Make lying in politics illegal

[mercalia]

http://chng.it/5qXGnsf95P

A petition

[Bonefishblues]

Signed, but I like the change.org site not at all.

[reohn2]

Signed

[Spinners]

Unworkable and unnecessary.

[windmiller]

How sinister is that stupid petition, what it really means is make free speech in politics illegal.

[mercalia]

How sinister is that stupid petition, what it really means is make free speech in politics illegal.

well speech is not 100% free - if you slander some one? well it is, but you can get sued for lots of cash. so why not lies made by politicians? There are rules in advertising? cant just say anything you want?

[Bonefishblues]

How sinister is that stupid petition, what it really means is make free speech in politics illegal.

I see your point. Politicians should be free to say what they want, irrespective. It'll definitely help further enhance their credibility in the eyes of the people they serve.

Oh wait, haven't we tried that in a few countries now

[windmiller]

The truth is relative and nowhere more so than politics. Even in science when something is thought to be proven - often years down the line it ain't necessarily so.
The trouble with so many on the left is that they believe with pious dogma that truth and their morality are always one and the same.
How inconveient they find it when it is not and they lose a democratic election. So to reconcile this abomination, they label the result as false, the opposition as complete liars and their supporters as unintelligent, fascists, racists, misinformed etc. Well keep doing that because it loses you a majority in referendums and keeps your ruinous political leaders out of power, and that suits me fine.

[drossall]

Exactly. You can't outlaw lying without a shared definition of the truth. Politics in recent years has pushed stretching the boundaries to an art form. I at least found the BBC fact check articles helpful in showing what was going on, but see below for what some will have thought. Statistics are quoted in ways that are technically "true", but designed to give an impression that is anything but. Statements quietly assume premises that the hearer won't necessarily share. And so on.

What we need is politicians who actually want to convey information to us in ways that are accurate and that we understand. Some kind of assessment scheme is more likely to achieve that than legislation - but politicians get out of any kind of assessment of truth by claiming that the assessor is biased. Maybe there's a fix for that, but it's complex. First score the fact-checking organisations themselves, and ignore all the ones that consistently give poor scores to one party and never find fault with the other.

Then maybe we could have some kind of health warning popping up every time a politician speaks, saying how reliable that person's words were last time when assessed, and based on a composite of all the fact-checking organisations whose records are not more dodgy than the politicians whom they are scoring?

Cloud cuckoo land, I know...

[Bonefishblues]

Perhaps something which has an element of sanction attached mightn't be such a bad idea. People seem reasonably sanguine about its applicability to advertising, where it clearly curbs the excesses.

[Tangled Metal]

Classic lie was 50,000 nurses but they were only recruiting was it 30,000? A downright lie that labour played on and got to make it the accepted truth. However as the bbc correspondent said, technically right for a couple of reasons.

That was part of a piece on how both sides of the labour vs Tory battle mislead and lied with a level of natural indifference to honesty. Whether it's lying positively about their own policies or negatively against the opposition. Also, the piece raised the phenomenon of passing off truths successfully as lies and getting it accepted by the electorate.

If you're hoping for lies to be illegal you need to know what are lies. That's not just fact checking but close understanding of the English language. Interpretation of claims could be heavily changed by politics of the reviewer, independence and integrity too. If a judicial element of the process to punish lies depends on a good barrister and perhaps a jury then it's likely to not be objective but subjective. Indeed is objectivity possible in politics?

The current system relies on confronting false claims by media, opposing politicians, general public, etc. That's immediate but legal action is delayed and offers nothing to the information quality at the time it's needed. Nothing's ideal but I think we're as close to the best system possible. We just need everyone to become more politically, mathematically, statistically , etc. aware. Ignorance or lack of understanding of statistics might allow people to fall for misuse of data or statistics for example.

[Bonefishblues]

Classic lie was 50,000 nurses but they were only recruiting was it 30,000? A downright lie that labour played on and got to make it the accepted truth. However as the bbc correspondent said, technically right for a couple of reasons.

That was part of a piece on how both sides of the labour vs Tory battle mislead and lied with a level of natural indifference to honesty. Whether it's lying positively about their own policies or negatively against the opposition. Also, the piece raised the phenomenon of passing off truths successfully as lies and getting it accepted by the electorate.

If you're hoping for lies to be illegal you need to know what are lies. That's not just fact checking but close understanding of the English language. Interpretation of claims could be heavily changed by politics of the reviewer, independence and integrity too. If a judicial element of the process to punish lies depends on a good barrister and perhaps a jury then it's likely to not be objective but subjective. Indeed is objectivity possible in politics?

The current system relies on confronting false claims by media, opposing politicians, general public, etc. That's immediate but legal action is delayed and offers nothing to the information quality at the time it's needed. Nothing's ideal but I think we're as close to the best system possible. We just need everyone to become more politically, mathematically, statistically , etc. aware. Ignorance or lack of understanding of statistics might allow people to fall for misuse of data or statistics for example.

"Approved by the Independent Fact-Checking Institute" (or summat similar) We have the OBR already, for instance.

