what is considered a lie or not.
Not necessarily. There are in fact ways to give that power to independent groups, and to protect them from capture. Diversified funding, transparent auditing and finances, whistleblower protections, short tenures, etc etc. Saying that it's just impossible is, again, awfully defeatist - and we can't afford not to try.
The UK doesn't have a separate layer of constitutional law that's harder to change than the rest, each government can pass or repeal any law as they desire, including a law that tries to force them to keep promises.
Time and time again the populous demonstrates it does not care about individually broken promises because we have aggregated power and choice far too much.
We often vote on representatives, but can't vote on individual issues, and even then binary, non-ranked voting further removed our individual power.
Lying in politics, in certain contexts, is already punishable: lying to parliaments has consequences the world over. Lying to Congress, lying to a British parliamentary committee, ministerial ethics codes that punish misleading parliament, lying to the Australian parliament, it's all punishable in various ways.
The big question to answer is this: why should a politician be able to tell a demonstrable lie using their official communications, without consequence? Their official social media presence, their official political status twitter feed.
Why should politicians not be expected to colour only within the lines, like we used to expect them to do in the era before social media?
What, exactly, is the problem with punishing a flat out, demonstrable lie by a politician? Why do people not imagine that a bipartisan/multipartite commission or an ombudsman can't manage that, when we have effective ombudsmen in the UK that ensure basic truth (that is, not flat out lies or misleading claims) in advertising, truth in financial services claims, laws that prevent lying about curing cancer etc.?
Why does everyone -- particularly US HNers -- have to assume measures like this are intrinsically fascist? Just because your own politics is infected with the spiritual offspring of Lee Atwater and Charles Coughlin doesn't mean we have to accept that same downward spiral in our own.
People in the UK believe politicians should want to be held to a higher standard, and we'd like them to try to get back to how they behaved before foreign social media platforms enabled them to lie at scale like drunken sailors with impunity.
Debate. An opposition with political power. Separation of powers. Federalism.
This is an ancient problem, which has been confronted by different societies in many ways. In no society has "banning lying" ever worked and it never will. Politics is about disagreement about facts.
> In no society has "banning lying" ever worked
Have you got a specific case in mind? I couldn't find one and multiple articles about Wales refer to it as the first country. So where has it not worked before?
Yes, namely that in all of political history I am not aware of a single case where an idea this awful was even attempted.
That only works when both sides have respect for the truth and facts and disagree in good faith. When one side becomes unhinged and unmoored from reality (cf Trump, UK Tories, etc.), things go horribly wrong.
Many political systems implement ethical guidelines and laws to minimize lying, especially in formal settings like courtrooms and official statements.
Why hold politics to a lesser standard?
> In no society has "banning lying" ever worked and it never will
There have been periods and societies where strong cultural or legal norms against lying have fostered more honest political environments. Ancient Athens had ostracism, where citizens could vote to exile those seen as harmful to the state, including habitual liars.
There used to be laws about lying through your teeth on news broadcasts.. While not perfect, removing them hasn't exactly been healthy for democracy, has it?
It won't help that much and will rarely succeed, but it's better than nothing. Definitely better than toothless, vague and potentially totalitarian legislations like the one described in the OP.
It's a period bound by topic, time, and location for a matter you were (likely) directly involved in or witnessed.
One folk (mis)understanding in the USA is that journalism will hold politicians to account. If that ever was the case, it's certainly not happening now.
We need something to counterbalance misinformation. Lest we succumb to mob rule and thereby forfeit our democracy to tyranny. h/t Aristotle
I'm completely fine with banning all political advertising. It serves zero purpose, is a net negative for society. Instead, candidates and parties would publish their agenda, platforms, proposed legislation, accomplishments, and misc critiques. They'd also have to focus on "the ground game", like doorbelling and townhalls.
Most campaign spending is on advertising. So next we eliminate most fund raising. Just publicly finance campaigns. It's cheaper (for society) overall.
Since > 2/3rds of a politician's time is spent fund raising, we just freed them up to do some actual legislating and governing. Woot.
I also want to establish trusts (or equiv) for investigative reporting. Just give journalists money (stipends) and see what they come up with. Like todays bloggers and podcasters, but without the patreon links. Publishers, editors, and other journalists will then pick up and boost worthy reporting. And the larger trusts (for research and publishing) can underwrite expenses as needed.
I'm bullish on innovations like Citizen Assemblies https://participedia.net/search?selectedCategory=all&query=c... and Citizen Juries. They're slow, deliberative democracy. Antithical to today's public discourse.
PS- At the end of the day, I support whatever reforms get our society to a multi-racial majoritarian democracy.
