“Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond is established between you and him… These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe that they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame.”
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
“The peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country — when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.'”
— Carl Schurz
“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”
— HL Mencken
“I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.”
— Zora Neale Hurston
I dig Manzi’s game theoretic approach. Given that human decisionmaking is an emotioncharged process, and that human empathy is distributed over a likely gaussian with Bono and Mother Teresa at the upper right tail and Cheney and Kim Jong Il at about negative infinity on the lower left, if we can reduce moral dichotomies to mathematics, it is always more productive.
Or maybe that is just how my particular brain is wired.
In any non-time-limited iterated game……strategy beats tactics.Report