As our government becomes more and more polarized, what can we do to ensure that facts and data hold out?
I’m not suggesting that lying should be illegal (in fact, it’s often unintentional), but when an MPs statement can later be proven to be false, shouldn’t they be forced to publicly apologize?
The truth shouldn’t be political.
I would go after non answers first, that’s what they do the most during the question period. If the speaker started throwing out MPs who don’t answer the questions they’re being asked you would see shit start to improve real quick.
Justin Ling recently published a report on polarization in Canada. He has a pretty good interview about it on CBC. What I got out of it:
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Truth is less important than pack mentality. With polarization, it matters that you’re showing you’re part of the in-group more than overall truthfulness. So a bell ringing when a lie is told probably wouldn’t help.
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Politicians follow social media trends, because that gets them clicks. That causes showboating in Parliament, since they get to use CPAC clips to their followers. But they don’t tend to lead the trends.
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MPs are under a lot of pressure to fundraise. Since union and corporate donations have been limited, MPs need to mobile their followers to send money. The best way to do that is with polarizing content on social media.
Outgoing Conservative leader Erin O’Toole said similar things in his final address to Parliament: MPs are chasing social media engagement, and that drives polarization.
The problem always lies with money and power … remove the need for money and power and government will act a lot differently than it does now.
If all funds were somehow nationalized and shared among all politicians so that no one group or individual could wield more power than anyone else … things would work out a lot differently.
I’m not saying it would be better or solve all our problems with government, it would just change it from what it is now … a forum for power and control where whoever has the most funds or access to the most funds, gets to decide where government will head.
And don’t get me started about how our government is not influenced by money … it is completely influenced by money and powerful interests. It’s so prevalent at this point in Canada as well as the US and every major nation in the world that it is a joke to even refer to any of them as democracies.
The problem always lies with money
Money is just an IOU. The only thing it introduces is the ability for trades to take place over longer periods of time.
If, for example, we agree that you will fix my sink and I will feed you lunch for your efforts, but you’re not hungry while you’re at my place, I can give you an IOU – money – to redeem for food at a later point in time when you are hungry. Without money, I would have to feed you when you are full in order to satisfy our deal, which is less than ideal.
Why is that beneficial deferral at the root of of all problems?
remove the need for money and power and government will act a lot differently than it does now.
The Communist Manifesto suggests that once we enter a state of post-scarcity, government will no longer be needed. Why do you think it got it wrong?
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YES; punished by the electorate. The problem we have is, they don’t. In fact, they like to be lied to. The more scared they get, or the more privilege they enjoy, the more they want to be lied to.
We need more independent journalism that’s not driven by some large media company with a bias.
That’s why Canada provides funding to private journalism, but then big company comes and buys them out
Capitalism has really become a god damn cancer.
And how do you determine the truth, exactly?
There isn’t a magical bell that rings when someone lies. Science changes, public consensus changes, new facts surface, and opinions are just opinions.
Of course if an MP makes an easily disproven statement that’s one thing, but most things that could be said are complex and very hard to define as either true or false.
I don’t necessarily disagree that there should be extra checks for truth in politics, but I don’t really think there can be such a thing, objectively.
Straight up false statements(lies) and especially those with intent to deceive or persuade should be punished
Who decides what a false statement is? Imagine if Trump had the power to appoint that person (ik it’s Canada, it’s to point out how someone who doesn’t care about truth could appoint the person who decides what truth is)
Fact check. If someone fact checks you and finds that your statement was false then you are sanctioned. It doesn’t have to be a magic bell. If someone’s fact checking team looks into what you said and comes back the next day and says “point of order, what xyz said yesterday was a lie and here is the proof” they get a sanction.
Where does exaggeration fit? Anti-vaxxers play up vaccine side effects. They happen, but very very rarely. If an MP spends a bunch of time talking about them and saying a vaccine is risky, they haven’t made a false statement.
