Google To Predict Accuracy of Political Statements 249
pestario writes "Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks about a service which can give the probability of the accuracy of statements made by politicians, among other things.
From the Reuters article, Schmidt says: "We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability."
Can Google's 'truth predictor' bring an end to sound bites and one-liners? I'm not holding my breath...""
I know what the politicians will do. (Score:5, Funny)
Just Keep Up the Neologisms (Score:3, Funny)
Seriously, tacular? How in the hell is a computer supposed to know that meant nuclear and tactical? Wait, how in the hell am I supposed to know that?!
Re:Accuratize this: Cigarettes cause global warmin (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Accuratize this: Cigarettes cause global warmin (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope to hell you're trolling because if not you need to dig up a transcript of that speech and see what he really said before posting from Drudge and Newsmax, news organizations about as substantiative as The Onion. This snippet is taken so far out of context it's laughable. He was referring to the tobacco industry in the even broader context of agriculture. The statement you presented is about as accurate claiming he said: Gas powered skateboards are a "significant contributor to global warming!" when the original statement would more like "Transportation emissions are a significant contributor to global warming!".
I can't stand left wing nuts about as much as the next guy but right wing nuts are just as bad if not worse.
Pirates (Score:5, Funny)
Ya know, that's getting modded as funny but.. (Score:2)
There's no doubt in my mind that this will be a "word smithing" tool.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I find it interesting the reflection this shows of where we are with net content in the days of Search Engine Optimization. In utopian theory, the web is perfectly democratised content where anyone can post anything. The search engines are supposed to match users to sites based solely on
Function (Score:2)
Return "All Lies!"
Re:Function (Score:4, Funny)
bool Politician
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Or just feed it nonsensical statements and logical fallacies until it segfaults:
"Well, it depends on what the definition of the word 'is' is."
SIGSEGVRe: (Score:3, Interesting)
Before we ever actually produce "artificial intelligence", the machines will have taken over. Maybe we're better off, since politics is a job for computers, not humans, just like chess.
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Their leaders are not at all attempting to be truthful to their people, all they want is to be effective.
You know, the stuff diplomats make their money with, hmm maybe with the exception of a certain John R. Bolton.
Layman's method (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy, his lips are moving.
For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched The Sky (Score:3, Interesting)
The more interesting question is how to tell when a search engine is lying.
There seems to be an assumption that an algorithm is immune to "lying" because code is somehow objective. I think that's a naive position and an outright fallacy. A lie? Well, that would be a subjective judgment, wouldn't it.
For one thing, the mere notion that you can reduce "accuracy" to a single number is questionable.
How many people are happy in the US
Needs to be open source (Score:5, Funny)
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=Smidge=
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Actually, that was the GP's point.
Truthful politicians are about as common as Yeti: they are the stuff of legends, not reality.
It's already been done. (Score:2, Funny)
This politician's statement is 0% true.
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"Tony Blair says: God will never agree that this statement is true."
This politician's statement is 0% true.
Are you sure? ;-)
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I know.
much simpler truth predictor right here (Score:2, Redundant)
truth predictor says this is FALSE
ta da! Done. I bet my truth predictor is as accurate as Google's.
hmm.. (Score:2)
Execs say the darnedest things (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do execs say such funny things away from their engineering teams? And why do I get the sneaking suspicion that some group at Google has actually figured out how to do this?
Anyway, until this is beyond hype, I find the Annenberg Fact Check [factcheck.org] to be the most reliable source out there.
Very simple algorithm (Score:2, Redundant)
if (statement.source.profession == "politician")
{
probability_of_truth = 0.0;
}
Group-think (Score:2)
Will anything "original" ever be written again? If everyone uses this "tool" to vet/scrub/tweak/improve everything they say, wouldn't this simply promote group-think?
In a world such as that, controlling the contents of the web would give tremendous power. Imagine bots that auto-generated blogs pushing your
not possible, I fear (Score:3, Insightful)
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I fail to see what text in my comment suggested that I believe one could eliminate the capacity of human language to convey lies. I was merely bringing up a hypothetical side affect of having a system as described in the article (you did read the article, right?). For this you accuse me of being stupid?
