strongmen

You can't just ship free food in, strongmen will capture it and put it to their own use.

First it was the Kings, but at least then common people knew to stay away from strongmen.

Take a look at what decathletes, strongmen, and even the CrossFit Games athletes are doing - it certainly isn't CrossFit.

You would expect to see a lot more strongmen get to be over 80 years old if that was true.

They were both ruled by strongmen on the fence between dictatorship and autoritarian democracy.

CrossFitters are not training to be bodybuilders, powerlifters, strongmen, football players or sprinters, they are training to be CrossFitters.

That is correct, but strongmen in your example exist exclusively to extract money (the ultimate common denominator in almost all societies) from weaker people/tribes.

I would add that to some extent the current crop of strongmen have figured out some ways of suppressing democracy more quietly than strongmen of old; Putin, for example, cloaks repression in bureaucracy.

There are no local police, just strongmen.

It boggles the mind that the only way to make things work is (apparently) political strongmen and what are in essence forms of exploitative labour arrangements under one guise or another.

Let the strongmen declare themselves Kings or Presidents-for-Life or whatever, but encourage them to actually foster liberty for their subjects, rather than trying to run an entire nation from a single desk.

Regardless of the posturing of both sides governments, Korea is one country with a grievous split artificially placed between the two by the warring strongmen placed in their positions by superpowers with limited or non-existent information about the native culture.