Why do Leftist propaganda books like germs, guns...

now, I ain't a /pol/tard and all but the Amerindians managed to create lots of civilizations in some unfavorable conditions, Africa is huge so there is definitely more good regions other than the Nile

I don't think it's the race doe, I think the populations being so spread out from eachother didn't help, unlike Europe where there was always a relatively high degree of populational density

>Amerindians
>In some unfavourable conditions

I'm going to try and not be mean.

It was the Mesoamericans that built civilisations, such as the Aztec Empire, Mayan City States or the Incan Empire and they did it in favourable conditions. They had far more favourable conditions than the "Amerindians" did.

Stop making posts and read the book.

>Diamons
>Gold
>Petroleum
Yeah none of those are important when it comes to forming an actual civilization. You can't farm gold and diamonds for food.

No civilization evolved in a savanna complex and no tropical civilization in the Americas dealt with anything like malaria, Ebola, zika, tsetse and a dozen other lesser known but deadly tropical diseases found in tropical Africa.Also want to note that until the introduction of banana no sahelian crop could be grown in tropical africa.

Why do you think so much of africa's population boom occurred with the introduction of American crops?

I meant Mesoamericans, either way, how is living inside a rainforest a favourable condition? cuz there's a big rainforest and Africa and there's no civilization at the level of the Aztecs and the Mayans there

and I'm not the op

I still think the isolation played a bigger part, Africa is absolutely huge, there are plenty of inhabitable regions but there should also be plenty of good ones

Not really.

How can you migrate to a tropical forest without crops? How can you survive the Sahara without Camel?

The banana is only 2-3k years old in Africa and the camel only 2k. Regardless both environments lacked the capability of holding large amounts of people and specifically in the tropics until cassava was introduced.

Most people lived in the West Soudan and East Africa.

this meme is supposed to have the most retarded answer paired with the biggest brain, not in reverse

Oh boy! Good thing those Iron Age farmers had Uranium & Oil!

Totally useful in the 16th century

I agree that GGS is probably bullshit, but dude, when you write things like "whatever the fuck that liberal shitbook is called", you are going to be rightfully treated like a retard.

Ok, let's get some things straight:
>rainforest is not the only climate of Mesoamerica. Civilisation did not spring up in the Amazon (as far as we know). Out of the major civilizations there, only the Mayans lived in rainforest, tropical conditions, and not really in the way that you're probably thinking of.
>There was civilisation in sub-Saharan African, and in some ways, they were more advanced than Mesoamericans. For example, Iron smelting appeared in Niger in 1500 BC, around the same time as when it began to appear in the Near East. However, city dwelling rarely became a large phenomenon in sub-Saharan Africa. In Mesoamerica, only very, very basic metal tools were ever used (e.g. copper and some bronze), but didn't seem to be in wide spread use. I have no idea why this is the case since they loved to play around with gold and silver.

For city dwelling, however, Mesoamerican environments are not ideal but are better than in sub-saharan africa. This is due to, but not limited to:

>literally no plague
>No diseases like Malaria or yellow fever
>More domesticatable plants and animals

I can't be fucked to carry on. Please do more research on your own.

Retards like this literally give me the strength.
Keep existing motherfucker ;)

Why are /pol/fags obsessed with diamonds? They aren't even valuable and never were considered particularly valuable historically.

Because they only look at its value in an already civilized society without taking into account that you can't eat them or build tools with them or run a power plant with them

there is a paper suggesting that the Amazon is a man made construct, i remember it being passed around on Veeky Forums some time back, i don't think i have the link any longer

bringing up diseases doesn't make much sense, I'm not saying there weren't external problems, I'm saying the isolation didn't allow complex structures to be made, the diseases were one of causes of that isolation, so of course it contributed, all I was trying to say was the terrain, the humidity, the weather, etc, didn't matter as much as there were plenty of civilizations on many different types of environments

No it was modified but the fact remains that majority of the Amazon's populations relied on Terra preta fields for cassava.

>Cobalt
>not tantalum
shit map

So what you're saying is that it's still the smartest and correct answer.

Are you calling Africa uncivilized?

A soil they created.
You are also wrong. There were civilizations in the Amazon. It wasn't just the Andes and Mesoamerica. Aside from the Amazon you have the Muiscas, Caribbean, Pueblos, Mound builders throughout the southeast, the Haudenosaunee and Virginians in the east coast. And Pacific northwest tribes like the Tlingit.

Wrong about what?

My objective was to explain to an user about why the Aztecs, Incas and Mayans were city/town dwelling civilisations whilst the Amerindians to the North were not. Granted, I did not make the distinction between the Muiscas and Incas because I was not aware of it, but I'm not sure why you're bringing up any other tribes.

