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No it's not. Both sides mashing the defect button just makes everyone worse off.
Players that always cooperate are always worse off than players who do tit-for-tat. They only get equal if they play against each other since tit-for-tat players don't initiate defection.
The optimal way to act against people who always cooperate is preemptive nuclear strike. If you want anybody to not break the rules against you, they need to know you will do so against them, or they have nothing to lose.
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What would you have Trump do instead?
I would have him not engage in the same detestable behavior Biden did. I don't fucking care if it means that the Democrats get to perpetuate bad things and get one up on Republicans, that is still preferable to the current state of affairs. If I get screwed over by only one side hitting defect, I'm better off than the status quo where I get screwed over by both sides.
You understand why, from my perspective, I expect Trump to engage in these kinds of minor shenanigans to protect my tribe from democrats, even if they’re still shenanigans?
I do not, because he isn't protecting anything. Nobody has gained here, there are only losses.
I mean, the J6 prisoners sure gained a lot.
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The overcharged J6 protestors gained something. There's some measure of injustice being removed.
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The people locked up for political reasons sure gained a lot.
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This is just 'Don't fight back when your bully hits you' schoolyard reasoning writ large.
Yes, in a proper, preferable world, the bully wouldn't be hitting you. Or the school administration would do something swiftly and render further altercations impossible for either side.
Lacking any sort of higher recourse, often times the best option is to draw blood and continue to do so until they stop.
Have you read Romeo and Juliet? A schoolyard bully is mano e mano. A feud between groups is much messier, with innocents caught in the fallout.
Equating abuse of power to Shakespeare's criticism of idiotic teenage romance is not a comparison I would make.
I am making it as a simple comparison, because there is a difference between a man vs a man, and the political situation where it is group vs group. The obvious difference to me is that the most vocal, violent, and dissident points of view control the dialogue (and retaliatory actions from each side continue indefinitely) while other people, who are not involved, are caught in the crossfire. Hence the tragicomedy of Romeo and Juliet.
To the other comparisons to war, which are also group vs group: defecting in this sort of political dilemma, rather than war, serves to improve the standing of specific people within the society, and not the group as a whole. The difference should be that the detriment of your neighbours is a sign of the detriment to yourself. Even if you believe that defecting helps the party who does so (to me it seems like a defect-defect downward spiral, not a defect-cooperate situation where there is any benefit), it does not folow that a benefit to the party is a boon to the people of the country more generally. But as long as people are happy to watch politicians (pretend to) club each other over the head, happy that their outgroup experiences tribulations (which means everyone gets a turn), and happy that the other side is upset, I don't see how anything constructive can happen. The reality is that the politicians will drink Johnny Walker with one another after the show is over, but the general public will have no such consolation.
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That works with bullies because it's a single person who you can hurt to get them to stop hurting you. In this case it's more like you're fighting a crowd of people, and to hurt them hurts yourself just as much. It's stupid to fight under those terms.
...no? No, it doesn't.
(I'm dimly reminded of a lynch mob trying to fall upon someone, only to have them pull out a gun and have said lynch mob descend into a horde of individuals. When was that...)
Again, we've tried the entire 'be a bigger man' tactics of politics. The past two to three decades have been a demonstration of the GOP 'taking the higher road' or 'loosing gracefully'.
While we're not out of those woods yet, there seems to be some light coming from behind the trees. And thank goodness for that.
A scene in huckleberry Finn.
This was more recent, and an example on one of the Firearm forums I frequent about how brandishing a firearm can be a complicated and thorny legal act.
But, yes, I suppose that applies as well.
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Are you joking? They absolutely have not been that. The GOP has been fighting every bit as dirty as their opponents. To paraphrase the old quote about Christianity, acting right hasn't been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and not tried.
You can point to examples of the GOP doing things that qualify, I’m sure?
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McCain and Romeny both were both broadly regarded as highly moral and above-the-board fellows able to rise above mere partisanship, at least outside of the period of their presidential campaigns at which point they were warmongering sexist racists. Afterwards they were once again respected statesmen, at least as long as they criticized Republicans.
Mitch McConnell was dead set against a president being able to nominate a supreme court justice during his lame duck period... right up until it was Trump doing said nominating. It was basically impossible for a significant chunk of Obama's first term to avoid hearing Republicans accusing Obama of not being a US citizen, when there is zero chance they would fight so vociferously against someone on their side.
