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Nornagest comments on SotW: Check Consequentialism - Less Wrong
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Comments (311)
Short exercise. Does anyone actually think pirates stand a chance against professionally trained assassins? I thought the only reason people defend pirates is because it's a way to say both of them (or their identity-memes) are just so damn cool.
The identity-memes are the only reason the question even exists. Historical pirates were mostly desperate or ambitious but otherwise ordinary sailors, and usually had pretty short careers. Historical ninja were usually dirt-poor burakumin without much in the way of reliable support, and -- in common with a lot of other historical assassins -- were individually used more as ammunition than as soldiers. I'm having a hard time coming up with a reasonable scenario in which they (as opposed to the pop-cultural image of either one) would have any incentive to fight, and if you stretch to create one the outcome would be almost completely determined by the circumstances.
Well, piracy was a huge thing in Japan and China and so on, so if there were any conflicts between them, they could have been recorded. But I don't see why they would have been- typically, there was no significant benefit to killing a pirate captain (rather than sinking his boat or hanging him and all of his crew), and so assassins would only be employed against people whose deaths were meaningful enough (generals, title-holders, etc.). Similarly, I doubt ninja would transport valuable cargo all that frequency, and typically it was Japanese pirates preying on Chinese vessels anyway.
I mean, pirate just means "sea bandit" but evokes the image of mostly European sea bandits at a time when navies were based far away, coastal land was essentially free, and cargoes were really valuable, because that's when there was a veneer of excitement over lowlifes murdering for fun and profit.
Even that's pretty time-period dependent; check out e.g. Jean Lafitte's utterly ridiculous career.
Nornangest!History seems to be different to Wikipedia!History. My limited familiarity only extends to the latter.
Presuming you're talking about my take on ninja I'm informed mainly by martial arts lore, which (outside the schools calling themselves ninjutsu, which incidentally are almost all modern inventions) is probably a little more interested in demystifying the tradition than the Wikipedia authors are. The wiki definitely puts a more glamorous spin on it, but reading between the lines I don't see too much that's actually incompatible with my take -- note the emphasis on infiltration and sabotage rather than combat, and that the field agents were mostly drawn from the lower class.