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Domande di Internet

Here is an idea – A presidential/ prime minister debate that is fact checked for every statement and you are only allowed a certain number of lies. If you run out, you cannot comment anymore and lose all your allotted time. How long will candidates in your country last ?

There’s still plenty of room for technically-true-but-misleading-to-the-point-of-lying statements, so I don’t think it would change all that much. Maybe debates would just be 10% debate between candidates and 90% debate with the moderator over whether what they said was sufficiently true

Ah; but here in the United States, roughly 40 percent of the electorate doesn’t care how its incumbent candidate ignores facts to a historically unprecedented degree. Thus he’ll last precisely long enough, no matter what.

The current government of the UK changed their party’s twitter handle to FactCheckUK during one of the debates in the last election, so assuming they can get away with doing that again I guess they’ll last forever.

Writing this out, I’m astonished just how openly corrupt my government is, and depressed that they get away with it.

I have multiple nationalities

Australia: Scott Morrison may last a minute. Maybe a bit more if he can keep his mouth shut.

Portugal: Longer than Scott Morrison. António Costa is an acceptable PM, except for his questionable handling of (ironically) the wildfires in 2017.

China: Have you watched any Chinese speeches? Well they are extremely long and difficult to understand or translate. Xi will most likely stick to that route and say things that are vague or difficult to grasp but technically correct. He will most likely last the longest because the person fact checking him takes forever to understand him.

It actually would turn into each other out-“platituding” each other. Broad, generalized statements that sound good but really have no “truth-value” to them is how they’d do it. Not that I like the lying, but at least there is a way, if even after the fact, of fact-checking them.

If they only talk broadly and inoffensively that actually may make it worse, because you can’t pin them down on where they actually stand. Besides, virtually everyone hates wishy-washy talk anyway, that’d be a bigger turn off than anything else.