This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 95. The previous thread has passed 300 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system.
Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24.
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Quirrell's dialog in this chapter has me thinking again about what exactly he did wrong, as David Munroe. I wonder if Eliezer thought that through as well as he should have, being a little too eager to show off the character's flawed understanding of human nature. From chapter 34:
Amelia Bones' later dialog suggests he was giving similar speeches as David Munroe.
Now the thing to notice here is that Voldemort's policies for troop discipline were really not all that exceptional. Lots of armies have had a policy of executing traitors and deserters. A policy of using torture to punish any slack may be hard to find, at least in the modern world, but I think if you go back a couple centuries you'd find militaries using flogging to punish minor infractions. The way the Dark Mark is described here suggests it works slightly different than canon, in that it acts as a magical tracking device whether the bearer deliberately signals Voldemort or not. Obviously no real world military does that, but if it were possible to cheaply put magical tracking spells on soldiers in the real world, it wouldn't be surprising to see militaries using them to discourage desertion. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there were already a proposal floating around DARPA to put tracking implants in soldiers. For their own good, ya know, so they can be rescued if they go missing.)
Insofar as we can give a sensible account of what "Munroe" did wrong, we might attribute it to bad marketing: pitching it as, "hey let's do what the Death Eaters are doing!" rather than, "we need to do what any country would do in wartime." Even a cynic should be able to understand people's aversion to the appearance of imitating like Death Eaters, and respond by providing would-be followers with rationalizations for why they're totally different than the Death Earters. Also, from later chapters it sounds like "Munroe" may have been angling to be made magical dictator for life right away. A more sensible approach would have been to first ask to be made temporary dictator, like the original Roman dictators, and then find a way to make the crisis permanent, justifying a permanent dictatorship.
We don't know anything about what Monroe's sales pitch was like (or even if he had one). However, given that "People began to speak of him as the next Dumbledore, it was thought that he might become Minister of Magic after the Dark Lord fell" it probably wasn't as terrible as you're suggesting.
Quirrell's conversation with Hermione seems to imply that for the most part, Monroe focused on action rather than speeches, though it may well have been action calculated to look as heroic as possible in order to win public support.