So I have returned from my short little vacation, a free trip to Las Vegas, gambling mecca extraordinaire. Of course, I’m not inclined to gamble, because the house always wins in the end. But we had a great time going to some shows, meeting some old friends, and enjoying the break from work.
Nonetheless, the gambling environment is instructive in human nature. People know that they will lose money, they know the odds are stacked against them, and they play anyway. Even if the house advantage is razor slim, as in Black Jack, repeated often enough the house still wins.
Democracy in America operates under a similar principle. The primary purpose of a biased media is not to prevent a right-wing victory per se, but rather to give the house (the Democrats) better odds. The same is true of our Leftist education establishment, celebrity figures spouting mealy-mouthed Marxist platitudes, and so on. Even now, with desperate plays by Jill Stein to force recounts in the Rust Belt, and with SJWs harassing Republican electors and fantasizing about the electoral college putting up John Kasich as an alternative… we are seeing nothing more than last minute, desperate plays by the house to recover from a loss they didn’t expect.
Yes, the house always wins the war in the end. But they still lose individual battles, individual hands, and this one cost them big time. You might even look at Donald Trump as a card counter. He knew the game the house plays, because he was part of the house.
So full media, education, and cultural control is sufficient to give the house an advantage, but not enough of one. Certainly not enough to bankrupt us as quickly as they would prefer. So another means was identified and created in recent years: Virtue Signalling.
If you are familiar with Game Theory’s Prisoners’ Dilemma, you know that the ideal result for the individual is to betray while the other sucker confesses. But the ideal result for both as a whole is to cooperate, and for each to receive very little punishment.
The numbers used often vary, but here is the basic matrix.
Virtue Signalling is the cheat code to Game Theory. It is how politicians, SJWs, and other assorted tyrants on planet Earth have managed to short-circuit the rational self-interest of people in Western countries. It uses political correctness as a bludgeon with which to force you into a default state of “cooperate”. Knowing that you will usually choose “cooperate” due to political pressure, they are then free to “defect” whenever they wish, leaving them with all the benefits, and you with all the costs.
It would be like playing poker where you had to show your hand (because Social Justice, or whatever excuse is in fashion at the moment), and the other player could keep his hand secret.
It must have been a consistent problem for tyrants throughout history. How do you get a theoretically democratic populace to vote consistently against their own rational self-interest, and in favor of your own? Control of education was one natural step, of course. If you fill the heads of impressionable young people with Communist “end of history” claptrap, they can be counted upon to vote your way for a while out of ignorance, at least. But reality quickly intrudes…
The quote falsely attributed to Churchill (it may have actually originated with Edmund Burke) explains for us:
If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.
So propagandizing education only works for a while. Virtue Signalling political correctness is a much more consistent weapon, because it can also be used against people who know better, but are merely afraid to speak up due to the probable consequences to career, family life, and friendship.
You better show your poker hand, pleb, or else you’re an evil-mean-bad person, and you’ll lose your job. Virtue Signalling is your warning that you are treading too close to “defect” and you better “cooperate”. No such restriction applies to the other side of the bargain.
Virtue Signalling forces a default setting of “Keep Faith” even when the person knows they will be betrayed. It forces “Keep Faith” with mass Islamic immigration even when most terror comes from an Islamic source. It forces “Keep Faith” even when illegal immigrants and Islamic migrants bring in diseases previously eradicated in America, when many use the people-smuggling routes for drugs, weapons, and cartel activities. It forces “Keep Faith” with thugs, criminals and malcontents.
Why? Because anything other than Keep Faith is hate, bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, otherkinphobia, and whatever bigot buzzword bonanza the SJW Left decides is the cause-of-the-minute.
At this point, I cannot conceive of anything that any Leftist victim group could possibly do that would diminish them in any way in the eyes of the Left. If Islamists nuked an American city, they would still say that Islam is a religion of peace. If a repeat of the LA riots occurred, and another Reginald Denny was pulled out of his truck and beaten near to death, the sympathies of the Left would still be with the poor, disenfranchised thugs, not the truck driver, who would still be accounted as having white privilege. And if a woman raped a man (yes, it is possible), radical feminists would celebrate the crime as a great step forward for women’s rights.
