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Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

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Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#121

Post by pmoriarty »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #80
hoodoof wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boxing, judo, grappling and wrestling all are more practical than karate. The core issue with karate is that it is loaded with formal or ritualistic representations of fighting. Karate kicks, punches and blocks are all hopelessly unusable when fighting a boxer for example, who is trained to defend their head and hit their opponents head hard and fast. By contrast, few, if any, karate stances are explicitly defending…

If only the boxer can get at the distance of his hands without having something broken or crippled. Primary head defense in most karate stances is distance.

You should watch Royce Gracie in early MMA competitions (before grappling became regularly studied by most competitors). He completely dominated everyone, no matter what discipline.

Distance did not help. At best, a punch or kick or two were thrown, and then the grappler was able to close the distance, and then anyone who didn't study grappling (or at least wrestling) was at a massive disadvantage, and the fight quickly ended in the grappler's favor.

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#122

Post by pmoriarty »

germinalphrase wrote: post #34
Kostchei wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done some form of boxing, grappling /judo or martial art for 30 years. I taught physical skills- use of force, to law enforcement for 6 years. For 5 years I worked in a violent custodial environment. Some young people entering that work-place had never faced an angry man, never been in a real fight. For them that "martial arts" environment is a reasonably safe and accessible place to start. I agree that it is no…

What you would recommend as a more practical form of self defense training for those not working in a high-risk environment?

I'll just add that HN is probably not the best place to ask that question, and also that you're probably very rarely get an unbiased answer. The overwhelming majority of practitioners view their own art through rose-colored glasses, especially if they've had little or no personal experience studying other marital arts.

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#123

Post by __s »

pmoriarty wrote: post #113
jbooth wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, that's a bullshit point of view. For the japanese military in WWII, rape was normal. Butchering civilian populations wholesale was normal. The Americans and British did not play by those rules, even though we did a lot of killing. This was not two equivalent evils. http://foxtalk.tistory.com/98

"Butchering civilian populations wholesale was normal. The Americans and British did not play by those rules" Perhaps you are not aware of the firebombing of German and Japanese cities, where as many or more civilians died as in the nuclear bomb detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which perhaps you also forget.

Vonnegut's a good read for this, often gets into Dresden

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#124

Post by HemanHeartYou »

coldtea wrote: post #95
berntb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Japanese war crimes really worse than the European standards in pre modern times? From my Swedish history, see the 30 year war (for a viewpoint not covered well in Swedish schools, google Polish deluge). To me it seems the main difference is that Sweden didn't have the same technological resources a few centuries earlier... Edit: The obvious point is -- does present Swedish culture explain why historical atrociti…

> Was Japanese war crimes really worse than the European standards in pre modern times? Or the bombing of 250.000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagashaki to make a point for the post-war era?

Oh boy, here we go...

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#125

Post by arca_vorago »

shiro wrote: post #31
cyberferret wrote: post #12

Interesting that the author mentions that the term "Bushido" wasn't really a thing until last century. I was sure I saw the term mentioned in the writing of Miyamoto Musashi, but I assume that might have been a modern translators interpretation. (I read the English version, not the native Japanese one). Also, some of my favourite graphic novels by Stan Sakai, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima seem to mention the term too…

The term "bushido" itself can be seen from late 16c literature (甲陽軍鑑, written between 1575 and 1586, is said as the first written appearance of the word), but initially it meant more practical skills of combat or survival. I don't have Miyamoto Musashi's book at hand but I suspect if he used the term it had the similar meaning.

I have a couple different translations and I am pretty sure it just references budo or if it says bushido anywhere it would be a mistranslation.

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#126

Post by RyanMcGreal »

kbart wrote: post #73

Every nation rewrites its history according to contemporary needs and cherry picks (or creates) sources to support it. A good example of today is Russia, where Stalin cult is resurgent and not so honorable history facts (pact with Hitler, Holodomor etc.) are being suppressed or played down[1]. 1. http://www.economist.com/node/10102921

Next you're going to tell me that George Washington never actually chopped down a cherry tree!

http://www.mountvernon.org/digital-encyclopedia/article/cher...

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#127

Post by pluma »

bbotond wrote: post #107
barry-cotter wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! Japanese people are human and the base morality that evolution has endowed us with. This divides humanity into two groups, in group and out group. Morality only applies to the in group. It takes a lot of acculturation and education to expand an individual's conception of the in group is, from family/tribe to nation/culture to humanity. As such, any sub-culture that can take over the public sphere of a culture w…

Thanks for the explanation. The book looks quite interesting. But that still doesn't explain why the armies of Western nations seemingly committed less and less serious atrocities. Or is that just an illusion because "history is written by the victors"?

Going by personal anecdote (well, by my grandmother who fled Silesia as a child): German refugees in late WW2 largely considered the Russians far more gruesome (violent, rape-y, etc, especially when drunk) than the British and Americans, although some considered their brutality justified by what they were hearing from how German soldiers (and the SS especially) had treated Eastern Europeans.