On top of that, the Right has made political hay saying the media and Snopes are biased against them. Parties here would do the same.
Yes, they always complain that the fact checkers are all leftists and biased but they never set up their own fact checking. Go ahead and fact check the truth, I fucking dare you. Even if they did the actual fact checkers would fact check their fact checking and expose their meta lies.
Maybe they should have a points system. Exaggeration could be marked on a scale. You get so many exaggeration points and you get a sanction.
“point of order, what xyz said yesterday was a lie and here is the proof”
And how do you establish that is not a lie? Proof that a statement was false does not prove that the falsehood was stated intentionally. The person may have simply been misinformed, misspoke, or otherwise didn’t know any better, in which case it would not be a lie.
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One issue with this type of system is, who defines what the truth is? If it’s the government in power, then it’ll flipflop immediately whenever the other side wins. Any sort of “independent bureaucracy” would also gradually be undermined.
This is also ignoring that lying in the house of commons is likely not a major cause of political polarization, given that I imagine very few people actually watch the sessions of parliament. I would attribute the rise of political extremism mainly to decreasing quality of life, which arises from a combination of the housing crisis, heinous wealth inequality, and the looming specter of climate change. After all, if the status quo doesn’t work for the average person, they will naturally look for alternatives (or get politically disengaged). The right wing has the edge here, as they have a multi-billion dollar propaganda complex that is very effective at getting their word out, and they have no end of scapegoats to blame. The left has no such network, but we do have the benefit that most people aren’t massive racist assholes, and it doesn’t hurt that the actual facts back us up.
It is also worth noting that this type of polarization cannot be avoided under the system of capitalism, which broadly pits two groups against each other: the working class and the capitalist class. The working class broadly seek to live comfortably, to receive as much money as possible in pay, and to work no more than is necessary. The interests of the capitalist class run directly counter to this: they seek ever-increasing profits, and would like to pay the working class as little as possible and have them work as long as possible in exchange. This adversarial relationship can be overcome temporarily by a social contract that enacts high taxes on the capitalists to pay for a welfare state (note that even this arrangement does require exporting suffering to the global south through the mechanisms of imperialism, which I’m going to ignore for brevity), but eventually the drive for ever greater profits will drive the capitalists to destroy that social contract. Two relatively obvious examples of this are that wages have become stagnant for the last 50 years despite massive increases in productivity, and the movement to destroy public healthcare.
In sum: if we are to eliminate polarization, we must first eliminate capitalism. 😊
I’m not suggesting that lying should be illegal (in fact, it’s often unintentional) …
By definition lying is stating something that the speaker knows to be untrue (or in case of lying through omission, knowingly saying something that is true, but not the whole story).
So how do you unintentionally lie?
Are you sure you’re not confusing “unintentional lie” with “erroneous”?
By definition lying is stating something that the speaker knows to be untrue
No. It is true that a lie is something one knows to be untrue. And lying is defined as the present participle of lie. But lying is additionally defined as “not telling the truth”. It turns out words can have multiple meanings, and the latter definition is not dependent on the speaker being aware of its untruthfulness.
If we were talking about speakers telling lies, there would be merit to what you say, but since we are talking about lying, that is not a necessary precondition. By definition, not telling the truth, even if erroneously, is, in fact, lying – although it is not telling a lie.
How do you take into account that someone told what they believed was true at the time although with limited knowledge, which then became false as the situation developed?
Intent is considered in the justice system, although sometimes hard to determine with 100% certainty.
Sometimes you need to make a decision NOW with partial information.
It’s not an admission of intent, but an admission of fact: that your statement was false.
It became false once more data became available… How do you deal with that, when you need to deal with a situation with partial information?
It’s not like they meant to lie about it, then had to make a decision and you can’t always make the right choice when you’re missing data.
Hey, that’s fine.
“We did the best with what we had and we now know that to have been the wrong decision”
But again, decisions aren’t facts. Misrepresenting facts should be decoupled from the resulting decision.
