> 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.
> 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.