I have a friend who constantly references this book when I try to talk about history and human societies.
Tell me why it’s all bogus, and I’ll make him cry.
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>Guns, germs, and steel
>shows amerindian
I though by the title that this was about germans
No, we call them “Krauts”, not “Germs”.
https://www.amren.com/news/2008/06/squaring_the_ci/
This is good. I will read it now.
> I don't like it, so it is wrong.
A close second.
>amren
I don't like it, so it is wrong.
It's a just-so story.
>Animals in Africa were not domesticated so they couldn't be
>An irrelevant tirade about diseases when in reality diseases were exchanged equally upon contact between people, it's just that Europeans usually had more people and came from a more densely packed region which gave them more immunities from the start
>Something about trade and technology traveling east to west rather than north to south that just completely ignores the fact that Aztecs existed
>BTFO's environmentalism by claiming some random islander trribesman should be more intelligent than an average European when we have a multitude of tests that demonstrate that isn't so
Actually reading the book is the best counter against it ironically. Diamond was just another wizard of Lysenko casting his spells of environmental determinism,
Dilate, commie troony
Are you declaring your intent and describing yourself or did you just click the wrong post?
The environmental conditions of Europe are present on other regions of the world. And China dominated most of history in terms of development. He also ignores that European culture, and the constant competition European-states and institutions drove progress. The Chinese would still be the most powerful civilization on earth if there culture wasn’t so anti-progress.
>The Chinese would still be the most powerful civilization on earth if there culture wasn’t so anti-progress.
elaborate on what that means to you
written by a israelite.
Europe is a shitty low resource cold peninsula on the western asscheek of Eurasia, the idea Europeans would win based on geography is pure stupidity.
easily the most kino coastline on earth though. It's clear where the protagonists live because the creator gave the map more attention there.
Europe has all the iron and farmland in the world and Africa has nothing.
>Africa has no farmland
>Africa has no iron
African soil is so iron riched that its fricking red
That's a idiotic argument. European soil is brown because it has iron and everything else. The only "good resources" troll you might make is india, and it still has low resources compared to its density.
Because jared diamond is a hack that overextrapolates geographic data to the complexity of all human civilization
Book written by an ornithologist who tought to himself "Bro humans are like, uuuh birds lmao". He quite simply doesn't understand shit about human nature or society and tried to come up with universal laws for how civilizations act as if they were his homosexual birds
It’s reductive
It is not really possible to explain how he is wrong in casual conversation between zoomers. His errors are confirmation bias and leaping to conclusions and you have to go into detail to see why. His basic premise is right, geography does play an overwhelming role in the fates of civilizations, however he does a poor job of actually proving it, which is also difficult to explain.
An analogy would be like trying to explain e=mc2. We know it is true, but I know frick all about special relativity and I wouldn't pretend to know. Jared Diamond was completely unqualified to examine something as complex and multi-faceted as the driving forces behind civilization and try to size it all up and condense it into one book. He points out a few obvious things "oh, they died of diseases, and maybe livestock meant old world diseases were worse", but then he goes off on a tangent about other things, like China's coastline being some kind of major factor. He doesn't elaborate on the effect on trade or anything, he says something about pirates and kind of leaves it there I recall.
It is just shit and you'll never be able to explain it. I'd give up. Maybe read it again, find a good example like the coastline bullshit and try to use that as an example of his errors in general and try to help your friend understand the logical fallacies, that might be your best hope if you can bother to do it.
Reminder that Diamond is a moron and that his Easter Island theory has been proved false
jesus christ, do you know what a correlation is. if you really want to blow your mind, compare monthly ice cream sales to monthly wild fires.
So literally temperature
that's the point of the analogy. both are influenced by another factor, but the correlation between ice cream sales and wild fires doesn't mean one causes the other.
...I don't think you got my point
The real reason is resources but to his, gdp=tourism.
Elephants are tame and not domesticated and yet we still use them to accomplish useful work.
Reductive, yet evidenced and explanatory.
And destroyed in this very thread.
Tell him to read this:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/guns-germs-and-steel-revisited/
havent read it and won't read it but it's an oversimplified premise that completely ignores the huge and complicated role that culture has on human societies. I doubt he gives a very good reason for why europeans colonized the world instead of the chinese, when the chinese had all the resources, climate and diseases the europeans had and more.
It's just bad histrory
>I doubt he gives a very good reason for why europeans colonized the world instead of the chinese, when the chinese had all the resources, climate and diseases the europeans had and more.
I don't know Diamond's answer to this but this is absolutely primarily geography. First of all, do you realize how big the Pacific is? how far are you going to sail not knowing where land is before you turn back or simply starve because you weren't prepared.
yes
>bantoids discover farming and iron
>genocide everything north of the kalahari