One of the things that annoys me about lesswrong is the spectacle of rationalization in the clothing of rationality.
Because any of these changes in government policy would radicalize more Muslims.
Where is the evidence for this claim? It’s entirely possible that the opposite is true; that if the radicals are perceived to be accomplishing something without pushback, it will attract more support for their cause and more recruits.
For instance, consider what happens when Muslim media report an airstrike by Western forces that kills civilians. At any point, myriad Muslim youths are angry at the Western intervention into Syria. For a number of them — say, 100 — the report will be the thing that tips them over from anger to outrage, and they will decide to join ISIS.
During WWII, the United States slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Japanese and German civilians in various bombings. How much “rage” did this cause? Did it make it more difficult to de-Nazify Germany? I’m not sure but my gut feeling is that on balance, it was not counter-productive. My instinct is that creating fear and despair is more productive than avoiding anger. And that if it is perceived that Western powers are afraid of creating anger, it will only embolden the radicals and encourage them to use human shields.
Anyway, these are empirical questions and the rational thing to do is to see what worked and did not work in the past in similar situations.
There is a great deal of evidence about radicalization as a result of western actions, for example this account.
Would you care to summarize the evidence? Is it mainly anecdotal observations of peoples’ claims about their own motivations? Or is it something else?
I am looking for specific, reliable evidence that Western military activities which resulted in the deaths of civilians had a significant “rage” effect you described (and had recruitment effects significantly above the baseline). Please note that peoples’ accounts of their own motivations are generally unreliable.
As a historian of modern European history, I can attest that archival evidence shows such slaughter did make it more difficulty to de-Nazify Germany.
I accept that you perceive that people’s account of their own motivations is unreliable, but that is the kind of evidence available. Can you present evidence for the counter-claim?
I can’t really summarize whole books. Please check out Biddiscombe, Perry (2006). The Denazification of Germany 1945–48. The History Press Ltd if you wish to read more on this topic.
For what it may be worth, I have read thousands of books in my life and I have never encountered a book which is impossible to summarize in a few paragraphs or even less.
I think you and brazil84 may have different notions of summarizing in mind. If summarizing a book means describing what’s in it then most books can be summarized in a few paragraphs. If it means conveying a large fraction of the useful or interesting content then many books can’t. (A dictionary or encyclopaedia might be an even better example than a physics textbook.)
I think you and brazil84 may have different notions of summarizing in mind. If summarizing a book means describing what’s in it then most books can be summarized in a few paragraphs. If it means conveying a large fraction of the useful or interesting content then many books can’t. (A dictionary or encyclopaedia might be an even better example than a physics textbook.)
Yes, I think so. Here is how I would summarize an unabridged dictionary:
This is a book which contains entries for most of the words in the English language; each entry sets forth the typical pronunciation as well as definitions for the word. Here are a few examples:
I accept that you perceive that people’s account of their own motivations is unreliable,
You disagree with this?
Can you present evidence for the counter-claim?
I might be able to if I put some time into it, but you have the burden of proof and I do not want to spend time on it.
I can’t really summarize whole books
I’m not asking for you to summarize whole books. Let’s do this: What’s the strongest piece of evidence that the deaths of civilians as a result of Western military action against Germany during World War 2 caused a “rage” effect which made de-Nazification significantly more difficult?
There are many pieces of evidence, it’s not helpful to speak of the strongest one. Here’s one typical example, a link from a prominent book that shows that there were a number of newspaper articles expressing outrage over the bombings that made de-nazification more difficult. Newspaper articles are representative of a segment of public opinion, so this is direct evidence of public opinion on this topic. Moreover, such events remain very controversial right now, giving continued support to radical German groups over 70 years after the end of the war.
There are many pieces of evidence, it’s not helpful to speak of the strongest one.
Then please summarize the best evidence for your claim.
Also, please answer my question: Do you dispute that peoples’ accounts of their own motivations are generally unreliable?
. Here’s one typical example, a link from a prominent book that shows that there were a number of newspaper articles expressing outrage over the bombings that made de-nazification more difficult.
Can you please quote the relevant part of your source? I did not see what you were talking about.
Yes, I dispute the statement that peoples’ accounts of their own motivations are generally unreliable.
Then I suggest you educate yourself about social desirability bias. It’s well known—and obvious just from general observation—that people have a strong tendency to self-report information which puts them in a more flattering light. If you have not taken this into account in your assessments, then it’s fair to say that any conclusions you have drawn are suspect.
It’s the sentence ending in footnote 22.
Ok, so apparently a typical example of the best evidence of your claim is a polemic in which someone cites the Dresden bombing as a rationale to criticize Western attempts to purge Nazis from post-WW2 Germany. There is no evidence as to how much such events actually motivated anyone; it’s just an argument someone is making.
Your evidence for Sipursky Rage is quite weak as to Nazi Germany and extremely weak as to the situation in Syria:
A few anecdotal reports of terrorists who make the self-serving and unverifiable claims that they were motivated by Western misdeeds is so weak as to be ridiculous.
Anecdotal reports by terrorists is the best data we have available. Weak evidence is still evidence. We should update on whatever evidence we have, and avoid dismissing it out of hand and calling it ridiculous. As aspiring rationalists, we need to orient toward the truth, and avoid confirmation bias.
Anecdotal reports by terrorists is the best data we have available.
Which explains why you ignored all the reports that didn’t fit your conclusion, e.g., the ones about how ISIS is planning to conquer Europe and considers this a war. You don’t win a war by worrying about not offending the other side.
Anecdotal reports by terrorists is the best data we have available. Weak evidence is still evidence.
If you had said that Western activities “risk” radicalizing more Muslims, you might have a point. Instead you came to a firm conclusion based on spectacularly weak evidence.
As aspiring rationalists, we need to orient toward the truth, and avoid confirmation bias.
Unfortunately, it seems you have fallen into exactly that trap. It looks like you gave a few self-serving anecdotal reports far far more weight than they deserved because it fit your pre-determined Leftist conclusion.
Not only that, but it seems that, having been informed about social desirability bias, you are not updating your confidence in your conclusion. You still believe that generally speaking we can trust terrorists to accurately report their motivations.
If you were serious about investigating your hypothesis, you would compare measures of radicalization in Iraq to other countries like Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, etc. If the Sipursky Rage hypothesis has any validity, one would expect lots of radicalization in Iraq and far less in Syria. But I doubt it ever occurred to you to do that, since you seem mainly interested in finding evidence to support your pre-determined Leftist beliefs than in actually investigating them.
If you had said that Western activities “risk” radicalizing more Muslims, you might have a point.
My statements were informed by evidence, and making a statement that it “risks” radicalizing more Muslims would be factually incorrect, since evidence that we do have shows that it does radicalize. We might talk about how many would be radicalized, but it would be false to state that aggressive western activities do not radicalize Muslims.
It looks like you gave a few self-serving anecdotal reports far far more weight than they deserved because it fit your pre-determined Leftist conclusion.
I see from the latter part of your comment now that you have come to a firm conclusion about my views, and were arguing from that perspective all along. I’m disappointed to learn of that. Not interested in engaging further with ou around this topic.
My statements were informed by evidence, and making a statement that it “risks” radicalizing more Muslims would be factually incorrect, since evidence that we do have shows that it does radicalize
That’s not true at all, and it’s easy to demonstrate with a thought experiment. Suppose I read a post on an internet by someone who says he spoke to a terrorist and the terrorist told him he was radicalized by reading Tsipursky’s posts on less wrong. To be sure, this is weak evidence that Tsipursky’s post are radicalizing people, but by your standards, it would be legitimate to say “Further posts by Tsipursky WILL radicalize more people.” Which is ridiculous, of course, but by your standard it would be correct.
We might talk about how many would be radicalized, but it would be false to state that aggressive western activities do not radicalize Muslims.
There is another possibility, which is that it is not known whether Western activities radicalize anyone. In other words, that the evidence is inconclusive. Surely you are aware of this possibility?
