Hating the Game: The cooperation game, the murder game, and acting in good faith with people you know are acting in bad

[LearnedHand]

https://www.the-reframe.com/hating-the-game

“Faith” is the last word of the title. This essay shines a very bright light on why the congressional Dems’ strategy for “opposing” TSF is not working — and never will. The essay a little unfocused at the beginning, so I’ve snipped some text from further down. Note that one remedy he proposes is to never grant a single vote to those playing the murder game of politics. Otherwise, you’re simply cooperating with the murder game.

SNIP

The two broad competing ideas of human politics are the cooperation game and the murder game.

The cooperation game: can you cooperate with enough people to gain the approval of the people and the right to govern them, and can your cooperation benefit the people enough to prove your ongoing right to wield the engine of governance? The cooperation game's strength is that it actually does result in human thriving and innovation and safety and security for increasing numbers of people. It's weakness is ... well. I'll get to it soon enough.

The murder game: can you harness the engine of murder long enough to seize the engine of governance, and use it to dominate the people and rob the value they create for yourself? This is also expressed as "might makes right," which is the explicit foreign and domestic policy of the Republican Party. The murder game's weakness is that it is based on vile unsustainable lies, and will eventually eat itself with its own cruelty and ignorance and murderous wrath. Its strength is that it can murder people playing the cooperation game, as long as those playing the cooperation game go on cooperating with them.

If all parties involved in a political system are playing the cooperation game, then the cooperation game will work very well, to the extent that everyone wishes to use the engine of governance to benefit the people who are governed—that is to say, to the extent everyone is playing the cooperation game.

If any one of the parties involved starts playing the murder game, the cooperation game breaks, and a different game begins. Republicans are currently playing the murder game, and have been doing so for many decades—less obviously at first, perhaps, but now very openly, very obviously, very blatantly. At this point, it's just armed death squads summarily executing U.S. civilians.

[ms liberty]

1. K&R

[betsuni]

2. But game of blaming Democrats for what Republicans do: OK. Author doesn't understand what a majority is

and how government works.

"Democratic/centrist fetishization of bipartisanship"... But of course if I ask, the Muse of explaining why the fuck what Republicans do is actually the fault of Democrats draws her veil in silence.

[LearnedHand]

3. Hmm you and I must have read entirely different essays

He doesn’t blame Dems at all. He does highlight everything Dems CAN do to stop enabling the murder party:

It can be strategic; refusing to grant even one vote toward the funding of a murderous government, until the death squads have been utterly abolished, and the vile white supremacist serial child rapist of a president who controls them has resigned, along with all of his cabinet, and submitted to prosecution. It can be legislative; refusing to allow voice votes, in order to grind down the apparatus of government. It can be social; refusing to fraternize with Republican colleagues, or refusing to serve members of Republican governments or their death squad in restaurants and businesses. It can be tactical: following the death squads and impeding their work; playing loud music to keep them awake; making them and their abuses known and shaming and shunning and excluding them for daring to murder their neighbors. It can be losing paperwork. It can be deliberately misunderstanding instructions. It can be purposefully dawdling. It can be tripping somebody up, getting them lost and turned around, obstructing the gears of brutality, sabotaging the engines of murder.

[2naSalit]

4. K&R