Yes in a few regions, most of the Amazon however was not. Some researchers don't even think it's intentional.

That doesn't invalidate any point I've made

this tbqh familia

This ad infinitum

>Left argues the reason the west excelled was due to their huge natural advantages.
This is proven to not only be demonstrably false but a deliberate and disingenuous fiction - even a cursory observation reveals many of the most impoverished regions have enormous economic potential
>W-well wealth actually makes you poor

Professionals across the political spectrum hate his incoherent ramblings. Though I'm glad he published, Guns, Germs, and Steel gave me two very valuable lessons.

1.) The Pulitzer Prize is sometimes awarded to irredeemable shit.
2.) A little learning really is a dangerous thing, a frightening share of the population are profoundly gullible and incapable of anything beyond a superficial understanding.

>I haven't read GGaS, but I'm pretty sure I can hide this blatantly obvious fact

You'd be wrong there.

see and the actual book itself.

>Professionals across the political spectrum hate his incoherent ramblings
Which ones? From what I've seen, it's been very well received by academics. The main two criticisms levelled at it are by people who think he's oversold environmental determinism and underemphasised cultural factors, or alternatively that he is too Eurocentric (i.e. he forgets about the success of China and the reasons why).

Resource Curse is an economic concept, moron. It's not leftist.

I have read it, it's not
>too Eurocentric
the book is literally a desperate attempt at explaining why European society emerged as dominant without conceding they were better at anything.
Of-course he doesn't spend much time discussing China, it would undermine his argument, China had just about all the advantages Europe had and in greater abundances yet was less successful.
Instead of activating his almonds, this bird watched devotes an enormous amount of ink to fetishizing the primitives of Papua new guinea.
> The main two criticisms levelled at it are by people who think he's oversold environmental determinism and underemphasised cultural factors
Those are left-wing criticisms, there are also politically neutral criticisms such as the fact he really doesn't know what he's talking about, he studies gall bladders and birds and decided to write these pulp history guides for a lark. He's also Mr. Hindsight, if the Incas became a superpower impressionable public intellectuals will fall into the same chasm of confirmation bias and say
>"Well Of-course the Inca came to dominate modern history, they had Llamas to domesticate and plants like pumpkin, maize, potato, quinoa and squash to cultivate. They were also safe from the apocalyptic infectious diseases that hampered Eurasian development for so long."
The right wing criticisms, no matter how empirical their substantiations are will get you banned from this board, so we don't need to think to hard about how academia responds to them. Without endorsing them, I think I can lament the fact that you're not allowed to talk honestly about some of the most provocative questions in the humanities.
some further reading if you want it:
independent.co.uk/news/science/fury-at-dna-pioneers-theory-africans-are-less-intelligent-than-westerners-394898.html

this to be quiet honest with you familiy

>water

(cont)
Just a few thoughts on the posts you've linked, it's all reductio ad absurdum.
If Leftists will explain away the rise of Britain as an inevitability owing to the bituminous (low quality) coal deposits on the island which made industrialization so easy (an actual argument i see a lot here) then it's not unreasonable to point out the similar and perhaps greater advantages plenty of less advanced nations have.

Whats more, you can examine the conditions of the UK all you like, having domesticated farm animals, coal mines and slowly developing resistances to the plague doesn't really explain why so many of greatest scientists were born there does it?

Yes I'm well aware of "race realism" and agree with it to a certain extent. Anybody who thinks about it objectively can figure out that if there are major biological differences between different races, e.g. facial structure, lactose intolerance, etc, then brains might be different as well.

However, environmental factors do play a part as well. Across the Arab world today an average of 45 percent of married couples are related, according to Dr Nadia Sakati, a paediatrician and senior consultant for the genetics research centre at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh. THis causes huge problems with brain development, most importantly in intellectual development.

Famine also plays a huge factor:

According to the most widely cited study, the average iq of ethiopia is 63, and yet Abyssinians are one of the few peoples in Africa to have independently invented a written language, and so their ancient civilization has been widely studied by
scholars.

In comparison, Native Americans (of modern day USA, not Mesoamericans) have an average IQ of 87. They had no written language and either lived off of subsistence agriculture with stone tools, or the lived as pastoral nomads on the great plains.

Something doesn't add up here.
My two cents on it is that the Ethiopian scores are inaccurate due to flaws in the methodology as well as environmental factors such as the famines that occurred there impeding brain development.

The IQ gap between native Americans and Ethiopians also clearly shows that environmental factors play a huge role in shaping the development of societies, whilst the IQ factor is incredibly limited.

If you want more evidence then consider that India and Nigeria have the same average IQ score.