I see from the latter part of your comment now that you have come to a firm conclusion about my views
Pretty firm yeah—based on your complete failure to provide satisfactory evidence for your position; your dodging and weaving; and your failure to look for legitimate evidence.
and were arguing from that perspective all along.
If you had come up with evidence which stood up to scrutiny, then of course I would have revised my views. For example if anti-American terrorists were disproportionately from towns in Iraq as opposed to Syria, it would actually bolster your argument.
So it looks to me like you are again rationalizing—the fact is that your evidence has completely failed to stand up to scrutiny; you failed to take well-known biases into account; and rather than just admit it, you need a face-saving out.
Why? You started to speak about Nazi Germany as an example of bombings haven’t lead to problems.
Are you joking? DId you actually read what I said? Here’s what I said:
During WWII, the United States slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Japanese and German civilians in various bombings. How much “rage” did this cause? Did it make it more difficult to de-Nazify Germany? I’m not sure but my gut feeling is that on balance, it was not counter-productive. My instinct is that creating fear and despair is more productive than avoiding anger. And that if it is perceived that Western powers are afraid of creating anger, it will only embolden the radicals and encourage them to use human shields.
Anyway, these are empirical questions and the rational thing to do is to see what worked and did not work in the past in similar situations.
By contrast, here’s what Tsipursky said:
Because any of these changes in government policy would radicalize more Muslims.
He also said this:
I can attest that archival evidence shows such slaughter did make it more difficulty to de-Nazify Germany.
Do you really not see why Sipursky has the burden of proof and I do not have the burden of proof?
My instinct is that creating fear and despair is more productive than avoiding anger.
You’re forgetting that one of the reasons why ISIS exists in the first place was the chaos the U.S. invasion created in Iraq (along with the already existing motivations of Al Qaeda, which ISIS split off from). Going about purposely making enemies is hardly “productive.”
You’re forgetting that one of the reasons why ISIS exists in the first place was the chaos the U.S. invasion created in Iraq
Let’s assume that’s true. How does it follow that in terms of dealing with ISIS (or any other enemy or adversary for that matter) avoiding anger is more productive than creating fear and despair?
I will certainly concede that creating power vacuums is dangerous policy.
Going about purposely making enemies is hardly “productive.”
It depends what you get in return. But anyway, the issue on the table is the Sipursky Rage hypothesis. Sipursky seems to believe that air strikes in retaliation for the Paris attacks will be counter-productive since they will make people angry and more likely to support ISIS. My position is that insufficient evidence has been presented to reach such a conclusion.
Do you have a position on this issue? Or do you just want to change the subject?
The U.S. response to 9/11 serves as a didactic example of the most counter-productive way imaginable to respond to terrorism. If France follows the U.S. example after these attacks (and the recent news about their military cooperation with Russia seems to indicate so), the potential for stupid mistakes escalates manyfold. Especially considering that the West and Russia have opposite opinions on what the future of Syria should be, adding more guns to the situation can only make it worse.
The U.S. response to 9/11 serves as a didactic example of the most counter-productive way imaginable to respond to terrorism. If France follows the U.S. example after these attacks (and the recent news about their military cooperation with Russia seems to indicate so), the potential for stupid mistakes escalates manyfold. Especially considering that the West and Russia have opposite opinions on what the future of Syria should be, adding more guns to the situation can only make it worse.
Umm, do you have a position on the Sipursky Rage hypothesis? Or do you want to change the subject?
My position was explicit in my comment. Short version: Yes, to respond to violence with more violence is counterproductive, to create more enemies is a stupid idea, and the aftermath of 9/11 gives ample evidence of it.
Ok, and what’s your evidence in favor of the Sipursky Rage hypothesis?
Yes, to respond to violence with more violence is counterproductive, to create more enemies is a stupid idea, and the aftermath of 9/11 gives ample evidence of it.
Can you be specific about the evidence? And are you saying that it’s always a bad idea for a state to respond violently to a violent attack?
What do you mean by”sufficient”? If you mean enough evidence to cause any reasonable person to accept the hypothesis, I’m not sure that anysingle historical example can do that.
(I think the invasion of Iraq was a really bad idea and was “sold” to coalition countries’ people on the basis of cynical lies, and I do think enraging your enemies is generally unwise, so I’m not saying this out of general ideological opposition. But I think you’re way overstating your case here.)
[EDITED to fix a really bad typo: I had “engaging” where I meant “enraging” in the previous paragraph.]
The aftermath of 9/11 is by itself overwhelmingly sufficient evidence for the hypothesis that enraging your enemies is a terrible idea.
Actually that’s not the issue under discussion. Sipursky’s claim seems to be that airstrikes would “radicalize” people who were not necessarily enemies beforehand.
In any event, do you care to cite any specific post 9/11 events which characterize this “aftermath” you refer to?
The implosion of Iraq, which paved the way for the emergence of ISIS. The implosion of Libya, which ended up worsening the conflict in Mali. The radicalization of the U.S. right wing, as illustrated in the Patriot Act, paranoid TSA procedures, and the Tea Party. By all measures, every response by the U.S. to 9/11 has ended up harming U.S. interests even more.
The implosion of Iraq, which paved the way for the emergence of ISIS.
The most obvious weakness with this evidence is that there exist numerous plausible reasons—other than Tsipusrky Rage—for the “implosion of Iraq” as you put it.
For example, the obvious explanation for the “implosion of Iraq” is that the American invasion destabilized the area and left something of a power vacuum. Your evidence provides no way of distinguishing between this factor and Tsipursky Rage. The same is true of the situation in Libya.
In short, your evidence does not stand up to scrutiny.
The Tea Party wasn’t in response to the TSA procedures [...]
polymathwannabe wasn’t saying it was, s/he was saying that all three of those things (Patriot Act, TSA paranoia, Tea Party) were consequences of the radicalization of the US right, which was part of the aftermath of 9/11.
Let’s steelman VoiceOfRa’s argument and choose the nuking of Japan as an example of the U.S. using sufficient brutality. While it is true that the threat of the Japanese Empire was successfully ended, it inevitably spawned a dozen other problems in other scenarios. Most notably, it paved the way for the Cold War. The madness that was the latter half of the 20th century could have been avoided if neither part had felt scared enough to engage in a spiraling arms race by building up their nuclear arsenals.
The same logic has been repeated elsewhere: Pakistan only started developing nuclear weapons because India did, and India only did so because they were afraid of China, and China only developed nukes because they were afraid the Americans would defend Taiwan with their own bombs. As soon as you use “sufficient brutality” and prove yourself to be dangerous, you will prompt everyone else to become more dangerous. It’s the same stupid logic by which everyone buys a big, fuel-thirsty car because they’re afraid to be crushed by all the other big, fuel-thirsty cars already in the streets.
In the case of ISIS, let’s say the U.S. gets fed up with the situation and drops nukes on strategic Iraqi and Syrian cities. ISIS is wiped off the map. Good! Next thing you know, Iran will panic and get its own nukes, the Saudis will respond by getting their own, Russia will defend the Assad regime with everything they’ve got, and who knows what the remaining jihadi groups will do. It’s just not worth it.
Edited to add: Moreover, as soon as Iran and Saudi Arabia openly display their new nuclear capability, Israel is bound to do something very stupid.
While it is true that the threat of the Japanese Empire was successfully ended, it inevitably spawned a dozen other problems in other scenarios.
By these standards, pretty much everything one does of any consequence in international relations spawns a dozen other problems.
As soon as you use “sufficient brutality” and prove yourself to be dangerous, you will prompt everyone else to become more dangerous.
Everyone else is quite capable and willing to become more dangerous without any prompting from us. Becoming dangerous is useful for its own sake, not just as a response to others being dangerous.
While it is true that the threat of the Japanese Empire was successfully ended, it inevitably spawned a dozen other problems in other scenarios. Most notably, it paved the way for the Cold War.
In the sense that Communism and the Free World wound up crashing once the common enemy was removed, yes. Your argument about nuclear weapons seems to boil down to arguing that if the US hadn’t developed them, no one else would have. I’ll let you clarify in case it’s something not quite this silly.
let’s say the U.S. gets fed up with the situation and drops nukes on strategic Iraqi and Syrian cities.
