But we know the most important thing: That man owned 42 guns, and last weekend he brought 23 of them — including the deadliest ones, weapons of war designed for maximal killing power — to a Las Vegas hotel room so he could mow down hundreds of people gathered for a country music festival.
His typical tactic is to raise the stakes of a negotiation impossibly high — a government shutdown or nuclear war — then to make a maximal demand and trust in the triumph of his stronger will.
It's no coincidence, of course, that maximal sharing means maximally lucrative opportunities for advertising.
What about the reports that his men were guilty of mass rape in Bosnia, using sexual violence as a weapon of war? "The Serbs would need to be maximal sex maniacs" to be guilty as charged, he quipped.
If President Obama approves McChrystal's maximal request, as John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman, and other war hawks demand, it will be an enormous drain of resources in a time of great economic hardship.
Absolute pacifism is understood as a maximal and universal rejection of violence and war.
There is, of course, a continuum between maximal and minimal pacifism, with maximal pacifism rejecting all forms of war and violence.
Although Tillerson supported the approach to the war in Afghanistan that Trump announced last year, he felt no need to frame U.S. goals in the same maximal terms as the commander in chief.
Although some maximal versions of deontological pacifism will claim that it is wrong even to kill combatants in war, other versions will argue that war is wrong primarily because of the risk to noncombatants.
But the parts are maximal.