Keep Faith. Cooperate. Obey.
They may as well say: “always lose.”
Life is not a zero-sum game, or at least it shouldn’t be, but the Left plays it that way. Their entire ideology is built around it. Marxism is an economic zero-sum ideology. Social Justice is a social zero-sum ideology. And, as the house, they seek to maximize their personal gain from it. They are the house, The Man, the Establishment, whatever you want to call it. And we are the poor slobs dumping money into the slots by the bucket load. And on top of all that, they still cheat.
Only, unlike my trip to Vegas, there is no option to say “no thanks, I don’t feel like playing a rigged game.”
Damn! That’s genius.
If you go into those blue areas, that’s how they operate.
Moved from OK to MASS at 8yrs old,I thought I’d lost my mind.
Good stuff! Keep going.
I guess I’ll have to read game theory this winter. I missed a trick there, I think.
Please note the prisoner’s dilemma is not a zero-sum game. Both can win by cooperating.
Except the Left’s idea of cooperate is actually “You Cooperate, I walk.” There is no agreement possible because the Left will never keep it.
Exactly.
I agree. After the 2014 election, the Republicans tried to cooperate with the Democrats. They tried to “play nice” negotiating several compromises, but in the end only made concessions without anything substantial in return from the Democrats. And that is a major part of why the voters were so angry at the Republican party, and regular party presidential candidates, and chose Trump. There is no compromise with the socialists running the Democratic party. They won’t accept genuine compromise.
The only reasonable cooperation is between conservative, and some libertarians, since they still have some honor.
The Left discounts that possibility entirely. They *make it* a zero sum game.
guiowen,
Please note the prisoner’s dilemma is not a zero-sum game. Both can win by cooperating.
You don’t understand the prisoner’s dilemma. In the prisoner’s dillema, if both rat each other out, they get 8 years in prison. If neither rats the other out, they each get 6 months prison time. The only time you will get no prison time is if you rat out the other, but he doesn’t rat you out.
The prisoner’s dillema is such that NO ONE ever gains. You can only minimize your losses.
It depends on the reward matrix. Some have positive outcomes for both if they cooperate with each other, although in that case it is more properly called the cooperation game. For example it could have a reward matrix of:
Cooperate Betray
Cooperate +1, +1 -2, +2
Betray +2, -2 -2, -2
In this form, if both cooperate, both gain 1, if one betrays the other loses 2 and they gain 2, and if both betray both lose 2. The winning strategy for repeated trials is still the same, start out as cooperate, and then always reflect your last opponents move back at them. So if your opponent cooperates you both consistently gain, otherwise if they betray you, then you betray them next time to get your -2 back, and if they continue to betray, you both lose, but equally till the end of the trials. This matrix is good for situations like military alliances or trade, where both benefit by cooperation, but one ally suffers if the other betrays them, and if both betray continuously then it will soon no longer be an alliance.
Not really, .The only true “win” option is “Free.” All the others are just varying magnitudes of loss.
Since you have no control over the other’s actions, all you can do is select a range of outcomes. Your options are:
1. Defect: Worst outcome: 8 years. Best outcome: Free
2. Cooperate: Worst outcome 20 years. Best outcome: 6 months
With option 1, the best outcome is the best possible and the worst outcome is significantly less bad than you risk by cooperating.
If you’re only concerned about your own welfare, defecting is the rational choice.
SJW? Marxist? Really? Came here looking for insightful analysis only to see the tedious drudgery of an alt-right dullard; one who uses concepts like game theory far beyond his reach. As others have noted, game theory doesn’t work the way it is. Marxism is far different than the cartoon rendition you’ve apparently read. Terms like SJW only reveal you to be an unthinking, critically impaired individual of insufficient intellectual capacity. All of this analysis… so superficial and monochromatic. What a disappointment.
