When you cross a swamp, try to do it fast

Sometimes you can win a fight by not fighting, as fighting is actually really expensive and risky
Maybe consider feeding your army. That can be important both in times of war and peace.
Please do not lead a frontal charge uphill into a fortified enemy position. I can't believe I have to explain this to you fucking newbs, but it keeps happening so here we are.
Have you tried being sneaky?
Read history. Sometimes someone has done a thing before you and you can just copy their homework. Sometimes you can see someone else copying homework and use that to your advantage. Sometimes its just good to know about things other than what you, personally, have seen and done.

Sort of reminds me of the story of Boudicca, who famously led the Britons against the Romans and slightly less famously kinda ate shit
I believe they lost the first major engagement to the Romans, as in the first one that wasn't like cleaning up a town garrison.
They chased a much smaller roman force around for a while, until the Romans basically nestled themselves up against a swamp and some thick trees so they couldnt really be flanked.
The Britons all ran in headfirst into heavy infantry and hit a crowd crush so hard they couldn't use their short spears, axes, long swords etc, while the Romans just chewed them up with their little swords. There was no ability to flank, they just threw light infantry right up into heavy, in a big funnel. Then when they started to run away they realized they had walled themselves in with their wagon train. The Romans then crushed them against that. They mostly all died and the Romans ruled Britain for a long time after.
Basically this legendary general and leader of the united tribes of Britain could have been consulted by any 15 year old who played some Rome Total War. Just a comically unforced error.
- Looks like they've learned a lot from Cannae....
- Hey mate, I'm old as shit and I have never had any idea of what am I doing when playing TW battles
- consulted by any 15 year old who played some Rome Total War.
  You're telling me I shouldn't be ashamed for corner camping?
Sounds like Sun Tzu predicted the existence of the Biden Admin and American politics in general.
- Nepo shitheads existed in Ancient China just as much as in contemporary America.
- Zhou Dynasty at his time was already in its last leg tho

It's really good though but you have to be able to take the specific cases Sun Tzu is talking about and apply them to conflict more generally. Like the "look for different kinds of dust clouds to figure out what your enemy is doing" bit doesn't apply much today, but you can look for tell tale signals that offer insight on the actions of your enemies. Are the pigs on foot or in cars? What kinds of weapons are they carrying? Are they in regular uniforms or riot gear. It sounds obvious, but most people have the same understanding of conflict as those ancient noble failsons

Y'all massively overestimate how much the average person understands about conflict and struggle. Sun Tzu has an important place and doesn't deserve all this scoffing.

I have read Sun Tzu and my takeaway is that he wanted to wipe away overconfidence, or the idea that conflict is decided simply by who wants to win more. It's a repeated message of "no, conflict is a risk you're taking and you have to think about it." The entire book is him constantly saying that fighting a war is difficult, you need to take literally every advantage you can get, and you should only fight if you have to or if you vastly outnumber your opponent. Also, run away when you have to and do boring logistics stuff like make sure the horses have water and everyone's getting paid. That's my impression for why business guys like it so much, because their gut instinct is that they're the hottest shit on Earth and don't need to think about how to do anything. They look at Sun Tzu's advice, which is often just "think about doing things before you do it, because you could fail and that would suck" and to them it's a massive revelation because they've never once considered a negative outcome was possible.
- I can't really speak to the cult of business self help, I just find the Art of War a useful manual.
- do boring logistics stuff like make sure the horses have water and everyone's getting paid.
  Once I joined a march in the middle of July. Somewhere between 80-100 degrees, in the sun, miles of marching. I had a big water bladder and snacks and first aid and shit, because I read Sun Tzu and Sun Tzu says you need to pay attention to water. All the libs I was marching with? Totally unprepared for a long march in the July sun. A couple of miles in we had to stop at a gas station and absolutely clean it out of water, like we were all emptying our wallets to buy as much water as they had for people. At that point a call was made to turn around before people started collapsing. Shameful, total logistical failure. Adequate water is the most basic thing, and the libs didn't even consider it.
  Next march I went to, I brought a wagon with like 20 gallons of water, plus a big bag of WHO oral rehydration mixture for people to add to their water if they wanted. Folks emptied me out before we'd gone two miles.
  Sun Tzu is important!
- So why do you figure do so many businesses suck at logistics or the nearest company equivalent if you're not actually in the business of physical things, like process management?
If Sun Tzu was such goofy common sense the FBI would not have infiltrated all these orgs or catch hackers with poor opsec. It’s only obvious because I’m reading it while taking a shit in an air conditioned bathroom. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
Y'all massively overestimate how much the average person understands about conflict and struggle. Sun Tzu has an important place and doesn't deserve all this scoffing.
People think they're too good for The Art of War and then go on to do shit that The Art of War specifically tells you not to do. And people in general need to read up on how to wage war, whether it's guerilla warfare or counterinsurgency or even just conventional warfare. Like, how can you shout "no war the but class war" without a general understanding of what war actually means? How can you even entertain fantasies of waging revolutionary warfare without even reading a single book on how to wage war?
It's also really easy to look at the advice and consider it obvious when you're sitting at home reading it with plenty of time on your hands. It's less obvious when you're in a stressful real world situation.
The stuff that soldiers get taught in basic training also feels really obvious. "Stay physically fit. Be aware of your surroundings. Only point guns at what you want to kill. Follow orders quickly." None of this should feel surprising to anyone with the most basic knowledge of what a soldier does, but drilling it in until it's what you do automatically in the moment is important.
- Dang, good point, never thought of the armchair stress-free aspect before.
- It's important, because in stressful situations, most do not rise to the occasion, but rather fall back on their training. So drilling in the basics during training plays a very important role. It also applies to competitive sports as well.
Clausewitz' On War often frustrates me with how dense and wordy it is, but if nothing else, I think it's made him considerably less likely to be coopted by dipshits than poor Sun Tzu.
- "war is politics by other means, dumbass" doesn't ring as true as "don't attack uphill, idiot"

