...that sounds very time-consuming but I suppose proportionately to how overelaborate you're trying to be in the first place? Who-all do you consider yourself obliged to explain to?

Ideally anyone who's concerned? In practice mostly the advisors I mentioned previously and Círdan and my insurance company. It is time consuming. That's why it's tempting not to do it, which is why they did not do it, which is why later when their capacity to plan well was - fundamentally compromised on a lot of levels -- people still trusted them and followed them and ignored obvious evidence that the limb they were following them out onto was a very shaky one.

Maybe you can save time by mostly delivering written copies. Why your insurance company?

They're very precise and rigorous and well-calibrated and hate it when I do risky things. It seems like a good thing to have in one's life, an insurance company.

Maybe yours are better at things than ours, nobody speaks very fondly of them at home.

Huh, then why don't they switch?

They're all like that. Also for medical insurance in particular I think there's a problem where you can't get them to cover anything you already had so if you're like, diabetic, you're stuck unless you marry somebody who gets insurance through their work and can tack you on that way, or something. I have never personally shopped for insurance and the medical insurance problem is mostly an American thing, Canada has socialized healthcare, but there's lots of Americans on the internet so one hears about it.

- I don't offhand know the exact thing that's wrong just from that description but if you let some Dwarves in and didn't arrest them unless they did any physical violence it'd probably get straightened out pretty quick.

I believe there are non-physical-violence-related regulatory complications to insurance.

That'd do it. 

Anyhow, Morgoth. He arranged for rumors to reach the right people, he arranged for people to overhear conversations that were either about something else or never even happened at all, he persuaded my great-grandfather's younger son that my father meant to have him expelled from the city. He persuaded my grandfather that his half-siblings were plotting to usurp him. And of course, just like that, he made both true.

...did he have one of those prophecies telling him that would work, because that seems like a plan you'd have to be really confident in to bet on.

I don't know. He took a thousand years going about it, to be clear. Maybe many other comparably complex plans failed without a trace.

I guess that'd do it.

Yes. The specific mistakes there were avoidable but the general situation was an evil god taking a thousand years to find whatever mistakes there were, and you can't plan on not making any, not on that kind of timescale.

The King's younger son called a public meeting and urged the King to denounce my grandfather. My grandfather drew a sword and threatened him. The King didn't do anything - that was a mistake, you should have law enforcement in kingdoms and it should apply to important people no matter what - and the Valar stepped in and banished my grandfather from the city for a hundred twenty years.

...okay. Did the Valar have some formal relationship to the government or did they just sort of do whatever because they were gods?

The latter. 

That can't have helped with having law enforcement apply to powerful people at all.

The King was very angry. My grandfather was very angry and - off-balance, he had a lot of things he needed pulled out from under him. Of course sometimes that happens to you if you threaten people with a sword. But - 

- the city sorted itself. People who felt my grandfather was being done by wrongly left with him. Instead of an exile, a - mass relocation. The King went with us. His younger son he left to rule in Tirion. 

I guess that was another mistake, or maybe several of them. If one of your kids threatens to kill another one of your kids and then you have to pick sides probably you should pick the victim's, though personally I solved this by not having kids, and I think that maybe mingling the personal and the political is inevitably bad.

Did the king instigate the mass relocation or did he just decide to move when it was clear a bunch of people were gonna?

I think there was a lot of complicated dancing towards the brink of consensus but he could certainly have made it not be a mass relocation if he'd thought it was a bad idea.

Mistake: if your population is experiencing a lot of tension don't put all the people with one view in one place and all the others in a different one for several decades, I think it polarizes things worse and makes people forget they were friends and neighbors.

I guess you could technically follow that advice by having it be more than several decades? I'd hesitate to blanket forbid secession.

That might've been better. Well, we needed to be unified to stand a chance against Morgoth but it would've been better aside from that. But no one thought they were emigrating, they thought they were waiting out the Valar and then going to come back and set things right. 

Some decades passed, and the Valar decided to host a feast and celebration at which there'd be a reconciliation between the two brothers.

Do they throw good parties?

The consent of the participants would probably improve them.

Ah. That does seem an especially important ingredient if you're trying to throw a reconciliation party.