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So, a geo-physiological Principia Mathematica? Always good to have the basics written down, things tend to be misremembered otherwise.

Jacob wrote: "So, a geo-physiological Principia Mathematica? Always good to have the basics written down, things tend to be misremembered otherwise."

Nah, not even that good. I liked it. It was better than Malcom Gladwell's stuff, but not as good as Robert Wright's in my opinion. But still a solid job on explaining to non-academics a basic theory on how geography determined who came out on top.

I appreciate your reaction, particularly if little was new for you. For me it was a revelation thinking about the limitation in domesticated animals in Africa and South America or how rice and wheat could spread through all of Eurasia because of the common latitudes. And it was a mind blower how disease of the West killed out Indian tribes even before first contact.

Michael wrote: "I appreciate your reaction, particularly if little was new for you. For me it was a revelation thinking about the limitation in domesticated animals in Africa and South America or how rice and whe..."

I've just danced around this book enough and it has seeped into the generally accepted ideas, etc., so deeply that it wasn't a shock.

The disease theory was also discussed in 1491 (published after, but read by me BEFORE)... so again... perhaps my reaction is just I was exposed to other sources that were inspired by Diamond's original work. I dunno.

No i didn't get into it is was better than Malcom Gladwell's though

Here's a 5000 distillation of Diamond's thesis - in some ways better than the book:

Jim wrote: "Here's a 5000 distillation of Diamond's thesis - in some ways better than the book:

..."

Late, but thanks.

Here's the problem you don't see. The intellectual class of persons in the West, wants to find the authority to discount the success of the West and its culture in the world, because they don't like the history of violence, conflict, power and capitulation and all the sordid details of the reality of the human story. So they want to invalidate Western Culture's current hegemony in the world economically and politically. However, what they don't see is that power is not equivalent to moral good, nor is economic progress equivalent to superior moral ethics. That has been the story not of moral superiority but of superior social and political organization in building things, fighting wars, winning those wars, developing materially and technologically. The West went thru many periods in its history when Rome had fallen, the Catholic Church had become a tyrant over moral right and might, and the West went in a dark age, which ended with the protestant reformation, the renaissance, the enlightenment, the scientific method, and had developed modern Statecraft and legal systems and armies and structure, that then easily usurped tribal peoples and peoples who had not gone thru those developments. Now is that moral good? What moral good? You think a tribe does not slaughter other tribals? You think the mongol horseman did not murder many foes? You think the tribes on the American Continent did not seek to defeat or enslave or murder other tribes? the whole history of mankind is a wreck of human tragedy. Cultures destroying other people, then building over their ruins, then destroyed themselves later and re-built in a new form by a new people again. The history of the human race itself is one of striving, conquering, creating, emerging, then petrifying, dying out, and being re-made. Every new thought, new movement, new assertion, may spell great things or portend the end of a civilization. None of this is based in Ecology. Nor is the story morally good nor is power equivalent to moral ethics, nor is material progress the end of the question of ethics. But the history of human beings is the story of human beings, not of ecology and germs. That's absurd. The current period is looking for a way to discount the past, and pretend its something other than what it is. That the west is not the product of progress in social arrangement, modern States, free-market economics, the freeing up of individuals to pursue their own ends, but is merely a fluke of history, that it happened to form on a certain land mass. It's absurd. If I took the Roman development of Legions, Economic advancement and coinage and trade, and its doctrine of heroism and its desire to conquer, and put it in the South African continent, they should have still conquered to Egypt, still taken huge gains, still formed themselves in such ways. Because they were a sudden new development that was superior in approach to War, social organization, power structure and ethics, when compared to the peoples and tribes surrounding them. Is that morally good? What do you mean by morality? Is it moral that romans burned towns into dust? Or moral that so did Egyptians murder each other? Or moral that one tribe conquers another? Or that a huge population of Mongols tears across half the globe and kills everyone else? What the world is built over is the tragedy of history. And if you think that the tragedy and story does not continue you are naive. Yes. Rome fell into atrophy and vanished from history. So does everything ever built at some point, only to be rebuilt in a new way by a new people somewhere else. And none of that process is easily foreseen, or easily done away with, by some absurd grouping of ecological facts cherry-picked out of all other facts and shoved into a fake narration of humanities story.

I grow weary of the fraud intellectual lacking authenticity who proclaims his cleverness rather than giving forth any great value, or great idea, or great new understanding, or asserting life and living and fighting and winning or losing and dying, but instead playing games of intellectual gymnastics to get to a new "hot take" from a closed space with a small desk and chair in an air-conditioned environment, where no great thing is gained and no great thing is lost. Perhaps I'd welcome a barbarian at the gates at this point rather than have to watch a gerbil pretend its still valid in its cage.