The Prince is basically the same. It's basically just "please just fuck with other nobles, and when you lock them up and steal their shit go and give it to the public or something, and don't fuck with the common people" and "it's ok that you're a huge dumbass, just please hire someone who's not and then let them do all the real work while you go camping and play soldier in the woods, also pack a lunch."

Machiavelli gets such a bad rap as an evil man, and I really think it's just people who don't understand politics balking at how cruel and nasty politics is.
- My own theory is that it's because Machiavelli himself was a radical republican who was necessarily opposed to what the ruling class thought was polite, and The Prince is basically a blunt treatise on ruling class politicking and strategy without all the pretty lies about nobility or w/e that none of them ever really followed but liked to pretend they did. Not to mention it encourages things that are outright dangerous to an aristocratic system, like emphasizing that noble-on-noble conflict should be brutal and taken all the way to completion instead of treated with decorum and mercy.
  Then liberals followed suit after liberalism subsumed the old aristocratic order into itself, so Machiavelli is the bad evil scheme man instead of the for-his-time-radical liberal who disrespected the old aristocratic system's norms.
  Like I feel that the modern equivalent of The Prince would be if a communist agreed to write a guidebook for the Waltons in exchange for being allowed to return home to the Walmart corpo-fief, and it said they should be resolving their conflict with the Kingdom of the Mouse with PMCs and assassinations instead of the Corporate Court, and they shouldn't stop till all the Mouse's shareholders are dead, then they should give all of Disney's capital to the citizenry to buy their loyalty. Liberals would fucking hate that because it's so uncivil and gives the lie to their idea of a peaceful rules-based order.
- Let's be fair, Machiavelli was a total edgelord about in some aspects of the text.
- Machiavelli explicitly said "use the least amount of tyranny possible" while for some reasons popculture pass this as "use the most tyranny as possible" if not straighforward "MUAHAHAHA bring the horses and rope"
Also, "if you build your army mostly from hired mercenaries, don't be surprised when your enemy hires them out from under you".
- “Do not ride inside a helicopter” -Machiavelli
- Every client is one missed payment away from becoming a target [41] and every target is one bribe away from becoming a client.
  From the 70 Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries.

All warfare is based on deception

This book is very popular in the business community

and people wonder why things are so shit.

The main reason econ and poli sci majors are so obsessed with Sun Tzu and especially Macchiavelli is that the actual good sources on realpolitik are Mao and Lenin and that's considered too dangerous for them, so they get the safe stuff, the utterly nihilistic and immoral Borghia bootlicker and the "archers are kinda good for killing at a distance" drivel instead of having State and Revolution on their reading list.

