Oddbean

the general principle behind this all is the same mechanics involved in cults, brainwashing is at the centre of how it can run for a long time, and being isolated is required because their economic theories are totally nonsense and they don't persist without someone funding them which means that some dirty thieving cunts have been funding NK for a really long time to keep that shitshow alive how to defeat this stuff? idk, but i know how it works on the small scale in families and small social groups and likely it just scales up with enough money to keep the reality from dawning hard enough to drive people out

These regimes are all platforms for theft, laundering, and human trafficking. Ukraine specializes in laundering, north Korea specializes in human trafficking, and all the shitholes in between are some kind of mix.

I'd say you defeat it one Switzerland at a time. This is really America's policy failure - we regime changed all these countries, but didn't fix any underlying problems. No country needs to be as big as Switzerland, and anything bigger than Switzerland creates a honey pot of bad incentives at the top. We should be explicitly teaching local self sovereignty in any country we clash with, including local language, local agriculture, local militia, local justice... But our own honey pot of corruption at the top means our ideals never make through to other people. So we're doing it wrong. Instead of a giant military, we should flood them with gandalf teachers that like to shoot.

right, so essentially the answer is, go find a region of some other country with a small, robust, conservative and rational majority and do what you can to reinforce their sovereignty was always the way i thought it should be done i just didn't have the time-perspective to understand the bigger picture

Yeah basically. Idk if a majority is needed, especially now that we can spin up a million AIs on tictok. That's one of those things... Either we do it or the bad guys will. Once a dude shows up to the battlefield with a cannon, you either get your own cannon or prepare to do what you're told