> Ujiharu’s blind charges may actually have had a noble purpose. Japanese battles involving castles almost always turned into sieges, and those always ended the same way: with the nearby fields and peasant settlements being either destroyed to try and draw the lord out of the castle or looted to feed the occupying army. Some researchers believe that Ujiharu was trying to avoid a siege to save his subjects.
I wonder how he managed to reconquer his castle.
By, uh... besieging it, maybe? Probably?
Now repeat that eight times - and honestly, I’m struggling to see where and how exactly he tried to save his subjects.
Sorry, but losing your castle nine times isn’t what capable military leaders do.
That's not how it worked. Armies had the tendency to eat more than the locals could provide. A region that could feed itself suddenly has to provide for thousands of soldiers.
This is why war inevitably led to starvation.
Not exactly the same vibe, but I highly, highly recommend Taiko by Eiji Yoshikawa. It follows Hideyoshi's weird rise to power and has a lot of the same focus of him doing counter-intuitive things and being weirdly convincing while navigating an era of warfare. Plus it is a great read - along with Musashi, by the same author.
> However, a wise man once said: “[It] ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward; how much you can take and keep moving forward.” Ujiharu may have lost Oda Castle nine times, but that means he also won it back eight times, almost always with smaller armies. His refusal to accept defeat and his iron will to get up and keep fighting is why many historians reject the “weakest samurai warlord” nickname and instead refer to him as “The Phoenix.”
> his retainers and farmers chose to see the best in their lord and were fiercely loyal to him. During Ujiharu’s early campaigns, some of his men did defect to the enemy, but a few raids to protect or take back Oda Castle later and you apparently could not threaten or pay off anyone in Ujiharu’s service to move against him.
Personally, I have to respect someone who earns that kind of loyalty.
I enjoy this blog, the articles are usually very well informed.
But this kind of grand theory in History is inherently flawed. There is a lot of irreducible complexity in History and trying to draw conclusions from sweeping low resolution panoramas is circular reasoning. It all depends on definitions and suffers from heavy survivorship bias.
> And it is quite clear from that evidence, that at the dawn of civilization, it was the least Fremen societies who tended to win the most.
This conclusion for example is simply not true. There is a mention of the Amorites overrunning Mesopotamia c. 2000 BCE. But there's evidence of several cycles of invasions, raiding, and take overs of established cities by nomads and pastoralist peoples just in the 1500 thousand years between the earliest evidence of writing and this Amorite wave. In fact, the political fabric that the Amorites impacted was itself a hybridization of early settled Sumerian polities and the nomadic/pastoralist Semitic peoples around it. It is a recurring theme that can be observed in stone engravings and the written record.
The dynamics can't be resolved in terms of whether civilized or nomadic peoples are stronger, mainly because the grouping is always arbitrary. It is more of a system of attractors in a sort of 'settled-nomadic' continuum in some phase space that people's life trajectories approach than a matter of easily distinguishable types that can be ranked.
I think it's a dumb aphorism, but ACOUP's article isn't really a good refutation, instead it's mostly an excuse for him to elaborate upon some specific historical misconceptions.
This is such a dumb saying. Good times are created by weak people working together to defeat strong people. Most hard times are created by "Strong Men" fighting each other. Just take a look around the world - is it countries under the sway of warlords that have the best times? Or is it countries where the institutions are stronger than the individuals, where rulers have been limited or deposed by groups of individually weaker people? Weak people don't create hard times - it's tyrants that do that.
Just finished a book about the Hundred Years War, before that, one on the Thirty Years War. Both have a glaring similarity, the "weak people" were consistently plundered, raped and killed by the "strong" people.
When will the working class people understand that the elite are just a few bad decisions away from their total destruction? (Here in the US we seem to be on some kind of precipice.)
Of course, many of those "strong people" were themselves peasants who joined up with mercenary companies to support themselves after their own livelihoods were destroyed by warring armies.
>Here in the US we seem to be on some kind of precipice.
Aren't working class people in the US just recently choose the most anti-elite candidate possible just because (and fuck the consequences, let it all burn in hell)?
Working class people are understanding that the elite are just a few bad decisions away from their total destruction. And now they WILL make THE OTHERS to understand this.
