[andy_ppp]

I think what I find most disappointing is the stunning amount of apathy when it comes to politicians lying. But then what can we do to stop them? It has become farcical how every time the government makes a statement on this it's almost immediately shown they are directly lying to the people.

These lies bring into question the truthfulness of a lot of other government statements.

[lifeformed]

Why aren't there legal consequences for politicians lying? I know you couldn't catch everything, but it seems like if you intentionally mislead the public in a high profile context, you should face proportional punishment. Corporations face huge consequences if they lie, even accidentally, in earnings reports.

Lawyers on the clock are always careful that what they say is legally sound; why shouldn't politicians be held to that standard? Maybe it'll make them more vague and hand wavy, but perhaps the law could be structured to be proportional to the malice and deceit behind the lie. If they must do something contrary to what they said, they should have to justify their decision in writing why they have changed their mind.

[cheald]

Who exactly is going to write and pass this law?

[a3n]

I think the answer is vaguely to make them irrelevant to real life. There's nothing we can do beyond voting, and money controls who gets on the ballot. Congress writes its own rules, and gathers the campaign cash.

I don't know how to concretely make them irrelevant. We could just ignore them, and consider the cost of government like friction, but they do fuck peoples' lives up and so we can't ignore them entirely. And they are currently the only significant outlet of safety net, as much as they're trying to fuck that up too.

I don't know. Anyone?