I’m sorry you wasted the time of many actual thinkers.
You sound like a lot of fun to hang out with.
Clearly an offended Marxist. They hate nothing more than to be called out and labeled like they enjoy doing to others.
” Terms like SJW only reveal you to be an unthinking, critically impaired ”
Yet, you miss the irony of having stated, “tedious drudgery of an alt-right dullard”.
Son, you sound extremely butthurt. Might want to retreat to your safe space and tune into the DU echo chamber so you can recover from the triggering effect that reality has had on your tender sensibilities.
OH, and you’re a racist misogynist homophobe islamophobe. And stuff.
Insult. Check.
Denigrate. Check.
Pretend you’re superior. Check.
Dismissal. Check.
Not even a spark of an original thought or action. But absolute certainty that you’re “a thinker” and not a predictable hack. Lol.
And for the record, this was a correct understanding of Prisoners’ Dilemma. Your stupid intimations aside, it is not a complex problem and serves as most people’s introduction to game theory. If you think this is a complex scenario, you’re not one third as brilliant as you think you are.
I don’t pretend to be an expert in Game Theory, of course. But as you say, the Prisoners’ Dilemma is not a complex concept to grasp.
Note that people like Post-Politics go right to “I’m smarter than you” without even stopping at proper refutation. They are emotionally invested in their self-proclaimed superiority over their opponents.
He could have disputed the idea that Social Justice peer pressure could change the outcome of the game. He’d lose that, I think, but it would have at least been a dialectical argument and not an emotionally-charged rhetorical one.
There’s one little subtlety in the Prisoner’s Dilemma that you didn’t touch on, but it doesn’t affect your point at all. The subtlety is “What’s the best long-term strategy”? People have done programming exercises where they program an AI to play Prisoner’s Dilemma against other AIs, and see which strategy works out best (racks up the least amount of prison time in the long run) against a variety of different strategies. And it turns out that if your opponents are capable of learning*, then the “tit-for-tat” strategy works best. That strategy says “In the first round, I will cooperate. In the next round, I will do to you what you did to me in the previous round.” So if the opponent is also playing tit-for-tat, both AIs continue to cooperate forever, because the tit-for-tat strategy doesn’t start fights (it just finishes them). But if the opponent goes for the betrayal option once, the tit-for-tat AI will betray the opponent on the next round. If, on that round, the opponent had chosen to cooperate, then the tit-for-tat AI will go back to cooperating on the next round, so that if the betrayal isn’t repeated, peaceful cooperation can resume.
If a tit-for-tat AI is faced with an opponent that can learn over the course of more than one game, that opponent will quickly learn that “betray + betray” leads to poor outcomes every time, “betray + cooperate” leads to a good outcome once and a bad outcome once, and “cooperate + cooperate” leads to good outcomes twice (or at worst a bad outcome once if the first cooperation had immediately followed a betrayal, because that’s the round in which the tit-for-tat AI is retaliating). And if it cooperates three times in a row, then it will get a good outcome at least twice. Over time, that leads its weighting algorithm to lean more towards “cooperate”, and so a tit-for-tat AI ends up “teaching” its opponents that betrayal isn’t worth it.
The parallels to politics are left as an exercise for the reader. 🙂
* Yeah, I know that makes this concept inapplicable to certain kinds of political opponents…
I missed that a couple of other commentators had already talked about the “tit-for-tat” strategy before I posted that comment. Oh well; the discussion of testing game theory via programming different AIs to employ different strategies, and seeing which one gathers the “best” outcome for the AI against a variety of opponents, is still (hopefully) interesting.
“Post-Politics”, thank you for a perfect illustration of virtue signalling. You may now safely retreat from engaging in any intellectual debate, secure in the knowledge that you are still One Of The Good Guys™ and told that Evil Rethuglican™ how Evil he was.
