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Lumifer comments on [Link] A rational response to the Paris attacks and ISIS - Less Wrong Discussion
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LOL. The dead and the broken don't rebel much...
Good, now analyse what you mean by "broken" and we're getting somewhere.
In this context "broken" = "internalised the slave mentality".
So would you say the Germans and Japanese internalised the slave mentality after WWII?
No, I would not classify Germany and Japan post-WW2 as "dead and broken".
Temporary occupation by a foreign power is something a bit different, anyway.
Well, since the OP was about how to deal with ISIS, "breaking" them in the sense that Germany and Japan were seems to be a desirable result.
ISIS is an idea. It's not a particular ethnic group or population of a particular piece of land. Ideas are notoriously hard to repress successfully.
So was fascism.
And do you imagine it disappeared..?
Except as a useful boogeyman for those currently in power, yes.
Not completely, but sure it is a few orders of magnitude less prevalent than if the Allies hadn't defeated the Axis in WW2, isn't it?
Most instances of fascism were somewhat closer to being "a particular ethnic group" than ISIS is, and anyway he said "notoriously hard", not "impossible", and the defeat of fascism was not exactly painless and effortless.
And attempting to avoid offending them, as Gleb is arguing for, was obviously counterproductive in retrospect.
How is there such a thing as "repression done right"?
What's the problem? Repression done right just means that a particular political system/approach/technique produces the desired results without the costs (including secondary effects and externalities) being too high. Moral outrage is not a particularly useful analysis tool.
Just like the best war is the one your enemy has lost before even realizing he's at war, the best repression is the one where the repressed population believes itself to be happy and in control :-/
My point was that "right" is a problematic term in this case. Using less loaded terms, you're describing "effective" or "successful" repression.
So, back to the original argument:
VoiceOfRa claims that [effective] repression doesn't cause rebellions. You seem to agree with me that it's mostly because the dead don't complain. Indeed, it's not very effective; if removing dissenters is your solution to everything, you'll end up a lonely tyrant.
"done right" is a sufficiently neutral expression often used in engineering context, I don't read moral overtones here.
That's just a tautology.
Not necessarily "mostly", but historically it has been a very popular way for a "successful" repression. It's a bit more difficult to pull off nowadays, though.
It depends on who you are repressing -- e.g. if it's an (ethnic, religious, cultural) minority, killing them all is very effective.
Because traditionally you kill the males and enslave the women, you can empirically find defeated populations in the genetic code of the descendants of the winners: they would have some matrilinear admixture, but none (or almost none) of the patrilinear admixture of the losers.
You lost me there. Why is that relevant?
This allows you to find empirical examples of ethnic groups that were successfully repressed by killing all the males -- even if you don't have e.g. literary sources. This has bearings on how popular and how successful repressions by kill-them-all methods were.
If we Latinos are mainly descended from male Spaniards and female Natives, and still we fought wars to kick the Spanish out, what does it indicate, according to your thesis?
I don't have a thesis, just a few comments. I think that it's very possible to have a successful (from the repressor's point of view) repression and that historically one of the main ways it has been achieved was by making the repressed dead and broken.
That indicates that local elites desire wealth and power, often more than the metropoly is willing to let them have.
No, Lumifer said that the dead and broken don't complain.
History does not agree with you there.