They may or may not have the government they want, but they certainly have the government they deserve. Every nation of people does.

If you're not willing to stand up and fight when a tiny number of people is oppressing you, then why do you deserve anything better? Who else is supposed to liberate you? Do you think that you're entitled to having a bunch of foreigners come risk their lives to liberate you from your own people (ISIS is headed by people who are native to the area, they're not foreigners, though many of their fighters are). That sounds like a pretty big entitlement mentality to me.

The power vacuum you talk of only existed because the people in that area allowed it to exist.

And yes, I do believe that a significant part of the population of their territory supports their actions. And no, their ruls is not "pseudo-Islamic", it's Islamic in the truest sense. Go read the Islamic holy books: they're following them to the letter. They're doing Islam correctly, just like every fundamentalist does their religion correctly; everyone else just cherry-picks the parts they like and ignores or whitewashes the really horrible parts.

At some point, a government will have an insurmountable military advantage, against which any resistance by its population is futile.

> At some point, a government will have an insurmountable military advantage, against which any resistance by its population is futile.

Most successful resistance by populations against the government have had the resisting part of the population overlapping the military. (Conversely, most popular resistance where this has not been the case has failed.)

So this is, generally, already the case, but in a sense somewhat less significant than is implied.

I suppose if you have an entirely automated and tamper-proof, self-maintaining and reproducing, military with the senior government decision makers as the only humans in the loop the situation becomes a bit different and there becomes a qualitative difference where popular resistance can no longer spread to include the military.

That makes no sense at all. The only way governments have "insurmountable advantage" is if they have more firepower and people willing to use that firepower than people willing to oppose them (plus their firepower). Governments do not (yet) have armies of robotic soldiers willing to do their bidding without question; this isn't the Clone Wars or droid wars or whatever. Governments need armies to do their military will, and those armies are composed of the People. This is why governments generally don't succeed at oppressing their own people; they can't get their military to go along with it. Now, of course, if the government is oppressing some other people (i.e., they invaded a foreign country), or they're oppressing some hated/demonized minority, that's another matter. The French and Polish didn't have much say in being oppressed by Nazi Germany, nor did the Jews/Gypsies/Roma there. However, the German people were not oppressed by the Nazis: they willingly elected them, and happily went along with their rule (except for some small minority of resistance forces).

I challenge you to show me any example of a government which was absolutely hated by its people and somehow managed to hold onto power. I don't think there is any. Every government gets popular support from somewhere, or else they wouldn't have an army to maintain their rule with. With occupations, it comes from the occupying nation. With places like Saddam's Iraq, it came from one powerful portion of the population that happily stomped on the other portions. With places like North Korea, it comes from a population that's been brainwashed into thinking the Dear Leader is basically a demigod.