I also note that your post did not present any counter-argument other than “You’re wrong because I say so.” You state that “game theory doesn’t work the way it is”, but you don’t bother to explain how (in your view) game theory actually works. In other words, your post contributes absolutely nothing to the discussion other than to show off that you’re one of the Enlightened Ones™ who are So Much Smarter™ than those idiots on the other side.
In other words, a perfect illustration of virtue-signalling.
Note also that anything our intrepid intellectual doesn’t like is automatically related to the alt-right, too.
Post-Politics, your little screed reminds me of all these journalists posting glowing eulogies of Fidel Castro, who are suddenly angry because the right-wing is not being nuanced enough about the Communist dictator. He had his good points, they say, and we must take into account his brave stand against the evil imperialist forces of America. Or whatever. They have different rationalizations. Some will speak of his great healthcare system, or his wonderful education system, or his love of authentic Cuban culture (whatever that is).
It’s the same sort of thing you touch on here. “Marxism is far different than the cartoon rendition you’ve apparently read.” You know nothing of what I have read or haven’t read. But let’s put that aside for a moment… I have family who lived under Marxism. And whatever rationalizing you do pales in comparison to their very real experience. You can talk all you want of the subtleties of Marxism. Perhaps you can speak of the Situationists, the Frankfurt School, or the Hegelian origins of Marx’s own work. You can armchair quarterback Lenin and Trotsky. But none of it matters. What matters is the real world result of its application. And we all know how each and every attempt has ended.
Orwell’s provides a quote in 1984 that is relevant here:
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:
…..Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
2 + 2 = 4, sir. Rationalize it however you like, the result is still the same.
I think one reason why people might think you have the wrong idea about Marxism is that you don’t use the term correctly. Marxism is the system of analysis: communism is the form of government. Nobody “lives under” Marxism.
Now you might want to argue that people often use the word Marxism to refer to the form of government, and this vindicates your use of it. That’s precisely the point, though because it’s people who have the wrong idea that use the term in this way.
TL;DR Tune semantics to ensure credibility.
You have it backwards. I used the term Marxism to provide continuity with my detractor’s comment. You will note that the in my original post I refer to Marxism as the ideology, not the system of government.
If you want to get into semantics, you used “people” to refer to my single detractor. Technically, you should have used the singular.
But you know very well that Post-Politics was not referring to my usage of the word in the first place, so your argument is a red herring. His dispute was with a supposed oversimplification of what Marxism really is. Many believe that opposition to Marxism comes from a lack of understanding of the ideology. They are mystified that some might understand it fully, and still be in opposition.
Semantics matter, but do avoid picking too many nits. I’ve neither the time nor the patience for it.
Using phrases such as “Marxism is an economic zero-sum ideology” is merely evidence that either you don’t understand it, or you’re deliberately misusing it.
The reason I used “people” is because a common trope on this type of blog is right-wing commentators claiming to have a better understanding of Marxism than actual Marxists.
It just seems weird that you rail against “Marxism” in the US, when US politics – including the Democrats – is more right-wing than most European right-wing parties.
That fact alone would give me pause, so I’m just trying to understand why it doesn’t make you wonder if perhaps you’ve got things slightly wrong.
Using phrases such as “Marxism is an economic zero-sum ideology” is merely evidence that either you don’t understand it, or you’re deliberately misusing it.
How so? The zero-sum aspect of Marxism actually predates Marx himself, and goes back to Hegel:
“[A]ll worth which the human being possesses — all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.”
-G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History
The zero-sum nature of this is implicit in the recognition of the State as the superior entity, the distributor of all. That this fits neatly with authoritarian Communism is instructive, and not at all coincidental as some Marxist apologists are wont to believe. If each human is but a fraction of the state, then he shares only his apportion from the state. Each activity is but a reshuffling of the resources of the state (zero-sum from the perspective of the individual). All transactions are thus to benefit the State, the individual is irrelevant.
