So there's been this thought experiment making the rounds that turns out to be a Monty Hall problem with a unique political twist.
Everyone in the world (who is cognizant enough to understand the choice, no kids/retards/whatever) has to press one button, red or blue. Their choice is made privately and they cannot confer with any other person. If more than half of people choose red, everyone who chooses blue dies. If more than half of people choose blue, everyone lives.
What button do you press?
Liberals have broadly decided this is a "sociopathy test." They say anyone who wouldn't press the blue button is a Nazi and everything else they always call people.
Game theory enjoyers have, however, noticed that this boils down to "if you press the red button, you survive. If you press the blue button, you only survive if half of people are dumb enough to press the blue button." People have recast the problem with illustrations, like this:
Another formulation is "Every human on Earth has to decide whether or not to jump into a gigantic woodchipper that has been built with a crucial design flaw: if more than half the population jumps in, it will jam the machinery and no one will die. Do you jump in?" You're a sociopath if you don't jump in the woodchipper to save whoever was dumb enough to go in there.
What's absolutely fascinating here is that I suspect the
button color itself is provoking the reaction of liberals. They have been brainwashed with the expression "vote blue no matter who" until it literally overrides any desire for their own self-preservation and makes them hit the "ultimate death gamble" button. Democrats have successfully caused people to believe a histrionic mass suicide attempt in order to demonstrate solidarity is a better scenario than everyone just pressing the red button and going on with their day. Because blue is the heckin' good guys. Red's the bad guys.
Watching people fail the most basic test of "can you understand how to act in your own interest" is very interesting, coming from the party that not so long ago was aghast at Republicans in middle America for "voting against their own interest." 2004's
What's the Matter with Kansas? was an entire book on this topic. Thomas Frank won awards for showing how redneck working class voters and poor folk were fools whose values had been hijacked to induce them to vote for the people who had nothing in common with them, who probably had nothing but contempt for them, and who didn't share the values in their personal lives that they espoused politically.
It seems like the DNC really did learn from that book, but I'm not sure it was really the lesson they were supposed to take away.
