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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25593 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Smashing the defect button in response to someone who always defects is the correct move.

This statement is wrong in the general case on game theoretic grounds. Not everything is a prisoners dilemma, and not everything your opponent does that you don't like is a game-theory defection. In this case, if you believe that government intervention in the market is bad, then cons are just doing a harm and not disincentivising future similar actions by liberals.

Kind of?

Until you're both way worse off at the end of it all. Although I guess you're both worse off together.

Would much prefer an unwinding of the political cold war and a commitment towards shared prosperity (as that's worked quite well for the last 10,000 years) but that brings us back to "the current crop of western political leaders are myopic morons"

Would much prefer an unwinding of the political cold war

And exactly how are you going to do that?

By forming an orthogonal coalition with other people willing to press the "cooperate" button. "Orthogonal" meaning you cluster around a set of self-consistent values that are split between the current political coalitions. For example, if I had the charisma and moral fortitude, I'd try and pull together a movement that concedes to the left-wing economics of the liberation theology catholics but promotes the right-wing moral culture of the tradcaths. We'd advocate something like an open-borders welfare state, but with brutal enforcement of moral orthodoxy to discourage leeches from coming here. (I'm a morally spineless neoliberal currently, but compromise means being willing to give stuff up.)

Genuinely I have no idea

I'm willing to be the first to cooperate vs defect as I believe in the power of human win/win coordination

But I am a single human with 0 political power

Honestly I'm mildly a doomer about all of this, I just refuse to say "fuck it" and embrace the zero sum game

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