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Notes -
'You see Charlie, these liberals are trying to assassinate my character. And I can't change their mind. I won't change my mind, because I don't have to. Because I'm an American. I won't change my mind on anything, regardless of the facts that are set out before me. I'm dug in. And I'll never change.' For your viewing pleasure - one of my favorite clips, and not even for that quote.
Every time I read one of these pathetic tough guy screeds, my first thought is to laugh at the absolute lack of self-awareness. 'Reee, my outgroup is full of animals who would never compromise or act in good faith! This justifies me never acting in good faith either. I can't wait for my fellow citizens to get mown down by the stasi for disagreeing with me!'
My second thought is to reply, 'Say it louder, and into the microphone, please.' Seriously. Go hop on Fox News and give an interview about how you want to shoot protestors and cruelty is the point and God praise Donald Trump. Write your angry, impotent screeds and spread them as widely as possible - under your real name if you can. There's really nothing better for democratic electoral odds than platforming people like you.
Or, and I hold little hope for a week-old-probably-troll account, you could dig yourself out of your sad little internet radicalization hole and stop holding so much hate in your heart. I guarantee your life would be better for it.
Except we did have a compromise that legalized 3 million illegal aliens and their progeny forever, which was the 4th time we had legalized illegal immigrants living in the US. So no I don't think that the other side of immigration is doing anything in good faith.
As evidence that your outgroup is acting in bad faith, you bring up legislation from 40 years ago. 2/3rds of those voters are probably dead, while the majority of voters today (myself included) weren't alive or were far too young to vote for your compromise. Your imagined voter who supported amnesty in the 80s knowing that we'd be in the situation we are today as part of some dastardly bad-faith plan to bring in more illegal immigrants is nonexistent.
"But Chris!" you say, scurrying back to your bailey, "I didn't mean voters today are acting in bad faith because of legislation from 40 years ago, I'm saying they push compromises in bad faith knowing that they're meaningless and we'll be back where we started 40 years from now! How could you not parse that from my two sentence effortpost that I worked on meticulously to avoid any ambiguity?"
To which I say, you aren't offering any evidence that these compromises are offered in bad faith, you're pretending to read the minds of your outgroup and ascribe the worst possible impulses to them. I believe that the majority of Americans support a middle path, flanked by people like the one I replied to and open borders folks. Biden, the media, and a majority of voters all knew the administration had a problem with immigration leading up to the election which is why they tried to craft a compromise to address it. You won't get a mea culpa, but it was pretty obvious throughout the summer that the status quo was unsustainable.
I feel there's kind of a false dichotomy/definition debate going on here.
Let's talk about Newcomb's Paradox. There is and stubbornly remains some class of people who think the solution to the problem is to intend to one-box, but then to become a two-boxer after Omega has made its prediction. This solution is fatally flawed because, to misquote Minority Report, "Omega doesn't care what you intend to do. Only what you will do". If one will "become" a two-boxer before the decision is made, then one already is a two-boxer, because the definition of a two-boxer is "one who will pick both boxes", not "one who currently thinks he will pick both boxes". If I am programming Omega, and I want to make Omega as reliable as possible, I should count such people as two-boxers because they will two-box; their false consciousness of being a one-boxer, no matter how sincerely believed, is not actually relevant.
(I went looking for the exchange I had with one of these people, but I couldn't find it.)
The shape of the excluded third option should now be pretty clear. There exists a class of people who'll sincerely make a compromise, and then change their minds later. When talking about your ingroup, the natural tendency is to count these people as "good faith", because they believe what they say and you sympathise with them. When talking about your outgroup, the natural tendency is to count these people as "bad faith" because the natural context of analysing your outgroup is wanting to know whether deals will be kept or not.
Hence, under their definitions, "deals have not been kept in the past" is evidence of bad faith, because "your outgroup doesn't care what you intend to do. Only what your movement will do". It's not totally-irrefutable evidence - movements change, and not all deals are created equal - but it's relevant. Moreover, I think modelling social justice as unable to keep its bargains is actually fairly justified, because of two reasons:
Social justice is leaderless. Committees are bad at keeping their bargains absent specific effort, because committees tend to include people who wanted to reject the bargain, and turnover might lead to those people gaining control of the committee at some point (and "you should respect a bargain you never agreed to, because others in your movement did over your objection" is a much-tougher sell than "you should respect a bargain you agreed to"*).
Social justice is not very interested in keeping historical norms. "Dead old white men", and so forth. So that tough sell is even tougher.
I get that it's really awkward to respond to the claim "you can't make a believable compromise, because you will change your mind and/or others in your movement will overrule you". I sympathise. Unfortunately, that doesn't always mean it's false.
