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Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

Completely ridiculous and destructive to any political system. In any democratic system political conflict is also a conflict about determining truth, giving some institution the power to determine truth from lie puts far too much political power into that institution. That institution will naturally be a target for capture as it allows the criminal prosecution of the opposition.

This is a genuinely insane idea and goes against essentially all democratic thought, which always wanted to give political opposition some means of participation.

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"There is a fire in the theater" when there isn't one creates a chaotic stampede. People die.

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.

Centrally planned governments with ministries of truth cost nearly 100 million lives in the 20th century. People die when the government decides what’s the truth.

You're describing what happens without checks and balances. An independent judiciary routinely determines what is and isn't true. It is arguably one of the most fundamental functions of government to determine agreed upon truth.

People dies when politicians lie. People dies when politicians decide what's the truth.

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".

> decided on a judicial trial based on facts and proofs

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.

Sure, but you can already tie your opponent up in court by accusing them to be drug dealers or having embezzled party money.

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.

It’s much harder to do that, because it requires evidence of physical conduct. It’s much easier to just label something that’s an opinion to be an assertion of truth that can be prosecuted.

Don't miss the forest for the tree. There are plenty of sentences said by politicians that are easily ground for attacking them for libel. So, if you find excuses to reject some of my example, you can just do a little bit of effort and you will find yourself other examples where politicians had opportunities to attack their opponent based on a superficial accusation.

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 seem to have a pretty clear understanding of how the law will be implemented and used.

Can you explain in more detail how the Welsh proposal works along with your sources?

I have a pretty clear understanding that the crazy misuses that some people are pretending will happen are obvious and will not happen because it's basic law making.

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.

> I have a pretty clear understanding that the crazy misuses that some people are pretending will happen are obvious and will not happen because it's basic law making.

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.

That's quite a reversal when you are steel-manning your argument by pretending that the large majority of politicians and legalists in Wales are so much uneducated that they did not notice this obvious misuse that you, you have noticed.

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.

> "they did not notice this obvious misuse"

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.

You know that "they" refer to more than just "the politicians in power", but to the whole people involved, including opposition, small parties, independent law specialists, ...

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.

> 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."

Again, if the authorities are in the pocket of the politicians, then they could already today declare it's a murder when a politician says their opponent has cut a blade of grass and it is a murder.

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.

The “authorities” aren’t “in the pocket of politicians.” But we have seen all over the developed world that they’re human, and not neutral, and suffer from their own ideological biases. Moreover, the “fact checkers” tend to come from the same social and economic class, which heightens their biases.

Again, then this law is totally harmless: if indeed people are biased when they decide if someone lies or not, it does not matter if there is a law on it.

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.

Answering now to your edit, with the example.

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.

>People dies when politicians decide what's the truth.

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.

> What is proposed here is that the truth is decided on a judicial trial based on facts and proofs.

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.

Nobody is asking the justice systems to answer these questions.

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 entirely legal to shout fire in a crowded theater, and the case in which that was mentioned positively was one that jailed people for speaking against the WWI draft.

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.

I think the key question is: would you support this if it was going to be established by your political opponents, whoever they are.

Obviously not. Every single person who supports this would instantly recoil if their opponents would propose the same exact thing.

The dishonesty here is just completely disgusting.

> The theater is the political culture war. Millions of human lives will die in the chase for politically charged click bait.

"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.

You can live in a free society, or you can live in a society with a ministry of truth. All human organizations are susceptible to corruption.

> 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".

Punished by the same people who punishes all the other infractions.

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"

So you're suggesting that politicians lying be tried (with prosecutorial discretion) by a jury of their peers in order to determine whether a lie was told? How would this law be written? Would politicians be imprisoned for giving a deceptive compliment? eg. "No, that dress doesn't make you look fat at all"

You realize that lies are already illegal in plenty of other situations. For example, lawyers and doctors cannot lie or deliberately deceive. Or you can be prosecuted if you lie when under oath. You know that no lawyer or doctor are arrested for saying "no, that dress doesn't make you look fat at all", right?

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.