You don’t have to go that far. How about having the government not treat rumors that an interrogator may have flushed a Koran down the toilet as a moral crisis.
Next thing you know, Iran will panic and get its own nukes,
Um, Iran is already developing nukes as fast as it can, despite the US not being very brutal.
I admit we were too lucky that the Nazi nuclear program didn’t succeed. But the fact that the “good guys” were the first to get the bomb is no more reassurance than the “good guy with a gun” cliché.
If the Koran-in-the-toilet remark is meant as an argument for enhanced interrogation, we live in separate moral universes.
When the Iranians say they’re not currently developing nukes, I find them believable. Experts of the International Atomic Energy Agency whose job it is to get their nose in places and ask questions and get paid to get this answer right and who understand that the future of the world depends on their findings agree with me on this.
I admit we were too lucky that the Nazi nuclear program didn’t succeed. But the fact that the “good guys” were the first to get the bomb is no more reassurance than the “good guy with a gun” cliché.
So your argument is that therefore good guys shouldn’t develop atomic weapons or carry guns?
If the Koran-in-the-toilet remark is meant as an argument for enhanced interrogation, we live in separate moral universes.
I was making factual (not moral) claims about the effects of various levels of brutality on the chances of retaliation. We can talk about moral claims once we’ve established what the effects of various policies are likely to be. Also, if you can’t imagine there being valid arguments for policies you disagree with, you’re going to have a very hard time being rational about policy.
Experts of the International Atomic Energy Agency whose job it is to get their nose in places and ask questions
The most obvious example of US willingness to be sufficiently brutal seems like Vietnam
Um, no. The US was actually extremely soft in Vietnam. However, photographs from the war were presented in a misleading manner to domestic US audiences to make the US seem brutal (e.g., the infamous Vietnam execution photo was a guy killing a Viet Cong assassin who had just killed his family). Thus, the US lost its will for even that level of brutality and promptly lost a war it had been tactically winning.
The execution in the “infamous Vietnam execution photo” wasn’t even being carried out by a US person; it was not the sort of thing I had in mind. I was thinking more of, e.g., the My Lai massacre.
Is that what you consider “extremely soft”?
The idea that the US had been “tactically winning” the Vietnam war is, so far as I can tell, far from universally held. Can you explain to me why I should believe your description rather than anyone else’s?
Um, no. The US was actually extremely soft in Vietnam.
Um, no. The US actually dropped “one million tons of ordnance” on North Vietnam (where US air strikes killed “approximately 52,000 civilians”) and “some four million tons of bombs” on South Vietnam (“the most bombed country in the history of aerial warfare—a dubious distinction for an ally”). The US actually supplemented those bombs by dropping about 70 million litres of herbicides on Vietnam, including over 40 million litres of Agent Orange and Agent Orange II, such that “millions of Vietnamese were likely to have been sprayed upon directly” and over 2 million hectares of Vietnam were sprayed repeatedly. (This excludes the anti-personnel gases and tens of thousands of tons of napalm the US employed during the 1960s alone.) And a working group in the US Department of Defense actually reckoned it could substantiate hundreds of reports of US war crimes.
I am looking for specific, reliable evidence that Western military activities which resulted in the deaths of civilians had a significant “rage” effect you described (and had recruitment effects significantly above the baseline). Please note that peoples’ accounts of their own motivations are generally unreliable.
Do you consider the account of a man who says: “I have to revenge a blood debt because they killed my cousin” to be a unreliable description of someone’s self-motivations?
Do you consider the account of a man who says: “I have to revenge a blood debt because they killed my cousin” to be a unreliable description of someone’s self-motivations?
Are you looking for a double-blind experiment where in hundreds of randomly selected countries the civilians were slaughtered, in other hundreds they were not, and this was all conducted in a way that neither the people in the attacking countries nor the people in the attacked countries knew which was which?
Are you looking for a double-blind experiment where in hundreds of randomly selected countries the civilians were slaughtered, in other hundreds they were not, and this was all conducted in a way that neither the people in the attacking countries nor the people in the attacked countries knew which was which?
No. I am looking for specific, reliable evidence which backs up Tsipursky’s claim. It is up to him what form that evidence might take. Is that a problem for you?
Middle Eastern cultures are heavily based on clan/kinship relations and honor. I would expect that just accurately killing guilty people would lead to a rage effect as bad as killing innocent ones, because of the enormous number of people in the guilty person’s kinship group whose honor you have just besmirched.
Middle Eastern cultures are heavily based on clan/kinship relations and honor. I would expect that just accurately killing guilty people would lead to a rage effect as bad as killing innocent ones, because of the enormous number of people in the guilty person’s kinship group whose honor you have just besmirched.
I would guess you are probably right, but the bigger question here is how strong is any “rage effect” compared to other factors which might influence human decision-making. For example, lets suppose ISIS rolls into your town, throws a few gay dudes of off roofs, blows up the local church or mosque, and publicly tortures to death a few suspected informants. One can imagine that perhaps this will create a large Tsipursky Rage. At the same time, it will probably result in a lot of fear and despair; these emotions might actually discourage people from working against ISIS. Which is stronger in the short or long term? What other factors might be in play? These are not easy questions to answer.
For Tsipursky to claim that he knows the answer with reasonable certainty based on a few magazine articles in which a few captured terrorists cite “rage” as their motivation is the height of the worst kind of irrationality.
That said, your point does illustrate how silly Tsipursky’s position is if taken to its logical conclusion. i.e. that we should not even kill actual ISIS operatives in Syria or Iraq because that will make people angry and result in more attacks.
That said, your point does illustrate how silly Tsipursky’s position is if taken to its logical conclusion.
It’s not really silly. Focusing on cutting funding sources might be better than focusing on killing ISIS operatives,
As long as a NATO country buys their oil for money, weapons and hospital care killing individual ISIS operatives won’t go very far.
It means that in practice doing one thing means that you can do the other less well.
Let’s assume that’s true. So what? The argument under discussion was not whether the West should avoid focusing on killing people because it will undermine the West’s ability to focus on cutting funding for ISIS. The issue under discussion is whether the West should avoid killing people because it will make other people angry.
Please don’t try to change the subject without openly acknowledging that’s what you are doing.
You don’t do things like bombing or not bombing for a single reason. At the same time it’s okay for an article in a mainstream venue to focus on a single reason because the medium doesn’t allow for a deep analysis of all factors that matter.
You don’t do things like bombing or not bombing for a single reason. At the same time it’s okay for an article in a mainstream venue to focus on a single reason because the medium doesn’t allow for a deep analysis of all factors that matter.
Again, assuming that is true, so what? If one of those reasons doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and you want to change the subject and discuss a different reason, then please be open and honest about what you are doing.
With charity the topic is whether resentment produced through bombing is a significant factor.
Conclusions based on the argument that we shouldn’t bomb can be true if you look at additional arguments and therefore they certainly aren’t “ridiculous”.
I think the factor of bombings producing resentments from the local population should factor into the calculation. You need further arguments to actually decide against bombing and a single argument isn’t enough.
Tsipursky’s article. The article only provides one reason. There no reason to see it as arguing that the reason alone is sufficient.
:shrug: Then you should have made that clear when you responded to my point, i.e. that you would respond to a different version of the article than the one I was responding to.
And you should have also applied the same principle of charity to my point and made it clear that you were changing the subject.
Saying someone is making a “ridiculous statement” is not something that I read charitably.
Actually what I said is this:
That said, your point does illustrate how silly Tsipursky’s position is if taken to its logical conclusion.
So let’s see if I have this straight. You use the principle of charity to reinterpret Tsipursky’s position so that my statement becomes less reasonable; then you refuse to offer any such charity to my statement based on your general principles. And you don’t disclose any of this until pressed onit, instead you just pretend to be responding to my point.
Please stop being so dishonest.
Also, for future reference please tell me what types of statements you refuse to read charitably.
