lolgaxe wrote:
Probably not, but I might add people that ask nonsense questions along the way. Just for practice.
But people who point out problems in your reasoning are safe right?
lolgaxe wrote:
So my range would be branches that would be considered incestuous with each other with the central target. If, and that's a huge if, anyone would be part of the small circle of people that would and could retaliate they would be there.
The central target is irrelevant. I'm assuming here that everyone operates under a similar mentality to you as far as revenge is concerned. The bounds of what is considered family vary from person to person, but let's say that first cousins are considered family.
So Joe harms your family. You kill Joe, his wife, and his daughter per your revenge, we'll get to whether you kill his first cousins in a bit. Joe considers his first cousins family, and they consider him likewise. His first cousins operate under a similar revenge mentality to you, and so they will attempt to kill you and your family. Knowing this you must either preemptively kill them or will have to do so in self defense regardless of whether they were part of your original murder plot. But Joe's first cousins have first cousins. These are Joe's second cousins don't consider Joe family, and likewise for Joe, but they do consider their first cousins to be family who consider Joe to be family. Since you have killed their first cousin, they will retaliate against you under a similar revenge mentality and you will be forced to preemptively kill them or do so in self defense. But these second cousins also have first cousins (Joe's third cousins), who have a similar revenge mentality. And so on and so on.
You can throw grandparents, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, step-relations, in-laws, or even life long friends into the mix of what is considered family. The point is that if the family members of a family member are not a closed loop, the chain of revenge explodes to include an absurdly large number of people, potentially literally everyone.
lolgaxe wrote:
that's not to say it's impossible someone will come looking, but we're in a scorched Earth scenario, meaning I've got nothing to lose.
Except any of your remaining family. Which is why I asked you the frustratingly logically honest question of whether you would kill your daughter to kill the person who killed your wife, because assuming people think like you do, you would at some point probably have to make this choice.
lolgaxe wrote:
Why wouldn't I start at the end game?
You could, but it makes no difference to the chaining problem mentioned earlier. It also has a separate problem where someone with the same mentality beats you to the bunch. Someone could consider your actions (either intentional or unintentional) harm to their family and whether they intend to outright cut down your family tree or simply escalate, if they merely consider that you would escalate as well then the logical thing for them to do is to preempt you at end game. Since you may not have realized you harmed them you have no reason to be on the defensive. And the vast majority of people cannot stop prevent themselves or their family from being randomly murdered. You mentioned earlier that people may not know about your intentions and actions, yes, but that is a symmetrical problem for you. As for caring, entertaining the idea, and temperament you are correct, but we're assuming people have a similar revenge mentality as you and therefore they have all of these covered. As far as the means, everyone has access to this. Anyone can very easily kill any other random person, and there is very little that can be done to physically stop this. Most people don't kill because they lack the desire (including the cost of getting caught/punished), not because they can't.
Edited, Aug 16th 2017 7:20pm by Allegory