This is such a great idea. Just think if this had been in place in England when Boris Johnson was prime minister. Instead we have the stupid system where MPs get punished more for calling another MP a liar than they do for lying. I still remember Dennis Skinner getting disciplined for accurately calling half the opposition liars, and responding “All right, half of them AREN’T liars then” 🙂
I hope to see it working and widely publicised and imitated.
I’m really happy that it is Wales who are doing this first.
who gets to decide what meets the threshold?
I worry about how easily politicised this policy could be in the wrong hands. Over the last few years the entire concept of critical thinking has been co-opted to buttress falsehood by co-opting the concepts and language of critical thinking to promote lies or extreme, undemocratic and inequitable policies. There are countless examples in the past of machinery to uphold truth being created (in either good or bad conscience) then being used to violently defend a particular ideology. Think of witch-hunting, the Inquisition, McCarthyism, Maoism, the French Revolution, revolutionary Russia: all instances where a model for upholding the “truth” or a particular model of morality has been used in a horrible way.
The wrong politicians could use this to their own advantage to wreck the workings of the Senedd or remove the elected members. The only real way to deal with lies and liars, terribly difficult as it is, is to promote the truth better.
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This is such a great idea. Just think if this had been in place in England when Boris Johnson was prime minister. Instead we have the stupid system where MPs get punished more for calling another MP a liar than they do for lying. I still remember Dennis Skinner getting disciplined for accurately calling half the opposition liars, and responding “All right, half of them AREN’T liars then” 🙂
I hope to see it working and widely publicised and imitated.
I’m really happy that it is Wales who are doing this first.
who gets to decide what meets the threshold?
I worry about how easily politicised this policy could be in the wrong hands. Over the last few years the entire concept of critical thinking has been co-opted to buttress falsehood by co-opting the concepts and language of critical thinking to promote lies or extreme, undemocratic and inequitable policies. There are countless examples in the past of machinery to uphold truth being created (in either good or bad conscience) then being used to violently defend a particular ideology. Think of witch-hunting, the Inquisition, McCarthyism, Maoism, the French Revolution, revolutionary Russia: all instances where a model for upholding the “truth” or a particular model of morality has been used in a horrible way.
The wrong politicians could use this to their own advantage to wreck the workings of the Senedd or remove the elected members. The only real way to deal with lies and liars, terribly difficult as it is, is to promote the truth better.
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