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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   1804 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 4, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, I was thinking about a brief exchange I had a little while ago with @gattsuru, as well as an earlier thread on the arrest of the guy who started the Palisades fire (plus perhaps some other comments here and there about how mass shooters and such tend to have poor target selection, as is entirely understandable with their being of generally unsound mind), I find myself asking: setting aside very-low-probability scenarios, how much damage could a reasonably-competent solitary actor — “a lone man with a grudge against the world,” to quote @Edawayac_Tosscount — pull off in a single “attack”?

There are still many places in which one man is invested with the responsibility to avoid causing a lot of damage. Say, the guy who steers freighters through the suez or panama canals. Airline pilots. Just become that guy and fail at your job hard enough. All it takes is youth and patience and baseline learning ability and zero fucks given about the consequences for yourself. I think specifically of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 .

I think that's pretty much the most you can do with "reasonably competent solitary actor".

I'm not sure one can pull it off as a true solitary actor, but politics would be a good venue. I mean, the cumulative damage from COVID lockdowns is estimated to be over 14 trillions. Of course, you'd have to be in the right place in the right time, but doing at least billions of damage may be even easier - e.g. become a mayor of a large city and defund the police, or something like that. Or maybe just promote the idea that half of the country population is irredeemably evil and stole everything from the other half. Bonus points if you can sell that idea to both halves. Imagine how much damage that could do.

Could make the argument for a solitary founder of a popular and aggressive religion, though obviously very hard to do deliberately as a lone wolf.

The OSS published a field manual about this for WW2 resistance fighters. It mostly focuses on practical, low-level resistance and sabotage rather than grand acts though. Amusingly one of their suggestions is simply to be annoying and incompetent.

A non-cooperative attitude may involve nothing more than creating an unpleasant situation among one’s fellow workers, engaging in bickerings, or displaying surliness and stupidity.

It also depends how you calculate impact. For example the idiot who tried to smuggle bombs in his shoes has probably caused hundreds of aggregate human lives to be wasted by the delay of every air passenger now having to remove their shoes, despite his attack being completely unsuccessful.

Nice try, FBI.

Not today, CIA.

Good attempt at obscurity, Department of Homeland Security.

You have a long, long history of describing yourself as:

  • Severely disabled and destitute, with a dysfunctional family and no significant social ties.
  • Terminally depressed, with little to nothing to live for and zero hope that things will improve.
  • Incredibly frustrated that people you consider on your side are not committing acts of lawless violence and terrorism against people you regard as on the other side.
  • Possessed of a profound, murderous hatred of your tribal opposites as a class, to the point of routinely mocking your allies for not murdering them already.

I personally have argued to you that it is in fact exceedingly obvious that individuals possessed of even minimal competence and resources can inflict such absurdly disproportionate harm to society that the culture war is a significant threat to our society's continued function. When I declined to provide you for specific details of how to do so, you spent some effort to call me out as a liar.

My assessment is that you resent what peace we currently enjoy and wish for nothing more than to see that peace drowned in blood. I think anyone who answers the questions you ask here is a fool.

I know we all love to fantasize about how this forum is overrun with federal agents and terrorists but come on. Let’s be real here for a minute.

Between Antifa, the John Browning Society(of which atleast one of our mods(former mod?) was a member of, once upon a time), the various upswell of various tranny terrorist groups(That whole Ziz kerfuffle), and given how some of our previous members are going heavily political and associated with LGBT, I'd say it's less than a fantasy and more hedging of the bets.

I can't say anything in regards to Federal agents, but. I mean. We have atleast one popular poster that talks off-handed about working in Washington DC in politics, iirc.

By this point, anything is possible.

A nut job on the motte, given the population prevalence of nut jobs, is not so difficult to imagine. And this guy calls himself crazy rather openly.

I'd give 50/50 about some law-enforcement-adjacent eyes here (maybe LLMs by now) but there are wackos everywhere. And a lot of recent attacks were committed by so called "lone wolves" - i.e., wackos without organizational links to any established terrorist groups. In fact, those likely have higher chances to commit an actual attack - there are more of them and feds can't watch them all.

It’s unfortunate that answering this question earnestly is so unwise. Brainstorming A) how much destruction one person, or a small team of people, could cause, and B) how best to prevent someone else from following through on those plans, would be a very fun discussion, especially in a group of smart people with diverse backgrounds. But as almost everyone else has mentioned, it would be extremely foolhardy to actually mention any concrete ideas in a forum such as this, or really, in any place where there’s a chance one of the participants might be tempted to follow through.

"Left-wing extremists" have been bombing electrical grids recently (Associated Press, Reuters). Presumably they've put more thought into this topic than the denizens of this forum have.

50 worthless internet points at evens that "left-wing extremists" in Berlin is a euphemism for Islamists.

Deutsche Welle:

Left-wing extremists from the Vulkangruppe (Volcano Group) had claimed responsibility for the power outage, claiming in a statement on Sunday that it had "successfully sabotaged" a power station.

In the statement, the group said its main target was the fossil fuel industry, pointing out that the action "resulted in power outages in the more affluent districts of Wannsee, Zehlendorf and Nikolassee."

"We apologize to the less affluent residents of southwest Berlin," the group added.