It's a nice reading, and I do think that the ability to take the wider view, to be prepared to suffer and fight for principles rather than immediate personal gain, to band together with others even at personal cost is an enormous strength.
I just don't think it's what people using this phrase mean.
>to be prepared to suffer and fight for principles rather than immediate personal gain, to band together with others even at personal cost is an enormous strength.
The more I think about it, the more I come to realization that all of this just fairy tales for children.
Of course! Fairy tales for children are how we communicate some of our best understandings of what it means to live a good life.
Many important things in life are fictions or rely on fictions - money, nations, property, family, art, justice, legitimacy, banks. All of them are fairytales. And like a fairy in Peter Pan, belief can make them real, powerful facts of our world while lack of belief can destroy them.
It works too - I know lots of real people who make the world a better place because of the fairy tales they choose to believe.
You don't understand the saying. If you want to find some of the most anti-war people there are, speak to veterans who have lived through such. If you want to find some of the most pro-war people there are, talk to people who have never experienced the consequences of such. Out of curiosity I just looked up 'us warmonger political advisor guy' because his named temporarily escaped me, and search delivered - John Bolton. [1]
I wanted to see his history because it's just about always the same - and yeah, good ole Yale grad who was a draft dodger getting his college deferment then immediately getting a national guard position to avoid conscription. For those that may not understand the latter - National Guard units were basically never deployed, extremely difficult to enlist in, and basically worked as a means for the well connected to avoid service. Bush, Cheney, Biden, Trump, Clinton, and all of them - draft dodgers, often using similar tricks.
It has nothing to do with political systems. There have been great times under dictatorial systems and horrible times under democracies. It has to do with weak people trying to be strong, which drives chaos. Maybe it could be framed up succinctly in that the "hard decisions" are indeed hard for strong men, but for weak mean they happily make them without the briefest of hesitation, though of course they'll put on a solemn face for the cameras.
I like your philosophy, but I think this phrase is a horrible way to express it. You should try to come up with a different pithy way of saying what you mean.
Perhaps
Beware those who make hard decisions easily.
Or
Hard times come when decision makers pay no part of the cost of their decisions.
It isn’t a good saying, in the sense that what the speaker means by “good times,” “bad times,” “strong men,” and “weak men,” is so open to interpretation as to be meaningless. I like your interpretation. But I think the expression is often interpreted with “strong” implying a certain sort of roughness/propensity toward violence.
Anyway, it is clearly not accurate—“good times” and “bad times” must at least be opposite, however we define them, right? But we see all sorts of countries in history that have multi-generational reinforcing stretches of excellency. And we see many countries that suffered from many-generation-long stretches of bad times. These good and bad men don’t seem to pop up anywhere near as reliably as the expression claims.
A lovely example of this is Starship Troopers and The Forever War. Both were written by veterans, but only one of them was written by someone who served during wartime. Unsurprisingly, it’s the anti-war one.
"Good times" is a property of the political system as a whole and has little to do with "strength of men" unless you bend backwards to redefine strength.
I agree, the ability to lend your strength to benefit others is a moral strength and it's key to human flourishing and achievement. Where I might disagree though is if you think that this is the kind of strength that most users of the phrase in question are thinking of.
TBH all the time I saw this phrase was about strong people in the broadest possible way. And always as a positive.
It’s very strange to see people defining strong in very narrow bigot way and then trying to spin the whole phrase into a negative. This thread is probably the first time I saw people take such turn.
It’s also very strange that people try to portray being weak as a positive. Sure, strong may have very different definitions from different people. Even borderline opposite. But turning the whole word into a negative… that reminds me of 1984. Weaknesses is strength, strength is weakness.
Whereas I always take this phrase to be refering to a military kind of strength. For example, this whole article tells us that Oda Ujiharu got the nickname "weakest" because of his military incompetence. Your own examples of strength in this thread tend to be mainly martial too.
This kind of strength - the ability to force your will upon others (which is what military strength is, and also the kind of strength that 'Strong Men' dictators have), motivates the (usually incorrect) comparisons to historical empires. There are other kinds of strength - moral strength, resilience, determination, vision, etc they're just not what I think is being talked about with this phrase.
