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Are you active in any of tho relevant fields? If not, then why do you think you are better qualified to judge the academic quality of his work than actual academics with the proper background?
What’s the “proper background” to comment on a pop anthropology book?
Since this thread seems so opposed to the 'environmental' causes of collapse that Diamond proposes, the Turchin theories on how societies naturally go through stages that lead to collapse is interesting second train of thought.
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Yeah. The Mongols were on a summer vacation, the Persian Empire wasn't invading ancient Greece, they were just sightseeing, the Vikings (Scandinavian not central european IMO) were just doing some exuberant boating, the Hans just wanted to sojourn in the Jungles of Vietnam, the Ottomans were just misguided proseletyzers, the Rus were just bored from Winter, etc. The Japanese in WWII were just looking for some iron an…
For anyone interested, I highly recommend George Carlin (not the comedian)'s podcast series (4 episodes iirc) about the Mongolian conquests. Really interesting. Also, on the "almost conquered Europe", I always find it quite mindblowing that they almost conquered Europe - with their light reconnaissance force. The main army was waiting while the lighter 10k horse force did some recon. While doing their recon they wipe…
I no longer have a copy, so from memory.... The book opens with a sequence of Jarrad discussing with a New Guineaian, why it was Europeans that went to New Guinea, and not the other way around He goes on to discuss this, as if Europeans were the first outsiders there (we are not talking about the Highlands, that is more complex) Where he was having the conversation there had been at least four thousand years of inter…
Sorry to be pedantic, but this really grates. At the very least it makes me wonder about the precision of your recollection of the content of the book.
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Never said it did. Just felt like making a little historical aside. >> What "people" say or write the one-dimensional stories you repeat? Lots and lots of people throughout my life. Sorry I don't have any references and so on. I've heard people say variously that it was gunpowder, horses, or steel. I've heard this from teachers at school, from friends at casual conversations, from fellow wargamers when discussing his…
We can agree that too many regular people don't know much about history, and what they do know comes from movies and story books. I thought you meant to refer to historians or scholars, who should know better.
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For anyone interested, I highly recommend George Carlin (not the comedian)'s podcast series (4 episodes iirc) about the Mongolian conquests. Really interesting. Also, on the "almost conquered Europe", I always find it quite mindblowing that they almost conquered Europe - with their light reconnaissance force. The main army was waiting while the lighter 10k horse force did some recon. While doing their recon they wipe…
Yes. Luck. There are a few other posters in this thread that objected to Diamond because he seemed too Euro Centric apologist, the argument being "well why didn't the East win". But sometimes it does turn on a flip of a coin. The Mongols (eastern power) could have won, and dominated, and colonized the world. And we would all be studying how horrible Mongol Colonialism was. Sometimes history does swing on singular eve…
that presumes that human culture would have developed the ideas regarding colonialism which we have and which after all are a late developed critique that would probably not have been possible without the ideas of humanism and similar intellectual branches, and the exposure of those ideas to people who were being oppressed by forces that claimed to espouse the same.
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Yeah. The Mongols were on a summer vacation, the Persian Empire wasn't invading ancient Greece, they were just sightseeing, the Vikings (Scandinavian not central european IMO) were just doing some exuberant boating, the Hans just wanted to sojourn in the Jungles of Vietnam, the Ottomans were just misguided proseletyzers, the Rus were just bored from Winter, etc. The Japanese in WWII were just looking for some iron an…
For anyone interested, I highly recommend George Carlin (not the comedian)'s podcast series (4 episodes iirc) about the Mongolian conquests. Really interesting. Also, on the "almost conquered Europe", I always find it quite mindblowing that they almost conquered Europe - with their light reconnaissance force. The main army was waiting while the lighter 10k horse force did some recon. While doing their recon they wipe…
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And part of Diamond's book was about how geography helped form free markets.
Sorry, free markets are not dependent on geography. Any country/civilization can adopt them any time they want to.
> Diamond absolves Europeans of blame for the crimes of imperialism through his geographical determinism, since the conquerors couldn’t help but seize the helpless Americas. Running through the article is the notion that somehow Europeans were uniquely interested in brutal empire building. I can only infer that such notions stem from never having read history books about other cultures. For example, "Empire of the Su…
I guess this is the historians' orangutan.
Is this referencing Robert Sapolsky? I didn't know there was controversy there also?