Political Minimax

     If you’re uninterested in game theory, you might not be familiar with the term minimax. Minimax is a common approach to many gaming situations. It’s a strategy of playing so that the maximum possible loss to the player is minimized, normally reckoned in monetary or quasi-monetary terms. In adopting it, the gamer eschews the maximum possible gain out of aversion to the possibility of great loss. The possibility of loss is a feature of zero-sum and negative-sum games, whereas in a positive-sum game – i.e., a game where all the players come out better off at the end of the game, regardless of who “wins” – it does not appear.

     Much of the decision making of major Republican figures is minimax-based. That is, it’s based on the answer to the question: “What’s the path forward along which, if everything breaks badly, the maximum political damage to me will be minimized?”

     For an example of Republican minimax strategy, consider President George W. Bush’s decision to sign the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act, even though he believed it unConstitutional. Dubya believed he would suffer political damage from vetoing the bill; therefore, he left it to the courts, which he believed would rule it unConstitutional as soon as it was tested. His decision angered many in the Right, including some of Dubya’s stronger supporters, which makes it difficult to grade his strategy a posteriori. However, be it admitted that he did avert whatever degree of harm the Democrats could have done to him through the media.

     This sort of Republican decision making – “Leave the tough calls to folks who don’t have to face the Democrats, the media, or the voters” – has been common in recent years. Just now, Mitch McConnell is playing minimax with the Flynn and Russia-hoax revelations:

     In last night’s interview, McConnell appeared not just uninterested but uninformed on the scandal of Democrats weaponizing the intelligence community for partisan gain. Baier asked McConnell to comment on the case of Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisor who was a major victim of the Russia collusion hoax. Here’s McConnell’s limp response:

     Well, If there were in fact misbehavior surrounding the Flynn case, the American public needs to know. And clearly that was the view of the attorney general. I gather it’s now in a rather unusual procedure of being reviewed by the district judge before whom the case was. I think we’re just anxious to get the facts. what actually happened. The American public needs to know; all of us would like to know. And one thing about Washington: you guys are so good at your job, truth always comes out, sometimes it takes a little longer than other times, but we’ll find out what in fact did happen.

     McConnell even plays minimax to shunt political risk to other Republican Senators:

     At the end of the interview, Baier asked McConnell if he agrees with President Trump that former President Obama should be called into a Senate hearing and whether he agreed with President Trump calling the scandal Obamagate. Obama’s personal role in the scandal was confirmed in additional documents released as part of the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss charges against Flynn. Here’s McConnell’s response:

     Look, that will be up to [Judiciary Committee] Chairman [Lindsey] Graham to make those kind of decisions — I think he may have addressed it already. I’m not certain… Look, that would be up to Chairman Graham to determine how to handle this. I have a lot of confidence in him and he knows what he is doing and I’m going to follow his lead.

     Game theorists would call it minimax; I call it cowardice.

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     Republican minimaxing is one of the reasons for the election of President Donald Trump. We in the Right have become contemptuous of Republicans that lack spines. Why support such persons? Indeed, why does the GOP continue to hold them forth as the candidates and officeholders we should support?

     It has long been believed that a sub rosa agreement exists between the GOP and the Democrats: specifically, that as long as the Republicans don’t fight the Democrats and their misdeeds “too hard,” the Democrats, when in the majority, will allow them to get in on the gravy train. (Note the lack of a reciprocal clause.) The actions and inactions of prominent Republicans bear this out. To dampen the popular disquiet from this arrangement, the Republicans have usually replied – albeit not in so many words – “If you don’t support us, you’ll get them.” Until 2016, the arrangement appeared impregnable.

     But matters have become unprecedentedly serious. The Obama Administration’s abuses of power constitute an internal coup attempt by the outgoing executive administration against the incoming one. Thanks to the documentary revelations of recent weeks, the criminality of the Obamunists, including Obama and Biden themselves, is now beyond dispute. If this is allowed to pass without prosecution, then what reason would future executives that have suffered reversals of political fortunes to deny themselves the same extra-legal, extra-Constitutional latitude?

     Mollie Hemingway provides a foreboding assessment:

     McConnell is praised throughout the Republican Party for his focus on confirming originalist judges to federal courts. It’s easily his greatest legacy, and one I wrote about at length in “Justice On Trial,” my book with Carrie Severino. But he should remember that he can’t confirm good judges if Republicans are not in the majority and if a stalwart person isn’t president to nominate them. Both of those key factors are threatened by his long-time lack of interest in holding Russia hoaxers accountable for what they did.

