> I wish this were true, and I share your compulsion, not necessarily a rational one, to prefer compassion and understanding and detente to bellicosity and intrigue.

No, I don't think you do. First of all, you dismiss it as an irrational fantasy. How would you feel about my opinion of your "compulsion" if I dismissed it as an irrational brand of paranoia? Not chuffed?

It feels like you're deliberately twisting my points, from which I surmise that you are merely starting from such a completely different set of assumptions that there is no possible conversation between us. However, I will attempt it nevertheless. Probably all this is a waste of time. Arguing on the internet, yay.

> Unfortunately for both of us, the truths of Machiavelli are not easily defeated, least of all by something as saccharine as "make love not war." The most tyrannical and imperialistic societies in history, from Rome to Stalin, often began with variations on such noble sentiments.

The "truths of Machiavelli" were written down in 16th Century Italy, in a time of constant warring and feuding between petty little dictators, at a time when it was acceptable to saw your enemies in half or cut off their balls and make them eat them, where rape and pillage were the way to conduct war, where assassination of political rivals was a primary political tool. They are not fit to be quoted in a discussion of how to conduct a democracy.

> "Care better for the crazy." In other words, anyone who means to do harm to the republic should be institutionalized? How? By force I assume. Who defines "crazy"? The history of international conflict unfortunately is not a story of the rational and benevolent vs. the "crazy and murderous", but of competing ideologies, scarce resources, and plain corruption.

That's a ridiculous straw-man interpretation of my statement. Your country has a great combination of a shitty healthcare system that is well known to fail the mentally ill (unlike the functioning healthcare systems of other countries) and wide availability of firearms. Strangely enough, this results in a higher incidence of shootings and other violent mass killings. Want to solve the problem? Reduce the number of guns and increase the number of services taking care of the mentally ill. How to diagnose them? The same way as in every other country.

> The problem with such naivete is that it assumes the problem is theoretical, and merely needs the correct sociological constructions and psychological theory implemented by benevolent institutions.

No, the problem is deeply practical: how to have less violence both from the inside and from the outside. The solution is deeply practical too: take better care of the mentally ill who tend to become mass murderers so they are in hospitals shooting valium instead of in school shooting toddlers, and don't do the multiply fucked up foreign policy things the US does that result in crazy people outside of the US wanting to cause it trouble.

> But how do those institutions grow over time? Who governs them, and which of the many competing and contradictory sociological and psychological models do we apply, first of all to define and identify "crazy," and then to apply the appropriate remedy? Further, what concrete example of such an application can you offer as proof that such a program works consistently on the local individual level, much less the international level?

See earlier point about how other countries "identify" mentally ill people. My understanding is that it comes through a combination of family and friends and medical professionals making assessments. Seems to work fine for the rest of the world.