Middle Eastern cultures are heavily based on clan/kinship relations and honor. I would expect that just accurately killing guilty people would lead to a rage effect as bad as killing innocent ones, because of the enormous number of people in the guilty person’s kinship group whose honor you have just besmirched.
Note that this dynamic can be profitably used in the opposite direction. Suppose in retaliation for someone committing a terror attack, the government exiles their entire family (out to, say, first cousins) in response. Now the family dynamics are recruited to cut things off early on, and local patriarchs face serious penalties if they fail to keep their kin in line.
(Compare to the frankpledge, wherein people were clustered into joint responsibility units, where if any person in the unit committed a crime everyone in the unit had to pay for it (if they couldn’t deliver the criminal to justice).)
There was a lot less general slaughter after WWI, so it should have caused Germany to be demilitarized a lot better then after WWII, oh wait.
What’s interesting to me is that as an American, if you visit Japan, there does not seem to be a lot of Tsipursky Rage in evidence. Even though we bombed the hell out of them and nuked two of their cities. And you don’t see many Japanese people plotting to launch terrorist attacks in the United States. Of course Japanese culture is probably different from that of the Arabic-speaking peoples in the Middle East. But anger at perceived injustice is a pretty universal human emotion (based on my general observations).
But anger at perceived injustice is a pretty universal human emotion (based on my general observations).
My looking at history is that this isn’t quite correct. It is the most restrained aggressor/tyrant who winds up getting targeted. To use an example I’m familiar with most of the Russian Tsars were rather despotic; however, two did make major liberal reforms, Alexander II freed the serfs, and Nicholas II make strides towards modernizing the country including introducing an elected parliament. Not-so-coincidentally, they were also the only tsars to be assassinated by revolutionaries.
Probably not. Consider why there was an increasing amount of dissatisfaction among the people, after all the Tsars had always been brutal, it was only when the Tsar was less brutal that dissatisfaction seemed to manifest.
The main problem with that argument is that it assumes dissatisfaction is determined by the amount of repression. It’s a factor, but there are others, like food, wars, and technical innovations.
This kind of question needs complex analysis and can’t be answered that easily. You could plot a measurement of repression against a measure of dissatisfaction (assume the measurements are accurate), show that they corresponded perfectly from regime to regime, and even if you ignore confounders it still wouldn’t show causality because you still wouldn’t know which one came first.
The main problem with that argument is that it assumes dissatisfaction is determined by the amount of repression. It’s a factor, but there are others, like food, wars, and technical innovations.
That’s sort of my point. That repression done right doesn’t cause rebellions.
show that they corresponded perfectly from regime to regime, and even if you ignore confounders it still wouldn’t show causality because you still wouldn’t know which one came first.
Well for starters if you look at them chronologically, you can see which one actually changed first.
When people say “fascism” they’re usually actually thinking of Nazism. Now, what was Nazism? It was a movement that stressed the need for intense loyalty to a strong Fatherland, that worried about pollution of that Fatherland by inferior races, that was contemptuous of democracy, that appealed to the glorious cultural traditions of the Fatherland, that lamented that the political Left was treacherously weakening the nation, that held that women should stick to traditional gender roles, that made much of the value of traditional religion without actually embracing it and being religious …
Gosh, it’s hard to see what possible motive a neoreactionary could have for making light of the idea that anything like that might still be around today.
NRx people should know the difference between fascism and nazism, given how they pay great attention to history.
But there also might be a bit of miscommunication. I suspect VoiceOfRa thinks about far-right parties in Europe which are often tagged with the neo-Nazi label. That wasn’t what I actually had I mind. I was thinking of people like Mr.Putin.
Calling someone a fascist nowadays is just an insult, there is rarely much meaning behind it.
But you might think about important elements of fascism, the ones that distinguish it from, say, liberal democracies or communist countries or even just plain-vanilla dictatorships, and check how current Russia compares...
So you admit your definition of “fascism” is time dependent? So why is this definition useful, are you saying that the laws of nature (or at least human nature) aren’t uniform across time?
So you admit your definition of “fascism” is time dependent?
One element of fascism is a desire to restore (alleged) past glories.
(I am not in fact convinced that “nearly everyone before the 19th century” has the characteristics I described. Some of them don’t even make much sense before the 19th century; e.g., the sort of leftism Hitler worried about, or the sort neoreactionaries worry about, didn’t exist in that form before the 19th century. But that’s a separate argument, and for now I’m happy to stick with this one.)
So why is this definition useful
I don’t understand the “So”. Lots of time-dependent things are useful.
What someone’s opinions tell you about that person depends on the context they’re in. Suppose I tell you someone believes that the earth is at the centre of the universe, and ask you for a probability distribution on their IQ. Then I ask you the same about someone 1000 years ago. You may very well give different answers. Suppose I tell you someone thinks democracy is a terrible idea. Again, any guesses you might make about their character or about other things they believe may be different depending on whether they’re in present-day England or present-day North Korea or revolutionary France or Periclean Athens.
are you saying the laws of nature (or at least human nature) aren’t uniform across time?
Depends on what you count as a law of human nature, and what timescale you’re interested in. Human biology probably doesn’t change much on (merely) historical timescales, but human societies certainly do and human brains are pretty malleable. Human biology probably does change enough to matter on, say, 20k-year timescales, and maybe there are places and times when it changes much faster (e.g., consider the debatable but not obviously crazy suggestion that Ashkenazy Jews are exceptionally smart but extra-susceptible to various interesting diseases because of strong selection for intelligence over the last millennium or three).
the sort of leftism Hitler worried about, or the sort neoreactionaries worry about, didn’t exist in that form before the 19th century.
So you’re arguing not wanting to live under a leftist totalitarian dictatorship with an economy based on a delusional economic theory makes one a fascist?
Sorry, I’m not interested in having a discussion with someone who both (1) wilfully misinterprets what I say, hence requiring lots of clarifications in order to get anywhere, and also (2) downvotes everything I write. Let me know when you’re prepared to be reasonable and we can try again.
(In the unlikely event that you really truly sincerely think that your question was a reasonable one whose answer ought to be yes given what I’d written, I think it follows that at least one of us is too stupid to be worth engaging with even without your abusive behaviour.)
Human biology probably doesn’t change much on (merely) historical timescales, but human societies certainly do and human brains are pretty malleable.
Except we’re talking about human political philosophies, not individual people. Thus it makes no sense to consider political philosophies and societies as extrinsic to our model.
I am not arguing that everything backward-looking is bad because Hitler was bad. (Though, actually, most of us would do well to eat less sugar.)
For that matter, in this thread I haven’t been arguing even that Nazism is bad, though as it happens I’m not a fan. Merely observing that there’s a considerable overlap between the backward-looking things neoreactionaries advocate and the backward-looking things the Nazis were keen on.
And, as it happens, I am quite comfortable saying that in many respects “nearly everyone before the 19th century” had views and attitudes that I dislike and disapprove of; if I make a list of Things I Dislike About Nazism and it turns out that they’re mostly also things I dislike about the fifteenth century, my conclusion will be “so much the worse for the fifteenth century”. I already know I wouldn’t want to live there; I already know that “nearly everyone” in the past was wrong about huge swathes of how-the-world-works stuff that we’ve discovered since; why should I be discomfited to find their values also meeting with my disapproval?
(One possible reason: “That would imply that almost everyone until recently was a Bad Person, but that lots of people now are not Bad People, which would mean a bigger faster change in human nature than is plausible.” But people’s values aren’t in fact mere manifestations of their genes, they also come from the surrounding society, and societies can change quickly. It could be that most people would be (what I would consider) Bad if brought up in one society and (what I would consider) Not So Bad if brought up in a different one.)
it makes no sense to consider political philosophies and societies as extrinsic to our model.
My apologies for being dim, but I’m not sure what it is you think I’m doing that I shouldn’t. What model am I treating what as extrinsic to?
OK, I looked at that. I’m afraid doing so hasn’t answered my question.