I don't know where you get 'weakness' is being described as a positive in this thread. Weakness can also mean many things, but in this context, it means being susceptible to others forcing their will onto you. It's not a good thing, but differences in strength are natural and impossible to avoid. What is a good thing is when the great mass of comparatively 'weak' people realise that together they are stronger than the tyrant.
Rather than 1984, for an appropriate comparison I'd go to the Bible:
- "God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong."
A lot of „martial“ skills are needed in daily life. Discipline, planning, ability to operate both on your own and in a team both as a leader and a member. Even physical strength does help, even in modern world. A good CEO and good military commander skillset is very very similar. Just like good specialist and good soldier.
Whenever I meet this phrase, it's talking about specifically those „other kinds of strength“.
I'd even argue that there's no „strength“ in dumbly forcing your will upon others. It's a strength to lead people, to inspire them and get them to follow you. Charisma and leadership is a hell of a strength. But to physically force people... All you need is a number of, possibly weak, people and you'll likely succeed in bending even physically much stronger people.
And weak people banding together can build a tyrant regime. Soviet union is probably good example. Both at initial stage when workers kick started it. And in later stages when usually the weak life scum went to work for the security apparatus of said regime. And reading about other regimes, it seems to be a recurring theme that security apparatus is built out of weak miserable people who look for an revenge opportunity.
I agree Boomers have made a real mess of things, but mostly millennials and gen Z seem worn out. I don’t think it’s obvious that we’re going to be the “strong men” predicted by the expression, to create good times.
Not only that, but "good times" and "bad times" are equally ambiguous - good times for who?
I have a feeling that the saying is used primarily by people who imagine themselves strong and think that the good times in history were when the strong were taking from the weak, whereas I think that good times in history are when the weak are protected from the worst abuses of the strong.
When famine hits or you get attacked by another country, it’s not about weak being protected from the strong. It’s about one society getting into trouble.
And perhaps this is the core of our disagreement - you see a country being attacked by another and you blame those hard times on the victim while I blame it on the attacker.
I say it's a problem of unrestrained strength, of strength misapplied, not a problem of some people being weaker than others.
And an enormous number of famines are caused by conflict, or historically by dumb central government by overly strong tyrants.
And conflicts are frequently caused by the victim getting weak.
> historically by dumb central government
That's what I pointing at.
> overly strong tyrants
They're not strong. Unless you want to define strong in a very narrow sense which simply dumb.
> you see a country being attacked by another and you blame those hard times on the victim while I blame it on the attacker
Such is nature. When a sugar lover gets diabetis, you don't blame diabetis. If a society wants to stay afloat, it has to be able to defend from outsiders.
Can it? What "bad times" were created by weak men? To me it seems most if not all bad times are just "strong men" taking advantage of that strength to take from others in one way or another and hence causing conflict or economic woes.
This is not true, we see plenty of long stretches of misery and success in various countries throughout history. It isn’t particularly cyclical, instead we see strengths sometimes reinforcing, sometimes collapsing, and often just regressing to the mean.
You're missing the point. The strong men are the ones building roads and sewers and buildings and exploring and policing and making safe and guarding and inventing and transporting, and the weak men are the ones deferring and allowing things to slide into safety and overly generous (with someone's money) social programs and overseas programs and politeness laws, and when things go wrong, populism, and the circle continuing.
I'm really struggling to match your definitions of weak and strong here to anything like normal usage.
I think you're saying that it's strong to be employed? I'm not really sure how that matches up to being against the things you mention in connection with "weak".
Incidentally, I don't know if you intended this, but building roads and sewers and policing are, in most countries, socially funded programs.
It's a metaphor, "strong" and "weak" refers to the ability to overcome the "hard times", whatever that may be.
Basically if you experienced the direct consequences of a "hard time" (a demagogue, a famine, a recession or financial crisis, SCRUM, or whatever) you will be more aware and resilient to allowing the things that caused that to happen than if you never experienced it. That's "strength".
It is of course true, we see it everywhere in nature, but it's perhaps often more due to hard times eliminating weakness than actually creating strength.
Good times tend to increase the number of people who don't know how serious bad times can get, don't realize the importance of principles that were obvious to the people who survived the bad times.
So "strong people" can perhaps be "created" equally in good times as well, but they are increasingly outnumbered. During hard times the "weak" are eliminated.