     If McConnell and Graham want to confirm judges after November, they need to understand how viscerally outraged many Americans are by the spying and leaking scandal. They need to know that refusal to do anything about it will hurt Republicans, not Democrats, at the ballot box.

     Republican analysts, strategists, and power brokers must discipline the GOP’s elected officials:

Show some backbone.
Abandon minimax.
Stand and fight.

     If they fail to do so, We the Voters must do it for them.

I Thought I Was Done For Today...

     ...but a piece linked at Doug Ross’s site has raised my hackles:

     When I come across some web site or material that starts to get racial – like, say, therightstuff dot biz – I go “Ugh!” and don’t look much further. Because assigning importance to race is dumb, whether it’s from the Left or the Right, I usually don’t want to waste my time on people/sites that do it. [Emphasis added by FWP]

     This contemptuous dismissal of the opinions sincerely held by several very bright persons I know -- including myself -- is pretty much the usual. “Dumb,” says this semi-literate...person. Well, if it’s so “dumb” to attribute some degree of causal power to race, how would he explain the strong and persistent correlations among race, intelligence, aggression, and criminality?

     Note that the very same people endlessly willing to call race realism “dumb” (and to spew venom at those of us who hold to it) will tell you that it’s “natural” that football and basketball are dominated by blacks. Yet they frown at the suggestion that it’s “natural” that hard-science doctorates and symphony orchestras are the almost exclusive province of whites and Asians. We who are willing to contemplate such connections must be “dumb.”

     The unwillingness to allow that it might be “natural” that as a statistical matter whites and Asians are more intelligent and less inclined to aggression and criminality than blacks suggests either a thorough indoctrination in political correctness or a deeply driven cowardice.

     A useful tangential observation: it’s very nearly impossible to domesticate the wilderness-bred wolf. It took many generations of selective breeding and careful conditioning to produce the amiable, comfortable companion we know as the dog. No doubt “Gay Patriot” would react to that by accusing me of wanting to institute a eugenic regime among blacks, to breed their aggression out and some intelligence in. But that, too, is a characteristic smear from those unable or unwilling to read racial cards that have been face up on the table for a century and more.

     This has been a public-service tirade by your race-realist Curmudgeon Emeritus.

Oops, they did it again...(a CNN "interviewer," that is)

If you want to talk about navigating interviews in hostile territory "like a champ" then look no further than Pamela Geller - especially since the Garland, Texas jihad attack. Oh, and my dear "journalists," it was NOT an attempted-attack; it WAS an attack! The sound of gunfire should have been your first clue.

But back to Geller, one of the lone female figures walking-the-walk in Lady-Liberty's footsteps...her appearance earlier this week on CNN with the disgrace-of-a-journalist, Erin Burnett. The link to the version I watched is here, on Geller's website. My graphical reaction is at the end of this (the audio of me F-bombing as I watched it the first time might have made for an "amusing" YouTube video!).

This link will take you to my site and a "cartoon search" page if you'd like to see a couple more Islam-/Liberty- related cartoons from this week I didn't get around to posting here.

I'd love to hear your feedback on my attempts to win the coveted Bosch Fawstin Wannabe Award. ;-) What works for you and what doesn't.

Free-speech & "fine lines"

Well, we can thank Alysin Camerota (especially at 2:30 mark+) for clarifying that whole Free-Speech + "fine line" thing for us. As you've already read here at Liberty's Torch (and many other places around the web since last Sunday's jihad-attack in Garland, Texas) LOTS of media-types agree wholeheartedly with her. This cartoon and an earlier version was inspired by all of those quislings. Islam aside (oh, that it was just that easy to brush barbarians away!), consider the Sisyphean task of pleasing an entire world all at the same time...and for all time. Whew! Makes me feel like a nap.

Cowardice: A Midweek Rumination

Old friend Pascal recently wrote with some thoughts:

Does cowardice fall in any way in the province of one of the 7 mortal sins? Does courage fall within the purview of one of the 4 cardinal virtues?

