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Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

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Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#131

Post by nickik »

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.

Ah, those famous Rape bombs.

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#132

Post by daemoncoder »

cjslep wrote: post #117
bbotond wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Ugly points in the USA's history: Trail of Tears. Slavery. Battle of Blair Mountain. Japanese Internment. Kent State. Jim Crowe. Abu Gahrib. Guantanamo. Drone Strikes. Global Surveillance. History is written, there's just more eye-catchy things to get distracted over. Game of Thrones. Brexit. Reality TV. Concerts. Drugs. Sex. Food. Cars. Video Games.

Beginning to sound like Billy Joel - We Didn't Start The Fire

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#133

Post by qrendel »

__s wrote: post #123
pmoriarty wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

Specifically, Vonnegut was present at and survived the bombing of Dresden, which became part of (the main?) the inspiration for Slaughterhouse-Five: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut#World_War_II

The book makes a lot more sense once you understand Vonnegut's history with the bombing.

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#134

Post by justinclift »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #83
SonOfLilit wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ninjutsu is the hackers' martial art - it's full of clever exploits of the body based on a very good understanding of the physics involved. It emphasizes practicing real fighting situations.

Is there any schools today teaching real Ninjutsu?

There should be at least several around still, depending on where you're located.

If you're in Australia, this group seems legit (I used to train with them years ago): http://www.tesoma.com

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#135

Post by pluma »

wbl wrote: post #44
ekianjo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more you learn about the real nature of ww2, you realize that there was no good side in that war. Just two evils fighting each other. You don't win wars without killing people, and therefore all sides are evil by definition. The little process of judging "war criminals" after the war is over is just for one's good conscience. If the Allies had lost they would have been judged as war criminals by the victors too…

Where is the American Treblinka, the British Buchenwald? WWII was against genocidal maniacs who starved entire countries and destroyed Yiddish speaking culture.

The Allied involvement in WW2 never was about the holocaust. In fact, the full extent of the holocaust only became apparent after WW2 as Allied soldiers had liberated the concentration camps and discovered the paperwork.

Also don't think that anybody in WW2 cared about the Jews. There are enough stories about Jewish refugees being rejected at borders and sent back to face certain death because nobody believed them or cared about them. Hating Jews was socially acceptable everywhere until the Nazis showed what that kind of thinking can lead to in a modern society (with the technical and political means to actually round up and murder people at scale).

The US only got directly involved in WW2 when it had no other choice (technically, Germany declared war on them after the US declared war on Japan). Britain only declared war on Germany because it had a pact with Poland which Germany invaded -- Germany had already annexed Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia at that point.

Heck, Italy and Hungary were allied with Germany for a significant part of the war. Not to mention various countries like Spain and Finland that fought alongside or at least supported Nazi Germany.

WW2 was a world war. It's called that because it involved so many countries that were at war with each other throughout the entire world at once over an extended amount of time. There were many reasons for each individual conflict and WW2 itself is just the aggregate of all of these (with the two major ones of course being the attempted domination of Europe by Nazi Germany and the attempted domination of East Asia by Japan).

It wasn't about ideals or principles. It was about power and territory. And for the Allies it was mostly about survival: a German victory would have meant vassalage for Western Europe and annihilation for most of Eastern Europe (because the Nazis wanted that territory as "lebensraum", i.e. living space, meaning the existing population had to go).

TL;DR: While halting the genocides was a nice side-effect of defeating Germany, the Allies weren't in it to save the Jews.

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#136

Post by jbmorgado »

cheriot wrote: post #102
coldtea wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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?

> Is there evidence to suggest otherwise?

Totally. Although that's the indoctrination that the USA wants to spread, unbiased authors always point that the war was about to finish for the Japanese and if the USA didn't want to invade them China would take care of it soon anyway.

Therefore, it's generally accepted outside the USA that the bombs were just a warning to a rising URSS that the USA now had the upper hand.

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#137

Post by justinclift »

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?

Arnis / Escrima / Kali can be useful for this.

One of the unfortunate lessons I learned early on in real life, is that "self defense" systems which only cover one-on-one fighting (eg the Tae Kwon Do schools I've seen) are close to useless in real life. eg in a bar fight, or a group of drunks decides to pick on you when you walk past. I'd studied Tae Kwon Do for about fours years before discovering this (the hard way doh!). :/

With Ninjutsu and Arnis (at least some schools), training for combat against multiple opponents is a core part of it. So, less likely to suck in real world situations.

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#138

Post by panglott »

euske wrote: post #45

Fun (though unverifiable) fact: No one reads Inazo Nitobe, or that "Hagakure" thing in today's Japan. It looks like these are mostly for Westerner's consumption. "Bushido" today is often taken as some weird/quaint moral code that is often depicted comically. It could be interesting for a historical viewpoint, but I don't think these historic texts are very useful to explain the modern-day Japan. It's a bit like readi…

Actually, I wonder if de Tocqueville has anything to say about Trump.

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#139

Post by speeder »

aedron wrote: post #104
hoodoof wrote: post #4

Related but at a tangent - after a lifetime of interest in karate I came to realise that most of the stuff taught at karate is not practical. Katas and karate punches and kicks - most of this better thought of more as dancing or ceremonial. A bit like Tai Chi - except that Tai Chi claims no real world martial value. The myth remains however of karate being great self defence training. Our local karate club is packed…

I like watching MMA because it pits all the various styles against eachother with a minimum set of rules. This way, it becomes very apparent which styles work and which don't. Predictably, more practical and direct styles like boxing and grappling form the bread and butter for most participants and make up the majority of fights. But interestingly, very high-level practitioners of traditional styles, such as karate a…

I used to train kung long fist.

I was training a kati (kata in Chinese) that was very flowery (literally, the name of the routine had the word "flower" in it).

It felt useless and so I asked the teacher what some weirder moves were used for...

First thing he was pleased I asked, most students doesn't. Then he showed me... it was just brutal, several moves were bone breaking grappling moves designed to be used as counter attacks.

I suspect most practitioners don't know this because people don't want to learn this grossly violent stuff, and so teachers don't make and effort to teach what exactly they are learning, and several of the moves were risky and opportunistic, not the thing a newbie can pull off in actual combat.

Re: Bushido: Way of Total Bullshit

#140

Post by cyberferret »

nickik wrote: post #131
pmoriarty wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Ah, those famous Rape bombs.

Hmm...because having the flesh burned off your bones or dying slowly of long term radiation sickness etc. is a better option than being raped and bayonetted? Why don't we take a straw poll on that?
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