I never said that the Democrats are perfect angels who act morally and have the people's interests at heart. Nothing could be further from the truth. But they are not the only ones who fight dirty in politics and are willing to break norms of good behavior. Anyone who claims that the past 20 years has been a pattern of the Democrats misbehaving as the Republicans try to take the high ground is woefully misinformed at best, and more likely is a partisan hypocrite.
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Meh. I remember McCain's and Romney's lame-ass campaigns, and I'm surely not the only one.
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Do you think most of his constituents want him to not engage in this behavior?
I couldn't begin to guess. I would certainly hope not, but given that people here are willing to make excuses for him it may be that most voters want him to.
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Nobody's hit "defect" here but the Democrats. First by pardoning actual terrorists, then by inflicting harsh punishments on people who did many of the same sort of things that are commonplace and go unpunished or lightly punished in leftist protests.
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It doesn't make everyone one worse off, it only makes those who were already defecting worse off.
No, it really does make everyone worse off. Not only have we now pardoned even more criminals who should be serving punishments for the things they did, Trump has now given the other side incentive (and justification, no matter how flimsy) to defect further.
Trump is perpetuating the cycle of badness and I refuse to accept bad reasoning like "oh well they do it too, turnabout is fair play" trying to justify it. I'm sick and tired of being caught in the crossfire between these people.
The BLM rioters were already de facto pardoned by Blue.
By their own definition, this is not an abuse of the process. Blue can always change their definition so it isn’t corrupt as fuck in the future.
But then again, I’m ok with the metaphorical battered housewife hitting back, even if that predictably results in an escalation where the batterer murders her. This is the ‘die on your feet/live on your knees’ question (or more generally, safety vs. dignity) all over again.
Since Red is the dignity party at the moment (they can’t out-safety the safety party) this reaction is natural.
There is absolutely nothing dignified about this. It's not "dying on your feet", it's getting down in the mud and shit to flail around with a knife before dying from an infection because you cut yourself.
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No it really doesn't.
In the standard formulation of the dilemma, the ideal outcome in terms of individual gain for any single player in a single round is "I defect while the other guy cooperates". By extension the worst possible outcome from the perspective of any individual player is to cooperate with someone who then chooses to defect. This is why defect-defect is a natural equilibrium.
The Democrats wanted tolerance and have been given tolerance.
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This is the only sane take. The people claiming this is like a prisoner's dilemma are crazy, given that the prisoner's dilemma involves some level of personal gain (or at least losing less) for playing. Here, it's just pure negative. Nobody here gained from Biden's pardons, nor did they gain by the J6 pardons.
The recipients sure gained. And some J6 protestors appear to have been overcharged and given excessively long punishments. If pardons and clemency should exist at all, it should exist for this situation.
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The claim that nobody gained here is preposterous.
The Biden family and thier inner circle of supporters absolutely gained from Biden's pardons.
The protestors who've spent the last 4 years rotting in prison for acts that would have them little more than a slap on the wrist (assuming the got prosecuted at all) had they not been Republicans absolutely gained from Trump's pardons.
Your tribe suffering a setback is not the same thing as everyone being worse off, no matter how similar they may feel in the moment.
Fine, I'll concede the point that a handful of specific individuals have gained. But literally everyone else gained nothing, and in fact is losing by this. So this is still by far a net loss even if a handful of people gained significantly. Your rebuttal "but some people have gained" makes it come off even worse if anything, because now it's hurting the vast majority just to benefit a token few.
Better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man should be imprisoned falsely.
A severe injustice has been overturned. The world is a little bit brighter, freer, and more just.
It saddens me that you can't see this.
I am filled with joy for the political prisoners and their families who were railroaded by a weaponized legal system. Those who perpetrated and defended this monstrosity ought to be jailed for at least as long as those now freed.
You make a persuasive point that we should err on the side of protecting innocents. I myself am a strong believer in Blackstone's formulation. On the other hand, I don't think that it's accurate to say that what Trump has done here is motivated by that same desire. If it were, then he would've been more selective about who he pardoned. After all, this isn't an "all or nothing" where we can't do anything about the fact that the guilty (and there are guilty people here) will be set free.
No, in my view this is pure "stick it to them" trying to get back at his outgroup coupled with a healthy dose of not caring whether the presidential pardon power is being abused. And that is not acceptable. We all lose by such an action, and we lose quite a bit at that. So, at best, this is some benefit to those who are innocent coupled with serious damage to the social fabric of the United States. I'm not prepared to accept that trade so readily as you are.