Look. We clearly have Prog shock troop leaders in the WH. They are mounting further provocations daily. The scope and enormity of their campaign may slowly dawn on its victims. They are seeking confrontations, and then what?

But as to cowardice in the past, when something might have been done with less dread, that's my thoughts now and worrying about its consequences.

IMHO, it came to this due in great part to a lack of courage of members of society to fight the other ever more prominent fostering and displays of sins that you discuss all the time.

Orchestrated PC was certainly involved in castrating a great number. Could it have been fought better if cowardice was well-tied to the mortal sins? I don't know. But now that I think of it, it greatly troubles me.

If there’s a better topic for deep in the Advent season, I can’t imagine what it might be.

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Is cowardice a sin? As it’s as contentious a matter as “torture,” I would venture to say: not always. I can easily think of instances where deliberately fleeing from combat or confrontation is the wisest available course. Yet there’s at least one case in which cowardice constitutes a moral default – a sin of omission.

To deny one’s faith out of fear for one’s temporal life is a sin, perhaps the only sin that’s on a par with suicide. There are other cases of seeming cowardice that appear to me to be sinful, but in some of those, the judgment of the individual involved is likely to be the deciding factor. God allows us to follow our own consciences without penalty, if we do so out of sincere conviction.

Moral courage – the willingness to act upon one’s own sincere convictions about right and wrong, without soliciting or requiring the approval of others – is exceedingly rare in our time, for reasons I hardly need to tell any intelligent Gentle Reader about. (I don’t have any other kind, do I?) Inversely, moral cowardice – the tendency to say and do nothing even when in the actual presence of evil – is quite common. That strikes me as entirely consistent with the common tendency to pooh-pooh the concept of moral courage: obliteration by derision.

The clearest example of moral cowardice publicly visible today holds regular sessions on Capitol Hill. I daresay I needn’t be more specific than that.

---

Hearken once more to the great Clive Staples Lewis:

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”

Courage comes in several varieties. If I may quote one of my own works of fiction:

    It was an ordinary July evening in Onteora: hot, damp, the air too still, the black gnats too numerous. Most of the city's residents had retreated behind closed doors and powered up their air conditioners, then turned their television sets up high to mask the compressor noise. On an unlit street in the abandoned part of the city, Joseph Follett and Lafayette Buskey were enjoying a special pleasure, raping a teenage girl who had wandered onto their turf.

    They had cut away her jeans and panties, stuffed the scraps of the panties into her mouth, and bound them there with a double winding of packing tape. Buskey knelt on her arms and held a knife to her throat while Follett violated her at his leisure. They had changed places once already. Perhaps they would do so again before the fun was over. Neither had bothered to conceal or disguise his face.

    They had been at it perhaps ten minutes when a quiet patter of footsteps from the far end of the street alerted the merrymakers that they were not alone. Both looked up to see the onrush of a short, slight figure, bearing down upon them.

    Buskey had turned toward the sound but had not yet risen when the runner braked and planted. His right foot lashed out in a powerful placekicker's arc, catching Buskey squarely beneath the jaw. The snap of Buskey's spine resounded the length of the street. He flipped backwards and lay on the sidewalk, twitching spasmodically.

    Follett had pulled away from the girl, drawing his own knife. The runner turned to face him.

    "Keep back, motherfucker."

    The runner made no reply. He advanced.

    Follett dropped into a knife-fighter's crouch. He kept both hands well out in front of him, daring the man to come within slashing distance. The runner halted and watched him, apparently relaxed.

    "So this is your idea of a high old time, eh, asshole?" The runner's voice was soft. The darkness concealed his face. "Wait till some defenseless girl wanders by, take her down, rape her a few times, then gut her like a deer? Not much to take home from it, though. Not like a Grand Avenue mugging or a good B and E."

    The young tough snarled. "What do you know about B and E?"

    The runner's eyebrows rose. "Isn't that how you make your living?" He gestured at Follett's crotch. "I mean, that thing dangling from your fly isn't big enough for you to make it as a gigolo."

    Upon being reminded that his dick was still hanging out of his jeans, Follett looked down at his crotch.

    The runner whirled and kicked again. His toe caught the elbow of Follett's knife arm. The elbow cracked and bent the wrong way, and the knife flew from the hand that held it. The young thug spun and dropped to the pavement with a piercing shriek, clawing at the rough asphalt.