This being Ycombinator one can consider the example of how any crazy idea gets funding during good times but during hard times the ideas that actually have legs remain. ;-)
> This being Ycombinator one can consider the example of how any crazy idea gets funding during good times but during hard times the ideas that actually have legs remain. ;-)
Remember economics isn't a morality play where bad things are secretly good. The general principle is that a bad economy only has bad results and there's no reason to want one.
Bad times are named "bad" for a reason of course, but there are many sayings - sayings being based on human observations throughout history - along the lines of "every cloud has a silver lining".
One that conceptually rhymes with the "bad times lead to good people" saying is "bad manners lead to good laws".
Man of the people:
> Ujiharu’s blind charges may actually have had a noble purpose. Japanese battles involving castles almost always turned into sieges, and those always ended the same way: with the nearby fields and peasant settlements being either destroyed to try and draw the lord out of the castle or looted to feed the occupying army. Some researchers believe that Ujiharu was trying to avoid a siege to save his subjects.
I wonder how he managed to reconquer his castle. By, uh... besieging it, maybe? Probably? Now repeat that eight times - and honestly, I’m struggling to see where and how exactly he tried to save his subjects.
Sorry, but losing your castle nine times isn’t what capable military leaders do.
Well if he had the loyalty of the surrounding subjects presumably there's a lot less looting during his sieges.
That's not how it worked. Armies had the tendency to eat more than the locals could provide. A region that could feed itself suddenly has to provide for thousands of soldiers. This is why war inevitably led to starvation.
The writing style has me in stiches, it feels at odds with the layout and imagery, but completely fits the character of the story in question.
I wonder how well a Real Housewives-style show would work set in the Sengoku-era.
Not exactly the same vibe, but I highly, highly recommend Taiko by Eiji Yoshikawa. It follows Hideyoshi's weird rise to power and has a lot of the same focus of him doing counter-intuitive things and being weirdly convincing while navigating an era of warfare. Plus it is a great read - along with Musashi, by the same author.
I can’t stand the writing style.
It reminds me of Cracked, sort of perfunctory but also like they're actually into it enough to try.
Or an action-comedy.
With the quotes in the article title I was thinking dang how have I never heard of that anime.
That’s an anime that should be made.
Write the web novel and you can be that anime('s original source material).
> However, a wise man once said: “[It] ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward; how much you can take and keep moving forward.” Ujiharu may have lost Oda Castle nine times, but that means he also won it back eight times, almost always with smaller armies. His refusal to accept defeat and his iron will to get up and keep fighting is why many historians reject the “weakest samurai warlord” nickname and instead refer to him as “The Phoenix.”
Love this paragraph from the article.
Also:
> his retainers and farmers chose to see the best in their lord and were fiercely loyal to him. During Ujiharu’s early campaigns, some of his men did defect to the enemy, but a few raids to protect or take back Oda Castle later and you apparently could not threaten or pay off anyone in Ujiharu’s service to move against him.
Personally, I have to respect someone who earns that kind of loyalty.
I love the complete tonal whiplash from the very next sentence:
> Ujiharu lost Oda Castle so many times because he made bafflingly bad military decisions.
> Ujiharu ruled the strategically important Hitachi Province from the massive Oda Castle, whose entire complex was 4.6 times larger than Tokyo Dome.
Okay, that's very helpful, but what was the furnished and unfurnished, and unroofed square footage of it, measured in postage stamps?
This is such a disappointingly low-quality, high-fluff piece. And the fluff isn't even very engaging.
Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
This guy is all of those men, like 10 times over.
Assuming this is what you truly believe, I recommend you read: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
I enjoy this blog, the articles are usually very well informed.
But this kind of grand theory in History is inherently flawed. There is a lot of irreducible complexity in History and trying to draw conclusions from sweeping low resolution panoramas is circular reasoning. It all depends on definitions and suffers from heavy survivorship bias.
> And it is quite clear from that evidence, that at the dawn of civilization, it was the least Fremen societies who tended to win the most.
This conclusion for example is simply not true. There is a mention of the Amorites overrunning Mesopotamia c. 2000 BCE. But there's evidence of several cycles of invasions, raiding, and take overs of established cities by nomads and pastoralist peoples just in the 1500 thousand years between the earliest evidence of writing and this Amorite wave. In fact, the political fabric that the Amorites impacted was itself a hybridization of early settled Sumerian polities and the nomadic/pastoralist Semitic peoples around it. It is a recurring theme that can be observed in stone engravings and the written record.
