Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigstrat2003 | Hacker News Reader

bigstrat2003·

No, not really. Two wrongs don't make a right. It doesn't matter who started it (especially since each party claims to be responding to the other, and the only thing they differ on is where to draw the zero point), it is still not acceptable to continue in kind.

View on HN

It does matter who started it and responding meekly to being wronged just makes you a sucker. And conservative morality being what it is, suckers are going to be bullied for fun.

> Two wrongs don't make a right.

It is ok to respond to gerrymandering by gerrymandering. It is not kindergarten. The court said it is legal, GOP will continue to do it. If the other side does not engage, they will honorably loose all ability to influence politics.

There's a nuance you're missing. These are not two comparable wrongs.

The CA proposition was put to a vote. Literally direct democracy. The TX legislature had a special session to put this in without voter input.

The CA proposition is time bounded, the TX one is not.

The CA proposition was in reaction to the TX one. If TX did not mid-cycle redistrict I am confident CA wouldn't.

Can you still really claim the two were equivalent?

I'd argue that in this case two wrongs literally do make a right, because AFAIK game theory proves tit-for-tat to be the most effective strategy in a two-player prisoner's dilemma (which this boils down to). Since the few instances able to prevent such voter repression had already proven their defection to the side trying to repress voters, Newsom's approach seems to objectively be the best one to defend democracy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com