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As I said in the previous thread, that's not the meme, it's an strawman of the meme.
Ain't nobody saying that because they think "weak men" can't swing a sword, shoot a gun, or push a button just as well as "strong men".
The meme is obviously tangentially related to military, but ain't nobody ever said that hard times necessarily come at the hands of defeat by the enemy. Ain't nobody said that weak mean means weak on the battlefield.
The meme refers to a cyclical "boom-bust" cycle, rather than competition between peer nations. A country of weak men creating hard times can be more powerful militarily than a country of strong men creating good times
The cyclical boom bust cycle is highly relative. Out in the african jungle, there can be tribes going through the cycle of good times and hard times while beating each other with sticks, while at the same time modern industrial states are going through the same cycle of good times and hard times while blowing each other with ballistic missiles. But again military conflict is not necessary for a cycle of good times and hard times to happen.
Of course if the strong men in an african tribal village leading their ascendant tribe encounter the forces of a heavily declining industrial state, of course they're going to get absolutely destroyed. But if they don't encounter each other, the tribe can still be on its way to good times, and the industrial state on its way to bad times.
History has shown that the decline of eminent powers is inevitable. In nearly all cases of that, it's due to the top dog screwing themselves over royally.
Hard times don't immediately create strong men, and good times don't immediately great weak men. They're breeding grounds for the next generation
You can say that there's nowhere to go but up from rock bottom, and there's nowhere to go but down from being top dog, but I don't fully buy it. I don't think it's simply brownian motion that causes this, but rather that it's actually a cyclical cycle of some sort.
The decline of many eminent corporations in the past is kind of a microcosm of the same phenomenon. Megacorporations have all the advantages: more information, better ip banked up, connections, and money to invest, yet there are many such cases where they've ended up in the dumpster. Being top dog often results in a loss of the dna that made a corporation ascendant in the first place.
Do you really want me to go digging up examples on Twitter? Very well.
https://x.com/ashukla09/status/1513940563917041664?s=20
https://x.com/MarkOrmrod/status/1941804527914537373?s=20
https://x.com/AntonKreil/status/1969104105894183202?s=20
https://x.com/romanhelmetguy/status/1684935042554843137?s=20 (Spartan glazing, in the context of an ACOUP post)
https://x.com/infantrydort/status/2023174525714645445?s=20 (More Sparta glazing)
https://x.com/demos_network/status/2019499416156098933?s=20 (It's even got a gif from 300!)
https://x.com/bitcoinzay/status/1488910846063484930?s=20 (Bruh)
Happy? You want more of this slop? My point was that it exists in the wild.
If you collapse the course of a civilization into "hard times" and "good times" then I would interested to see how you didn't get a cycle out of it.
You acknowledge that the "cycle" is variable, and grossly so depending on context. Great, does that offer any predictive value? Can you pinpoint the threshold of "decadence" where the odds of collapse skyrocket, or the degree of character-building hardship that ensures a society moves onto the good stuff?
If you can't, then the theory is borderline useless. It only beats one alternative, which is that literally nothing ever happens.
That is a phase shift, it should preserve the overall pattern.
Corporations are not nations. More importantly, you have omitted what I think is most necessary to have this actually be a supportive argument: that corporations or companies that go through bad times tend to emerge stronger, and that that bad times breed better companies. It's good that you don't say that, because it's not true. A far more common result is that they go bust too. Unfortunately that means you're selectively paying attention to one side of the argument.
How do any of those tweets reference military victory at all? They don't.
ok...
ok...
ok...
Has nothing to do with the good times / hard times meme at all
Also has nothing to do with the good times / hard times meme at all
This is the closest you get, but this tweet would work equally well with any gif of a badass looking guy
This uses the meme, but it has no connection between strong/weak men and military victory.
So it seems like your collection of slop tweets exactly proves my point. Ain't nobody saying that because they think "weak men" can't swing a sword, shoot a gun, or push a button just as well as "strong men".
I never said it was a particularly useful or thought provoking theory, just one that's quite a bit more useful than the strawman you make it out to be.
It actually beats a quite significant theory though, that is: "the winners keep winning, forever." Simple models, such as those in chess, 4x games, etc, show that once one side has a decisive advantage, it's already game over. But civilizations in real life don't follow the same pattern.
