Edit: I intentionally put “bad people” in the title in order to provoke. 😊
If you don’t know what I’m talking about:
Black Mirror - Hated in the Nation
I’m not sure how to limit the scope of this discussion, since it touches upon so many areas of morale:
- the value of life
- the right to kill
- vengeance/revenge
- crime
- good and evil
So I encourage you to be articulate and to follow some structure: “what(thesis) - why(evidence) - what (thesis)”. Other easy to follow variations, such as “why(background + evidence) - what(thesis)” or “what - why - what - by the way(discussion)” or just a simple “what” are of course good too. I’m not trying exclude comments, and I won’t, just encouraging an easy to read discussion. As for me:
I would not kill using a Death Note, unless for some utterly personal vendetta. I would also not kill those that did, if we were talking about some sort of society wide phenomenon. I believe that taking action against human life on the macro scale, such as a nation state against another or such as one confined justice system against one of its subjects (state versus an individual, for instance) or in the fictive case of the above mentioned media, is wrong. This is because I don’t believe it right to through politics or legislation qualify or quantify the value of a human life, such as is done in jurisdictions that allow capital punishment. While I’m against such “marco actions” on human life, I for some reason have less of a problem empathizing with the individual victims involved, which is to say, I don’t think I’d rage against, say, a grieving mother avenging her murdered child by killing the murderer. But then again, not all individuals have the ability or the capacity to exact revenge and maybe they have to rely on their nation state for some kind of restitution? My opinion is probably logical mess, full of contradictions, but there it is. Feel free to poke holes, in a kind manner!
Those who have, through their direct involvement and obscene power, caused and continue to cause harm and/or death to countless others I would use it on. I.e., those who have already chosen to abandon their humanity without remorse. No “small fries” or, like others have said, those who are already handled by society’s systems.
I would, however, methodize for death by natural causes if possible rather than direct violence. Much harder to make a martyr of someone who died like Stalin ;)
Wihile I think that you’re right to recognize that there is a risk of these people becoming martyrs, I think any real quantity of people would become quickly recognized as violence regardless of the method of death.
For instance, if you killed a dozen billionaires, and one of them was Elon Musk, all the Musk stans would probably go into conspiracy theory mode, and call it an assassination.
If you kill hundreds of billionaires, then you’ll likely have nation states recognizing it as violence.
And I think that would the case regardless of the timing or means of deaths. A pattern would emerge eventually.
Buy a set of d10,000 dice. Make a long list of names, up to that amount. Roll a d10 to decide how many people’s names you’ll write that day, then roll the d10,000 to determine the names actually get written in the Death Note. The randomization will help mask patterns, and if you pick pricks across the globe it’d be even harder to spot.
I’ve definitely thought about how using dice to add randomness would be a good strategy, and I’d definitely use it if it were me.
But if you’re doing 1d10 per day, that’s going to add up quickly to the point where the quantity itself adds up to a pattern of “before the rich started dying” and “after the rich started dying”. And that’s what will lead to martyrdom.
You are after all talking about the deaths of 140-190ish public figures per month, every month. That will be noticed.
Eh. It’s more to obfuscate any browsing pattern that might match your research to targets. If you front load most of it and randomize the actual order it’s a lot harder to track.
Also, the range is 30-310 people per month, with a normal distribution centered on 170 per month