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"Look what you made me do" - man doing what he was going to do anyway. The thing about unprincipled people is that they think everyone else is just like them and that principles are for suckers. There are enough other unprincipled people that it's extremely easy to sustain this belief even in the face of clear evidence that you're well below average in terms of behavior simply by telling yourself others would do it if they could.
Political revenge narratives make more sense if you consider them as a gloss on crude dominance seeking. You can't just come out and say "I enjoy having power over my enemies" because you'll scare your less dominance-oriented political allies (who may start to wonder when the jackboot is coming down on their face). Framing it as revenge lets you justify it as a balancing of the scales - both punishment for misbehavior and a necessary reminder of why you shouldn't be fucked with. Actual misbehavior or unbalanced scales somewhere between optional and a negative.
This definitely seems to be the main explainer, but it seems to be missing something. No reply has yet even tried to explain why government needs to buy up and own private enterprise, something you would expect them to be able to do if they truly believed it was a beneficial and sound policy and were going to do it anyway.
So what's the motivator there then? I think some of it is just circling the wagons, a generic ex post facto justification for decisions that they otherwise would find alarming and dangerous for big government to do.
I don't think the Intel deal ties into the revenge narrative except insofar as Trump's supporters have extended him near-infinite deference in exchange for promises of vengeance against the libs. (More generally, the fact that conservative voters tend to be more tribal and less ideological gives the Big Men a lot more freedom to act out of bounds)
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This is politics. Principles are objectively for suckers.
You even evidence why: there are vast quantities of people who will defect, which makes being a cooperate-bot a terrible strategy.
If you don't tit for tat you just end up in the grave with Thomas More, Pompey and Alexander Kerensky. Though what an honorable grave it is. The best.
This is by definition a subjective, not an objective, topic. There can't be an objective evaluation of what values one should hold.
Instrumentality is an objective metric.
What ought to be done is subjective. What can be done is objective.
My point, and Machiavelli's, is that a certain conduct is necessary to attain and retain power in the first place, independently of one's ultimate aims. Making it a necessary precondition to the enactment of any political program.
Whether one should engage in politics is a subjective question, but once one answers yes, the requirements placed on one are the same regardless of ideology. And they include the necessity to destroy one's enemies that they may not rally against one.
I'll agree that effectiveness can be objectively measured. But "principles are for suckers" isn't a statement on effectiveness, it's a value judgement of what a person should do. Thus, it is not (and can't be) objective.
A "sucker" is a victim of one's own credulity or benevolence. This is an objective category in instrumental terms. A cooperate-bot in a population that contains defectors is a sucker, this is not a value judgement, it's a purely analytic statement of fact.
You either are putting yourself at the mercy of your enemies thereby threatening your ability to effect your agenda or you are not.
You can only argue this is subjective if you're willing to say that engaging in effective politics is not your goal, which is axiomatically excluded from this discussion given effective politics is the topic.
No, this is a value judgement. Perhaps you mean it as an analytic statement of fact, but that is not what "sucker" means. It is purely a derogatory statement about one's belief that someone is foolish.
From Merriam-Webster:
From Oxford:
I think my usage is perfectly appropriate. But it's not like I've made a mystery of what I meant. You certainly seem to have understood it.
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More and Pompey didn't lose by playing cooperatebot against defectbot.
More never tried to fight the Reformation Parliament and the Succession Oath - it was as obvious to him as it was to everyone else that with the King's mind made up there was nothing to fight. Saint Thomas More was playing a different game, with the only prize worth having in his estimation not being of this world, so he decided that martyrdom was a better alternative to going along to get along.
I'm not going to litigate which of Pompey and Caesar defected first, but at the critical decision point they are both all-in on defection - Pompey just lost the resulting war.
Pompey’s side defected 80 years earlier when they beat the Tribune of the Plebs to death with table legs, committing what was in the Roman worldview both treason and blasphemy. Then they spent most of the next century being shocked at the succession of demagogues who were suddenly willing to break all sorts of political norms, for some unknown reason.
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Because you bloody well know that there are many points in the First Triumvirate where he could have crushed Caesar who had demonstrated his danger to him but let his friendship and honor get in the way. A courtesy that Caesar did not pay him later, except perhaps posthumously.
To be sure, but once again it is politics we are talking about, not Godliness. His martyrdom did not change England's course.
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Note that tit-for-tat recommends cooperating until you are defected against. If there's no first defecter, cooperate-bot and tit-for-tat produce identical behaviour.
Of course. And the iterated prisoner's dilemma is a limited model anyways.
But do you really doubt the existence of prior defection in American politics at this point?
No, of course not, I was only speaking hypothetically.
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