You cannot stand here slandering my boy Sun Tzu like this. The Art of War is good and explains core concepts around engaging in and managing conflict. It lays out the basics so you have a foundation to build off of. It might seem obvious to you, but most people have absolutely no idea when or why to fight and Sun Tzu explains it.
- For examples, just look at your average armchair general who got their experience from video games! This stuff does not come naturally to people.
- Yeah people gotta remember Sun Tzu in the BCs when dudes were fighting with swords and spears and arrows lol. It’s one of the first texts on military strategy - or conflict management if you wanna be that guy.
  It’s like criticizing someone for writing that lifting heavy objects strategically give you muscles during a period where Jesus was his neighbor.
- They say that the best capitalists are the ones that have read Lenin and Marx.
- I keep seeing Conservative strategy in the frame of vanguard tactics learned from Lenin and it pisses me off; because it is obviously working so well for them, but one also has to look at the fact they are just so loaded and well-funded.
The funniest one I've seen has to be that one book, what is it "48 Laws of Power" or something? That's just packed with translated old Arabic poetry and ends by praising Mao and calling people who think they can learn leadership from a book dumbasses. IIRC the forward is something like "so yeah this book is mostly based on the bullshit that I've seen the worst people I've ever known do, plus some literature I think is cool," too.
- Mike Tyson read Mao in prison and it changed his life so much that he got a tattoo of him lol. Too bad he’s a piece of shit otherwise it’d be funny to point this out.
The founder of BuzzFeed was a Maoist in college. Or at the very least, he read Mao and somehow influenced him to create BuzzFeed.
- What type of liberalism are you buzzfeed quiz
- Jameson and Delueze
  Capitalism and schizophrenia
  Peretti's article is an interpretation of Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" and Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, both of which use "schizophrenia" as a key part of their analysis.
  "Schizophrenia" here doesn't have much of anything to do with the actual mental illness (as Jameson writes, "I'm not even sure that the view of schizophrenia I'm about to outline … is clinically accurate"), and in retrospect the use of an actual illness from which millions of people suffer as an abstract tool of cultural criticism is rather cringe-inducing. I use the term here since it's the preferred jargon within cultural theory, but, for the record, it's gross and they should have found another word.
  In context of the theory, both Jameson and Deleuze/Guattari use "schizophrenic" to refer to a person without a defined identity or ego. Jameson, for one, thinks "late" capitalism (which he said was beginning to emerge in the mid-1980s, as he was writing) causes that kind of schizophrenia. People usually build identities, after all, at least in part from cultural items (songs, movies, TV shows, advertisements, etc) they encounter. But Jameson thinks that if those items are presented in a scrambled, confusing way to people, they have a hard time forming identities, and run the risk of schizophrenia.
  https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used-to-write-marxist-theory-and-it-explains
All the better.
How does that saying go - never interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake?
Plenty of these poli sci majors are going to be opposed to the revolution, if not most of them. I can't imagine many econ majors are going to make it through liberal ideology ✨but reified with statistics✨ and end up on the right side of history.
Let them study garbage and produce garbage takes and make a mess of everything. Paper tigers etc. etc.

Try and stand somewhere where the sun is in their eyes, instead of in your eyes

Not only have I used this, at one point I made a shield with a mirror on it so I could be that fucker and direct light in to people's eyes if I didn't have the sun. If you want to intimidate someone, for instance, put the sun in their eyes so they have to squint at you.

The whole "appear strong when you are weak, and weak when you are strong" nonsense is so easy to spot when people and companies apply it. Everyone can tell when someone is fronting and faking confidence, or faking being humble, nobody is fooled.

Other stuff from The Art of War is more useful though.

