Facta non Verba: How to Own Your Enemies
medium.com
medium.com
"unlike Napoleon and the Tsars, Roman emperors before Diocletian were not absolutists"
This is one of those little "red flag" moments when you realize the writer is either ignorant of the facts, or thinks the reader is. Just picking a few that come to mind quickly: Caligula, Nero, and Commodus would certainly have answered to the description "absolutist" (and would have been proud of it), and one could argue that all of the emperors, from Augustus on, were "absolutist" for at least some reasonable interpretations of that word.
At that point I lost interest in the article; a writer can have his own opinions, but he can't have his own facts.
(In fact, I'm even more confused by the choice of Diocletian as the starting point for absolutist emperors: he abdicated.)
Moral absolutism, the position that there are absolute standards against which moral questions can be judged, and that certain actions are either good or evil, regardless of the context of the act.
This definition appears to jive with what Taleb was saying. Are you using a different definition?
"the principle or the exercise of complete and unrestricted power in government."
In other words, an absolutist about power, not about morals.
It seems this article could use a TL;DR
> The best enemy is the one you own by putting skin in his game and letting him know the exact rules that come with it.
What does this mean exactly?