A common refrain in the lefty blogosphere is that you have to support the candidate with a D after their name, even if they repeatedly betray your causes and ideals, because the Republicans are worse. They’ll repeal all the ‘great’ legislation the Democrats have passed over the past two years, and continue all the terrible policies the Democrats have unfortunately continued – policies which are also, conveniently, the Republicans’ fault.

However, game theory teaches us something quite different – that cooperation without the threat of retaliation for betrayal is a sucker’s game.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

To see why, let’s back up a bit. First, what’s Game Theory? From Wikipedia:

Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that is used in the social sciences, most notably in economics, as well as in biology (particularly evolutionary biology and ecology), engineering, political science, international relations, computer science, and philosophy. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, or games, in which an individual’s success in making choices depends on the choices of others.

In essence, it’s roleplaying as science. To try and understand what the best strategies are when dealing with other actors, you set up a mock version, either on a computer or for kicks in real life, and play out the various strategems, measuring which is more successful and what the pitfalls are. The results can often be surprising.

One of the most famous experiments in game theory is the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’. Again, from Wikipedia:

The prisoner’s dilemma is a fundamental problem in game theory that demonstrates why two people might not cooperate even if it is in both their best interests to do so. It was originally framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher working at RAND in 1950. Albert W. Tucker formalized the game with prison sentence payoffs and gave it the “prisoner’s dilemma” name (Poundstone, 1992).

A classic example of the prisoner’s dilemma (PD) is presented as follows:
Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated the prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies for the prosecution against the other (defects) and the other remains silent (cooperates), the defector goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

Obviously, the prisoners would be better off if they cooperated – 1 year’s combined jail time is a lot better than 10, which is the result if either betrays the other, or both do. However, it’s not *rational* to cooperate – no matter which choice your opponent makes, betraying them increases your benefit. If they cooperate, you stab them in the back and walk free. If they stab you, you protect yourself by backstabbing them.

A pretty bleak assessment of human nature, eh? The problem here is accountability, or rather, the lack thereof. Remember the setup: the police make sure neither prisoner can confer with the other until after the decision has been made, and you only get to make it once.

If accountability is added, however, things turn can turn out very differently.

The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, aka Politics

If you set up a game where the players have to run through that same scenario multiple times, with memory of what happened before, things turn out differently, and different strategies succeed. If you defect every time, your opponent is free to, and indeed only rational to follow your example. Likewise, however, if you cooperate every time, your opponent can see an easy mark and take advantage.

Wikipedia again:

Retaliating
However, Axelrod contended, the successful strategy must not be a blind optimist. It must sometimes retaliate. An example of a non-retaliating strategy is Always Cooperate. This is a very bad choice, as “nasty” strategies will ruthlessly exploit such players.

Herein lies the fundamental flaw in always voting Dem just because Republicans are worse, and we have decades of math to back it up. If you always cooperate, your opponent will face enormous temptation, arguably selection pressure, to defect and betray you. It’s only a matter of time, and what’s more, they face absolutely no penalty for doing so – you’ll just cooperate again the next round.

If, on the other hand, you are willing to retaliate, a more successful strategy can be devised.

Tit for Tat
As it turns out, cooperating all the time and defecting all the time are both proven losers, given repeat performances. So what works?

It turns out, a combination of the two. I’ll let Carl Sagan explain this one (from his essay ‘The Rules of the Game’, collected in Billions and Billions):

The most effective strategy in many such tournaments is called “Tit-for-Tat.” It’s very simple: You start out cooperating, and in each subsequent round simply do what your opponent did last time. You punish defections, but once your partner cooperates, you’re willing to let bygones be bygones. At first, it seems to garner only mediocre success. But as time goes on the other strategies defeat themselves, from too much kindness or cruelty, and this middle way pulls ahead. Except for always being nice on the first move, Tit-for-Tat is identical to the Brazen Rule. It promptly (in the very next game) rewards cooperation and punishes defection, and has the great virtue that it makes your strategy absolutely clear to your opponent. (Strategic ambiguity can be lethal.)

The problem for Progressives is that we’re being told to, and have in the past often utilized an Always Cooperate strategy.. and our partners in elected office learned that long ago, and are exploiting it.

On gay rights, on immigration, on financial reform, on restoring the rule of law, on putting torturers on trial, on unions and the free choice act, on escalating unwinnable wars, on fighting the legalization of marijuana, on just about any and almost every single Progressive issue you can name the current Democratic party has defected. Why?

Because it’s a winning strategy to defect if you know your opponent will always cooperate; in fact, it’s the absolute best strategy to employ.

The Way Ahead

The only way we can expect to stop the exploitation is to show our would-be-defectors in the Democratic Party that we’ve woken up, once and for all, and are willing to retaliate when defected from. Yes, if we do so, we’ll lose in this round of our iterated game. We might, in fact, lose very badly indeed.

The alternative, however, is clear, from both game theory and common sense: the exploitation will *never* stop. Never. Let’s be very clear; the current dilemma Progressives face with their estranged counterparts does not stem from a lack of understanding; the party understands us all too well. It isn’t the result of Dems failing to learn from past mistakes; on the contrary, they’ve learned exceptionally well from ours.