(It may be worth saying explicitly, though, that my comments here aren’t intended to address the question of whether bombing the hell out of Nazi Germany was an effective way of getting rid of Nazism in Germany, or the possibly-analogous question of whether bombing the hell out of ISIS-occupied Syria would be an effective way of getting rid of fundamentalist Islamic terrorist dictatorship in Syria, or the higher-level question of whether and to what extent you can get rid of ideas with bombs. I think I kinda agree with you about the first, am inclined to disagree about the second but would need to see some more joined-up thinking on the subject than seems generally to be on offer before forming strong opinions, and suspect the third is too vague to be able to say anything useful about.)
I know what the outcome of WW2 was but not what the outcome of bombing or invading Syria will be. WW2 was a huge affair in which several major nations expended pretty much all the effort they could to beat the Axis powers; it is vanishingly unlikely that anything like as much will be done to ISIS. There wasn’t a great deal of sympathy for Nazism in the rest of the world, but there’s plenty of Islamic fundamentalism outside ISIS.
There wasn’t a great deal of sympathy for Nazism in the rest of the world
In the 1930s, yes there was. There wasn’t much by 1945, but that was because people saw what happened to the Nazis and were basically going “despite appearances to the contrary, we never really liked the Nazis we swear, please don’t do that to us”.
IIRC ethnic nationalism wasn’t even much of a thing until around 1800, and I doubt many people “lamented that the political Left was treacherously weakening the nation” a few centuries ago.
That hardly counts as stressing the need for intense loyalty to a strong Fatherland (before Zionism became widespread) or worrying about pollution of that Fatherland by inferior races (?).
A Jewish woman is prohibited from marrying a non-Jew (that’s why Jewishness is determined matrilineally), but in any case I’m objecting to “ethnic nationalism wasn’t even much of a thing”. It most certainly was.
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.
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.
[effective] repression doesn’t cause rebellions
That’s just a tautology.
it’s mostly because the dead don’t complain
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’s not very effective
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.
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.
and still we fought wars to kick the Spanish out, what does it indicate
That indicates that local elites desire wealth and power, often more than the metropoly is willing to let them have.
My looking at history is that this isn’t quite correct. It is the most restrained aggressor/tyrant who winds up getting targeted.
That may very well be the case, and if so, it’s positive evidence that Tsipursky Rage is not a relatively important factor in motivating peoples’ behavior. Which is consistent with my instincts.
One of the things that annoys me about lesswrong is the spectacle of rationalization in the clothing of rationality.
Where is the evidence for this claim? It’s entirely possible that the opposite is true; that if the radicals are perceived to be accomplishing something without pushback, it will attract more support for their cause and more recruits.
During WWII, the United States slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Japanese and German civilians in various bombings. How much “rage” did this cause? Did it make it more difficult to de-Nazify Germany? I’m not sure but my gut feeling is that on balance, it was not counter-productive. My instinct is that creating fear and despair is more productive than avoiding anger. And that if it is perceived that Western powers are afraid of creating anger, it will only embolden the radicals and encourage them to use human shields.
Anyway, these are empirical questions and the rational thing to do is to see what worked and did not work in the past in similar situations.
There is a great deal of evidence about radicalization as a result of western actions, for example this account.
As a historian of modern European history, I can attest that archival evidence shows such slaughter did make it more difficulty to de-Nazify Germany.
Would you care to summarize the evidence? Is it mainly anecdotal observations of peoples’ claims about their own motivations? Or is it something else?
I am looking for specific, reliable evidence that Western military activities which resulted in the deaths of civilians had a significant “rage” effect you described (and had recruitment effects significantly above the baseline). Please note that peoples’ accounts of their own motivations are generally unreliable.
Again, would you care to summarize the evidence?
I accept that you perceive that people’s account of their own motivations is unreliable, but that is the kind of evidence available. Can you present evidence for the counter-claim?
I can’t really summarize whole books. Please check out Biddiscombe, Perry (2006). The Denazification of Germany 1945–48. The History Press Ltd if you wish to read more on this topic.
Er, what?
For what it may be worth, I have read thousands of books in my life and I have never encountered a book which is impossible to summarize in a few paragraphs or even less.
I could use a summary of Statistical Physics by L.D. Landau and E.M. Lifshitz in a few paragraphs if you have one to sell me. :-)
I think you and brazil84 may have different notions of summarizing in mind. If summarizing a book means describing what’s in it then most books can be summarized in a few paragraphs. If it means conveying a large fraction of the useful or interesting content then many books can’t. (A dictionary or encyclopaedia might be an even better example than a physics textbook.)
Yes, I think so. Here is how I would summarize an unabridged dictionary:
This is a book which contains entries for most of the words in the English language; each entry sets forth the typical pronunciation as well as definitions for the word. Here are a few examples:
Example 1:
Example 2:
Example 3.
Lol, fair enough. You caught me well on that one. Let me update my statement to being unwilling to summarize whole books.
You disagree with this?
I might be able to if I put some time into it, but you have the burden of proof and I do not want to spend time on it.
I’m not asking for you to summarize whole books. Let’s do this: What’s the strongest piece of evidence that the deaths of civilians as a result of Western military action against Germany during World War 2 caused a “rage” effect which made de-Nazification significantly more difficult?
There are many pieces of evidence, it’s not helpful to speak of the strongest one. Here’s one typical example, a link from a prominent book that shows that there were a number of newspaper articles expressing outrage over the bombings that made de-nazification more difficult. Newspaper articles are representative of a segment of public opinion, so this is direct evidence of public opinion on this topic. Moreover, such events remain very controversial right now, giving continued support to radical German groups over 70 years after the end of the war.
Then please summarize the best evidence for your claim.
Also, please answer my question: Do you dispute that peoples’ accounts of their own motivations are generally unreliable?
Can you please quote the relevant part of your source? I did not see what you were talking about.
Yes, I dispute the statement that peoples’ accounts of their own motivations are generally unreliable.
It’s the sentence ending in footnote 22.
Then I suggest you educate yourself about social desirability bias. It’s well known—and obvious just from general observation—that people have a strong tendency to self-report information which puts them in a more flattering light. If you have not taken this into account in your assessments, then it’s fair to say that any conclusions you have drawn are suspect.
Ok, so apparently a typical example of the best evidence of your claim is a polemic in which someone cites the Dresden bombing as a rationale to criticize Western attempts to purge Nazis from post-WW2 Germany. There is no evidence as to how much such events actually motivated anyone; it’s just an argument someone is making.
Your evidence for Sipursky Rage is quite weak as to Nazi Germany and extremely weak as to the situation in Syria:
A few anecdotal reports of terrorists who make the self-serving and unverifiable claims that they were motivated by Western misdeeds is so weak as to be ridiculous.
Anecdotal reports by terrorists is the best data we have available. Weak evidence is still evidence. We should update on whatever evidence we have, and avoid dismissing it out of hand and calling it ridiculous. As aspiring rationalists, we need to orient toward the truth, and avoid confirmation bias.
Which explains why you ignored all the reports that didn’t fit your conclusion, e.g., the ones about how ISIS is planning to conquer Europe and considers this a war. You don’t win a war by worrying about not offending the other side.
If you had said that Western activities “risk” radicalizing more Muslims, you might have a point. Instead you came to a firm conclusion based on spectacularly weak evidence.
Unfortunately, it seems you have fallen into exactly that trap. It looks like you gave a few self-serving anecdotal reports far far more weight than they deserved because it fit your pre-determined Leftist conclusion.
Not only that, but it seems that, having been informed about social desirability bias, you are not updating your confidence in your conclusion. You still believe that generally speaking we can trust terrorists to accurately report their motivations.
If you were serious about investigating your hypothesis, you would compare measures of radicalization in Iraq to other countries like Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, etc. If the Sipursky Rage hypothesis has any validity, one would expect lots of radicalization in Iraq and far less in Syria. But I doubt it ever occurred to you to do that, since you seem mainly interested in finding evidence to support your pre-determined Leftist beliefs than in actually investigating them.
My statements were informed by evidence, and making a statement that it “risks” radicalizing more Muslims would be factually incorrect, since evidence that we do have shows that it does radicalize. We might talk about how many would be radicalized, but it would be false to state that aggressive western activities do not radicalize Muslims.