That said, policy work is already slow. A politic friend lobbys on behalf of working families. His org's very first legislative win was enacting modest praternity leave (IIRC). The smallest sliver of their agenda (basically a Nordic style safety net).
It took EIGHTEEN YEARS.
Similarly, in The Waxman Report, former Rep Henry Waxman relates the yeoman work of policy. Some of the reforms he worked on took THIRTY YEARS.
In comparison, maybe Citizen Assemblies aren't so bad.
It could be one of those counterintuitive "slow down to speed up" things.
Back when I managed teams, I flipped most of our workflows to front load everything. Hash all the major stuff at a project's launch. Everyone HATED it. Absolutely HATED all the DISCUSSION. Let's just get to work.
After ramming all my process crap down everyone's throat, my teams mostly ran themselves, always hit their deadlines, and made money. (And of course no one remembered all the initial strive.)
Alas, the major downside of "continuous process improvement" is the apparent requirement of having a benevolent dictactor, enforcing empowerment and delegation. (Oh, the irony.) Backsliding is so, so easy. The impulse to gatekeep and concern troll must always be clamped down.
Alas.
To finish off, I'm with you. Seems like even if "more democracy" is the best answer, we've probably run out of time.
Or maybe we need these ideas fleshed out, to have a plan ready, for the power vacuum resulting from tyranny's inevitable failure.
I just don't know.
You can't exactly fact check promesses, and politicians in power are already not held accountable for current laws, they just make commissions, inquiries, special counsels... until it goes away. Just another chess piece to be used in their political ping pong games, spending millions in the process, solving nothing
And on that terrible disappointment, it's time to continue our usual life. (c)
In a macabre way, I kind of admire those that try to legislate morality in a democracy. Good luck =3
Bad faith flat out liars do not respond to interrogation, because they do not feel the need to.
It's not that difficult to imagine a set of steps that return us to the pre-social-media days where politicians were expected to colour only within the lines, as a matter of ethics and principle.
And it would be better, not worse, than the kinds of lies that risk our democracies now.
I'd vote for Lord Bucket-head, as I think irrational covert evil simply shows a lack of resolve. =3
It does, unfortunately, go along with other problems we must solve, such as encouraging people to rebuild trust in media organisations, and encouraging media organisations to earn that trust.
In a random system, the errors of known facts should not be slanted toward any bias, but rather cancel out over time in a predictable manner.
Oh joy, a fresh bag of cheese goldfish crackers, nom nom nom =3
The use of fables, hyperbole, puffery or invoking of spiritual beliefs should not send a politician to jail.
Agreed. But the argument is about lying, which is not any of those things.
I am not convinced it could ever work, though maybe in a society with a king it is plausible. We certainly manage to define "lying" well enough to call it "perjury" when you do it in a courtroom after swearing an oath. So it can be done. But who will be the judge(s)?
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/306784...
Most of us think one guy lied more and worse than the other. But which one can we trust to appoint the people who determine which were lies and which not? Me: neither.
> For the record, virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump's characterization was wrong.
When it's clear to everyone that it's entirely a group of white supremacists, and someone says many of them actually are very fine people, to many that demonstrates an attempt to protect and legitimize the group and defend its atrocities by whitewashing the nature of its character.
There's a lot of historical evidence of Trump's affinity for white supremacist groups and of their affinity for him in return (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump) so it's not like this was out of the blue.
Personally I would say the given context above makes Biden's statement basically correct and Snopes's tag misleading (ok, I guess I did comment on it), which is I guess subjective.
Trump was pushing back on the journalist’s attempt to paint everyone who opposed tearing down confederate statues as white supremacists. That was wholly reasonable. My Italian American neighbors oppose tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus. Are they Nazis too?
If the way they express their feelings is by joining the Nazis For Christopher Columbus march where the way they express their support for Christopher Columbus is by chanting "Jews will not replace us", that would probably answer the question for us.
Trump was trying to equivocate, to offer support in principle, even though every single one of the people in that rally was actually in the class of people who he was supposedly condemning, and he knew it.
Quite aside from the fact that there is no ethical reason to oppose taking down confederate statues that were erected for explicitly white nationalist reasons:
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues...
One way not to associate with that would be to walk away from it, rather than join in.
> In a news conference after the rally protesting the planned removal of a Confederate statue, Trump did say there were "very fine people on both sides," referring to the protesters and the counterprotesters. He said in the same statement he wasn't talking about neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who he said should be "condemned totally.
Trump’s statement eliminates any ambiguity about what he meant with regard to white nationalists.
The addendum to the fact check is talking about the factual issue of who was at the protest. Trump understood the protestors to include people who opposed taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee. He makes this explicitly clear in the same paragraph where he made the “fine people” comment:
> You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
He returned to that many times, and had a whole aside about whether taking down statues of George Washington was next. The reporter had attempted to paint all of those people as white nationalists and he pushed back on that.
