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Not percolating, sorry. You’ve got this bucket, and into it drip some threats, and from the other side arguments about fairness. Both are real things with visible effects, in a complex causal relationship, but each can be independently generated. (At any time, there are always a small number of pure altruistic arguers and completely self-interested blackmailers.)
Why then do you describe the resulting liquid as being composed entirely of threats? Why is the man who argues wasting his time, and the pirate the only true champion of the cause? Both can theoretically achieve the same goal. (But the pirate’s way is a lot more bloody, and results in a law of the jungle society where morality and justice mean nothing, and individual outcomes are not good.)
You attempt to reconcile the contradiction by insisting on seeing arguments as merely another power play, and making the threats the ultimate cause of the arguments. The panglossian mirror version would view threats as nothing more than political enforcement of fairness concepts, entirely generated by those.
It’s like the different perspectives scott wrote about. You can see the corruption of the state as the exception, or as the default. I prefer the former, but you seem to go farther than the latter and say corruption is the entire story.
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