This is from Dr. Kelley Ross ( You can find much of his work at http://www.friesian.com/ ), the gentleman from whom I have gained much of my insight into Marx and Hegel:
“Thus, the mere common individual person is unreal compared to the State, which is Real and Rational. A dissenting individual is, as the Marxists would say, “objectively” irrational. An individual as individual becomes real only to the extent that it participates in the Universal. In those terms, the most real individual is the one that uniquely embodies a universal, as Napoleon did the Zeitgeist of his Age, as the King of Prussia did the Prussian State, or as Hegel himself did the philosophy of the Absolute Idea. This dismissal of the ontological claims of individuality is then of a piece with the dismissal of the moral claims of individuality: as the “All the Real is Rational, and all that is Rational is Real,” so is the universality of the state identical with good and right. This gives us a kind of judicial positivism sharply different from Kant, where the source of moral authority is in autonomous individual reason (a recipe for “irrationality” for Hegel), and external reality cannot measure up to the demand for Good Will in the Moral Law, or even from Plato, where the Forms are, after all, detached from the World of Becoming, which cannot approach their perfection. The privileged claims of conscience, then, or the idea that worldly governments are inherently imperfect and corruptible, would be for Hegel meaningless. Indeed, in his own day Hegel could complain about the merely “formal” freedom of British institutions (like Marx complaining about mere “bourgeois” freedom), in comparison to real freedom under the King of Prussia.”
To Hegel, thus we find the individual is unreal. His activities are of no consequence, except that they reflect and serve the State. Since the State is all, an individual is but a component of the State, and his actions within it must be implicitly zero-sum based on the value of the State (no other “value” is real, except that).
The reason I used “people” is because a common trope on this type of blog is right-wing commentators claiming to have a better understanding of Marxism than actual Marxists.
I don’t make such a claim, per se. You will see that I generally place Marxists into two broad categories. The first are those who really don’t understand their ideology. Call them College Communists, or whatever, if you like. They are very common, and can be found all over social media and meatspace, and generally have no idea of the consequences of their actions, or deliberately blind themselves to it. They can be spotted readily by their over-reliance upon tiresome cliche. The second category are those who do understand Marxism quite well, and have an in-depth understanding of the consequences, and still desire them.
The second group is, perhaps, less common. But they are quite adept at their art, and I do not underestimate them. They are formidable enemies. In many cases, they understand their ideology much better than I do. Many of them are highly intelligent, and expert at ideological subversion. Dismissing them as stupid has been a great mistake of the right wing. But the thing to be aware of here is that such deeper ideological understanding does not confer rightness (hence my quote from Orwell above). The geologist may, for instance, have a deeper understanding of a particular rock than I do. But it is still a rock, and it can be expected to have certain characteristics as such.
It just seems weird that you rail against “Marxism” in the US, when US politics – including the Democrats – is more right-wing than most European right-wing parties.
You are missing the obvious here: I don’t care about the relative position of European parties. If they are more inclined toward Marxism (and I would agree that, in general, they are) than those in my own country, that is their business.
That fact alone would give me pause, so I’m just trying to understand why it doesn’t make you wonder if perhaps you’ve got things slightly wrong.
I wonder every day if I have things slightly wrong. I used to be, for example, very much in favor of free trade. I was in line with the philosophy of Milton Friedman in this. Over time, I have moved to the position that free trade is a great idea in theory, but in practice can allow enemies too much power over a country’s own economy. The old “the Capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them” argument.
But if you want me to admit error, you will have to prove that an error took place.
I preface everything below with the qualification that I am not an expert.
It’s worth starting by reminding ourselves of what Hegel meant by the State – “the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth”. Marx was clear that he did not subscribe to this: in the afterword of Das Kapital, he says “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite… With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”
In his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx describes Hegel’s conception of the State – that “Family and civil society are conceived of as spheres of the concept of the state” – as “logical, pantheistic mysticism”. This is hardly a resounding endorsement, and he goes on to say that “Family and civil society are the presuppositions of the state; they are the really active things; but in speculative philosophy it is reversed… The fact is that the state issues from the mass of men existing as members of families and of civil society; but speculative philosophy expresses this fact as an achievement of the Idea, not the idea of the mass.”