The dynamics can't be resolved in terms of whether civilized or nomadic peoples are stronger, mainly because the grouping is always arbitrary. It is more of a system of attractors in a sort of 'settled-nomadic' continuum in some phase space that people's life trajectories approach than a matter of easily distinguishable types that can be ranked.
I think it's a dumb aphorism, but ACOUP's article isn't really a good refutation, instead it's mostly an excuse for him to elaborate upon some specific historical misconceptions.
I was just joking, and don’t hold that quote as a serious belief. :) Poe’s law, alas.
Thanks for the article link, so far it’s interesting reading!
Sometimes it's hard to tell!
The whole blog is worth reading, glad you enjoy it.
Hard times create broken men with PTSD who sleep with a gun under their pillow while slowly drinking themselves to death.
In this case, Ujiharu lost and died penniless with his family held as hostages.
This is such a dumb saying. Good times are created by weak people working together to defeat strong people. Most hard times are created by "Strong Men" fighting each other. Just take a look around the world - is it countries under the sway of warlords that have the best times? Or is it countries where the institutions are stronger than the individuals, where rulers have been limited or deposed by groups of individually weaker people? Weak people don't create hard times - it's tyrants that do that.
Just finished a book about the Hundred Years War, before that, one on the Thirty Years War. Both have a glaring similarity, the "weak people" were consistently plundered, raped and killed by the "strong" people.
When will the working class people understand that the elite are just a few bad decisions away from their total destruction? (Here in the US we seem to be on some kind of precipice.)
Of course, many of those "strong people" were themselves peasants who joined up with mercenary companies to support themselves after their own livelihoods were destroyed by warring armies.
>Here in the US we seem to be on some kind of precipice.
Aren't working class people in the US just recently choose the most anti-elite candidate possible just because (and fuck the consequences, let it all burn in hell)?
Working class people are understanding that the elite are just a few bad decisions away from their total destruction. And now they WILL make THE OTHERS to understand this.
The people you mentioned aren't working class, they're wealthy but blue-collar, ie petit-bourgeois or local gentry.
Though Americans don't have class consciousness anyway, or if they do it's based on style of consuming and not working.
Another way of reading the saying is that the weak men are weak mentally, they're cruel and inept. So maybe outwardly "strong"... but not really.
It's a nice reading, and I do think that the ability to take the wider view, to be prepared to suffer and fight for principles rather than immediate personal gain, to band together with others even at personal cost is an enormous strength.
I just don't think it's what people using this phrase mean.
>to be prepared to suffer and fight for principles rather than immediate personal gain, to band together with others even at personal cost is an enormous strength.
The more I think about it, the more I come to realization that all of this just fairy tales for children.
Of course! Fairy tales for children are how we communicate some of our best understandings of what it means to live a good life.
Many important things in life are fictions or rely on fictions - money, nations, property, family, art, justice, legitimacy, banks. All of them are fairytales. And like a fairy in Peter Pan, belief can make them real, powerful facts of our world while lack of belief can destroy them.
It works too - I know lots of real people who make the world a better place because of the fairy tales they choose to believe.
You don't understand the saying. If you want to find some of the most anti-war people there are, speak to veterans who have lived through such. If you want to find some of the most pro-war people there are, talk to people who have never experienced the consequences of such. Out of curiosity I just looked up 'us warmonger political advisor guy' because his named temporarily escaped me, and search delivered - John Bolton. [1]
I wanted to see his history because it's just about always the same - and yeah, good ole Yale grad who was a draft dodger getting his college deferment then immediately getting a national guard position to avoid conscription. For those that may not understand the latter - National Guard units were basically never deployed, extremely difficult to enlist in, and basically worked as a means for the well connected to avoid service. Bush, Cheney, Biden, Trump, Clinton, and all of them - draft dodgers, often using similar tricks.
It has nothing to do with political systems. There have been great times under dictatorial systems and horrible times under democracies. It has to do with weak people trying to be strong, which drives chaos. Maybe it could be framed up succinctly in that the "hard decisions" are indeed hard for strong men, but for weak mean they happily make them without the briefest of hesitation, though of course they'll put on a solemn face for the cameras.
