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Comment by croisillon | Hacker News Reader

it's thanks to the lying that he was elected in the first place, and no one around him dares to contradict him, what would be the incentives to stop?

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I wish there was simple three strike policy on any elected official. Three proven lies and they are remove from office for life. And these can be anything. And not knowing at time does not change it.

Only silence or absolute truth should be accepted.

That way politicians would change every week. Probably not a bad thing :)

So someone gets to arbitrarily decide what is or isn’t true, and thus arbitrarily remove anyone from any office for life?

Sounds like a foolproof plan.

Did we not read 1984?

That's how it works right now. Besides Trump, the US's last presidental impeachment was over a sex scandal. They "say" it was because he lied about it, but I think we know better at this point. It's just really hard to impeach because you need 66 or 67 of the Senate to agree on something, not the usual 51.

But yes, we'd need some truly neutral Ombudsmen to back up such a system. And they themselves would need to be accountable should they corrupt. I don't think it's impossible, but hard to do with the current power structures.

Cheating on your wife isn’t a crime.

Perjury is.

Yeah, use loopholes to get what you want. This year has taught me that well.

"absolute truth" doesn't exist. I understand what you're saying, but the question of when a lie should then disqualify you from office must itself be a political question.

Absolute truth exists, and a claim that it doesn't is self-contradictory. The difficulty is in determining what is or isn't true, especially for empirical matters. (In math and logic the difficulty can vary. And some statements are true by definition, e.g., all unmarried men are bachelors.)

You're confusing logical/mathematic "truth" with philosophical/scientific "truth". While "politics should be based on scientific truth" is an opinion I have some sympathy for, even if it immediately falls apart under any scrutiny. "politics should be based on mathematical axiomatic truth" is a statement so laughable I can only imagine you forgot the context we were talking about.

P.S. I'm not confusing anything and not forgetting any context, and then I get slammed with an absurd strawman, "politics should be based on mathematical axiomatic truth"--not remotely anything I said. Gawd but some people are rude.

The fact remains that absolute truth exists ... "delusional" seems to have no idea what the word "truth" even means.

lol. just last week he posted that the Canadian ad showing the audio recording of nixon against tariffs was fake.

Reagan, not Nixon

And now that the U.S. has a tyrannical government, there’s no one left to stand in its way, the Second Amendment has proven to be a paper tiger.

Can you expand on what you mean exactly? I see these sentences like your littered throughout reddit, vague notions of violence/war?

It was a common argument that ultimately all of the constitutional protections, balance of powers and all that were protected by the Second Amendment - that in the face of losing their liberty, Americans would rise up against an authoritarian government.

Within this administration, a lot of people feel that there has been an assault on constitutional protections, but the people who trumpeted the Second Amendment as being fundamental to protecting American liberty and democracy have largely been silent in the face of it.

It was always BS .. the Founders never intended the 2nd Amendment as a means to overthrow the government they created--the Constitution explicitly says that treason can be punished by death. And the people making that argument were always hypocritical about how they would apply it.

It was also avoided for decades as "vile" and now the groups that could most use the 2nd Amendment are (mostly) unarmed.

It brought to mind the Four Boxes of Liberty[1]. It used to be toted out by conservatives during the gun control debates, but I haven't seen it used by anyone recently until now.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty

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