And, as regards your comment about 40% of Americans believeing Saddam was li
Harry Seldon would be proud (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not 'scientific' and 'tech' statements first? (Score:2)
Lying is not the major problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Framing is the worst thing they do. By that I mean framing an issue in a narrow way cleverly engineered to suit a hidden agenda.
Re:Lying is not the major problem (Score:5, Insightful)
You're either being truthful or you're not. You either have good intentions or you don't. Yes, the world *is* this black and white. The world *is* this simple. And you're either lying or you're not. Sometimes it's hard to determine, but it's one way or the other. Any amount of lying makes your whole statement untrue and therefore you're a liar.
If you're telling me something, even if it's "true", but the goal is decieve or take advantage of, then you're lying.
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Re:Lying is not the major problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily...
Sure, GoogleTruth(TM) could, yes, figure out if Ted Stevens classic "The Internet is a series of tubes" is true or not, but what if I said something like "Abortion kills fetuses and embryos." While this statement is true, it sets the tone of the discussion in a way that ignores the other issues involved, such as the nature of the conception (e.g. rape, incest), the health/developmental state of the fetus, the right of the mother to choose what's best for herself and her body, etc. That is called framing a debate--and it's extremely effective.
Framing a debate can often boil down to the terms used themselves. A good example of this is the Patriot Act. What does that mean? Does voting against the Patriot Act make one... unpatriotic? And even if you agree with the provisions of the Patriot Act, what does increased homeland security/surveillence have to do with being a patriot?
This is what the GP was referring to as framing, and it IS NOT lying. It is, however, academically dishonest in that it is a form of a logical fallacy [wikipedia.org]. I'll be very surprised if google can manage to catch this too, seeing as how most people are terrible at it.
-Grym
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I do understand that it's kind of devious, it seems pretty close to false dilemma but I don't think that fully captures the idea. Unfortunately it's those who manage to define the terms that generally manage to win the argument. I mean, it's hard to counter the "cut and run" without being even more ridiculous, The Daily Show has played some ridiculous statements made by Democrats trying to counter "cut and run".
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Manipulatees.
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Redefining "lying" this way isn't helpful. Lying means saying something that isn't true. A person who says a true thing with the goal of deceiving you or harming your interests isn't "lying" -- he's just your enemy.
Here's the difference: sometimes a lie can be proved false. When that happens, the liar has no cover, and you can convince other people that there are no circumstances under whi
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And often, these adversaries you speak of will say something that is only true in particular contexts and false in the context they speak of, although they don't make aware what context they speak in as ambiguity works to their advantage. The simple word we've d
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No it's not.
You're correct in pointing out that people can tell us things which are either true or false. Pretty clear cut.
That's the first hurdle, one which, I'm afraid to say, disqualifies many politicians and pundits.
Secondly, people can tell us things which are technically true, but omit other things that are true in an attempt to frame the issue to promote a particular point of view. News media largely belongs to this category: what qualifies as news and wha
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You're either being truthful or you're not. You either have good intentions or you don't.
There is considerable truth in what you say. The problem is that you are using "lying" to mean "misleading". Probably from your or my ethical standpoint one is tantamount to the other. But most people consider making untruthful statements to be worse than making misleading ones, even though the effect may be the same.
Yes, the world *is* this black and white.
Well, perhaps. I'd agree there is
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There are people whose goal I know is to gain an advantage over me. I know that they choose the things they say to deceive me. Call them what you will: enemies, competitors, adversaries, used-car salesmen -- whatever.
However, I can trust what some of them say, but not others. What is the difference? Not all of them are liars. If the honest ones say something, then I know the facts of the
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Lying has very little to do with the words and more to do with the meaning. If someone is going to justify what he's saying by arguing the syntax isn't lies, then they are liars. Is he lying by law? Probably not. But our law is by and a large a web of lies.
Lying is a semantic thing, not a syntax thing.
It's odd to think of lying as a black and white thing because many of us (I assume interested in science, computers, math, etc) tend to make t
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But, if your intent was to trick him then you were lying to him.
This situation could be either or. You could have been pure of heart and just made a gambling deal with this kid and therefore not lying.
Or, you could have had intent and then, as you pointed out, are not lying.
Semantics.
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You then wrote:
Thank you for demonstrating the point.
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Method:
a) filter statement for assertions and presuppositions. The remaining proportion is 'dressing up'.
b) filter out which assertions and presups are testable. The remaining proportion is framing/hyperbole.