Trump's motivations are irrelevant when assessing the rightness of the act itself. The right thing for the wrong reason is still the right thing, even if Trump himself gets not moral credit. As to that, if the choice were all or nothing I would very much prefer the outcome we have just had. And I do think the choice was much more all or nothing than it wasn't. As soon as you start picking and choosing, it opens an avenue of attack. "Why this particular person and not this particular person? Why clemency for this but not that?" And this attack will be leveraged to the hilt as many times as it can be since, after all, the attackers are absolutely politically motivated. They were willing to put people in jail for decades for low-level hooliganism or even just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why wouldn't they make hay?
There is also his own base to consider. Political capital is not an unlimited resource. Even Elon had to walk back his H1B stance on his own website. A significant part of Trump's base would see anything that wasn't a blanket pardon as a betrayal.
A blanket pardon is far harder to nitpick.
I also think that the protests were legitimate and the worst excesses (which still hit nowhere near the level of a typical Floyd demonstration) were intentionally allowed or even encouraged, both in the police/NG response or lack thereof and in some cases with literal plants acting as agent provocateurs. In any event, it infuriated me to know I lived in a country where sitting in someone's chair and smoking a joint got the full force of the federal government on you finding every possible way to charge you for as much as possible, while literally burning down entire city blocks killing dozens and causing billions of damage and possibly decades of urban blight was met with a, "I mean what are we gonna do, send in the National Guard (lol how ridic can you imagine that would be like totally fascism. fascism is when you shoot people burning down your cities don't you know?)."
Now we are slightly less living in that country. Hopefully the trend continues.
Forgive me for the facebook link, but my view is basically this https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1120248821680811 I don't think anyone should be able to break the law just because they are protesting. But I also think that a law that is applied unevenly, and wielded as a political bludgeon, is not only no longer serving its rightful purpose but serving an incredibly destructive one instead. It would be better for it to go unenforced entirely than for it to be used in such a way.
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But how can Trump really know who's innocent or not? The premise here is that the court that convicted all of them was politically compromised, and it's probably not a good idea for Trump to sit as judge and jury.
I like the analogy of someone convicted due to the fruit of an illegal search -- yes, he is probably guilty; no, that does not mean that it's an injustice for him to be turned loose. It means that the justice system needs to do better next time.
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Which is the same thing they'd most likely do if he decided to pardon everyone except those who provably committed violence against the police.
So what? This line of argument fails twice:
Trump isn't responsible for what they do, he's responsible for what he does. He deserves criticism for provoking others even if they would have acted the same anyway.
Even if you discount his moral responsibility to act right, he still shouldn't do it. This pardon still has screwed everyone over by releasing criminals and further weakening the (paper thin at this point) norms of our country. Even if it's guaranteed that the left would do the same next time they get power, we are still better off if he doesn't pull the same stunt. Fewer outrageous pardons is an unalloyed good, no matter what the left chooses to do when they have the reins.
Why is it always my tribe that has to unilaterally disarm?
It's not, I demand the exact same thing of both sides. But I'm not willing for either side to wait until the other side starts, because then nothing will ever happen.
Even if it were, that would still be better than having all out breaking of norms on both sides. Better for you as well as for them, in fact. Because again, this shit hurts everyone.
Because a good person acts right regardless of what others do. You can't control their behavior, only your own.
Trump refused to pardon the J6ers back when it would have been most effective- the day before leaving office.
He did not do that.
Biden could have encouraged prosecution of BLMers back when it would have been most effective- the day after taking office.
He did not do that.
You claim "both sides never even tried for mutual disarmament", but Reds did offer that opportunity, from January 21st, 2021 through January 20, 2025, for Blues to dedicate themselves to prosecuting [their own] rioters and thus disavow their approval and encouragement of burning, looting, and murdering as valid political strategy.
At what point do the demands for rigor become isolated?
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In practice, it’s a demand made of my side and not the other, despite most of the actual tyranny coming from the other.
Make a Ta’if agreement.
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You say that, but I don't see you down thread tearing your hair out about Fauci and Milley, and at least one of them is definitely a criminal whose actions had much worse effects on society than any j6er.
Nor do you see me defending Biden's pardon of Fauci. I think it is equally ridiculous and damaging to society. Furthermore, who exactly would I be arguing against? When I saw that subthread everyone was in agreement that it was bad.
I have no idea who Milley is, so I can't offer an opinion there. But you're searching for an inconsistency which simply isn't there. Not commenting on something isn't some kind of tacit agreement with it.
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Welcome to Culture War, where you can choose between fighting to the detriment of everyone and surrendering for the benefit of your enemies and the detriment of your own.
Or, as we used to call it back on the day, "war".
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