This is just an engineer's disease argument, using "extension" to do all the intellectual work of justifying the position. It's a pseudo explanation and works like how all misinformation works, using specious logic. Ironic given the topic of this thread.

How "truth" works today:

"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!"

Two anecdotes followed by an opinion, responded to with another opinion and anecdote. There is not any meaningful argument about 'truth' going on there.

And you trust the people making these decisions to agree about what’s an opinion and what’s an assertion of fact? When they can put their political opponents in jail by blurring that distinction?

Real life example: https://x.com/paulkrugman/status/1712494317024026761?lang=en

The "reader added context" below that post seems on point. It is an opinion, not a fact. I assume the graph is accurately representing truth. It is a decent demonstration of the old saw about lies, damn lies, and statistics, but it is real numbers, real dates, and the metric is described specifically. Excellent for misleading, but still truth.

The assertions that "we won" or it is "over" or it was "at very little cost" are all one man's opinions, however.

"Numbers don't lie" is a truism, but is practically undone by "People use numbers to lie."

"Winning the war on inflation" isn't a statement of fact, it's a jingoistic military metaphor.

Is it humane to have homeless people in a society that is financially booming?

Lying is apparently a trait that differentiates us from other animals. Humanity is another.

Homelessness is a choice. Just compare Germany where there is a right to housing to the US. All homeless people in Germany are homeless by choice, usually because they are severely mentally ill.

Btw. guess who has more homeless people Germany or the US.

There are no traits that distinguish us from other animals. We're just a little bit smarter than apes, elephants, and dolphins, which has pushed us past a tipping point into civilization.

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.

A little bit? Like, computers designed by dolphins are only 16-bit? I'd say it was more than a little bit.

A bit as in: on the spectrum of civilization-capable organisms, between bacteria and human beings, we're only a bit ahead of dolphins, which is where the tipping point happens to be. Aside from dolphins et al, this space was also occupied by our hominid ancestors.

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.

How many homeless people you see on the way to work is a worse measurement of the economy than the stock market.

The current status quo in UK politics is that Boris Johnson was able to say demonstrably false things, but the person who called him out on this was ejected.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/22/dawn-butler...

Am I understanding it correctly that this was just an MP getting ejected from the chamber because there are rules of decorum? That does not seem controversial. Presumably she can say whatever she wants about the PM out in public, in the media, or whatever?

That's my understanding, yes. The only point I disagree with you on is:

> 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?

I concede that while the concept of decorum makes sense, this particular example seems like it has gone too far. I sort of understand the idea that just calling someone a liar amounts to petty namecalling and is out of place in a legislative setting. But dryly presenting specific examples of provably false statements ought to be fair game.

If it requires a court case with a jury, I think it's a good experiment to run.

If a liar can convince millions of people he is saying the truth, why couldn't he convince twelve?

Courts have good truth finding mechanisms, with burden of proof, standards of evidence, jury deliberation, and both sides presenting their case over a long period of time in a controlled manner.

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.

> That institution will naturally be a target for capture as it allows the criminal prosecution of the opposition.

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.

Arresting your opponents is quite different from telling lies about them.

Parties in power arrest opposition in many places in the world without this institution. If they'd try to use this institution to jail someone, I don't see why they wouldn't use some other way right now.

>If they'd try to use this institution to jail someone, I don't see why they wouldn't use some other way right now.

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.

How can you arrest your opponents in such system? It is explained that it will go through the independent judicial system.

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".

>How can you arrest your opponents in such system? It is explained that it will go through the independent judicial system.

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 Wales, the place this law is discussed, it is not true that the winner has all power: the system is designed to give a lot of power to the opposition too. It is just not true that in Wales the opinion of the opposition is not heard or is considered as lies.

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.

Any other suggestion for fixing the problem of „fake truths“ in politics?

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.

>Any other suggestion for fixing the problem of „fake truths“ in politics?

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.

Why do you assume the opposition lies more than those in power? Both sides lie when it suits them.

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.

