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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4247 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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The other night my father rhetorically asked "I feel like asking Netanyahu, 'when has a terrorist group ever been defeated militarily?"

I immediately said "In Sri Lanka in 2009?" The reason it occurred to me was because of @CriticalDuty's write-up here.

Naturally, my father immediately commenced moving the goalposts of the question.

Out of curiosity, are there any other recent examples of terrorist groups being defeated militarily?

I think El-Salvador is a good example, the cartels aren't exactly terrorists, but the difference is nominal for all intents and purposes. If El-Salvador can within months with their shitty military..

I think that question unnecessarily invokes history and empiricism when it needn't be, because the question most normies actually mean to ask is "is it even possible?".

The answer to that is, if Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan can be defeated, so can some rag tags in the desert. It's just that modern powers don't have the stomach to carry out a merciless campaign (high civilian toll) followed by prolonged occupation/brainwashing.

I don't know if Islamist terrorists in particular are a special case or not. My galaxy brained shower thought is that the Quran and the resulting set of potential downstream belief systems will almost always produce something that approximates Islamist/Jihadist terrorists, they never had a cultural moderation of the likes of the Nw Testament and the religion/scripture->lore is far too political to have any meaningful distinction of Church and State even in the space of conceivable ideas.

There are meaningful differences, though—I'm sure they'd immediately point to the palestinians thinking of themselves as a different people than the Israelis (which I would guess wouldn't be the case for the cartels), and, as you pointed out, the cartels aren't exactly terrorists. You can lock up all the cartels, but I haven't heard people suggest locking up the entire population of Palestine.

ISIS seems a better parallel to me.

I think China's treatment of the Uyghurs is an example of successfully suppressing Islamists. It's not exactly pretty, but it seems to work fairly well for them, despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the Western powers. They do seem to have the will to put boots firmly on their necks and keep them there for decades; perhaps that's what it takes.

I think there are a lot of big questions over what's happened in El Salvador that will take years, maybe decades to answer. Clearly it's an impressive achievement, on the surface of things. I suppose the question is how sustainable it is, what does the country look like in 20 years, etc.

El Salvador if true is one of the few cases where I had to "update my priors". I guessed that the demand for drugs are too high, and the money too good, and the cartels too scary and the officials too corrupt/scared, for anything to happen at all. Those caveats are the main barriers long term, but the fact that it happened at all is a surprise to me.

This is a mega crazy idea I have no evidence for, but I think the tail end ultra violent genes have largely been killed/exiled off in the more populated old world, creating a new mean. This probably didn't happen in the new world. Jailing almost 1-2% of the population, that too mostly young males yet to pass on their genes, is going to probably change the genetic makeup of the country.

I think there was some element of genetic pacification in the Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations as well, since the unmixed indigenous populations there are generally more peaceful than their mestizo and white neighbors, while up north (and possibly down south in Patagonia too, but I haven't checked) the trend is the opposite.

This is a mega crazy idea I have no evidence for, but I think the tail end ultra violent genes have largely been killed/exiled off in the more populated old world, creating a new mean. This probably didn't happen in the new world.

I've seen this idea bounced around by HBD-types and as far as I can tell there's not only no evidence for it, but evidence against it. Indians in Latin American countries are not broadly more criminal than whites. There's actually a negative correlation in Mexico between how native a state is and how violent it is. It's generally not Indians getting in cartel shootouts. Even as far back as the initial European contact, Spaniards always commented on the remarkable peacefulness and good order in Indian cities. Looking at the US, the hispanic homicide rate has actually been more than halved since the 80s, as the composition of hispanic immigrants shifted from largely-white northern Mexican Chicanos to heavily Indian Guatemalan/Salvadoran/etc. type laborers.

I’m surprised that it worked and my hunch is it wouldn’t be successful in many other countries in the region. I think it’s possible the military and police were less under the grip of the cartels than they are in other Central American countries, perhaps because the state was so dysfunctional that they previously operated with relative impunity and so considered it less necessary to takeover the institutions.

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