In Das Kapital, the state is described merely as “the concentrated and organised force of society”, chiming with Engels’ dismissal of Hegel’s view of the state in Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State – “The state is therefore by no means a power imposed on society from without; just as little is it “the reality of the moral idea,” “the image and the reality of reason,” as Hegel maintains”. He asserts that it is a historical contingency at a certain stage of development, writing in a letter to Bakunin: “We, on the contrary say: do away with capital, the appropriation of the whole means of production in the hands of the few, and the state will fall away of itself.”
It seems unlikely that, if they believed that all transactions are to benefit the State, they would anticipate – and hope – that the state would fall away. It is clear that even if you have correctly understood Hegel’s conception of the State – and I agree that Hegel is notoriously difficult to grok – Marx and Engels themselves did not agree with that conception, and did not agree with Hegel’s conclusion about the worth of the individual.
My comment above was meant for postpolitics.
Pretty good attempt at reinforcing political correctness there “Post-Politics.” Or flabby liar being far closer to the truth. “Marxism” as an ideal sounds like a pretty neat proposition but marxism as practiced by actual human beings has a body count of human death and misery every place its been tried. Every single one. SJW for social justice warrior is another political correctness attempt at controlling the conversation. Social justice warrior is the term chosen by themselves to describe themselves. So basically all you did in your little screed is to call anyone who does not agree with you stupid and toss out a few other (also unsubstantiated) insults and name calling. So nice of you to drop in and show us just how little you have. We are so impressed.
He/she/it is “Post-Politics” because politics didn’t go its way this time. So simple!
Forget playing the prisoner’s dilemma. It’s time to go full Kirk on the Kobiashi Maru scenario.
And of course you make no specific substantive argument. You call names and make unsupported, dismissive assertions. Because this is all the Left is now. But we have now passed peak leftism. This kind of cheap bullying is transparent to a growing number of people. Once you see that leftism is merely empty posturing, it instantly loses all credibility or interest. It causes the kind of preference cascade we are beginning to witness now. You people will continue to squeal like stuck pigs, but you’re over.
Inwas addressing the risibly named Post Politics.
Grow up; stop whinging
I think you are onto something, but I didn’t really get how a VS mechanism enforces PD outcomes. I hope you expand your thinking on this. I was with you on the concept of the left as the gaming house; totally agree with that. Maybe the concept of liar’s dice can be applied to VS. Each player signals until the believability threshold is crossed and someone is caught out. Something like that.
When you have the choice of “betray” instead of “keep faith”, Virtue Signalling and political correctness provide a certain peer pressure upon you. They want you to “keep faith” more than “betray”. Of course, they intend on betraying every time.
If most of the time you keep faith, and they betray, then they win. If some of the time (but less than half), you betray anyway, well at least they aren’t any worse off.
It’s a way to control the game. To cheat. To ensure that at worst, they are never any worse off than you. At best, they win everything.
Without that social pressure that virtue signalling provides, you would be free to be entirely rational in your choice of keeping faith, or betraying.
Neither liberty nor prosperity are zero sum games, in fact, I think both of them act as multipliers. The wanna be totalitarian and statist thugs either don’t get it or are aware and trying to make damned sure the populace doesn’t remember.
@jdwill07: I think it’s that VS behavior by the left strongly discourages anyone not on the left from making the “Defect” choice, which would be represented by showing open disagreement with the left’s positions. VS behavior appeals to one’s natural desire to be seen as humane and generous — and it’s also often accompanied by the implicit threat that one could lose one’s job or otherwise suffer real-world consequences for disagreeing. So one is biased toward going along and giving the left what it wants. Again, the only way to win is not to play.
LP Lodine said: “Again, the only way to win is not to play.”
Certainly Donald Trump proved this. Would any of the other Republican candidates have avoided the trap?
Instead of invective, why not instruct us on why your lefty positions are correct, especially in the face of their failure worldwide for 100+ years.