Reuters:

In a letter posted on website kontrapolis.info, [Vulkangruppe Tesla Abschalten] said destroying Tesla was "a step on the path to liberation from patriarchy".

So I don't think so.

Given that they've caused less damage than a single particularly retarded-as-in-dropped-on-his-head arsonist, I'm not convinced that they've been optimizing for damage, whatever thought they've put in. I'm... actually a little unconvinced that they've even optimized well for disruption, but there's a lot of reasons I don't want to talk about that publicly.

Which is one half of the problem in talking about this stuff. If there are red team exercises that can up the high score from the known alternatives, it's... not a very good idea to start talking about them at length in public. The other half's that if you have reasons why a given attack shouldn't work, it's not a very good idea to talk about that at length in public, either.

Nice try, fedboy.

...seriously, this is one of those questions that the last sensible thing to do would be to put word and thought on the matter on some public forum. I give my CIA handlers enough conniption fits as-is.

I don't really like to speculate too far in that direction to avoid giving people ideas. There definitely are people on this board who have posted about at least thinking about doing such things. Hopefully nobody actually will, but who knows for sure, and there's no telling who else reads but doesn't post.

I will say though that I think firearms, at least in the hands of one or a few people, are a pretty bad way of killing large numbers of people. In a way, we're relatively fortunate that most such nutcases are still using them. Fire and explosives are much more effective at such things.

Most terroristic violence is memetic in nature. The popularity of various attacks goes up and down acting as trends. The same goes for lone wolf attacks.

Sometimes exceptional actors (such as OBL) come up with a novel threat.

It's still pretty wise not to give anyone ideas, and if you read the forum long enough (and pay attention) you'll see people mention something or not mention specific examples. Anybody with a brain should be able to look at the history of mass shootings and be able to come up with something (thankfully the people who do these things generally don't). With some creativity you should be able to look at some wide categories like physical infrastructure and cyber security and come up with some ways, some of which a single person could implement. Mass general economic disruption with or without loss of life would be even easier.

Even scarier is the fact that state actors have plenty of ways to grossly impact the health of the planet (the most obvious and famous is nuking the shit out of stuff), and at least one way could be theoretically implemented right now by a big enough PI at any of the major research labs.*

I wouldn't recommend thinking about it over much and I don't want that juju out in the world, but an asshole wrote a whole SF book trilogy about similar problems so maybe someone notices and snaps and we all die.

Lone man with a grudge has plenty of options. Let's not make them clear.

*slow moving death of all life on earth that wouldn't be solvable with current technology but maybe we'd be able to fix it with enough motivation.

With some creativity you should be able to look at some wide categories like physical infrastructure and cyber security and come up with some ways, some of which a single person could implement. Mass general economic disruption with or without loss of life would be even easier.

People say things like this, but I don't see it. Our critical infrastructure looks pretty robust and defended to me.

Absolutely not, in the U.S. a lot of our critical infrastructure is falling apart without any intervention at all.

Massive broadcast into the dark forest? Or mirror life?

I agree with you on the wider thrust, but there is also Nick Land's point about "Dr. Gno" - something along the lines of "with every x years' advance in technology, the IQ required to destroy the world drops by a point". And when you crawl high up enough along the bell curve, you'll find someone who'll do it.

IMO the actual bottleneck is not intelligence but time preference. Someone who can get in the frame of mind to cause the mass death of innocents - unless they're some true sociopath, like Bin Laden, or an academic virologist - wants to do it now, ASAP, let me kill/die now so I don't have to spend any more time like this. Most mass shooters could have 10xed their kill count if they were rationalist killmaxxers, but at that point, thankfullyish, too much of the mind has snapped off into little fragments.

but there is also Nick Land's point about "Dr. Gno" - something along the lines of "with every x years' advance in technology, the IQ required to destroy the world drops by a point".

Ugh, I've heard about this before but had forgotten about it. Thank you for the reminder haha.

how much damage could a reasonably-competent solitary actor — “a lone man with a grudge against the world,” to quote @Edawayac_Tosscount — pull off in a single “attack”?

Very easy for this discussion to become a Tom Clancy (ghost)writer’s room meeting, but I suspect that in this case the “best” (worst for humanity) option given current technology (e.g., we are probably not yet in the place where a lone actor can use AI and a home lab to synthesize a virus that can kill billions, because I have a strong fear that at that point it will happen) would be to spend time infiltrating some large, possibly mundane, organization and becoming a figure who has operational control over some kind of system (which might not even be a very senior role) where oversight is minimal and a bad actor could deliberately cause catastrophic damage that would either result in a huge number of casualties or result in a smaller number of (or even just one, critical) VIP casualties.

I also remember reading somewhere that nuclear submarine captains have the absolute authority to order nuclear strikes in a dead hand scenario, so maybe that.

In the US, where there's relatively extreme weather and fairly bad infrastructure, the optimal strategy would be to get yourself in charge of some kind of disaster preparedness agency, and do the sloppiest, laziest job that you possibly can in preparing for/responding to that disaster. As an example, you could refuse to respond to wildfires because of the risk to plants. The hard part of using this approach to cause mass casualties is that there will be many other people, often with better local political connections, running the exact same life strategy, and they're more fairly described as satisficing for mass casualties.

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