#strongmen

[crispyafterdark]

It's the

"Manly Man Yelling and Dropping Heavy Things Hour!"

Featuring these two hunks!

episode: Operation C.O.U.C.H.

[officialboredom]

We gotta introduce these strongmen and bodybuilders and stuff to bisexuality. They'll just go and post the most homoerotic video of them by themselves or with other men and then not act on it.

[muscletitanlover]

Eddie Hall and Brian Shaw, strongmen

[strudelknight]

That's the catchphrase...

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Edward Reece, the famous strongman, shows his strength by supporting a troupe of four actresses while he is suspended between two chairs, March 9, 1927.

Photo: Underwood Archives via Fine Art America

[tuxedomoon-64]

[jefkphotography]

Strongman, 12,5 KG dumbbell pinch grip lift and hold

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

[herculespower]

Mighty Khan from Pakistan, current holder of the Worlds Strongest Full Nelson title, this year he takes on British Hercules

[postcard-from-the-past]

Parisian strongmen

French vintage postcard

[2000sfeature]

needing a blonde, tall, strong british man fr 😔 💔

[strudelknight]

Dumb as a rock

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[tuxedomoon-64]

[jefkphotography]

Me, a strongman with handbend metal in my left hand.

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Strongmen can lose power in stages. That was the case with Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. After twenty years of tyranny, his own Fascist Grand Council removed him from power in 1943 for incompetent leadership after the Allies landed in Sicily. Adolf Hitler revived him as head of a puppet state (the Republic of Salò), and he resumed the ruinous war that ultimately led to his death.

Will a wartime erosion of power, jump-started by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin's show of force, eventually take down Russian President Vladimir Putin too?

Seen from the perspective of authoritarian history, this moment stands out as a breach of a system--one of those stress tests that wars can bring--and as an omen of what could befall Putin in the future.

Prigozhin's action reminds us of the fragility of authoritarian power and why such leaders live in fear of being overthrown. It brought to mind a passage from the "Endings" chapter of Strongmen. "The authoritarian playbook has no chapter on failure. It does not foresee the leader’s people turning against him, from military men he trained to young people he indoctrinated to women he rewarded for having babies."

Authoritarian leaders arrange things to prevent intimations of that failure from reaching their ears. They surround themselves with sycophants who won't tell them the truth about their incompetence and puff up their personality cults and aura of omnipotence. Ironically, this "institutionalized lying," as I call it, only increases their insecurity and obtuseness about what is happening on the ground, in their ministries and among their regular and irregular armed forces.

The longer such individuals stay in power, the more defensive and paranoid they become, which is why they multiply their bunkers and informants, monitoring everyone and trusting no one.

While Putin blames the West for threatening Russia's cultural and moral integrity, his greatest fear seems to be the prospect of the Russian Federation imploding from within, repeating in miniature the breakup of the USSR that so scarred and shaped him.

All autocrats fear being overwhelmed by "the mob" that could come for them. But Putin's particular obsession with tropes of disintegration speaks to his terror of everything falling apart, of the center not holding, of the power verticals he has so carefully assembled crumbling.

--Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Some Strongmen Lose Power in Stages,” Lucid