You also miss the point that the ideal long-term strategy in an ongoing PD scenario is “tit-for-tat”l, where you start by cooperating and then thereafter respond the way your opponent did in the previous round. This seems to be what Reagan did and what Trump seems inclined to do.
The Social Justice position is if there’s a straight white guy, he ought to cooperate no matter what, even if his opponent betrays. Keep cooperating. Always. Because to do anything else would be racism/sexism/whatever.
The way to play is to adopt the winning strategy.
You gain wisdom, youngling.
The other way to win, though, is to beat the house at it’s own game, repeatedly, consistently, until they surrender – then you have the option to stop playing.
This last election was an example of this; as you pointed out, Trump beat the Dems at their own game, by taking it and dialling it up to 11, then shoving it back at them. The Dems had grown complacent through expecting that their opponents would continue to play the honorable patsy, and had no plan to deal with someone who’d hit them on their own low terms and not give ground.
Side comment:
I’m beginning to wonder if the democrat-republican divide is going to become overtly irrelevant in the near future.
Consider: there seems to be a very small but real group of ‘center left’ democrats who are trying to bring the party back to some level of sanity. Note the Ohio congressman and 62 others who tried to push aside Nancy Pelosi. Also, Jill Stein’s silly recount efforts might be an attempt to grab the attention and shift the loyalty of the fervent ideological base of today’s democratic party – namely, the SJWs, BLM fans and others who can best be described as New Age Marxists.
Could we be witnessing the death of BOTH parties, in fact? A democratic party that splits into the New Communists who, continuing to fade into irrelevancy, eventually resort to violence and re-found groups like the SLA and Weather Underground and a small center left New Democrats? On the GOP side, a rump group that stays in the ideological domain of the ‘religious right’ and is always soft, very poor at defending its positions and complacent to Big Government, a New Republicans under Trump that constitutes a very slightly right of center group that mixes nationalism, big government and business, and a tiny Libertarian group?
I’m speculating here. Curious if I’m just delusional.
It’s entirely possible.
What we are actually seeing here is that Trump commands what is, in Parliamentary parlance, a coalition government.
We have the old GOP (itself a coalition of right-libertarians, religious right, and old guard establishment) as one party, and the Trumpites (a center-right party with some center-left dems/indies co-opted in) as another party.
And currently they have a coalition. The Trumpites with the executive branch, and the ability to tilt the court, and the GOP with Congress and most of the state/local govs.
The Trumpites may constitute a third party WITHIN a party, and it may continue to attract rogue center-left Dems who find the center-right closer than the Marxist left.
We’ll see, I suppose.
I’m pretty sure game theory demands that every time they betray you, you betray them in return and continue to do so until they stop betraying you. You are under no obligation to cooperate with them if they are selling you out. In fact you have an obligation to betray them in order to correct their improper behavior. Remember, they chose to betray you; you didn’t start it, they did.
Considering first, the truth in Dystopic’s post then the natural conclusion that talk and debate are useless would a continutation of talk and debate be evidence of the definition of insanity? Other than as a counter psy-op tool, I mean? Shouldn’t a more agressive approach be invented? I give as an example the Chick-fil-a dust up for example.
If all were truly post-politics, then Post-Politics would be tied to a post…
Part of the Prisoner’s Dilemma problem is that the “adopt his strategy last time” doesn’t work all that well when the only guy who knew his strategy was the DA, the cops and the guy sold out- and the guy sold out is in jail for 20 years, and his partner is free to find another patsy.
I was thrilled to see Trump deploy the big lie offered usually offered by the left (“Republicans want old people to starve!”) and deploy it- so the Democrats didn’t benefit from unconditional disarmament of the Republicans. That meant that he only had to fight the 15% advantage of the news media being 99% Democrat activists with a byline, and voting corruption in Democratic run cities. The beauty was that the Democrats in Detroit believed that Hillary was ahead, so they didn’t produce as many fake ballots as was needed.