I see from the latter part of your comment now that you have come to a firm conclusion about my views, and were arguing from that perspective all along. I’m disappointed to learn of that. Not interested in engaging further with ou around this topic.
That’s not true at all, and it’s easy to demonstrate with a thought experiment. Suppose I read a post on an internet by someone who says he spoke to a terrorist and the terrorist told him he was radicalized by reading Tsipursky’s posts on less wrong. To be sure, this is weak evidence that Tsipursky’s post are radicalizing people, but by your standards, it would be legitimate to say “Further posts by Tsipursky WILL radicalize more people.” Which is ridiculous, of course, but by your standard it would be correct.
There is another possibility, which is that it is not known whether Western activities radicalize anyone. In other words, that the evidence is inconclusive. Surely you are aware of this possibility?
Pretty firm yeah—based on your complete failure to provide satisfactory evidence for your position; your dodging and weaving; and your failure to look for legitimate evidence.
If you had come up with evidence which stood up to scrutiny, then of course I would have revised my views. For example if anti-American terrorists were disproportionately from towns in Iraq as opposed to Syria, it would actually bolster your argument.
So it looks to me like you are again rationalizing—the fact is that your evidence has completely failed to stand up to scrutiny; you failed to take well-known biases into account; and rather than just admit it, you need a face-saving out.
Why? You started to speak about Nazi Germany as an example of bombings haven’t lead to problems.
I would like an answer to my question:
Do you really not see why Sipursky has the burden of proof and I do not have the burden of proof?
Are you joking? DId you actually read what I said? Here’s what I said:
By contrast, here’s what Tsipursky said:
He also said this:
Do you really not see why Sipursky has the burden of proof and I do not have the burden of proof?
Really?
You’re forgetting that one of the reasons why ISIS exists in the first place was the chaos the U.S. invasion created in Iraq (along with the already existing motivations of Al Qaeda, which ISIS split off from). Going about purposely making enemies is hardly “productive.”
Let’s assume that’s true. How does it follow that in terms of dealing with ISIS (or any other enemy or adversary for that matter) avoiding anger is more productive than creating fear and despair?
I will certainly concede that creating power vacuums is dangerous policy.
It depends what you get in return. But anyway, the issue on the table is the Sipursky Rage hypothesis. Sipursky seems to believe that air strikes in retaliation for the Paris attacks will be counter-productive since they will make people angry and more likely to support ISIS. My position is that insufficient evidence has been presented to reach such a conclusion.
Do you have a position on this issue? Or do you just want to change the subject?
The U.S. response to 9/11 serves as a didactic example of the most counter-productive way imaginable to respond to terrorism. If France follows the U.S. example after these attacks (and the recent news about their military cooperation with Russia seems to indicate so), the potential for stupid mistakes escalates manyfold. Especially considering that the West and Russia have opposite opinions on what the future of Syria should be, adding more guns to the situation can only make it worse.
Umm, do you have a position on the Sipursky Rage hypothesis? Or do you want to change the subject?
It’s a simple enough question.
My position was explicit in my comment. Short version: Yes, to respond to violence with more violence is counterproductive, to create more enemies is a stupid idea, and the aftermath of 9/11 gives ample evidence of it.
I think you mean “implicit” not “explicit.”
Ok, and what’s your evidence in favor of the Sipursky Rage hypothesis?
Can you be specific about the evidence? And are you saying that it’s always a bad idea for a state to respond violently to a violent attack?
In this branch of the thread I have already elaborated on the 9/11 example and why should we take it as a warning of what not to do about ISIS.
Yes, I’m a pacifist.
So you have no evidence for the Sipursky Rage hypothesis besides what you posted about 9/11?
That’s a peculiar choice of wording.
The aftermath of 9/11 is by itself overwhelmingly sufficient evidence for the hypothesis that enraging your enemies is a terrible idea.
What do you mean by”sufficient”? If you mean enough evidence to cause any reasonable person to accept the hypothesis, I’m not sure that anysingle historical example can do that.
(I think the invasion of Iraq was a really bad idea and was “sold” to coalition countries’ people on the basis of cynical lies, and I do think enraging your enemies is generally unwise, so I’m not saying this out of general ideological opposition. But I think you’re way overstating your case here.)
[EDITED to fix a really bad typo: I had “engaging” where I meant “enraging” in the previous paragraph.]
Your evidence is pretty vague and flimsy.
Actually that’s not the issue under discussion. Sipursky’s claim seems to be that airstrikes would “radicalize” people who were not necessarily enemies beforehand.
In any event, do you care to cite any specific post 9/11 events which characterize this “aftermath” you refer to?
The implosion of Iraq, which paved the way for the emergence of ISIS. The implosion of Libya, which ended up worsening the conflict in Mali. The radicalization of the U.S. right wing, as illustrated in the Patriot Act, paranoid TSA procedures, and the Tea Party. By all measures, every response by the U.S. to 9/11 has ended up harming U.S. interests even more.
The most obvious weakness with this evidence is that there exist numerous plausible reasons—other than Tsipusrky Rage—for the “implosion of Iraq” as you put it.
For example, the obvious explanation for the “implosion of Iraq” is that the American invasion destabilized the area and left something of a power vacuum. Your evidence provides no way of distinguishing between this factor and Tsipursky Rage. The same is true of the situation in Libya.
In short, your evidence does not stand up to scrutiny.
The Tea Party wasn’t in response to the TSA procedures so much as the government’s increased interference with people’s economic livelihood.
polymathwannabe wasn’t saying it was, s/he was saying that all three of those things (Patriot Act, TSA paranoia, Tea Party) were consequences of the radicalization of the US right, which was part of the aftermath of 9/11.
Which occurred because the US wasn’t willing to be sufficiently brutal in clamping down on it.
How do you know?
(The most obvious example of US willingness to be sufficiently brutal seems like Vietnam, which wasn’t a responding success.)
Let’s steelman VoiceOfRa’s argument and choose the nuking of Japan as an example of the U.S. using sufficient brutality. While it is true that the threat of the Japanese Empire was successfully ended, it inevitably spawned a dozen other problems in other scenarios. Most notably, it paved the way for the Cold War. The madness that was the latter half of the 20th century could have been avoided if neither part had felt scared enough to engage in a spiraling arms race by building up their nuclear arsenals.
The same logic has been repeated elsewhere: Pakistan only started developing nuclear weapons because India did, and India only did so because they were afraid of China, and China only developed nukes because they were afraid the Americans would defend Taiwan with their own bombs. As soon as you use “sufficient brutality” and prove yourself to be dangerous, you will prompt everyone else to become more dangerous. It’s the same stupid logic by which everyone buys a big, fuel-thirsty car because they’re afraid to be crushed by all the other big, fuel-thirsty cars already in the streets.
In the case of ISIS, let’s say the U.S. gets fed up with the situation and drops nukes on strategic Iraqi and Syrian cities. ISIS is wiped off the map. Good! Next thing you know, Iran will panic and get its own nukes, the Saudis will respond by getting their own, Russia will defend the Assad regime with everything they’ve got, and who knows what the remaining jihadi groups will do. It’s just not worth it.
Edited to add: Moreover, as soon as Iran and Saudi Arabia openly display their new nuclear capability, Israel is bound to do something very stupid.
By these standards, pretty much everything one does of any consequence in international relations spawns a dozen other problems.
Everyone else is quite capable and willing to become more dangerous without any prompting from us. Becoming dangerous is useful for its own sake, not just as a response to others being dangerous.
In the sense that Communism and the Free World wound up crashing once the common enemy was removed, yes. Your argument about nuclear weapons seems to boil down to arguing that if the US hadn’t developed them, no one else would have. I’ll let you clarify in case it’s something not quite this silly.
You don’t have to go that far. How about having the government not treat rumors that an interrogator may have flushed a Koran down the toilet as a moral crisis.
Um, Iran is already developing nukes as fast as it can, despite the US not being very brutal.
First, “Free World” my ass.