I'm guessing it's because Germans had racial propaganda dehumanizing Eastern Europeans (Slavs are "untermenschen") and the Russians retaliated once they were able to. They had seen far more gruesome behaviour by the Germans and had less inhibitions to treat them in kind. The Americans and British, OTOH, had merely been exposed to the far more "conventional" horrors of war (i.e. civilian casualties from war and occupation) until they found out about the camps.

As for the lack of atrocities committed by the West: don't for a second believe anything about the Pacific theatre of WW2 was lacking atrocities. Japan quite literally raped China, yes, but the US routinely firebombed Japan until they literally nuked city centres.

The fire bombing of Dresden (a German population centre) is considered a morally questionable decision these days. The routine fire bombing of Japanese cities is not even talked about. And whether you consider fire bombing civilians a war crime or not, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki most definitely were.

The thing to know about war crimes is that the legal framework for defining and punishing war crimes we have today (even if we make far less use of it than we should) didn't exist back then. There was no legal basis for the Nuremberg trials, legally speaking, other than victor's justice.

The reason no Allied (including Soviet) commanders or politicians were tried after WW2 wasn't that they didn't commit any atrocities, there were simply no international laws they could be charged for violating.

Note: I'm not arguing whether the way the US fought Japan worked or not, or whether the death count would have been higher or lower had they done it differently. I'm merely arguing that objectively speaking not only the "bad guys" have done horrible things to humans in modern wars. And I haven't even mentioned how the Vietnam war is perceived outside of the US.

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#128

Post by cheriot »

coldtea wrote: post #119
cheriot wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to make a point for the post-war era? AFAIK, American WW2 leaders saw it as a choice between invading and dropping nukes. Is there evidence to suggest otherwise?

Yes, though it's not the kind of thing one will find on sugar coated high school history or books from patriotic academics. It's common historical knowledge that the Japanese were pretty much defeated and desperate (out of oil and resources, with the Russians circling them, and they had already examined the possibility and terms of surrender, using USSR as a mediator). Of course to make it less easy, the US insisted…

> I know that the enemy is on its last legs

So they're still fighting and the war is not over yet?

> there's nothing about "invading" that's worse than dropping nukes on civilians

A country's leadership is responsible to its own people first. Truman dropped bombs to avoid sacrificing his people. Tojo let his people die to avoid loosing face.

WW2 ended in a horrific way and the stories popular in the US definitely leave out details that make the US look bad. However your comments read like you've adopted the opposite bias rather than less bias.

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#129

Post by gritzko »

kbart wrote: post #73

Every nation rewrites its history according to contemporary needs and cherry picks (or creates) sources to support it. A good example of today is Russia, where Stalin cult is resurgent and not so honorable history facts (pact with Hitler, Holodomor etc.) are being suppressed or played down[1]. 1. http://www.economist.com/node/10102921

http://i.imgur.com/6eUoctT.png

The history gets rewritten all the time. It is simpler to define and understand it as geological depositions of bullshit.

Archeology is a bit better. (The same, but without the bull- part, literally.)

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#130

Post by nickik »

coldtea wrote: post #119
cheriot wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to make a point for the post-war era? AFAIK, American WW2 leaders saw it as a choice between invading and dropping nukes. Is there evidence to suggest otherwise?

Yes, though it's not the kind of thing one will find on sugar coated high school history or books from patriotic academics. It's common historical knowledge that the Japanese were pretty much defeated and desperate (out of oil and resources, with the Russians circling them, and they had already examined the possibility and terms of surrender, using USSR as a mediator). Of course to make it less easy, the US insisted…

Thats simply false. If you actually study the document of that time, nobody was talking about post war demonstration.

You have essentially 3 ways to defeat Japan. First, invade and take the country, city by city, town by town. Second, bomb them into submission. Second, starve them into submission.

Given the Japanese resilience shown in the war, they were sure that the Japanese would fight a defence to the death of their homeland. Applying scorched earth policy, and more worse things. This would have cost many American lives and a huge amount of both soldiers and civilians in Japan.

The second idea had already been done so much that their was not much left to bomb. From the perspective of death, the nukes were not worse then a couple normal bombing raids. In Tokyo they had already killed more then 250'000 people just by conventional bombing.

The third choice is just as cruel and would have taken a very long time (and they were already doing it anyway, they would just have to wait).

The nukes, from a moral perspective, are nothing more then a step up from normal bombing. Just as fire bombing was a step up from precision bombing that they tried before. The only difference is the fallout, but that comparatively speaking is relatively weak compared to a full on war.

You objection should really be to all bombing of civilians.

What would be your opinion should they have done? Also, if you care about democracy, people did not give a fuck about bombing or nukes, they were all for it.

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