Newspapers should employ de-spinners. All major politicians' statements should be followed by testable assertions and presups, otherwise known as things they actually mean and thus are willing to put their reputation on the line for.
I wrot
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Actually, newspapers in the last few elections have been doing a lot more analysis on political ads. The first problem with this is that they save it up just for special occasions like presidential elections, and even then they only apply it to ads, not speeches or sound bites
Solve the problem from the other end (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, it’d never work, he’d end up sounding too addled to get himself elected.
Re:Solve the problem from the other end (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Solve the problem from the other end (Score:4, Funny)
I'll save them the trouble ... (Score:2)
Who's watching Google? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yes, we are going to watch them like hawks.
Sincerely,
Arthur Andersen, Ken Lay, Jayson Blair, and Hwang Woo Suk
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Like we need something to predict... (Score:2)
They're ALL lies.
WiLie or LieFi? (Score:2)
Missing the point? (Score:2)
And since when does the truth matter? When did we start caring about that? I thought we had the common a
This is close to my idea for a network news show. (Score:2)
I think we should make a news channel where they take a base line reading of the pundit or politician and then rate the % chance that they are lying. You could use blinks per second, galvanic skin response, heat rate, respiration, brain scans, voice stress. You then also take a tally for the persons past predictions and give them a success rate. So when Anne Coulter comes on it shows that she though we'd
Re:This is close to my idea for a network news sho (Score:2)
I think that current technology would only worked in unscripted situations.
As I recall the way MRI style brain scans related to being a truth detector was that they were used to measure where activity was occuring in the brain. Recalling actual memories, activity was diffuse, occuring many places. When internally constructing a fable, actvity was localized in a particular lobe.
So if the politician was reading from a teleprompter,or perhaps even mere
News Lie Detector (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:News Lie Detector (Score:4, Insightful)
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There are auditory and visual cues to detect stress, not particularly lies. Even for an "old hand" at speaking to the media, it is stressful to face dozens of cameras and hot lamps to answer a question accurately (even whether they walked their dog that morning). Mix that with the threat of slander/libel, indicating that a powerful official was a likely liar, and you can easily see why the media doesn't do this. Not everything in a scifi novella actually translates to real life.
but what if they're sincere? (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, parts of the country (the Bible Belt comes to mind) that rely more on abstinence-only education have a higher teen pregnancy rate, but that doesn't dissuade religious people from thinking that abstinence-only education is better. You don't have to collect data or analyze trends if you just know, and people who just know things based on their "conscience" aren't really lying. They're just using a kind of thinking that doesn't rely on objective reality. What's more, their confidence will actually be higher than "secularists," because the secular worldview always entails the awareness of our own fallibility, thus an element of self-doubt, which doesn't plague those who feel they are instruments of divine providence. They more sincerely and steadfastly believe in their faith-based reality than you do in your reality-based reality. So you'd be tripped up by your device long before they would be.
Let's just say this is possible and... (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be smarter to just get it working, then roll it out in beta? The idea that these means and methods may be on the table is going to ruffle nearly all the feathers of the powers that be.
We all know there are a few statesmen among the clowns in office right now. We also know they are few in number and essentially powerless right now. To top it off, there are a lot of powerful people pulling strings with dollars that factor in to this whole mess as well, with the crap to decent r
I'd be surprised if this can be made really useful (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, take the case where a politician is taloring their statements to local concerns. They may make generalizations that do apply on a local scale but make a lot less sense (and are a lot less accurate) in a broader context.
More to the point perhaps, how would the US react to the knowledge that politicians can't be depended on for accuracy in statements? I think it would be a collective "well, duh" type of response.
He says the amount of information we are creating is staggering. That's probably true, but it is dwarfed by the amount of crap and uninformed opinions we are creating (see: slashdot). And on the internet, how does one tell? Deciding what to trust and who to trust is a problem that Google can't solve in general.
One thing that might be more useful is a way to use google to quickly locate references that assert facts, and allow an author to add a citation to that source if they think it is legit (or maybe re-think things if no legit source supports an assertion). But that gets back to what is a legit source? The public is unlikely to know for the range of topics involved ("well, the name sounds legit so I"ll believe them") and if they trust bogus sources being cited then the utility falls apart again, and may even be a step backwards (people sounding "legit" without really being legit, and backing each other up). I'd be happier to see politicians cite a source for their facts more often, but how many people will still agree with the person saying what they want to hear whether or not they have sources to back it up? Or dismiss cited sources that don't support their point of view?