*I'm reminded of the exchange at the end of the TNG episode "The Pegasus":
It's very, very easy to be a Pressman. There are probably still circumstances where I'd be a Pressman, despite having assimilated Ratsphere cautions against it.
I do think that strat works for Kavka's toxin puzzle, though. I don’t know about other people, but I am entirely capable of entertaining a single, limited, stupid thought for a moment, without simultaneously considering higher-level contradicting thoughts.
Yes, this is a clear distinction between the two problems. Kavka's billionaire does care about what you intend to do, not only (or even at all) what you will do.
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It's evidence of bad faith on the part of the Dems of 40 years ago. I think @Chrisprattalpharaptr 's point re: "legislation from 40 years ago" is that the people at issue are dead (or at any rate no longer relevant), and you can't read the minds of people today based on dirty tricks pulled - consciously or otherwise - by their geriatric forebears half a century prior, even if the current scions are nominally waving the same flag.
I guess the question becomes whether you can meaningfully talk about "a movement" behaving in bad faith in the sense you describe. I guess you can gloss the internal turnover as just what it looks like when "the movement" "changes its mind", and still analogize to the bad Newcomb solution. But I don't think it creates much light to try to talk about "bad faith" when describing the external behavior of a movement without any reference to the conscious experiences of anybody in the movement, whether sincere or otherwise.
From upthread, just in case you missed it:
Also
Does that mean we can put any discussion of reparation to rest too because there's no such thing as group responsibility for past sins so long as you run the clock long enough?
I did mention the "geriatric forebears"! Three out of these four people are in their 80s. The sole exception is a sprightly 74. These are no longer the people on whose trustworthiness the party's long- or even mid-term trustworthiness depends. They will be dead or in care homes long before they get the chance to recant on any deals made in the 2020s. This is what I meant by "no longer relevant".
Well, that doesn't follow. I wasn't talking about holding the son accountable for the sins of the father, but about the pragmatic question of whether the son is or isn't committing the same sins as his father today. The thread was discussing Republicans' ability to trust Democrats as a practical issue - that's not the same thing as granting that Democrats may be sincere today, but refusing to negotiate as punishment for past defections.
All of which said, yes, I do in fact believe there's no such things as group responsibility for the sins of past generations, and that "reparations" are a bad idea. (If some groups today are more disadvantaged than others, they should receive help proportionate to the extent to which they are disadvantaged. But there's no reason the distant descendants of their oppressors should be uniquely responsible for providing that help, and it shouldn't be regarded as something "owed" to the disadvantaged descendants of the oppressed, except insofar as all citizens are collectively responsible for the welfare of all other citizens - which applies just as well to someone whose family was ruined by a freak meteor crash twenty years ago as by slavery or segregation. I really dislike the justice-based/"punitive" framing.)
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I'd think that if the movement has changed enough that the bad faith from 40 years ago isn't relevant, then people in the present-day movement who are acting in good faith would say "I admit that happened 40 years ago, but we no longer want to do that." If they don't say that, then either they are acting in bad faith today or they have to appease people in the movement who are acting in bad faith today.
Ideally they should also add "... and here's what we're doing to make sure it doesn't happen again". But they haven't even gotten to the first step of admitting that it's a concern.
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From within the movement, it sure doesn't feel like it. I did say that it only counts by the outgroup-definition of bad faith, and called it a "third option".
From without, as someone who wants to know ideal behaviour for dealing with the group, the game-theoretic incentives are identical: "don't make deals with things that aren't going to honour those deals". For the outgroup, the rest is gravy; this question of "will X honour deals" is 99% of what it wants to know, because it determines whether it should make terms (and avoid a needless civil war) or fight (and avoid exploitation). That answer rests solely on the result, not the process. The rest is interesting anthropological information, but they're your outgroup; it's not like you matter to them as people and they don't care about all of the same things as you.
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They've already demonstrated bad faith by maliciously not enforcing the law in just the prior administration. We would need some kind of signal that they were serious about departing from this practice, or any statutory promises about future enforcement are worthless.
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The right-wing in this case need not be emotionally attached to the language of "good-faith." Put simply, if today's movement quacks like yesterday's movement, then it's yesterday's movement. Today's movement must distinguish themselves from yesterday's movement if they wish the right-wing to compromise with them. An unwillingness to distinguish themselves is an admission that they are, in fact, yesterday's movement. Personally, I think "good-faith" is simply the name given to this concept, since as a show of good faith is the standard English phrase for what I am calling "distinguish."
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