The first example doesn’t seem like a game of chicken to me, since neither Alexi nor Beth can make a change themselves. It may be that they have “inherited” the debate from their political factions’ respective allies, who are actually playing a game of chicken. But Alexi and Beth are doing the classic political topic “talking past one another” and part of this seems to be that they’re treating different sets of actions as reachable, and only assigning should-ness to reachable actions.
The first example doesn’t seem like a game of chicken to me, since neither Alexi nor Beth can make a change themselves. It may be that they have “inherited” the debate from their political factions’ respective allies, who are actually playing a game of chicken. But Alexi and Beth are doing the classic political topic “talking past one another” and part of this seems to be that they’re treating different sets of actions as reachable, and only assigning should-ness to reachable actions.
If neither Alex nor Beth can make a change, then it’s not a game at all.