It’s time to teach a new lesson.

The practical problem with attempting to suppress a particular form of speech is that it tends to be counterproductive; stamp out one freethinker or rebellious individual and more tend to take their place. Combine that with the ease of reaching a mass audience in the internet age and the foolishness of frantic overreaction to a non-violent protest, like, say, burning a Koran, becomes readily apparent.

That is, if you’re reasonable. It looks like the administration at Queensland University of Technology is anything but.

A quick recap of events: QUT lawyer (apparently he works on contracts) Alex Stewart is an Atheist, somewhat active in a Brisbane organization of likeminded people. After hearing of the mass hysteria resulting from the small, non-violent planned (and eventually cancelled) protest of one Florida man at his tiny church, Stewart decided to do some burning of his own.

However, unlike Terry Jones, he seems to have a sense of humor, and wanted to do it for a ‘good purpose’, and so he engaged in a bit of Mythbusters-esque testing to determine which made for better rolling papers, pages from a Koran, or a Bible.

(Not that this is the first time I’ve heard of using a Bible for that purpose; far from it.)

Taking things a step further, he filmed the whole ‘experiment’, along with a genial discussion of the merits of religious literature, and put it up on Youtube.

Nobody was hurt. Nobody was killed. The Earth didn’t fly off its axis, the Sun didn’t explode, and despite this prodding, God did not make himself physically manifest or smite Mr. Stewart for his cheek. The entire event occurred in the privacy of Stewart’s home, in his off hours, with books that he himself owned.

No crime was committed. (Don’t believe me? Fair enough. Click this link and watch the embedded video/news report; at about 55 seconds in, a spokesman for the Queensland police makes clear that it is not an offense to burn ANY book in Australia)

Yet Stewart found himself at the center of a firestorm. Depending on which press account you believe, he was either ‘hauled’ before the QUT administration or met with them voluntarily, and has in any case been placed on administrative leave while they decide whether he gets to keep his job and ‘investigate all aspects of Mr. Stewart’s behavior.” Meanwhile the local press is staging hit pieces and hatchet jobs on the man, stalking him with cameras and talking up the ‘collateral damage’ he caused with a goofy Youtube video.

Keep in mind, again, that the police have already stated for the record that burning the pages was completely legal under Australian law.

So if Stewart didn’t break Aussie law, why is his job in jeopardy? Why is QUT, a public university, harassing an employee for a legal form of protest in which no one was injured, let alone killed, and the books burned were the property of Mr. Stewart?

As far as I can tell from their public statements, it’s because he hurt the feelings of religious people, and that’s something That Simply Is Not Done.

Check out the statement their Vice-Chancellor (and humorless blowhard) gave to the press:

QUT vice-chancellor Peter Coaldrake moved to distance the university from its employee.

“QUT does not condone the destruction of any religious artefacts. This was a personal view and action expressed in the person’s own time,” Professor Coaldrake said.

“[Mr Stewart] does not associate himself with QUT in the clip.

“QUT is tolerant of all religions and welcomes staff and students from many countries to our university and regularly celebrates their cultures and religions.”

A personal view, expressed on personal time, with no endorsement claimed by Stewart from the University for his actions.. and yet he’s put on leave, pending an investigation.

But they’re tolerant of all ‘religions’ at QUT, so bashing, even suspending Atheists for legal speech is apparently within their mandate.

Globally, the mass uprising against Koran burning has yet to occur, though as Professor Cole notes over at his blog, the Taliban, lovely people that they are, have seen fit to demagogue on these peaceful and legal activities to their own benefit:

Saturday witnessed a second wave of demonstrations against the threats by small American fundamentalist churches (especially the Dove Outreach group of some 50 in Gainesville, Fl.), to burn copies of the Muslim holy book, the Quran, on September 11. News that the planned bonfire of the scripture had been called off did not reach the provinces in time to avert the rallies, which were sparked in part by Taliban pamphleteering against the US.

But it seems clear to me in any case that the threat of Quran-burning by a few dozen kooks in the US is only a pretext for these demonstrations, which inevitably are actually about the grievances of Afghans under foreign military occupation.

Wait, you mean.. this tempest in a teapot is being used by unscrupulous religious zealots to make names for themselves? I never would have guessed!

As usual, PZ Myers, himself an experienced destroyer of so-called ‘Holy’ items, has been out in front of this whole series of overreactions to peaceful protest:

Informing me that the Muslims are genuinely and sincerely and deeply offended is not informative — contrary to the suggestion that I must have an empathy deficit to be unaware of that, I know that and appreciate the fact that their feelings are hurt and they are angry and outraged. My point is that I don’t care, and neither should anyone else. The Abrahamic religions are all about fostering that feeling of oppression, even when it isn’t there, and hearing yet another one of the more deranged members of the People of the Book whine that we show insufficient respect for their mythology gives me the same feeling of exasperation I felt when my small children would wail about not getting a candy bar in the grocery store. Fine, you can be mad about your deprivation, but that does not obligate me to serve your whims.

