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Oda Ujiharu: Why the ‘weakest Samurai warlord’ is admired

tokyoweekender.com

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Re: Oda Ujiharu: Why the ‘weakest Samurai warlord’ is admired

#71
post #26
post #3

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.

Re: Oda Ujiharu: Why the ‘weakest Samurai warlord’ is admired

#72
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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

> The general principle is that a bad economy only has bad results and there's no reason to want one.

People don't want a bad economy. But in a good economy they will vote for things that create a bad economy.

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