There are some facts that are so intuitively obvious that Nobel Prizes are given for their recognition and codification. Most people understand by First Grade that if you give a bully your lunch money on the first day of school you will be going without lunch all year. Robert Aumann won the 2005 Nobel Prize for economics for his work in game theory, or interactive decision theory, a formal analysis of repeated games. Lee Smith interviewed him to help understand why the Palestinian-Israel Peace Process never seems to end up with Peace:
Aumann’s analysis of repeated games explains how cultures build systems that allow them to function reasonably smoothly. The problem is when one player does not understand the sort of game being played. For instance, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli peace process, Aumann believes that the problem isn’t that the Israelis and Arabs don’t want peace, but rather that the Israelis and their U.S. patron believe they are playing a one-time game whereas the Arabs see themselves as playing a repeated game. Jerusalem and Washington are in a hurry to conclude negotiations immediately, whereas the Arabs are willing to wait it out and keep playing the same game. The result is that Israel’s concessions, or the desire to have peace now, have brought no peace.
What Aumann is getting at is what he called in his Nobel lecture “one of those paradoxical upside-down insights of game theory.” Of course, poker players are familiar with the principle: Don’t show your hand with chips still on the table. “For repetition to engender co-operation, the players must not be too eager for immediate results,” Aumann said in his lecture. “The present, the now, must not be important. If you want peace now, you may well never get peace. But if you have time—if you can wait—that changes the whole picture; then you may get peace now.”
In Aumann’s view, the post-Oslo period shows that Israel’s behavior leaves it at a serious disadvantage in a repeated game. “In games that repeat over time,” Aumann wrote in an article called “The Blackmailers’ Paradox,” “a strategic balance that is neutral paradoxically causes a cooperation between the opposing sides.” Aumann offered the example of two men forced to split $100,000. Person A assumes that they will split it evenly and is astonished when Person B explains that he will not accept anything less than $90,000. Afraid that he will leave empty-handed, A relents and takes one-tenth of the money. In this situation, A acted as if this were a one-time game, but had he understood it as a repeated game and refused the split so that both he and B walked away empty-handed, he would have shown for future reference that he was every bit as determined as B. This in turn would make B more willing to compromise. “Likewise,” Aumann wrote, “Israel must act with patience and with long-term vision, even at the cost of not coming to any present agreement and continuing the state of belligerence, in order to improve its position in future negotiations.”
Once again, Israel is the canary in the coal mine for the West, for today the game is being played by proponents of Sharia, which includes radical Islam but also includes many who are regularly touted as moderate Muslims, against Western Civilization.
While the schoolyard bully is easily identified and the dangers of surrendering to his demands are well known, the paradigm is identical for Sharia Islam; yet because the stakes are higher and the dangers greater there are far too many in the West who convince themselves that there is no long game at play. To fail to see the nature of the threat that Sharia poses to the West requires one to be a charlatan or particularly craven and in denial of one's own fears. There are many in the West who would like nothing more than to suppress free speech. Hate speech laws are nothing less than efforts to silence the speech of those who are out of favor with the PC thought police. Our MSM has marginalized themselves in the struggle to maintain our freedoms, as the Viking trenchantly points out:
If you only have time to click one link on this blog today, make it this one. It's about EDM Day, which I've written about a lot, and it goes into the utter failure of our media and law enforcement institutions. Could you imagine if the FBI said it couldn't protect black people from the KKK? The media would be all over their asses, and rightly so. What has happened to the "creator" of EDM Day is a complete and utter travesty. If you needed any more evidence that NYT writer Nicholas Kristof has his head firmly lodged up his ass, read this article. If you didn't, read the article. Bottom line, read this article.
Molly Norris had the temerity to insult the incredibly easily insulted proponents of Sharia's proscription about any ridicule of their religion or their founder. Death threats, and the complete failure of our institutions which are supposed to be dedicated to preserving and protecting our freedoms, led her to go into her own Infidel Protection Program. Where are those members of the MSM who tout their bravery in speaking truth to power? Where are our officials who have done Shariah limbo in order to support the building of a Mosque of triumph at Ground Zero?
Our intelligentsia, in an effort to preserve an image of themselves as fearless fighters for all that is good and right in the world, have determined that insulting Islam is a far worse crime than Muslim death threats. A rural rube threatening to burn a Koran mobilized officials from the President on down and their minions in the media to castigate the intolerance of the Koran burners (who never actually went through with their threats.) Meanwhile an American citizen is in hiding because the RoP has threatened her with death, threats that have proven to be all too real in the past, for the crime of mocking how Islam has allowed Mohamed to be hijacked by radicals. (Are they radicals if their program is supported by the majority of Muslims? Are they only radicals if they use violence as opposed to merely enabling and excusing violence?)
Every time a Western politician or "Statesman" surrenders our freedom to mock and annoy in the service of keeping the worst elements in Islam appeased, we lose another battle in this very long war. By seeing every instance as a "one-off" we are losing because we are playing a series of isolated single games while our enemies are playing the same game, repeated time and again. Until we catch on, which means having the adults punish the bullies and letting them know in no uncertain terms that stealing the little kids' lunch money is no longer going to be tolerated, this war will go on. By appeasing we will keep the casualty rate low ... right up until the day they find a way to make our casualty rates explode.
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