Rekna

I wanted to start a thread here to see what people thought. I'm not talking this current administration but the government in general reguardless of whether it is republican or democrat or whatever.

Paq

I want a more transparent government, honestly, but i realize that yes, there are some things the government should not tell. That said, they should not lie about what info they are going to release.

__________________
Live.

Chris

Rekna

My opinion is this, the government has a duty to be honest with its populous. Honesty does not mean open access to information but they should never lie to them or miss lead them. We need to be able to trust the government.

joe_eschaton

Can a government do anything else?

Consider the number of people composing a cabinet, let alone a government: imagine how difficult to keep the long and interrelated web of conceptions floating and bouncing around their heads in perfect synch with one another at all times, and this assuming they have a clear idea of what half of the concepts they employ mean anyway. Remember how hard it is to have a seamless conversation with anyone especially, friends in particular. And then the chain of interpreters and reporters and their editors; the concensus you end up with (when you've made your own dodgy evaluations of course) is about as far from the 'truth' as you could possibly hope to get. Is a lie as bad if its inevitible, albeit magnified beyond all reasonable treatment by any individual? Fuck knows... that's why I don't vote for anything. What 'thing'?

Lebell

I would have voted halfway between the last two options.

At times, it is a good thing to lie to the people if the interest of the people is served in doing so.

For example, during WW2 the government regularly told lies to the people to disseminate false information to the enemy.

However, lies that are told in the self interest of the government for the sole sake of the government are wrong.

__________________
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

The ONLY sponsors we have are YOU!

Please Donate!

flstf

From "A Few Good Men"
I suspect that if the government discovered an extinction sized asteroid due to strike in a few months that they would not tell us.

highthief

How to make an atomic warhead should be secret. The access code to the white House or Downing Street or Sussex Drive prime minister/president's alarm system should be secret.

But outright lie? It should be illegal - in campaigns and while in office, as long as it does not affect national security.

__________________
Si vis pacem parabellum.

Rekna

yeah there is a big difference between keeping things secret and lieing about things

Strange Famous

It is considered acceptable to lie in times of war, or in circumstances such as a run on the unit of currency... or at least that was always my understanding.

__________________
"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas

politicophile

I think we are generally better off keeping procedure secret whilst keeping outcomes entirely public. For example, decisions made by the Federal Reserve should be widely publicized, but the debates behind the policy should be kept secret. The same should apply to committee hearings in Congress and to advice received by the President. These types of instances are ones in which our leaders need to be able to make unpopular decisions when they are the right decisions.

Government secrecy is a way for those in the know to avoid being pressured by the uneducated. In the policy-making process, this insularity is critical. Conversely, in the policy-implementation phase, as well as the broad decision-making picture, accountability is more important than secrecy.

__________________
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

roachboy

now that is a rousing defense of democracy in the american mode.
who exactly would constitute "the uneducated"?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

politicophile

Uneducated was perhaps the incorrect wordchoice: what I mean was more along the lines of uninformed, or at least uneducated about the specific policy consequences under discussion. I will provide examples based on the broad categories I provided above:

Federal Reserve: This agency is, of course, insulated from public pressure already, as it should be. The President is able to obfuscate the process of fiscal decisions by pointing innocently at the opaque Reserve: everyone knows when the Fed raises the interest rate, for example, but nobody can be held accountable for it. If an elected official was in charge of making this sort of decision, how long do you think it would be before an interest-nullifying populist was elected?

Committee hearings in Congress: The most efficient way to make deals in a two-party legislative body is in secret committee hearings. By exposing the committees to the oversight of the public, politicians become unable to swap votes and engage in the minute give-and-take excercises through which deals are made. Instead, the Congressmen must bribe votes through pork-barrel spending. Why do the people allow this bribery to take place? Because everyone loves pork. Go back and look at how much pork was in the budget when committee hearings were closed to the public: the results are shocking.

Advice received by the President: Sometimes, an advisor to the President might come to the conclusion that an extremely unpopular means is the best one for the given situation. Think along the lines of assassination of a democratically elected politician. Now, if the advisor were concerned that the public would find out about the request at some later date, she might be afraid to give the advice, ev of the nation. It is thus the case that secrecy in advice received by the President preserves the independence of his advisors and allows him to receive the very best advice under all circumstances.

I hope that clarifies my position.

__________________
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

SERPENT7

I think i agree w/ politicophile.
However, I think things should be more transperent than they currently are. (Too much is bad, though.)
Also,
I interpreted his 'uneducated' crack to mean people that watch too much T.V., and believe what it tells them. Those that don't read, and forgot how to think for themselves,...etc.

Willravel

I'm not alowed to lie to the government, so it seems only fair that they not be allowed to lie to me. I'm not a simpleton, I realize that because the current system of governments relies on information and intelligence that keeping the truth hidden is a tacticle advantage, but there is a line between necessary withholding of information and hording of information for control. I do not need to know where our troops are right now because if that information is released, it would compromise the safety of our troops. HOWEVER, I would like to see the intelligence linking Osama Bin Laden with the 9/11 attacks, as Condalezza Rice promised several years ago. Because my decisions in voting depend on my knowledge of facts like 9/11, it is necessary that I have all relevent information in order to cast the most informed vote possible. If I am not allowed to cast the most informed vote possible, my vote is being controled, whether by government, media, or any other party.

roachboy

the right does not view information as important and an informed polity as decisive for a functioning democracy--they do not like democracy; they view not filtered information as subversive and view the public as a manegement problem.
the question at the outset of the thread was perhaps too broad: it includes raison d'etat, and opens up the space for the move that politcophile made, which was to substitute questions that center on lying to the public about such trivia as war in iraq with the need for secrecy at various administrative levels within the state itself. presumably, if you can justify secrecy as an administrative requirement, you can also justify lying to the public about the reasons for war.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

politicophile

I don't think it is particularly helpful to talk about the opinions of "the right", as there is no such monolithic entity. I consider myself to be a political centrist, although I would wager that, in your black and white political spectrum, I too would be sucked into "the right".