[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=us+warmonger+political+adv...
I like your philosophy, but I think this phrase is a horrible way to express it. You should try to come up with a different pithy way of saying what you mean.
Perhaps
Beware those who make hard decisions easily.
Or
Hard times come when decision makers pay no part of the cost of their decisions.
It isn’t a good saying, in the sense that what the speaker means by “good times,” “bad times,” “strong men,” and “weak men,” is so open to interpretation as to be meaningless. I like your interpretation. But I think the expression is often interpreted with “strong” implying a certain sort of roughness/propensity toward violence.
Anyway, it is clearly not accurate—“good times” and “bad times” must at least be opposite, however we define them, right? But we see all sorts of countries in history that have multi-generational reinforcing stretches of excellency. And we see many countries that suffered from many-generation-long stretches of bad times. These good and bad men don’t seem to pop up anywhere near as reliably as the expression claims.
A lovely example of this is Starship Troopers and The Forever War. Both were written by veterans, but only one of them was written by someone who served during wartime. Unsurprisingly, it’s the anti-war one.
Then those men you're calling „weak“ are actually strong...
"Good times" is a property of the political system as a whole and has little to do with "strength of men" unless you bend backwards to redefine strength.
Good times is not a property of political system. It’s overall life property. Including politics and whatnot.
Producing a quality political regime needs strong men too.
Strong together. Strong, when they choose to support each other. Weak otherwise.
Ability to band together is a strength.
I agree, the ability to lend your strength to benefit others is a moral strength and it's key to human flourishing and achievement. Where I might disagree though is if you think that this is the kind of strength that most users of the phrase in question are thinking of.
TBH all the time I saw this phrase was about strong people in the broadest possible way. And always as a positive.
It’s very strange to see people defining strong in very narrow bigot way and then trying to spin the whole phrase into a negative. This thread is probably the first time I saw people take such turn.
It’s also very strange that people try to portray being weak as a positive. Sure, strong may have very different definitions from different people. Even borderline opposite. But turning the whole word into a negative… that reminds me of 1984. Weaknesses is strength, strength is weakness.
Whereas I always take this phrase to be refering to a military kind of strength. For example, this whole article tells us that Oda Ujiharu got the nickname "weakest" because of his military incompetence. Your own examples of strength in this thread tend to be mainly martial too.
This kind of strength - the ability to force your will upon others (which is what military strength is, and also the kind of strength that 'Strong Men' dictators have), motivates the (usually incorrect) comparisons to historical empires. There are other kinds of strength - moral strength, resilience, determination, vision, etc they're just not what I think is being talked about with this phrase.
I don't know where you get 'weakness' is being described as a positive in this thread. Weakness can also mean many things, but in this context, it means being susceptible to others forcing their will onto you. It's not a good thing, but differences in strength are natural and impossible to avoid. What is a good thing is when the great mass of comparatively 'weak' people realise that together they are stronger than the tyrant.
Rather than 1984, for an appropriate comparison I'd go to the Bible: - "God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong."
A lot of „martial“ skills are needed in daily life. Discipline, planning, ability to operate both on your own and in a team both as a leader and a member. Even physical strength does help, even in modern world. A good CEO and good military commander skillset is very very similar. Just like good specialist and good soldier.
Whenever I meet this phrase, it's talking about specifically those „other kinds of strength“.
I'd even argue that there's no „strength“ in dumbly forcing your will upon others. It's a strength to lead people, to inspire them and get them to follow you. Charisma and leadership is a hell of a strength. But to physically force people... All you need is a number of, possibly weak, people and you'll likely succeed in bending even physically much stronger people.
And weak people banding together can build a tyrant regime. Soviet union is probably good example. Both at initial stage when workers kick started it. And in later stages when usually the weak life scum went to work for the security apparatus of said regime. And reading about other regimes, it seems to be a recurring theme that security apparatus is built out of weak miserable people who look for an revenge opportunity.
I don't see how anyone can look at the generation that survived the great depression, and look at boomers/millenials/gen Z and not see the truth of it
The generation that survived the great depression, caused the great depression. If they were strong as you imply how could they cause bad times?
Dumb phrase.
