Aren't There Laws Against That?

[sheepdog 10]

Don't know about the rest of you, but I am more than ready for this election to be over with. I have never heard such BS in my life, back and forth back and forth, This one says my opponent did this and this and supported this cause, and I won't do that, I'm on your side, I did this and that, and the other guy says no, I didn't do that, I did this, bla bla bla. But here's the thing, One of them has to be lying. If 2 people are saying totally opposite things, at least one of them has to be lying. No 2 ways about it. Now, if you were a company in this country and you developed a product, you couldn't go on television and claim that your product did all sorts of wonderful things for people if it wasn't true. The government would come down on you like stink on poo and fine you and make you stop your advertising campaigne immediatly. They would force you to provide scientific data and the reasearch you did to prove your claims of whatever it is your product is supposed to do. In many cases, it would require you to spend tons of dollars in reasearch before you were ever even allowed to put your product on the market. But then on the other hand, all these dang politicians can get up there and say pretty much whatever they want to say about their competition weather it's true or not and they can get away with it. Why is that? I wonder if it's because they are the ones making the laws? Sure would be nice to make rules and regulations and then make yourself exempt from them!

[adriantc 0]

In a normal world the three nominal powers of the state (with the media being the forth) would be total independent and would make sure that if somebody promises something and cannot deliver specially if it is within their capabilities he should take the responsibility. That control is very important... Every one of those powers must check the other two. But that never happens. The one thing that binds everything up is money. Remember the huge amount of money spent in campaigns. Every new election brings more and more funds. I have heard somewhere this years election had a total budget of 150 million dollars... that is just huge, specially considering the times we are going thru. Whoever is donating that amount of money is sure looking at it as an investment. Spend money on a candidates campaign and once he gets the job, he will take care of his debts. And when money is involved everything works very smoothly. Government business goes to preferred companies (the ones who make considerable "donations" for the elections), the laws are passed for their benefit and their friends benefit.In a perfect world it doesn't necessary mean if the two sides say two different things one of them is lying. Politics should not be an issue of promising stuff, but of promising a list of measures to take in order to get more jobs, better paychecks, better health-care and so on. They should be talking about two ways to get to the same result. As in mathematics an equation can have more then one result. But of course in politics the equation usually doesn't have any result. People just get fooled every four years by someone else.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

Now, if you were a company in this country and you developed a product, you couldn't go on television and claim that your product did all sorts of wonderful things for people if it wasn't true. The government would come down on you like stink on poo and fine you and make you stop your advertising campaigne immediatly. They would force you to provide scientific data and the reasearch you did to prove your claims of whatever it is your product is supposed to do. In many cases, it would require you to spend tons of dollars in reasearch before you were ever even allowed to put your product on the market.

 

This is far from being the truth. As far as I know, giving false information would just be a civil suit, not criminal (I'm not an attorney but as far as I know this is true). As for providing research data, you could always skew that as well (and many companies do). You more or less have to use the old saying, "if it seems too good to be true, it probably is."

[sheepdog 10]

Do you know what a Baker's dozen is? Many years ago the government stepped in to protect consumers. Now a days it's called the department of weights and measure. But anyway, back to the Bakers dozen. In the old days the bakers would sell you 12 one pound loaves of bread, and they were supposed to weigh exactly 12 lbs. Bakers got in serious trouble if you didn't get your full 12 lbs of bread, I think they used to cut off a hand or some barbaric thing like that. Anyway, so Bakers would give you 13 loaves of bread, in case any of them where under one pound, hence the bakers dozen is actually 13 and not 12. Today we have all sorts of government agencies regulating commerce. The Department of Weights and measures, the Food and drug adminsitration, the United States Department of Agriculture just to name a few that you better label your product accurately or you will be in deep doggie doo doo.

[k_nitin_r 8]

There aren't laws against that per-se, but if one party files a lawsuit for slander, the other could have to pay for the damages. I guess the defense could be that the knowledge was not common knowledge, was not easily accessible, and the damages cannot be quantified because of a lack of definitiveness in elections.In either case, public debates always go the way of contradictions. People hardly agree with one another because if they did, others would simply say, "Oh, he's just a yes-man." There is a thing like diplomacy but people don't become popular with being diplomatic.BTW, remember Gandhi? He's typically remembered as a peace-loving leader. People who read about him criticize him for his polygamy and ill-treatment of his family. People who play Civilization think of him as a psychopath who talks about peace and when you turn your back on him, he starts amassing nukes and goes war-crazy... something about a programming bug in the first version of Civilization where his aggressiveness was set to one on a scale of one to two hundred and fifty five. Then, after the Indian civilization discovers democracy, the leaders are given a minus two for aggressiveness. Since Gandhi was already on a one, you would think aggressiveness would go to a negative one, but since there are no negatives, his aggressiveness goes all the way up to two hundred and fifty five! It's the lack of understanding of representing decimal numbers as binary and a lack of code quality that is to blame. If any of NASA's missions failed because of the number systems, that wouldn't be a first either.