Then why doesn't banning lying in politics cause Orwell, Kafka, Voltaire, and others to roll in their graves? Please provide a compelling reason why the warnings of our greatest philosophers and thinkers do not deserve even a moment's consideration. (It will be the burden of the Welsh gov't to prove that such a policy does not harm innocents and that this law ends up getting abused. This is a more powerful kind of law than e.g. ingredient labeling laws or e.g. hate speech laws: politically controversial issues are not so domain-specific or narrow in scope.)

I am bewildered reading so many comments that are A-OK with this this proposal prima facie.

>Why do you assume the opposition lies more than those in power? Both sides lie when it suits them.

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.

Exactly, I really don't understand the logic of people saying that it will allow to arrest the opposition.

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.

>Exactly, I really don't understand the logic of people saying that it will allow to arrest the opposition.

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.

There is no solution, because there is no oracle of truth that we all can and do completely trust.

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.

>Any other suggestion for fixing the problem of „fake truths“ in politics?

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.

That works for people interested in working out disagreements. There's a large number interested in just shouting their lies again every time they're debated. The concept of posting something slightly incorrect to get people to disagree with you, just so you can grow the number of your followers (who don't care) has really only became a thing since Twitter and it's definitely used for political reasons.

There's every problem in fake truths, and the recent phenomenon is people so entrenched in troll farm lies to come to believe that truth is impossible.

Politics is the process of lying so well that you can get things your way.

I’m not so sure. Sometimes there are opinions and either times there are easily verified, straight up lies that are destructive and dangerous to the common good. I have no problem seeing that stuff easily taken off the internet and the person doing it fined, they usually can’t be found though, because it’s often foreign propaganda preying on those who seem to have given up on facts.

The opposition can be targeted with any whatsoever law, in any country that doesn't have immunity for politicians (none does for any politician, by the way).

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 is legitimately a totalitarian idea. There is no good it could do which isn't outweighed by the evil it will cause.

It invalidates politics as a whole.

I think your idea of totalitarianism is messed up, or maybe you think it would be the government to enforce the law (democratic countries typically have separation between the judicial and the executive branch - yes, the US much less so).

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

The devil is in the details and a very careful process and very careful wording of said law could mitigate that to some degree. I mean representative democracy could also be considered a system conflicting in principle with values underlying a direct democracy, which, to be clear, I think would be an even worse system but my point is that regardless of which rules of the game you make up, there is almost certainly upsides and downsides to them. E.g. You want a functioning economy? Well, listening to the corporations that employ a vast majority of the workforce might be a good idea in principle - until they start corrupting politicians and the lobbyism presents a detriment to society at large.

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.

Is it not already illegal to deliberately mislead a courtroom? Many of the same concerns apply, and yet thankfully the solution is not generally to throw our hands in the air and say it’s impossible to deal with the nuance.

That’s because court cases tend to be between two parties, and don’t have far-reaching impacts on the whole country.

...Ever heard of precedent? Many cases never see a trial specifically to keep advantageous ambiguities from becoming case law.

Honestly I don't think so. You can write a statute in a way that is at least partially enforceable and that may be enough. We already have functional laws against perjury that have a higher standard than simply saying something wrong. All you'd have do is make all statements at political debate sessions subject to perjury. The lie would have to be proven to be both intentional and material. I would imagine every decent politician would be safe.

Hard disagree. I would prefer that politicians be required to run every statement in their speeches (not impromptu interview answers) through a fact checker.

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:

https://community.qbix.com/t/transparency-in-government/234

The US Congress is very specifically allowed to lie about policy and not allowed to be punished over it. Seems preposterous, right?

See the Speech & Debate Clause.

Except "fact checkers" are just as corrupt and biased as the politicians they supposedly check.

Better to have peer review in science than having someone tweet their article at 3am

>through a fact checker

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.

There's ongoing disagreement because people lie when they say "I believe x" (when it's actually "I've been paid to support y")

On most subjects people would come to an agreement after a while, if they were forced to be honest.

But you can’t trust the “fact checkers” to be honest.

Most "fact checkers" actually rarely get it wrong.

As with any law anyhow, of course there have to be enough judicial safeguards.

>On most subjects people would come to an agreement after a while, if they were forced to be honest.

This is completely delusional. Genuinely surprised to hear such a ridiculous thing.

Well I see your opinions similarly...

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