I didn't suggest a simple strategem, I suggested a way of thinking about how to dissuade someone who is willing to burn you or things or people you care about t

I didn't suggest a simple strategem, I suggested a way of thinking about how to dissuade someone who is willing to burn you or things or people you care about to gain something. How you implement what I said will vary from person to person. It can be Machiavellian if you're a student of the Jack Bauer school of persuasion, but for normal people it's just negotiation. Everybody has that ledger in their head when they make a decision but what's on that ledger can vary dramatically. If you want to both dissuade an irrational actor and keeping things civil, then you need to figure out what's on that ledger and whether you have a way of adjusting those items, maybe by offering a more palatable (to you) alternative, or by changing the perception of the costs/benefits, or by actually changing the costs/benefits, and so on.