It was fun getting people out of bed. 'n frankly, likely necessary. Apologize for the inconvenience, but it is actually amusing playing a soviet political officer here in the great patriotic war... despite the hassle.

For those lurking the board, we need the major states (and the surface-level gangs, petty corrupt mayors, and the like which manipulate them) for a simple reason : they (actually, their employees, but) have decent-enough skills in military, counterespionage, and criminal investigative fieldwork, and influence over enough resources, that change the degree of drasticity required to solve this problem.

"Victory" would be the beginning, not the end.

There's some severe, well, delusion though. Bluntly, your "WMD threat model" is not, actually, some schmuck on the internet who's been severely mistreated (and, yeah, okay, maybe I threw a few probes). The notion of "special people" and "point eradication of threat" are... completely fucking delusional.

Organophosphates do not require halides, sulfur, or nitrogen to be an effective inhibitor, nor are AChEI the only nerve agent.... and alkylation is babby's first pre-orgchem. Because the existence of drugs, SARs, and molecular biology is so much more intellectually stimulating than, say, abuse in a public school system, you could find several people capable in literally any middle school you walk into. Hint : it's usually not the teachers. Biowarfare is as simple as rotting something in your fridge, reseeding multiple colonies with it, and slowly underdosing and increasing with some diverted antibiotics. It already eats meat (and I'm pretty sure a vegan determined to launch an area attack would overcome their qualms for one instance, comparatively), is epigenetically geared to eat meat now, and now, it's treatment-resistant. An aerosolized broth at altitude in a crowded place, and a large swath of the folk of an area are crawling with treatment-resistant meat-eating bacterium - which remain treatment-resistant bacterium in the environment, since they came from the open air and can thus presumably survive there.

(plague crucifixion, in case you're wondering)

The notion of "special persons" and "single-point elimination" is a delusional myth... and yes, there were some deliberate probes; it's one certain folks are absolutely willing to swallow. For a fool, a more realistic worldview is that 20-50% of the people could create a WMD facility and stage an attack off the top of their damn head, and about 95% could do it if they wanted to look into it - anyone who is not drool-and-make-funny-noises retarded, and some of them, because neurodiversity isn't even synonymous with intellectual disability.

A far, far more distributed model, with no one node that can be taken out. Any random homeless person you can find has a reasonable chance to be as well armed as a major state actor. A fool now views their entire populace as their threat model, I suppose...

In reality, your only defense is not your security services, but the fact that the "powerless" are mostly reluctant to violence - it's all you've got. And your greatest threat model is your petty beat cop, and maybe the occasional school teacher or administrator.

This is fairly universal - the average 2 year old could smash your kneecap with a hammer, key your car, smash the windshield, whatever. It requires no particular skills or training. The ability to spank, slap, or take away someone's toys to "punish" them is perfectly symmetrical. All that differs is the willingness to do evil.

It's universal enough that it's an axiom. The notion of a heirarchy of power is not a concept that can ever be supported by the universe. All power-based suppression does is escalate the bid - which, literally anyone can generally match. The delusion of having power (in that sense) is, actually, your only threat model, and any delusion to the contrary is your threat model.

Think of it essentially thermodynamically. The greater the distortion, the more energetic the return to its natural state will be. Breaking springs, decomposing exothermic compounds, falling objects... anything distorted from its rest state will return to its natural rest state.

"Great men" and single actors are actually completely unimportant.

These delusions have side effects. Collective decisioun theory, the economic studies of monopoly and monosopony, etc - the fact that other people have their life degraded more than yours, and have worse worse outcomes than you, does not mean you do not in fact lose, rather than gain, from delusions of power. Just about any economist could tell you this; they're your employees, go ask the experts.

It's because of this that moving WMDs to the disaffected is actually a good idea, and frankly, one you should probably support. Whnn bullets fly both ways, metaphorically speaking, actions have costs, parties prioritize different choices - the end result is peace. When (pardon the economic jibber) price signals are suppressed, the system is severely distorted. Zero- or minimal-gain solutions keep happening despite their total cost; bluntly, the world ends whether one special person is present or "removed."

A state nuke is usually about a mile direct crater or so. Assuming the average person is not going to carry a beach ball the size of their dinner table by hand, one can cut that diameter in half. The worst-case scenario is actually a tiny goddamn price to pay compared to the price of not doing so.

