Ugh. I found 4 to be the worst of the first-person SPs.

Great.

So now in my mind Riker has never washed his genitals before... Thanks, OP.

I can't help but keep thinking it started with a request for a letter of apology. Every deal after that has just been better.

Not like the fancy grit 80 we use in public toilets today.

There's so many layers to this 🤣 On both sides and then some...

Like... where to even start?

Genuinely, this entire interaction could be used to kick off discourse for each week's new topic of a Y1 S1's sociopolitical studies unit.

My brain's having a conflict between being impressed and an aneurysm.

They don't make them up. They only do that with absolute power or desparation.

Imagine you have no political influence or are directly involved in politics. But you want to ultimately be in a position of authority for personal boon. What's your first move? What moves do you continue to make to get there?

Would making shit up work for you prior to established influence? Or would you pull out the historical playbook and chip away like it's always worked?

At this phase, you're already in sociopolitical influence. You got there by exploiting failed defences of the people already. Murder went from 1 to 2 in your town and you used that for your campaign. You're a mayornow; do whatever you want so long as murder goes back to 1.

Everyone's unhappy with the governor ignoring a single on-topic issue. You hyperfocus on that in your campaign, get the spot. Job done; do whatever again.

You now have influence over topics and the feed people see. Shape that for you by creating issues that aren't really there—just like the murders—but now you can make them issues. Boom, you're in the next phase.

So how to influence next and how to control next? Well, a kid did this horrendous one-off thing, or education performances are falling for many reasons, but the two can be linked through social media and poor parenting of it. Done. Push that one...

At this point you're already so deep in there by just using the same tactic. "Where is there turmoil that I can use to my advantage?" You've beaten democracy, you've beaten narrative, you need to control the next frontier, and there's an in. Hell, in 2026 you're also using the same tactics to get richer and widen the class gap.

So now go back to being a normal person again, how do you make sure that foothold doesn't exist? You just do be better at it to ensure it can't be exploited by the instances of one-off.

You don't have to be a sociopath to beat one, a community and a society just needs to be aware of how they work. They don't have to work hard either, they just need to close up like a herd and do things better to close the gaps. Done long enough, they win through fatiguing those imposing authority AND there's no downside. But it shouldn't need to be said that better parenting shouldy be something that only happens when the parent is unhappy with a state exploiting it.

Yes, that's a long message, but I'm trying to—very simply—makenaware of the much bigger picture of the play and variables. Just saying "This isn't right!" never works and they know that attrition of foot holds at a controlled pace would never result in immediate violence or revolution. History is just available to you as it is to them. Use it.

Almost got it.

Point is, it doesn't have to be bad parenting, that's just the narrative. But if not, what is it then? What's the foothold? As far as I can tell, it's to protect children since that's the narrative. How was that foothold given to them? They don't need much to work with. If it were evident there were no foothold, there wouldn't be one.

And, you're exactly right, they would look for another if we had this one defended well. It is evident what the end goal is, but a defence is by minimising chinks in armour. If there were strong contrasting evidence to the very few bad parents, it wouldn't be a foothold—they couldn't use that narrative. But they seem to think there's just enough of a chink for pressing fallacious generalisation.

Everyone knows kids just get around it all anyway, so that's not the point, but they're in because there was enough to make use of secundum quid. That's almost always how authoritarian shifts worked in social history if not outright oppression through violence. We know it's bullshit, but it works like that, unfortunately.

How could you possibly read that as "buying their excuses" when the context is "don't give authoritianism excuses"? Did you make it past two words?

An authority doesn't need much to deploy secundum quid. That's arguably the most used tactic. It's part of the backbone of any authoritarian ideology.

🤦

We're so fucked, lol

Better parenting.

That's not a joke. This is a stupid government's way of trying to halt generational harm and decline due to low quality parents. Everything listed is a "if they won't, we'll have to" solution. Unfortunately this means every child gets a Nanny State out of it and it'll fail to work and likely backfire long-term, leading to more nannying.

Hmmmm... That's been happening to me lately too, actually. Sounds like I got some reading to do. Ideally, I should be using an alarm as a final fall back, but this hasn't been a habit for many, many years. My biggest mistake the other night was seeing sleep as a high value thing to get instead of just getting up when my body was actually ready to.