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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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First, the context was clearly the CP5 case. Timing matters. I think that most here would agree that a lefty posting a "resist fascism" meme within hours of Kirk being killed would be worse than a lefty posting the same meme a week earlier. Personally, I was disgusted by the pro-Palestinian demonstrations a day after the oct-7 attacks, when I week earlier I would been wholeheartedly meh about it.

Second, I disagree with Trump that an emotional response like hate will lead to better justice outcomes. I want judges and juries calm rather than emotional when they make their verdict.

Third, the world is not populated by easily distinguishable cooperate-bots and defect-bots. Your perception of the behavior of other people is always affected by noise. Under such circumstances, tit-for-tat is no longer the optimal strategy, and you want to build in some amount of forgiveness to avoid getting into a defect-defect loop with someone like you. Sure, any forgiveness option will lower your performance against defect-bot, but maximum effectiveness against defect-bot is defect-bot, and it does not perform particularly well. (This also happens to be the gist of the message of Christianity, as far as an atheist like me understands it.)

In particular, the fact that Trump was (as I have extensively argued here) wrong and overconfident about his "murderers" being defect-bots -- an opinion he likely formed with no in-depth knowledge of the subject -- is a cautionary tale.

Sure, we could simply task the police with shooting anyone who looks like a defect-bot to them, and that would tremendously cut down on the costs of the justice system as well as the rate of reported crime, but it would not lead to a much worse equilibrium than our present system, both due to innocents getting killed and such a system being ripe for abuse.