I admit we were too lucky that the Nazi nuclear program didn’t succeed. But the fact that the “good guys” were the first to get the bomb is no more reassurance than the “good guy with a gun” cliché.
If the Koran-in-the-toilet remark is meant as an argument for enhanced interrogation, we live in separate moral universes.
When the Iranians say they’re not currently developing nukes, I find them believable. Experts of the International Atomic Energy Agency whose job it is to get their nose in places and ask questions and get paid to get this answer right and who understand that the future of the world depends on their findings agree with me on this.
So your argument is that therefore good guys shouldn’t develop atomic weapons or carry guns?
I was making factual (not moral) claims about the effects of various levels of brutality on the chances of retaliation. We can talk about moral claims once we’ve established what the effects of various policies are likely to be. Also, if you can’t imagine there being valid arguments for policies you disagree with, you’re going to have a very hard time being rational about policy.
Would those be the same experts that are outsourcing inspecting Iranian nuclear sites to the Iranians themselves?
Um, no. The US was actually extremely soft in Vietnam. However, photographs from the war were presented in a misleading manner to domestic US audiences to make the US seem brutal (e.g., the infamous Vietnam execution photo was a guy killing a Viet Cong assassin who had just killed his family). Thus, the US lost its will for even that level of brutality and promptly lost a war it had been tactically winning.
The execution in the “infamous Vietnam execution photo” wasn’t even being carried out by a US person; it was not the sort of thing I had in mind. I was thinking more of, e.g., the My Lai massacre.
Is that what you consider “extremely soft”?
The idea that the US had been “tactically winning” the Vietnam war is, so far as I can tell, far from universally held. Can you explain to me why I should believe your description rather than anyone else’s?
Um, no. The US actually dropped “one million tons of ordnance” on North Vietnam (where US air strikes killed “approximately 52,000 civilians”) and “some four million tons of bombs” on South Vietnam (“the most bombed country in the history of aerial warfare—a dubious distinction for an ally”). The US actually supplemented those bombs by dropping about 70 million litres of herbicides on Vietnam, including over 40 million litres of Agent Orange and Agent Orange II, such that “millions of Vietnamese were likely to have been sprayed upon directly” and over 2 million hectares of Vietnam were sprayed repeatedly. (This excludes the anti-personnel gases and tens of thousands of tons of napalm the US employed during the 1960s alone.) And a working group in the US Department of Defense actually reckoned it could substantiate hundreds of reports of US war crimes.
Do you consider the account of a man who says: “I have to revenge a blood debt because they killed my cousin” to be a unreliable description of someone’s self-motivations?
Absolutely.
Are you looking for a double-blind experiment where in hundreds of randomly selected countries the civilians were slaughtered, in other hundreds they were not, and this was all conducted in a way that neither the people in the attacking countries nor the people in the attacked countries knew which was which?
No. I am looking for specific, reliable evidence which backs up Tsipursky’s claim. It is up to him what form that evidence might take. Is that a problem for you?
Middle Eastern cultures are heavily based on clan/kinship relations and honor. I would expect that just accurately killing guilty people would lead to a rage effect as bad as killing innocent ones, because of the enormous number of people in the guilty person’s kinship group whose honor you have just besmirched.
I would guess you are probably right, but the bigger question here is how strong is any “rage effect” compared to other factors which might influence human decision-making. For example, lets suppose ISIS rolls into your town, throws a few gay dudes of off roofs, blows up the local church or mosque, and publicly tortures to death a few suspected informants. One can imagine that perhaps this will create a large Tsipursky Rage. At the same time, it will probably result in a lot of fear and despair; these emotions might actually discourage people from working against ISIS. Which is stronger in the short or long term? What other factors might be in play? These are not easy questions to answer.
For Tsipursky to claim that he knows the answer with reasonable certainty based on a few magazine articles in which a few captured terrorists cite “rage” as their motivation is the height of the worst kind of irrationality.
That said, your point does illustrate how silly Tsipursky’s position is if taken to its logical conclusion. i.e. that we should not even kill actual ISIS operatives in Syria or Iraq because that will make people angry and result in more attacks.
It’s not really silly. Focusing on cutting funding sources might be better than focusing on killing ISIS operatives, As long as a NATO country buys their oil for money, weapons and hospital care killing individual ISIS operatives won’t go very far.
The two are not mutually exclusive, agreed?
If you want to use certain NATO bases to do your bombing, then you will be less likely to criticize the policy of the countries that host the bases.
Umm, does that mean “yes” or “no”?
Truth is more complex than binary values. It means that in practice doing one thing means that you can do the other less well.
Let’s assume that’s true. So what? The argument under discussion was not whether the West should avoid focusing on killing people because it will undermine the West’s ability to focus on cutting funding for ISIS. The issue under discussion is whether the West should avoid killing people because it will make other people angry.
Please don’t try to change the subject without openly acknowledging that’s what you are doing.
You don’t do things like bombing or not bombing for a single reason. At the same time it’s okay for an article in a mainstream venue to focus on a single reason because the medium doesn’t allow for a deep analysis of all factors that matter.
Again, assuming that is true, so what? If one of those reasons doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and you want to change the subject and discuss a different reason, then please be open and honest about what you are doing.
With charity the topic is whether resentment produced through bombing is a significant factor. Conclusions based on the argument that we shouldn’t bomb can be true if you look at additional arguments and therefore they certainly aren’t “ridiculous”.
I think the factor of bombings producing resentments from the local population should factor into the calculation. You need further arguments to actually decide against bombing and a single argument isn’t enough.
Charity as to whose statements? Mine or Sipursky’s?
Can you please quote or summarize the statement you are interpreting charitably.
TIA.
Tsipursky’s article. The article only provides one reason. There no reason to see it as arguing that the reason alone is sufficient.
:shrug: Then you should have made that clear when you responded to my point, i.e. that you would respond to a different version of the article than the one I was responding to.
And you should have also applied the same principle of charity to my point and made it clear that you were changing the subject.
Saying someone is making a “ridiculous statement” is not something that I read charitably.
Actually what I said is this:
So let’s see if I have this straight. You use the principle of charity to reinterpret Tsipursky’s position so that my statement becomes less reasonable; then you refuse to offer any such charity to my statement based on your general principles. And you don’t disclose any of this until pressed onit, instead you just pretend to be responding to my point.
Please stop being so dishonest.
Also, for future reference please tell me what types of statements you refuse to read charitably.
Note that this dynamic can be profitably used in the opposite direction. Suppose in retaliation for someone committing a terror attack, the government exiles their entire family (out to, say, first cousins) in response. Now the family dynamics are recruited to cut things off early on, and local patriarchs face serious penalties if they fail to keep their kin in line.
(Compare to the frankpledge, wherein people were clustered into joint responsibility units, where if any person in the unit committed a crime everyone in the unit had to pay for it (if they couldn’t deliver the criminal to justice).)
There was a lot less general slaughter after WWI, so it should have caused Germany to be demilitarized a lot better then after WWII, oh wait.
What’s interesting to me is that as an American, if you visit Japan, there does not seem to be a lot of Tsipursky Rage in evidence. Even though we bombed the hell out of them and nuked two of their cities. And you don’t see many Japanese people plotting to launch terrorist attacks in the United States. Of course Japanese culture is probably different from that of the Arabic-speaking peoples in the Middle East. But anger at perceived injustice is a pretty universal human emotion (based on my general observations).
My looking at history is that this isn’t quite correct. It is the most restrained aggressor/tyrant who winds up getting targeted. To use an example I’m familiar with most of the Russian Tsars were rather despotic; however, two did make major liberal reforms, Alexander II freed the serfs, and Nicholas II make strides towards modernizing the country including introducing an elected parliament. Not-so-coincidentally, they were also the only tsars to be assassinated by revolutionaries.
Causality could go the other way here—the reforms might have been (ultimately ineffective) attempts to address dissatisfaction among the people.
Probably not. Consider why there was an increasing amount of dissatisfaction among the people, after all the Tsars had always been brutal, it was only when the Tsar was less brutal that dissatisfaction seemed to manifest.