In some sense you might say it's stating the obvious. But why is that a problem? Tons of memes state the obvious, that's what makes them accessible. That doesn't make them wrong.
My intent was to demonstrate examples of the phrase in the wild, the connotations seem clear to me, even when they're not strictly military.
Huh? Did you miss:
There are two implication is that the Great Depression was a hard time, which created the strong men who fought in WW2. Alternatively, both count as hard times, and created a generation of strong men who produced the good times from the 1940s to 1970. Since it references a literal world war, what else do you want?I can only apologize for the poor quality tweets, but Ywitter's indexing sucks. I went to the bother of finding at least one robust example:
https://x.com/OrdainedPrepper/status/2018394819597660297?s=20
Please try and guess the context first. It's a reply toa woman complaining about working 9-5s .
I'm sure there are more out there, but I'm calling it a night.
It's hardly my fault that the tweets are slop when the topic is slop and the search functionality is trash. I think it's rather clear that unironic admiration of the Spartans as superlative warriors is relevant to the thesis, though they used spears rather than swords for the most part. It'll have to do for now.
I disagree that you have demonstrated this.
Is anyone making that claim? Very well, your approach beats the two maximally degenerate models.
The obvious is the Motte. The bailey is all the additional extensions heapened on it. Devereaux does not contest that nations rise and fall, because that is obviously true. Neither do I. We both claim that the version he specified is immensely useless. The more you steelman the idea, the more it becomes something mundane. Add enough caveats, and you're describing standard history.
I also note that you haven't addressed my point about corporations, as of the time of this edit.
Both of these tweets unambiguously point to the war itself as being the bad times. And the good times are built by the strong men that came out of it.
None of the tweets make any connection with strong men = winning wars. That's exactly the insane strawman you and acoup guy are trying to make.
I disagree that you have demonstrated this.
Certainly acoup guy's interpretation of the meme is useless. But exactly what I'm saying is that it's a strawman.
If you can give me some actual examples where people claim that hard times -> strong men = military prowess, then I will be inclined to believe that it's not a strawman.
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But if the meme was true, you would expect basically every society to see a cycle of uprisings from the lower class that overtake the complacent upper class folks. The new rulers would then get complacent over time, and their descendants who only knew good times would be overthrown by the underclass created by their parents. You would expect a good deal of social mobility where rich kids rot while the poor amass power until the positions are reversed.
Yet that does not happen. The poor stay poor, the rich get richer. Money flows towards wealth, and power creates more power. The same families stay well-off for generations and usually your parent's social position is a strong predictor for how your life will turn out. This is the opposite of the meme. Even in countries like the US where your rights are (mostly) not dictated by your social standing, people who break out of poverty are incredibly rare.
I think appeal stems from the idea that people grow in the face of adversity and get complacent when everything is handed to them. I think this much is true. But it does not at all follow that hard times create strong men. Humans need the right amount of adversity to grow - too much will damage you - along with good role models, food, and shelter. You need some amount of abundance for this. Good times, in other words. So unless you actually mean to say "complacency creates weak men" (which is so trivially true as to be uninteresting), I also do not believe it holds up.
I literally said that it's a description of cycles, not of relative power. The poors during good times may be weaker than the rich during bad times.
It's even in the words of the meme "good times" and "bad times". Simply being in a slum doesn't subject you to bad times.
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This definitely is not an inevitable historical constant, otherwise we would be ruled by Sumerian priest-kings or something.
Which tbf is a pretty fun conspiracy theory.
Given enough time, random chance ensures that things will change. But in general terms it seems to be true. If someone is born rich, odds are they will stay rich. Someone born to a poor alcoholic will likely stay in the underclass. Even then, exceptional people prevail and rise above what you would expect. But it is more common to stay in the class you were born in, and to my knowledge, this has always been the case.
If there was an iron law of history that every four generations like clockwork the meritorious in the lower classes would rise up and take the place of the decrepit in the upper classes, this would still be true. It's quite possible for there to be both a cycle of uprisings from the lower class that overtake the complacent upper class folks and for most people to stay in the same social class as their parents.
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