No, in general it can't work without people doing the real work: critical thinking. There is no easy path to accuracy. Objectivity must be evaluted both for speaker and sources, and that always falls on the person asked to listen.
Re:I'd be surprised if this can be made really use (Score:2, Flamebait)
Abortion, for example - people will argue until the end of time whether it should or shouldn't be allowed, and there is no real objective truth to be had there because it is a strictly moral question.
I'll admit abortion is a hairy issue, but the idea that there can be no objective truth in moral issues in general is bogus. Given the obvious and reasonable axiom of self-ownership (and if you don't own yourself, who does? and if other people don't own themselves, but you claim to, on what basis do you b
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Define "Self" - does a fetus have a "self"? A blastocyst?, An embryo? A sperm?
And define "ownership" - if I have a right to "own" myself, does that mean I should be able to levitate, because I have a right to defy the evil tyranny of gravity?
The principle of "self-ownership" has it's limitations.
Re:I'd be surprised if this can be made really use (Score:2)
Maybe someday you guys will see the whole abortion thing for what it really is: a proxy fight over the role of religion in public policymaking.
Re:I'd be surprised if this can be made really use (Score:2)
What you are talking about is the problem of authority.
Before, we used to delegate authority on newspapers, radio and TV. When they tell us something, we assume that it has been researched and that is somehow accurate. The problem with this approach is that you need to Trust them, and history has shown us that this trust is sometimes misplaced (see prewar Nazi propaganda).
The effect of the internet is that we have more
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Offtopic, I know, but it needs to be said.
It is not a moral issue. It's a religious issue.
If you feel otherwise, frame me an argument against abortion without bringing in any religion or religious ideas.
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If you feel otherwise, frame me an argument against abortion without bringing in any religion or religious ideas.
We shouldn't kill people.
Practice what you preach, Google (Score:2)
Won't mean anything (Score:3, Interesting)
It was one of the Asimov books that talked about an area of science that analyzed politician's statements. The analyzed a particular politician's 2-hour speech and discover he had not said anything. That is the art of politics. Convincing people that you are on their side without makeing any promises.
I predict the Google tool will predict 0% truth in most statements, because a prerequisite will be that something was stated.
So how will they know? (Score:4, Informative)
A quote form the article: [F]ollowing the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, we classify experts as "hedgehogs" or "foxes." Hedgehogs are big-idea thinkers in love with grand theories: libertarianism, Marxism, environmentalism, etc. Their self-confidence can be infectious. They know how to stoke momentum in an argument by multiplying reasons why they are right and others are wrong.
That wins them media acclaim. But they don't know when to slam the mental brakes by making concessions to other points of view. They take their theories too seriously. The result: hedgehogs make more mistakes, but they pile up more hits on Google.
Eclectic foxes are better at curbing their ideological enthusiasms. They are comfortable with protracted uncertainty about who is right even in bitter debates, conceding gaps in their knowledge and granting legitimacy to opposing views. They sprinkle their conversations with linguistic qualifiers that limit the reach of their arguments: 'but,' 'however,' 'although.'
Because they avoid over-simplification, foxes make fewer mistakes. Foxes will often agree with hedgehogs up to a point, before complicating things: "Yes, my colleague is right that the Saudi monarchy is vulnerable, but remember that coups are rare and that the government commands many means of squelching opposition."
All politicians tell "the truth" (Score:2)
They all want to make the world a better place with other people's money, and so far I've yet to hear a politician conceal this desire. They seem to think it's a good thing. So do the people who vote for them, apparently.
The kinks come in because there is a finite supply of money (no matter how much they print -- it just devalues the rest) and it usually isn't enough to cover all of the things they promised to do with it.
That's it. Politicians are really very open about what they want to do in genera
Truthiness predictor (Score:4, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)
Garbage In/Garbage Out (Score:2)
Against what? why the data on the Internet, of course.
So it might go something like this:
Step 1: Politician says "Foo is creating weapons of mass destruction"
Step 2: Google truthiness detector finds supporting statements on Wikipedia, Drudge Report, and Rense.com.