The last sentence, which completes your slippery slope, is where one finds the gap in your reasoning. I would not presume that administrative secrecy leads to lying about the Iraq war and would be interested in knowing how you derive the latter from the former. Moreover, what do you think about the specific examples I presented?

I suggest you pick up a copy of The Future of Freedom by Fareed Zakaria. In it, you will find some interesting thoughts on the importance of secrecy in liberal democracies, among other things. It comes very highly recommended from me.

__________________
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Elphaba

I agree that Rekna's question is too broad and her/his poll choices are too narrow. But the OP also made it clear that this question is not about this specific administration or either of our two parties.

Roachboy, whatever you may think of the "right" or the "left", is irrelevant to this particular topic. The question is whether there is any justification to be lied to by our government.

Politicophile answered the broader question with what he deemed appropriate withholding from the public, as did others.

Do you have a position, in general, about when or if the government has a reasonable justification for ever lying or misrepresenting the truth to the public?

I can think of circumstances that would make that necessary, but I insist that our country's checks and balances should be the watchdog over those decisions. Abuse of power to sway public opinion would never be acceptable to me.

roachboy

1.
in general, i think that the state in a democratic context, even one as weak and superficial as the american, should be extremely reluctant to lie to the public.
in fact i would think that an informed polity could function as a kind of feedback loop for the state, checking its actions/orientations/excesses/failures.
i would have thought that a basic relation between the polity and the administrative or political apparatus it creates.
but as a normative matter, this seems of little interest.
what is theunderlying question?
do you in general prefer to pretend that the state does not lie or the opposite?
that is a matter of individual disposition, a kind of political a priori, which pertains to the peson answering the question, who is asked to consider him or herself in the abstract and think about assumptions that might structure other relations to politics.

the examples given earlier to argue that the state can and should lie to the polity were outlined across particular situations----so it follows that judgements concerning the question of whether the state can or should lie to its public are in fact judgements about situations. the same type of thinking, carried out on behalf of the state, is raison d'etat. introducing that element enables folk to argue that the state should not lie in general, but in an (apparently infinite) set of particular situations--or types of situations--it is ok.
i imagine that an actor within a given state apparatus who was called upon to justify a particular lie issued to the public would say nothing different.
this is what i meant when i responded to politicophile.
who responded in turn by rehearsing the same line back to me as if it was a response.
but that's mostly a function of a lack of clarity in my post--i did not speel out how i was using the phrase raison d'etat and so things followed. mea culpa.

2.
the general features of conservative politics are relevant to this thread whether you like it or not, elphaba, given that the general features of conservative ideology can provide a way into thinking about how a conservative administration--how the bush administration--operates.
the fact is that not all discursive environments outline the same relation to information.

a normative question was posed at the outset of this thread.
like i said earlier in this post, most of the answers move from a general statement to a series of situations.
that means that each respondent is moving from the normative to a way of trying to make the matter concrete.
i simply chose another way to move from the normative to the concrete.
at that level, the move is every bit as legit as any list of situations.
so you do not get to rule it out.

3.
politicophile: i have no idea what your politics are as a human being and i would not presume to speculate about that.
i simply react to your written language and map features of it onto what i see as conservative discourse.
you see that as generating a "black and white world"---i see it as reacting to features that i can know something about (what i read from you in your posts) and not going beyond that.
if you object to this procedure, i could easily substitute an approach predicated on guesses (like yours concerning my "black and white world")
my response to your specific examples is pretty straightforward: if you introduce raison d'etat/that logic into how you think about the question, then your examples make sense and your postion on them does as well.
but i wondered why you would do that--that is make that move at all.
i still wonder about why you do that.
i expect that it is an index for you of some pragmatism, some "realism"--i simply see the move itself as problematic because it dissolves any position from which you can make normative judgements. unless "whatever suits the adminstrative interests of the state is ok with me insofar as secrecy/deception is concerned" is for you a normative position.
in which case we simply disagree.

as for the question of classification of your politically: if you rehearse what i take to be conservative discourse in your posts, it more often than not follows that your thinking follows the same type of path. ideology is like that.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

jorgelito

I agree with this. However, I would like to point out that the "left" is also labeled and sandbagged in the same way, especially here on these boards. Just subsitute "left" for "right" in the above and see what I mean. Like Pan, I also think that we get way too bogged down here in left-right squabbles that are useless, often obscuring the real issues.

As far as the post, well, I don't think it's a good idea for the gov't. to lie to its people. I'm probably closer to Will on this aspect. I think secrecy and lying are 2 different things. Secrecy would be ok in my book but lying, probably not. Of course this is really vague and general, but hey, it's a poll right?

Hmmmm.....*wanders off to think about it some more*