…

I’ve seen enough videos of Middle Eastern protesters setting American flags on fire that I do have to wonder…how would they feel if we informed those countries that people who disrespect the United States ought to be arrested and their demonstrations shut down by force? The people Jones has offended feel no compunction about offending other Americans right back — and that’s OK. It is not a crime to offend others, and in fact, it’s pretty much a natural consequence of having diverse cultures.

I highly recommend you read the whole thing; it’s that good.

So where does this leave us? Hard to say. Western nations with free speech guarantees are buckling in the face of hurt feelings and vague, poorly defined threats of violence, compromising their most fundamental principles because, well, there aren’t that many Atheists/malcontents and they’re easier to kick around, I guess. One thing’s for certain, though; the Stewart case shows us, with crystal clarity, that protests of this sort are going to continue, one way or another, so as a society we’d be better-served coming to grips with that reality instead of shutting our eyes and hoping against hope that the irreligious (or in Jones’ case, hyper-religious) will swallow their pride and give up their rights and their ideas without a fight.

Or, you know, funny Youtube videos.

The lefty blogosphere, as well as elements of the mainstream and international press, has been abuzz with investigations into the seedy details of Terry Jones and his tiny church in Florida. Has he been buying property on the church’s dime? Did he file his tax returns properly? Was he run out of Germany on the proverbial rail after trying to run a larger organization there like his own personal cult? (warning, the Spiegel Online piece linked there is a hell of a nasty hatchet job).

Even more startling than the press and blogging fixation on the backers of a tiny, non-violent form of political protest has been the level of governmental pressure, arguably even harassment, of the people looking to conduct it. The FBI showed up to interview the pastor. Immaculately dressed Florida Governor Charlie Christ called on Jones not to start a smaller fire than many people use to roast weenies over Haloween. Defense Secretary Robert Gates phoned Jones to try and stop the protest. Even President Obama felt the need to publicly condemn the harmless burning of a small pile of paper, putting a good boot into American Atheists while he did so.

And of course, foreign governments feel the need to meddle with an entirely internal American matter.

But wait; it gets better. The Vatican has a position!

Burning the Quran would be an “outrageous and grave gesture,” the Vatican said Wednesday, joining a chorus of voices pleading with a small Florida church not to burn Islam’s holy book on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Hmm, yes, those paragons of moral virtue at the Vatican condemned burning the Koran. Being good-natured I’ll leave the issue of their credibility vis a vis relations with the Islamic world aside (*cough*Crusades*cough*) for the moment.

Still, all this concern over a tiny protest at an even tinier church? All this poring over documents in search of financial irregularities because someone wanted to make a name for himself with a bonfire? Really?

Isn’t there any more important scandal in the world of religion we could be discussing?

How about, say, this one,with a hat tip to PZ Myers:

‘No Belgian church escaped sex abuse’, finds investigation
Child sex abuse by clergy or church workers has taken place in every Roman Catholic congregation in Belgium, according to an independent commission investigating paedophilia allegations.

Yes, that’s right, the global pedophilia network sometimes referred to as the Catholic Church has been exposed in yet another nation, this time Belgium, home of waffles, in which an investigation discovered that, and I swear I’m not exaggerating, every single solitary Catholic church in the country had at some point been home to the sexual abuse of minors by clergy or staff.

Every. Single. One.

This is of course only part of a far, far larger conspiracy to cover up, even facilitate the sexual abuse of children, going back many decades and reaching to the highest corridors of power within the Vatican.

Well, maybe it was just the Belgian branch of the church that was this deranged, right? Well, no… and in Ireland the sheer depth of the depravity found in the Catholic organization is rocking their society to the core.

Even the police aided and abetted the sexual abuse of children, deferring to the Church’s authority and refusing to pursue cases against molestors in robes. The moral exemplars in the hierachy, meanwhile, coerced children into taking vows of silence against their abusers.

Perhaps these cases are too distant for a direct comparison, though; I mean, the koran burning was to happen here, on American soil. That makes it our problem, right?

Fair enough. How about this example, then:

On the morning of January 14 in Seattle, Ken Roosa and a small group Alaska Natives stood on the sidewalk outside Seattle University to announce a new lawsuit against the Jesuits, claiming a widespread conspiracy to dump pedophile priests in isolated Native villages where they could abuse children off the radar.

“They did it because there was no money there, no power, no police,” Roosa said to the assembled cameras and microphones. “It was a pedophile’s paradise.” He described a chain of poor Native villages where priests—many of them serial sex offenders—reigned supreme. “We are going to shine some light on a dark and dirty corner of the Jesuit order.”

Don’t worry about it, though! The Church is on top of the matter (no jokes please). How seriously do they take it? Well, look how they deal with it under their own, precious, extremely harsh church law: raping a small child is every bit as serious as ordaining a female priest.

Yes, their priorities are clearly straight, and so are ours, when an international, decades long global conspiracy to aid, abet and cover-up the sexual abuse of children makes so much less news than one sad, attention-seeking man starting a tiny fire.

But hey – I hear that Terry Jones might have lied on his tax returns! News at 11! Let’s get that (not-quite) koran burner!