The Snopes fact-check says that Trump may have been wrong about who was in the protest. But Trump was unambiguous about condemning white supremacists, and the Snopes article doesn’t walk that back.
After that it's just a question of how much you buy the ignorance.
The idea that there were fine people "on both sides" has to be interpreted in terms of who the two sides were.
One side was made up entirely of white supremacists and white nationalists. That was the reason they were there -- it was also, one imagines, why they were all happy marching behind people shouting "Jews will not replace us":
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/charlottesvi...
The only reason to say "on both sides" -- and he stressed "on both sides" -- was to create an equivalence between those sides. When there is no equivalence. One side was an organised white nationalist anti-semitic, racist protest, and the other side was a pretty disorganised bunch of people who think things like that are unamerican.
He had one job, to condemn the Unite The Right protest, and he chose words that made it explicitly clear he did not.
No, it has to be interpreted in terms of what he said. He was explicit about what he said: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” Nobody operating in good faith could interpret that as ambiguous.
At most Trump was mistaken about who else was in the park. Be repeatedly said that “there were protesters who were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.” Maybe he was wrong about that fact.
> He had one job, to condemn the Unite The Right protest,
But that’s your real argument, isn’t it? That it was insensitive of Trump to address the larger context of the protests (which was about tearing down confederate statues) instead of just sticking to condemning the neo-Nazis. Maybe that’s true. But it’s utterly dishonest—a point-blank lie—to say that he didn’t condemn neo-Nazis and white supremacists when he did, using those exact words.
The thing is: that left nobody. It was a white nationalist parade. He was absolutely, deliberately, trying to equivocate his condemnation, so as not to upset his base.
The confederate statues are also unambiguously white nationalist monuments. That's why they were all put up, so many years after the fact. There's no simple "pride in loss" motive: it was deliberate, planned white racist powerplay signalling to litter the South with confederate memorials, and that is pretty well-documented.
No president of the whole USA should be defending that.
Most southern people do not know that. They do not think confederate symbolism is any different from say the British or French flag (which may have been associated with negative periods of history, but has meaning apart from that). https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/02/politics/confederate-flag-pol.... Whatever the original intention, confederate imagery transformed into a generic cultural marker. More “fuck New York” than anything else. When I was growing up in the 1990s in northern Virginia, even in liberal circles the notion that confederate flags were “heritage, not hate” was a mainstream position.
Unlike Nazi imagery, confederate imagery was not condemned immediately, and had more than a century to develop alternate connotations. Have you seen Dukes of Hazzard? It’s a liberal show about fighting small town corruption with vaguely environmentalist sentiments. They made a movie of it in 2004 with Jessica Simpson and nobody complained about the confederate flag. That’s what a large swath of the country grew up with.
Most people around the world will not condemn their ancestors, and will put up with a great deal of cognitive dissonance in order to avoid doing so. Japan has never formally apologized for its atrocities in WWII: https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/14/shinzo-abe-regrets-but-.... Does that mean you can infer that present day Japanese embrace and support the motivations of their ancestors that raped and murdered women in Nanjing? No, that would be fundamentally dishonest.
The deep irony of your comment is that Trump was the grownup in the room. He was addressing an important point that you cannot treat everyone that opposes taking down confederate monuments as white supremacists. That’s what the reporter was incorrectly trying to do, and he correctly pushed back on that.
But you could, correctly, characterise everyone taking part in that march as having white nationalist sympathies. Because it was a white nationalist march: that was the point.
There cannot be "good people" on the side shouting "jews! will not! replace us!", because if they were good people they wouldn't have been there at all.
Trump was trying to create a false equivalence because he knows those people are his people. And he did it again more than once. "Stand back and stand by".
Fuck him, fuck excusing this stuff and fuck bad-faith pretence that Trump was talking about some bigger picture: he was talking about the people at that rally.
This seems to be possible in other cases like ACCC in Australia dealing with false claims in advertising https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/advertising-and-promotions... - yes, to they're not perfect and I know of at least case where they misunderstood the context, but I think the outcome is positive overall.
It's like Snopes and Twitter community notes - they'll still get things wrong, but on average they're a massive improvement over having just the random claim online.
1. https://communitynotes.x.com/guide/en/under-the-hood/ranking...
Politicians opening their mouth == lying. Covid had an awful lot of lying from the government. Mass surveillance by the government. Political promises which arent kept are lies.
But to give the sitting government the power to decide what is true and what is not will 100% of the time result in censorship of the opposition.
It will force political speech underground and create a huge polarization problem, until mandatory revolution.
I know this because im describing Canada.