    The runner stepped forward to stand over his victim. Stray rays from the headlights of a car passing on a connecting street revealed the runner's expression. It was that perfection of rage that resembles perfect calm.

    "Well, so much for the muggings and B and Es. Think you can make a living as a rapist? I mean, you're going to need a new helper and all. Maybe two or three. Big nut to carry."

    The runner straddled Follett's body and lowered himself to a squat, all but sitting on the thug's belly.

    "Who the fuck are you, man? You got no business here!" Follett's voice was an agonized hiss.

    The runner pursed his lips. "Business? No. I was just out for a walk, and it went on a little longer and farther than I intended. I don't get into the city much. It's not my favorite place. But here I am, and here you are, and thereby hangs a tale."

He paused and sighed. "I knew you were going to kill that girl when you were done with her. If I hadn't been sure of that, maybe I would have handled it another way. Or maybe not. Not that it matters now. May God have mercy on your worthless soul."

    Follett's pain had not displaced all his fear and hatred. He surged in a last attempt to throw his assailant off him as he scrabbled for his knife.

    The runner's right hand arrowed at Follett's face. The heel of that hand crashed into the bridge of Follett's nose, driving the bone into his forebrain with the impact of a well-thrown spear. The rapist's body spasmed once and was still.

    The runner waited for perhaps a minute, peering into the slack face for any indication that the body might still house life. When he was satisfied, he pulled the jeans off Follett's corpse and brought them to the girl, who had remained where she'd been held. She seemed about sixteen, not especially pretty, and frightened beyond all ability to respond. Carefully, he pulled the makeshift gag from her mouth.

    "Where do you live?"

    "Eighty-two Devlin Boulevard," the girl whispered.

    He bent to help her stand, then offered her the jeans. "I'll take you home. Sorry I have nothing else to cover you with."

    She clung to him and began to keen. He coaxed her to step into the jeans, closed the fly and buttoned them at her waist, rolled up the legs so that she could walk, and escorted her down the street, one arm around her shoulders.

    The body of Joe Follett lay still in the middle of the street. On the sidewalk, the body of Lafe Buskey twitched at lengthening intervals as the life finished seeping out of it.

***

    Louis was beyond astonishment.

    "You were watching."

    Loughlin nodded. "And for a few days after, until I was certain you were the genuine article. Even then you knew to kick, not punch."

    "I never saw you."

    "You weren't supposed to. I've practiced invisibility until I can almost make you forget my presence while you're staring at me. It's a useful talent for moving through cities and such."

    "But why, Malcolm? Why do you do it at all?"

    "You're not going to like the answer."

    Louis stared hard into his friend's eyes.

    "I need to know."

    Loughlin told him.

***

    Louis sat very still. Afternoon had given way to evening, and the trailer had grown dark. Loughlin watched him steadily.

    "Unless this is how you show hysteria, you're taking it a lot more calmly than I expected."

    "I'm all right." Louis tried to shake off his gathering fatigue. He'd had enough shocks that day to stop an army in its tracks, and rest was far away. "I know better than to doubt you. I should probably get home pretty soon, though, or Christine will panic. So that's the why of it?"

    "Moral courage is the key. Physical courage is fairly commonplace, at least in moderation. Bravery in the face of real danger is rarer, but still common enough that you'll find a few dozen cases of it on any battlefield. But moral courage is rarer than any other human trait."

    "Moral courage?"

    "Courage enough to stand by your convictions and trust in your own judgment. That's what you showed that night. You took it upon yourself to save that girl and to execute the bastards who were abusing her. You didn't wait for some committee of designated bystanders to ratify your decision. You have no idea how rare that is."

Do you find Louis Redmond’s execution of the two rapists admirable or despicable? Do you agree that his decision to do so constituted an exercise of moral courage? Indeed, can a man exhibit any sort of courage if he's a moral coward?

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A final, tangential thought: If our consciences are truly intended to be our guides, and if I’m correct in my belief that even the most poorly reared individual of normal mental capacity has enough of a conscience to recognize evil, then it’s quite possible that all sins fall into one of the following categories:

• Blasphemies (denial or derision of the supremacy or majesty of God);
• Abuses of others (e.g., murder, assault, fraud, theft, false witness);
• Instances of moral cowardice: to stay one’s voice or hand when confronted by evildoing.

May God bless and keep you all.