It would be wrong to publicly offer correct advice on what a rational person would do to further such an evil goal, even in the context of fiction. You don’t want crazy people to watch your film and learn how to do this sort of thing correctly.
It’s something of a SOP in fiction to describe harmful actions in a way that sounds correct, and for the most part is, but tweaking enough key details that if someone tried to imitate the fiction in real life they would fail, and ideally have a lot of trouble figuring out why they failed.
E.G. give a long, engineering-porn type description of the improvised bomb your heroes successfully use, but tweak a few chemical ratios so that in reality the bomb wouldn’t explode (or would explode in the wannabe bomber’s hands).
Or you could explain how to get away with murder, in such a way that anyone who commits a murder thinking they could use this method to get away with it would end up leaving a certain kind of evidence, so they would still be caught.
Oh, wait, there is something wrong with that plan.
That’s what I’m aiming at. They only believe to be rational, when in fact they are as ideological and misguided as everybody else, although not as obvious. That’s mostly owed to the fact that they’re only two people, since the risk increases with every conspirator they would add. So they form an echo-chamber of their own, eventually spiraling off…
I’m outlining some posts on memetic infections which might be highly apposite. This may be extremely good for ideas too—statistically, jihadis tend to be engineers and appear to have decompartmentalised badly. (Making your protagonists engineers? See also RW: Engineers and woo—most engineers are perfectly normal geeks, but there’s a long and venerable history of engineers turning into complete cranks about non-engineering matters.)
It would be wrong to publicly offer correct advice on what a rational person would do to further such an evil goal, even in the context of fiction. You don’t want crazy people to watch your film and learn how to do this sort of thing correctly.
It’s something of a SOP in fiction to describe harmful actions in a way that sounds correct, and for the most part is, but tweaking enough key details that if someone tried to imitate the fiction in real life they would fail, and ideally have a lot of trouble figuring out why they failed.
E.G. give a long, engineering-porn type description of the improvised bomb your heroes successfully use, but tweak a few chemical ratios so that in reality the bomb wouldn’t explode (or would explode in the wannabe bomber’s hands).
Or you could explain how to get away with murder, in such a way that anyone who commits a murder thinking they could use this method to get away with it would end up leaving a certain kind of evidence, so they would still be caught.
Oh, wait, there is something wrong with that plan.
Fiction would, however, be an excellent place for cautionary examples of getting it badly wrong.
That’s what I’m aiming at. They only believe to be rational, when in fact they are as ideological and misguided as everybody else, although not as obvious. That’s mostly owed to the fact that they’re only two people, since the risk increases with every conspirator they would add. So they form an echo-chamber of their own, eventually spiraling off…
I’m outlining some posts on memetic infections which might be highly apposite. This may be extremely good for ideas too—statistically, jihadis tend to be engineers and appear to have decompartmentalised badly. (Making your protagonists engineers? See also RW: Engineers and woo—most engineers are perfectly normal geeks, but there’s a long and venerable history of engineers turning into complete cranks about non-engineering matters.)