It was caused by the previous generation.
I agree Boomers have made a real mess of things, but mostly millennials and gen Z seem worn out. I don’t think it’s obvious that we’re going to be the “strong men” predicted by the expression, to create good times.
I don’t see how anyone can look at the numbers 1 and 2 not see that x + y = 3 is always true.
> This is such a dumb saying.
It can be aptly applied throughout history, so while maybe not the best word choice, the spirit of the message can't be dumb.
I'd say it's actually completely useless.
The definitions of "weak" and "strong" are extremely malleable depending on your own subjective assessment of the person/people.
It's an almost-aphorism; nearly useful, but not quite.
Not only that, but "good times" and "bad times" are equally ambiguous - good times for who?
I have a feeling that the saying is used primarily by people who imagine themselves strong and think that the good times in history were when the strong were taking from the weak, whereas I think that good times in history are when the weak are protected from the worst abuses of the strong.
When famine hits or you get attacked by another country, it’s not about weak being protected from the strong. It’s about one society getting into trouble.
And perhaps this is the core of our disagreement - you see a country being attacked by another and you blame those hard times on the victim while I blame it on the attacker.
I say it's a problem of unrestrained strength, of strength misapplied, not a problem of some people being weaker than others.
And an enormous number of famines are caused by conflict, or historically by dumb central government by overly strong tyrants.
> famines are caused by conflict
And conflicts are frequently caused by the victim getting weak.
> historically by dumb central government
That's what I pointing at.
> overly strong tyrants
They're not strong. Unless you want to define strong in a very narrow sense which simply dumb.
> you see a country being attacked by another and you blame those hard times on the victim while I blame it on the attacker
Such is nature. When a sugar lover gets diabetis, you don't blame diabetis. If a society wants to stay afloat, it has to be able to defend from outsiders.
Can it? What "bad times" were created by weak men? To me it seems most if not all bad times are just "strong men" taking advantage of that strength to take from others in one way or another and hence causing conflict or economic woes.
This is not true, we see plenty of long stretches of misery and success in various countries throughout history. It isn’t particularly cyclical, instead we see strengths sometimes reinforcing, sometimes collapsing, and often just regressing to the mean.
You're missing the point. The strong men are the ones building roads and sewers and buildings and exploring and policing and making safe and guarding and inventing and transporting, and the weak men are the ones deferring and allowing things to slide into safety and overly generous (with someone's money) social programs and overseas programs and politeness laws, and when things go wrong, populism, and the circle continuing.
I'm really struggling to match your definitions of weak and strong here to anything like normal usage.
I think you're saying that it's strong to be employed? I'm not really sure how that matches up to being against the things you mention in connection with "weak".
Incidentally, I don't know if you intended this, but building roads and sewers and policing are, in most countries, socially funded programs.
It's a metaphor, "strong" and "weak" refers to the ability to overcome the "hard times", whatever that may be.
Basically if you experienced the direct consequences of a "hard time" (a demagogue, a famine, a recession or financial crisis, SCRUM, or whatever) you will be more aware and resilient to allowing the things that caused that to happen than if you never experienced it. That's "strength".
It is of course true, we see it everywhere in nature, but it's perhaps often more due to hard times eliminating weakness than actually creating strength.
Good times tend to increase the number of people who don't know how serious bad times can get, don't realize the importance of principles that were obvious to the people who survived the bad times.
So "strong people" can perhaps be "created" equally in good times as well, but they are increasingly outnumbered. During hard times the "weak" are eliminated.
This being Ycombinator one can consider the example of how any crazy idea gets funding during good times but during hard times the ideas that actually have legs remain. ;-)
> This being Ycombinator one can consider the example of how any crazy idea gets funding during good times but during hard times the ideas that actually have legs remain. ;-)
Remember economics isn't a morality play where bad things are secretly good. The general principle is that a bad economy only has bad results and there's no reason to want one.
https://eml.berkeley.edu/~enakamura/papers/plucking.pdf
Bad times are named "bad" for a reason of course, but there are many sayings - sayings being based on human observations throughout history - along the lines of "every cloud has a silver lining".
One that conceptually rhymes with the "bad times lead to good people" saying is "bad manners lead to good laws".
Dinosaur eats man, woman inherits the Earth
[dead]