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PaperclipPerfector  15hr ago (text post)   641 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 25, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Oh, that's potentially more one-sided. Not for infants or toddlers, since gun triggers typically require multiple pounds of force to pull, but for older kids. Unintentional gun deaths kill dozens of kids a year in the US, so the only remaining question would be whether your proposed re-conditioning wouldn't have negative consequences when you needed responsible gun users as adults.

Or maybe we're both just not taking the thought experiment far enough? As an American citizen I'm fairly conscious of how the democratization of military power preceded and helped instigate the democratization of political power, and from that perspective I worry that we're running on hysteresis already and shouldn't risk making it even worse. As a World Controller I would presumably also be fairly concerned with the democratization of political power, but mostly from the perspective of how to stop it from ever happening again, and from that perspective the solution to child firearm accidents is easy: only our cadres of devoutly loyal childless soldiers shall be allowed anywhere near the trigger of a gun, and so we don't need to condition anyone against guns, just against disloyalty.

Obviously, as a real world controller, the world would inevitably end up in the state that the book is in. There simply isn't any reason to not pull a Grand Inquisitor and induce societal heat death, as long as we're talking about stopping coups from ever happening. However, I think that the methods used would probably have to vary a lot more and we'd have to have a lot better industrial capabilities and maybe a better understanding of biology. Sleep hypnosis can't work, we obviously can't grow kids in jars and it might not be possible at all, and I think you'd have to take more extreme measures to eliminate things like hate and jealousy and greed. Like "nerve stapling" like in Alpha Centauri. And people don't like nerve stapling.

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