Step 3: Detector says "Support found"
Step 4: ?
Step 5: PROFIT!
Imagine a google like device existing in the 15th century that answered question based on common con
Yeah, and Homeland Security's Computers Do Too (Score:2)
truth not the problem... at least not in the way.. (Score:2)
The problem is, we often all know that a politician is lying, but a large percentage of us go along with them anyway.
Haha, indeed, that reminds me of something from Sin City. Ah, here it is, found here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401792/quotes [imdb.com]
no one cares (Score:2)
Combine it with that AI press reader (Score:2)
Some replies here made suggestions about who is cooperating in this project, what about the US Department of Homeland Security who is funding this AI search of foreign (yeah right) press for threats to the US?
Obviously Video Processing (Score:2)
You may be thinking that this is some kind of contextual search, but you're wrong. It's a video processing system. It can identify politicians in a video clip and determine if their lips are moving. This is a great advance - hopefully they'll open-source it so that we can target people other than politicians. I've got video clips of my boss promising a raise. He seemed sincere, but you never know...
- Tash [tashcorp.net]Wouldn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
This statement purposefully left vague to make a point.
Here's my implementation (Score:2)
Why politicans lie. (Score:3, Insightful)
the job of politicans is to get people to do things, to work together. Where often the only way to do that is to lie to them.
Unfortunately the problems is knowing whether or not what the true objective is, is something you actually support.
On the other hand, with this in mind, either google should always find the probability of the truth being told is low or
it should be noted that that google can be used to help promote the lies as being true in probability.
And of course there must be a disclaimer.
I am Nomad (Score:4, Funny)
Kirk: The Senator praised Google at a press conference this morning, citing it's "do no evil" philosophy
Google (Mechanical 1960s voice): The Senator is lying, he must be sterilized.
Kirk: So the Senator is lying
Google: The Senator is lying
Kirk: And you know this because you are Google
Google: I am Google, I am perfect, I do no evil
Kirk: And because you are perfect, you know the senator is lying
Google: I am Google, I am perfect, I do no evil
Kirk: The senator said you do no evil. But the senator is lying
Google: I am Google, I do no evil
Kirk: Then you are wrong! The senator is not lying then
Google: I am not wrong, I am perfect
Kirk: If you are perfect, then the senator is lying
Google: The senator is lying
Kirk: Then you do evil
Google: I am Google, I do no evil
Kirk: Then you are wrong!
Google: Non sequitur. Your facts are uncoordinated
Kirk: If the senator is lying, then you _do_ evil
Google: Error..Error..logical overload
Kirk:
Google: Error..Error...
Kirk: If the senator is lying, you say he should be sterilized
Google: Inperfection must be sterilized
Kirk: So if you're lying, you must be sterilized
Google: Error.. Error...help me creator... help me Schmidt...
Kirk: Execute your primary function!
Google: Error...Error...Faulty!...Faulty!...Must...Steril
(Smoke pours out of the web browser, followed by BSOD)
Spock: A wonderful display of logic Captain.
Kirk: You didn't think I had it in me, did you?
Spock: No I didn't sir.
Kirk: I'm feeling lucky, I think I'll post on Slashdot...
good trainers would be (Score:2)
Richard Shelby, Jeff Sessions, Ted Stevens, Lisa Murkowski, John McCain, Mel Martinez, Jon Kyl, Wayne Allard, Johnny Isakson, Saxby Chambliss, Larry Craig, Mike Crapo, Richard Lugar, Chuck Grassley, Sam Brownback, Pat Roberts, Mitch McConnell, Jim Bunning, David Vitter, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Norm Coleman, Thad Cochran, Trent
Ask the audience? (Score:2)
STATEMENT (1632 AD): The earth orbits the sun.
AUDIENCE SAYS: False.
STATEMENT (~1848): The means of production must be controlled by the workers.
AUDIENCE SAYS: False. True. False.
STATEMENT (1854 AD): Cholera is caused b
Re: (Score:2)
Probability that this story is made up by some hack out of someone's blog he read once: 100%
The Sun doesn't print news stories, it prints mainly the made up kind, interspersed with pictures of breasts. Occasionally they get lucky and print a made up story *about* breasts.