Punishing the breaking of election promises would be a start. Those are not ambiguous or unintentional, and it should be punishable as a breach of contract.
Sometimes circumstances change and you can’t always follow through on your election promises. Imagine if someone had promised to run a balanced budget just before COVID. If they couldn’t spend money due to their promise, we wouldn’t get things like CERB, which would be much worse than breaking that promise.
In an ideal world, breaking an election promise would be political suicide so it just wouldn’t happen, but we’ve already seen that voters don’t care enough, and 4-5 years is a long time to run wild without any repercussions.
We need a way to hold politicians responsible, but making it illegal to break an election promise is probably not a good idea.
Then they should not make (what would then be) a legally binding promise. There should be a way that a claim can be made into a commitment with consequences, regardless of why it was broken. Sure, not every claim can be handled that way, but the option should exist.
Then you just get parties who don’t promise anything.
Look at Doug Ford’s 2018 election platform. Buck a beer and… nothing else. Look at the platforms for everyone who ran in your municipal election. I don’t know where you live, but if it’s anywhere like the cities I’ve lived in, the candidates don’t really have a platform, but occasionally make vague statements like “I’m would like to address issues with housing” or “we should do something about the homelessness problem”.
If every politician is given the choice between “vague statements that don’t mean anything” or “legal consequences if you promise to do this thing that you actually want to do but circumstances change and you can’t do it”, they’re going to go with “vague statements” every time.
Then they should not make (what would then be) a legally binding promise.
Yes, if this is what the electorate wants, they should present the contract and get the candidate to sign it before election night.
I think you’ll find the electorate doesn’t actually want that, though. The incumbent maybe has sufficient information to present an election promise, assuming they can implement it in the first few days before the state of the world has moved on, but the other candidates most certainly do not. Why would you want a politician making decisions before they have information? That would be downright stupid.
As in contract law, the solution is to eliminate overarching or vague promises. Instead of promising to “balance the budget”, have them produce a budget plan. Instead of promising elections reform, promise election reform pilot programs. And let’s not kid ourselves, election promises made in good faith are a rarity these days. It’s time to make it harder to lie to the electorate.
Instead of promising to “balance the budget”, have them produce a budget plan
Many parties do produce a vague budget going into the election, but it still doesn’t account for unexpected events like the pandemic. And even though “balance the budget for 4 years” is a somewhat reasonable promise, creating a budget 4 years in advance is a terrible idea for so many reasons. Even just through the normal course of an uneventful term, things will change that the government has no control over, and if they can’t react by modifying their budget that they made several years ago, then that will cause a lot of problems.
And if their promise is something vague like “balance the budget” and there are legal consequences to not balancing the budget, then the government would be encouraged to sell of infrastructure in order to make up any deficit they may have accrued. That’s also bad.
It’s difficult to police, who decides what is right? If Danielle Smith was in charge then anything pro-science would be considered lying. If Polievere was in charge then anything pro-minority would be considered lying
How do you make an impartial committee? Before both sides would approve positions back and fourth to keep others in check but we can see the US Judiciary to see how that no longer works when one side is dishonest
Uh, in every other field of discourse the ultimate arbiter of the truth is a judge. Why should politics be any different?
My last line
We aren’t immune to immoral judges, having a judge that can make your opponent side with you is very valuable
At this level known lying should be something like perjury. And by known lying, I mean hypothetically like if Trudeau said he didn’t pay his family through that foundation, but there is proof he did, that is just lying and he knows he is. Compared to somebody who might make a mistake and say there is no missing funds in account x, but then later realizes they have an outdated sheet…then that is more like mispeaking error and should not be same level of accountability.
From all the history and current events I’ve taken in, there’s no law that can force politicians to push in a given direction. At the end of the day they can all be rescinded or reinterpreted or ignored. It’s a matter of ensuring the system self-corrects faster than anyone tries to tear it down.