The main problem with that argument is that it assumes dissatisfaction is determined by the amount of repression. It’s a factor, but there are others, like food, wars, and technical innovations.
This kind of question needs complex analysis and can’t be answered that easily. You could plot a measurement of repression against a measure of dissatisfaction (assume the measurements are accurate), show that they corresponded perfectly from regime to regime, and even if you ignore confounders it still wouldn’t show causality because you still wouldn’t know which one came first.
That’s sort of my point. That repression done right doesn’t cause rebellions.
Well for starters if you look at them chronologically, you can see which one actually changed first.
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..?
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?
Except as a useful boogeyman for those currently in power, yes.
You’re kidding yourself.
Or trying to kid others.
When people say “fascism” they’re usually actually thinking of Nazism. Now, what was Nazism? It was a movement that stressed the need for intense loyalty to a strong Fatherland, that worried about pollution of that Fatherland by inferior races, that was contemptuous of democracy, that appealed to the glorious cultural traditions of the Fatherland, that lamented that the political Left was treacherously weakening the nation, that held that women should stick to traditional gender roles, that made much of the value of traditional religion without actually embracing it and being religious …
Gosh, it’s hard to see what possible motive a neoreactionary could have for making light of the idea that anything like that might still be around today.
NRx people should know the difference between fascism and nazism, given how they pay great attention to history.
But there also might be a bit of miscommunication. I suspect VoiceOfRa thinks about far-right parties in Europe which are often tagged with the neo-Nazi label. That wasn’t what I actually had I mind. I was thinking of people like Mr.Putin.
And you think it’s reasonable to call him “fascist”?
Calling someone a fascist nowadays is just an insult, there is rarely much meaning behind it.
But you might think about important elements of fascism, the ones that distinguish it from, say, liberal democracies or communist countries or even just plain-vanilla dictatorships, and check how current Russia compares...
So by your definition nearly everyone before the 19th century was a “fascist”?
Only in the same way as everyone in mediaeval times was a reenactment enthusiast.
So you admit your definition of “fascism” is time dependent? So why is this definition useful, are you saying that the laws of nature (or at least human nature) aren’t uniform across time?
One element of fascism is a desire to restore (alleged) past glories.
(I am not in fact convinced that “nearly everyone before the 19th century” has the characteristics I described. Some of them don’t even make much sense before the 19th century; e.g., the sort of leftism Hitler worried about, or the sort neoreactionaries worry about, didn’t exist in that form before the 19th century. But that’s a separate argument, and for now I’m happy to stick with this one.)
I don’t understand the “So”. Lots of time-dependent things are useful.
What someone’s opinions tell you about that person depends on the context they’re in. Suppose I tell you someone believes that the earth is at the centre of the universe, and ask you for a probability distribution on their IQ. Then I ask you the same about someone 1000 years ago. You may very well give different answers. Suppose I tell you someone thinks democracy is a terrible idea. Again, any guesses you might make about their character or about other things they believe may be different depending on whether they’re in present-day England or present-day North Korea or revolutionary France or Periclean Athens.
Depends on what you count as a law of human nature, and what timescale you’re interested in. Human biology probably doesn’t change much on (merely) historical timescales, but human societies certainly do and human brains are pretty malleable. Human biology probably does change enough to matter on, say, 20k-year timescales, and maybe there are places and times when it changes much faster (e.g., consider the debatable but not obviously crazy suggestion that Ashkenazy Jews are exceptionally smart but extra-susceptible to various interesting diseases because of strong selection for intelligence over the last millennium or three).
So you’re arguing not wanting to live under a leftist totalitarian dictatorship with an economy based on a delusional economic theory makes one a fascist?
No.
Then what were you trying to say when you wrote that clause?
Sorry, I’m not interested in having a discussion with someone who both (1) wilfully misinterprets what I say, hence requiring lots of clarifications in order to get anywhere, and also (2) downvotes everything I write. Let me know when you’re prepared to be reasonable and we can try again.
(In the unlikely event that you really truly sincerely think that your question was a reasonable one whose answer ought to be yes given what I’d written, I think it follows that at least one of us is too stupid to be worth engaging with even without your abusive behaviour.)
I see you’re a fan of the “say something outrageous and when called on it get angry and claim to have said something different” school of debate.
Yes, and Hitler ate sugar.
Except we’re talking about human political philosophies, not individual people. Thus it makes no sense to consider political philosophies and societies as extrinsic to our model.
I am not arguing that everything backward-looking is bad because Hitler was bad. (Though, actually, most of us would do well to eat less sugar.)
For that matter, in this thread I haven’t been arguing even that Nazism is bad, though as it happens I’m not a fan. Merely observing that there’s a considerable overlap between the backward-looking things neoreactionaries advocate and the backward-looking things the Nazis were keen on.
And, as it happens, I am quite comfortable saying that in many respects “nearly everyone before the 19th century” had views and attitudes that I dislike and disapprove of; if I make a list of Things I Dislike About Nazism and it turns out that they’re mostly also things I dislike about the fifteenth century, my conclusion will be “so much the worse for the fifteenth century”. I already know I wouldn’t want to live there; I already know that “nearly everyone” in the past was wrong about huge swathes of how-the-world-works stuff that we’ve discovered since; why should I be discomfited to find their values also meeting with my disapproval?
(One possible reason: “That would imply that almost everyone until recently was a Bad Person, but that lots of people now are not Bad People, which would mean a bigger faster change in human nature than is plausible.” But people’s values aren’t in fact mere manifestations of their genes, they also come from the surrounding society, and societies can change quickly. It could be that most people would be (what I would consider) Bad if brought up in one society and (what I would consider) Not So Bad if brought up in a different one.)
My apologies for being dim, but I’m not sure what it is you think I’m doing that I shouldn’t. What model am I treating what as extrinsic to?
You may want to look at how this thread started.
OK, I looked at that. I’m afraid doing so hasn’t answered my question.
(It may be worth saying explicitly, though, that my comments here aren’t intended to address the question of whether bombing the hell out of Nazi Germany was an effective way of getting rid of Nazism in Germany, or the possibly-analogous question of whether bombing the hell out of ISIS-occupied Syria would be an effective way of getting rid of fundamentalist Islamic terrorist dictatorship in Syria, or the higher-level question of whether and to what extent you can get rid of ideas with bombs. I think I kinda agree with you about the first, am inclined to disagree about the second but would need to see some more joined-up thinking on the subject than seems generally to be on offer before forming strong opinions, and suspect the third is too vague to be able to say anything useful about.)
I never said one could get rid of an idea with bombs. Bombs + boots on the ground, on the other hand.
Why the difference? This sounds like a classic near mode/far mode thinking split.
Even if you kill all of ISIS that won’t destroy fundamentalist Islam. There are enough other sources of that in the middle East.
I know what the outcome of WW2 was but not what the outcome of bombing or invading Syria will be. WW2 was a huge affair in which several major nations expended pretty much all the effort they could to beat the Axis powers; it is vanishingly unlikely that anything like as much will be done to ISIS. There wasn’t a great deal of sympathy for Nazism in the rest of the world, but there’s plenty of Islamic fundamentalism outside ISIS.
In the 1930s, yes there was. There wasn’t much by 1945, but that was because people saw what happened to the Nazis and were basically going “despite appearances to the contrary, we never really liked the Nazis we swear, please don’t do that to us”.
IIRC ethnic nationalism wasn’t even much of a thing until around 1800, and I doubt many people “lamented that the political Left was treacherously weakening the nation” a few centuries ago.
*cough*Old Testament*cough*
That hardly counts as stressing the need for intense loyalty to a strong Fatherland (before Zionism became widespread) or worrying about pollution of that Fatherland by inferior races (?).
A Jewish woman is prohibited from marrying a non-Jew (that’s why Jewishness is determined matrilineally), but in any case I’m objecting to “ethnic nationalism wasn’t even much of a thing”. It most certainly was.
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.
That may very well be the case, and if so, it’s positive evidence that Tsipursky Rage is not a relatively important factor in motivating peoples’ behavior. Which is consistent with my instincts.