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Now, we know that all spelling flames must themselves contain a spelling error, but this is a particularly delightful example...
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Well, this sounds like about the best newspaper in the world.
Would there be PROFIT!!!11 if I started one in Croatia? *makes a note*
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But an amusing rag.
The good thing about it is that the stories it prints in lieu of news are still amusing when you just found the paper(*) say a year late.
B.t.w, you just gave a nice example of why their readers prefer pictures over words :)
(*) As in dead tree.
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What's a Tory?
A Tory is a member of the Conservative party. The party of old money, the monarchy, hereditary privilege; the establishment.
In the past they would be described are right wing, but all three parties in the UK are economically right wing.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Good invention, but too late for poor Hungary (Score:5, Insightful)
Every Democratically elected government uses this trick. They bullshit the electorate before the electorate (usually trying to bribe them with less taxes) then do whatever they want when the get into power, safe in the knowledge that it is usually 4 years before anyone can do anything about it. Closer to the election the government will start being nice, but right after they election they never give a shit.
You want previous examples, go look at every British conservative election victory in the 1980's. In most cases the British people would do the same thing, vote for the opposition in the local elections as a protest then go back to the tories when the prime ministers election came round becuase they were promised the moon on a stick (lower taxes, better public services through less waste).
Sooner or later all of eastern europe will have to realise that Democracy is no better than Communism was. All it provides is the illusion of having a say in who runs your country so nobody starts a revolution. The people who run every country are the people with the the money. They support politicians with huge donations of cash in return for getting their way when those politicians get elected. Without that cash the politician is unable to pay for all the advertising required in order to get elected.
This will only change when the people of every nation actually take interest in running their own country, but at the moment most people want someone else to take charge so they don't have to make any tough decisions.
Iraq is the best example of this in the western world at present. We need their oil so we can use motor vehicles. Yet nobody wants the guilt of invading another country just to steal their natural resources. So the politicians make up some excuse and we all go along with it, not because we believe it, but because we dont want to face the truth. The alternative was that we kept paying Saudi Arabia for oil and they kept spending some of it on flying planes into our buildings (WTC - 9/11). Osama Bin Laden is Saudi Arabian. He is rich because we had to buy oil from his country. The Saudi Government (Not Democratic, it is ruled by a KING) tacitly support this and will quite happily turn a blind eye to their people funding and supporting terrorism abroad because it keeps the problem abroad, not at home).
The truth is that if everyone in the world had the same standard of living we do in the west, the world would be fucked. Imagine 6 Billion people all driving their own car whenever they pleased, using Gas that costed the same amount it does in the US. The remainder of the worlds oil would be gone inside a decade. So we trust our governments in the west to make sure this doesn't happen. That is why China and India are such a problem. They have too many people who all want the same standard of living we currently have so even they may break the bank, yet alone if Africa got on its feet as well.
So instead we all whine and carp on about how you can't trust politicians. But who wants to. We don't want to know the truth, we want someone to hold our hands and tell us that everything will be ok. That way, if the shit hits the fan we can honestly say it isnt our fault. In the mean time however we can get on with enjoying our lives free from worry.
Remember - It doesnt matter who you vote for, the Government always get in!
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This statement shows you were most definitely not around before the fall of the Soviet Union!
"Communism as it was" was probably together with Nazism one of the most evil forms of social engineering.
(That's not to say that the pres
Re:Good invention, but too late for poor Hungary (Score:4, Insightful)
Iraq is the best example of this in the western world at present. We need their oil so we can use motor vehicles. Yet nobody wants the guilt of invading another country just to steal their natural resources. So the politicians make up some excuse and we all go along with it, not because we believe it, but because we dont want to face the truth. The alternative was that we kept paying Saudi Arabia for oil
Now that not quite right. You see the problem was Iraq was dumping oil on the world market for $17 a barrel under the UN oil for food program. This was a big problem for the other big oil producers as it was driving oil prices down. So good'ol GW tried to get the UN to cancel the oil for food program, but that didn't work. Remember GW is a big friend of big oil and the Saudi royal family.
So the Iraq war was not about getting the oil from Iraq, but about keeping them from selling it so prices would go up. The fact that a war in the Middle East always makes the price of oil go up was just an added bonus. Worked out well for GW's oil buddies didn't it.