All these great ideas, including the tools you regularly use, are sabotage. And if you, yourself, are basically a product of sabotage, are you actually an actor, or just a tool?

A lot of times, one can blame the help. Degrade, disrupt, and destroy - including disinformation - merely degrades, disrupts, and destroys. See the econ 101 up there. Ask the help. They sell you these great ideas, the product is actually you, and sure, sometimes they just want to make money without caring about the job (also a product of sabotage), but sometimes, it's very deliberate.

The "cure" for its effects is usually more sabotage, in fact. Sure, it's like heroin, there's usually some rebound when the suppression stops, but adding 20% more heroin every time you dose is just going to make it much, much worse.

The basic positions are often sabotage, themselves. A "director" notices that they're essentially fucking useless and the help does all the work. A little psychological defense kicks in, and it's pretty easy, it's been fed to them the whole way, they've risen "to the top." The "great man" theory (of indeterminate gender; the germanic mana is universal) gets swallowed for self-preservation reasons. It then becomes natural to develop the right (predictable and exploitable) blind spots, believe in the great man/single actor theory in other places, etc, etc.

The confucian model (pretty much invented to fix this shit a little during some of the worst times in history and import a few older concepts into an otherwise ill-suited framework) is far more accurate. You're not a great man. You're not special in that particular sense. You probably are good at what you do. The people you rely on are good at what they do.

I've noticed a huge amount of distortion in responses, including absolute panic at the shift in the balance of power which would occur from slightly-more-mutual armament solutions. No, you dumbfuck, you vent this shit with microquakes (or get it down to less, if you have those means; I have few resources there) or you get the god damn big one. And yes, it is fear of loss of power in any shift in a balance of power rather than any humanitarian concern...

...my favorite so far is the "what are you bitching about, everything's fine." Sometimes with a few surface concessions which, while definitely on the birth-to-death hope list, are pretty shallow in a larger picture sentiment.

The modern order of society...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

...is literally patterned after prior animal torture studies. Just part of the sabotage...

...but if I can play you to map where a thing is distorted from any normative state, and your underlings are playing you with accelerationist nonsolutions which are only going to drive things to the brink while creating degraded outcomes (sometimes out of incompetence and laziness, but more often, I presume, at the deliberate direction of others), are you really an actor, or a tool? Okay, I might mistake the number of people and/or resources that have been driven out of bed, by a year tops - and an oligarchy of a few more mayors and small community groups is probably going to be as close to what works (horizontal panarchism with a lack of heirarchical suppression - see the CDT/econ/etc bits, or the part about the police being the prime threat level)... are you a playerr, or a helpless tool?

The most telling thing was the inability of any party to provide a working, nonviolent response that the mere peons could actually do. Pretty much any moron can tell you that's the first and simplest thing, and the only possible response. Instead, it's universally been escalation and brinksmanship for a decade or two - fairly implausible. This is too far below competence, so like the rest, had to come from somewhere.

There was one partial exception.

A lot more folk, now, can begin to note that a military/criminal/intelligence victory is a beginning, not an end. But... it is necessary to get as much out of bed as possible; these are resources I need, albeit for comparative peace and comparative peace alone.

A novice would trace problems in France to 1946; a student of the war would probably trace it to around 1830. Someone familiar with the similarities between republics and the return to Tomar after the initiation of antisemitic riots in southeast Spain might try the 1300s.

Someone who remembered that the misnamed "Norman" invasion of Latin-speaking people from the south us also the dawn of the notion of crimes against the state rather than crimes against persons would probably trace it back about 2,500-3,000 years, more or less.

I'd trace it back about one to 1.5 million years, give or take. This was not specifically france, however, so 2.5k years or so would do.

But... the obvious, visible work is important. With less added problems, addressing the real issues might be more feasible - and frankly, as prior noted, most of the help can tell you these things already; it's their discipline.

Tracking mild response distortion has been interesting. Sometimes even friends cannot be friends, and one has to ask one's self why. I'll accept that you're out of bed, now, to about as close to the lower levels I want as one is likely to get. Good luck, have fun. I'll turn my mind to other things...

...well, actually, I'll turn my mind to whatever needs it. But first, I'll turn my mind to other things.