Terrible take. People think they can tell when someone is bluffing or lying, mostly they cannot. As someone who does a lot of contract negotiations, who has to bluff all the time, and as someone who also does a lot of audits where I have to spot bluffing all the time I see it both ways. Most people are bad at spotting liars and bullshitters, however good news, most people are also absolutely terrible liars and bullshitters so you don’t need to be good, however this gives a false sense of security in your instincts, you are not Sherlock Holmes, you can’t sniff out a lie a mile away and if your opposite number is half way competent the only way to be really know is to do your homework and catch people out in hard data and in evidence. Me included, I’ve been fooled before and doubtless will be fooled again. It’s the nature of the beast. The only way you can reliably find truth is to know more about your opposite number than they do and to test every premise you can. Conversely the more you can control knowledge about your own position and obfuscate the more margin you have to present a position to your benefit. So long as you’re smart enough to understand what your opponent can know and can’t know it’s very easy to distort a picture.
- Word. The importance of controlling information is a theme Sun Tzu hammers on again and again. You want to know as much as possible while doing everything in your power to actively deny your enemies any useful information.
Everyone can tell when someone is fronting and faking confidence, or faking being humble, nobody is fooled.
The folks who do it badly tend to stick out. But this is far more useful on the margins, where a firm's performance is genuinely not well-understood.
Companies understating/overstating their expected earnings to manipulate their stock price is a time-tested means of legalized insider trading. Firms, like Apple, used to do an exceptional job of sitting on products in development until the last moment, generating all sorts of ambient hype whether or not they had anything to brag about releasing. Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway is a textbook case of "talk small and carry a big balance sheet" and routinely outperforms its competitors as a result.
Exploiting gaps between your perceived and actual value is functionally how value-investors make money. If nobody ever got fooled, equities would never value themselves different from the perfectly predicted book value.
During WWII all sides used decoy vehicles, supply depots, factories. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.
During the age of sail warships would sometimes pretend to be civilian vessels to lure privateers in. When the privateers closed in the warship would run up it's colors, their national flag, and open fire at point-blank.
There's a standard method for an infantry unit retreating from an ambush - Instead of running straight away from the ambush you retreat at an angle from the ambush. Troops leapfrog past each other, firing back at the ambushing for. Since they're moving at an agle it sounds like more soldiers are joining the fight from the flank. The purpose is to deceive the ambushing forces in to thinking you've got more soldiers than you do so they don't pursue you.
There's a famous story from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Zhuge Liang is famous for being the smartest sonoremovedun in China. He routinely pulled off brilliant strategic and tactical victories, achieving stunning results effortlessly. Well, one time, he was supposed to defend a city, but his army was still two or three days away, marching hard to catch up with him. An enemy army was approaching the city and Zhuge Liang had basically no forces to defend with.
This absolute fucking madman opens the gates, then sits out from calmly playing guitar. When the enemy general gets word that Zhuge Liang is sitting outside with the gates wide open having a jam session he says "Okay fuck this. I don't want to deal with Zhuge Liang's bullshit today. let's go attack somewhere else" and they leave.
More than one prisoner has escaped prison using fake guns carved out of soap or whatever they had handy. Lots of people have used a finger, or a piece of pipe, or whatever to convince a bank teller they have a gun when they don't.
Cold Reading is a classic tactic in most cons and in interogations where you pretend to know more than you do, using carefully worded questions to convince the person you're interogating that you already know what's up, to convince them to talk about what's up, when you really don't know what's up.
Counterpoint: Tesla, SpaceX and everything else
touches
The whole "appear strong when you are weak, and weak when you are strong" nonsense is so easy to spot
I mean look at Wirecard, that shit works out

"You'll do better if you know the capabilities of your army and the enemy's army before a fight."

It sounds simple, but look at Fascism. Their ideological framing of the enemy as both everywhere and all powerful, but also week and feeble, makes them incapable of assessing what's really happening.
Or that bit where it says - If you're surrounded, with no way out, you must fight? The liberals are begging anyone to save them from having to fight. They're up against a wall with no where to go except through the enemy, and they're preying to a senile, evil old man to save them.
It all sounds simple on the page, but then you look at how people actually behave.
- The only thing I'd say about that is it seems like it's working out just fine for the fascists but like you said in your second point that wouldn't be possible if the libs opposing them didn't think that actually opposing them was a moral failure.

'How to Not Be a Dumbass: A Guide for Fail Sons' by Sun Tsu

Audio book narrated by Kurtwood Smith

The ancient version of "PROTIP: To defeat the Cyberdemon, shoot at it until it dies."

: how do I get into silver rank?

: throw games until you fall out of gold
- Lmao that's like the old joke about pfand.
  What's the easiest way to become a millionaire?
  Buy a million beers, drink them and cash in the pfand.

i mean that comprises the whole genre, really, even the modern military manuals are for idiot boots & their nepo officers

There are interesting cultural differences between the manuals that crop up, though. Like during the Cold War, American manuals for low level officers really emphasized understanding the concepts of combined arms warfare and applying them dynamically to evolving situations, while the Soviet manuals were more like a flowchart - enemy has you out-ranged? Get closer. Enemy has fortified the city? Go around. Stuff like that.

Many modern translations of the Art of War are misappropriated and forcefully applied to business or politics.

Sun Tzu was a Taoist, who believed in simplicity, spontaneity, equilibrium, and so forth. He believed in flowing effortlessly like water finding is level and weathering a stronger enemy.