The whoppers have really got whopping/deceptive (cf 'More Nurses"). There is NO trust - of ANY Party to fulfil its promises. I really think we have to try to do better than this - if this is as close to the best system as is possible, goodness help us.

[Cunobelin]

How sinister is that stupid petition, what it really means is make free speech in politics illegal.

Not at all...

If I say I am going to sell you a carbon fibre racing bike and you accept that, I then provide a Tesco Mountain bike, that is illegal.

Nothing to do with free speech, just honesty, and integrity

"We are building 60 new hospitals.... build them, or be honest and state you are in fact only building 4

[windmiller]

How sinister is that stupid petition, what it really means is make free speech in politics illegal.

Not at all...

If I say I am going to sell you a carbon fibre racing bike and you accept that, I then provide a Tesco Mountain bike, that is illegal.

Nothing to do with free speech, just honesty, and integrity

"We are building 60 new hospitals.... build them, or be honest and state you are in fact only building 4

Such a simplistic few of the world might work in C. S. Lewis's utopian Narnia, or even Stalin's Russia where failure would mean death. We live in a highly complex world society, the variables of economics, power, wars and climatic events can make many political intentions into predictions sometimes into promises at best.
I think if you seek total honesty and integrity in the world of politics you will forevermore be frustrated from cradle to grave. If the present lot disappoint and fail with most of their policies, then they can be voted out at the next election.

[Cugel]

How sinister is that stupid petition, what it really means is make free speech in politics illegal.

Not at all...

If I say I am going to sell you a carbon fibre racing bike and you accept that, I then provide a Tesco Mountain bike, that is illegal.

Nothing to do with free speech, just honesty, and integrity

"We are building 60 new hospitals.... build them, or be honest and state you are in fact only building 4

The Miller is correct to note that truth is relative. The human notion of truth is generated out of some set or other of fundamental beliefs that serve as the base and underpinning of any other statement to be made in the culture concerned. Religious dogma is one example; the scientific method another. There have been and will be many alternative truth-systems, despite what the oh-so-certain think about having The Absolute or Objective Truth.

For practical purposes, human collectives - be they just a village or something as large as a nation - need some form of truth-tests and a raft of associated fully-agreed truths to express the cultural glue that keeps such polities together and allows them to operate via shared information and practices. This stuff is sometimes formal (as in "the law") and sometimes less formal (as in a shared morality or ethical practice). Sometimes its very informal, as in the popular culture of films, novels and so forth.

The risk in any society that's as large and culturally variegated as a typical modern Western society - especially one shot through with so-called individualism - is that the agreed fundamental beliefs or truth-tests fragment, as various cultural eflorence occurs and what we now call "bubbles" are formed, in which the group involved develops fundamental beliefs outside of the mainstream; eventually in contradiction to those of the mainstream.

In the USA and UK, the effects of neoliberal socio-economics is to fragment or even isolate people. They get into a mental state where they can "choose" (i.e. be propagandised into) all sorts of belief systems. One description is "multiculturalism". Such arrangements can only work (retain institutions such as "the nation" or "a political system") if there is a high degree of tolerance between the now fragmented believers in this, that or the other worldview.

When the various belief systems become severely conradictary, one with another, the chance of tolerance between them decreases and eventually disappears. The USA is now badly fragmented (in truth, was never really a whole nation). As often seems the case, the UK is following their example. Our politics is polarised, with various offshoots. There is a vast chasm between well-off and poor. Various conspiracy theories and once foreign ways of thinking and acting have made inroads into a once more amalgamated British Weltanschauung.

*****
So how to detect a liar and their lies?

*******
If a group's beliefs and actions are sincere and in some degree coherent, it's possible to use their own truth tests to test for any lying. You don't have to agree with their truth system to use it to test their own propositions or statements.

It's also possible to label propositions or statements from groups or individuals with no obvious coherent or explicit worldview as potential lies, since they will often say anything to suit their purpose of the moment and invent some sort of justification for it out of thin air rather than out of any stable or coherent set of beliefs.

And of course, everyone tends to measure the truth or falsity of propositions and statements against their own truth tests - against their own basic or fundamental beliefs. When these are vastly different from those of the proposer or statement-maker ......

BoJo is an obvious candidate for inclusion in that second group, as is Trump. It's their modus operandi. Nothing they say can be treated as any kind of truth as there's no benchmarks in their thinking to measure the truth or falsity against. They are liars (or not) based on your own truth-tests, your own body of fundamental beliefs. There is no other set of tuth tests to use, in their case.

******
The Miller complains that those who disagree with him are seeking to ban "free speech". But how free should speech be? In this day and age, speech is so free that anyone can make words mean anything they want. Statements and propositions are made with often no reference to any resilient or well-proven truth-tests of any utility to anyone except to the raving nutter making the mad statements. They are Trumpish "made up stuff". Effectively, they're indistinguishable from lies, no matter how fervently the statement-maker believes them.

Others are mendacious and will lie knowingly, disregarding the failure of their statement to pass their own truth tests - perhaps anyone else's truth tests. This is the Goebbels mode. The telling of deliberate lies for a dark purpose. There are a number of British politicians who do this. They often have to as they're whipped.

Cugel