PS: please stop talking about "left wing" history and "right wing history" since you're misunderstanding the terms. "left" or "right" should only be used when referring to the economic spectrum, otherwise you just end up confusing ideologies.

Because uranium is really fucking useful for a non nuclear civilization.

>the Amazon is a man made construct
That is incredibly stupid.

>It hasn't been well received by academics
prove it.

I hate this argument so much. It is the 21st century. Countries like Saudi Arabia have literally transformed themselves from a primitive tribal desert with their natural resources since WW2.
Anyone who argues that bountifuk natural resources arent beneficial in any country in the modern world because of some shit like "Africa was once not in the 20th century" needs to be immediately dismissed as a complete retard

Middle East has civilization for thousands of years. Africa was tribal like not so long ago.

I said Saudi Arabia. Not mesopotamia or anatolia

>diamonds

diamonds are common and clear stones were worthless until a 20th century marketing trick.

we could make them in a factory for a fraction of the cost. yet the diamond cartel keeps manufactured stones in a legal second class status.

the diamond cartel pushes the ban on conflict diamonds, because those diamonds were not going through them.

yes its just the meme is used wrong

Saudi Arabia is ethnically homogeneous and wasn't ruled by non-arabs, because they had nothing of value besides Mecca which they only recently wrestled control of. Botswana transformed itself from a tribal country of cow herders and farmers through similar resource exploitation to a smaller degree.

>diamonds
>petroleum
Though they have industrial applications, the US and others have enough of the stuff for the post -oil fuel world and diamonds are forever anyways so you don't need all of them.
Poor Africa should have been capitalizing on those resources in the last century, by the time the Chinese stabilize the region to softly exploit it they won't get as good a price as they might have in the 70s.

Bad bait

Not sure if retarded or (((jeweler)))

>Those are left-wing criticisms
I don't think dividing criticism of a book about history into 'left wing' and 'right wing' is very useful from an academic perspective. It leads to things such as OP's post
and , where entire books are being disregarded because they were made by ''''''The Left''''''' (itself a vague and nebulous concept) and not because Guns, Germs and Steel is objectively a pretty mediocre book, which is not the way healthy, sceptical discourse develops. I know you've just had your elections and you're all excited about them but it's not an excuse for over-politicisation of literally everything. (just go to /mu/ and you'll still see "i used 2 like their music until i realised they were libruls" threads, it's pretty retarded)

this

literally this

Why is everything left and right? Ideas you disagree with aren't inherently left wing just because you're right wing.

The question is political though, and the whole book is looking for a politically correct answer. You can dismiss GGaS for this alone, I've read it cover to cover, it's clearly the work of an awkward liberal Jew, the product of late 20th century American academia.
Recognizing this bias doesn't make me a /pol/ack that's politicizing everything. People take David Irving with a big pinch of salt and are right to, he clearly has an agenda and his books (while they might seem to) don't honestly tackle the questions.

The problem with the book is not that it's political, it's that it's bad. It may be bad because of political origins, but the problem is that it's bad. In any criticism of the book the reasons why it is bad should be the main focus, and its politics should be a footnote.

Saudi Arabia got American love and support+avoided the brunt of the Cold War.

African states went from indigenous self rule to European colonial rule where all power pretty much gutted/stripped then straight to a modern state where all your institutions/laws are based of a colonial one an d the only experience with modern governance is a colonial one.

The brain is complete mystery to this day and age and on top of that it's very slow to change and extremely so since we still retain a fuckton of things from our earlier evoltuionary days

Cousin marriage is minor as fuck though and extreme overblown in it's effects.

those books try to explain why black people were still in the stoneage when europeans arrived, they make no claims as to why they still have trouble

but put it this way, the average IQ is around gorilla-tier, digging wells for fresh water is too complicated, an oil well is downright impossible, fuck digging a hole at all might even be above their mental pay-grade

And by the way if you think I'm racist for saying any of that then you need to realize that I don't just think the negro race is inferior, I can demonstrate it to you.

North of the Congo Africa is mostly desert, with some agriculturally rich areas in north africa.

West of the Congo it's mostly jungle with arid ground

South of the Congo, it's a savannah, interlocked with impenetrable jungles. Now south Africa did indeed present an opportunity for an agricultural revolution there, had people there deforested some areas and begun toiling the soil. However due to cultural elements, such as south Africans subsisting on hunting and husbandry and it being a vast area that was sparsely populated, this never happened.

>fuck digging a hole at all might even be above their mental pay-grade
I suppose then, Ghana's growing tech industry is staffed entirely by golems or some shit.

You can make sweet as fuck glass out of it

>water

India is poorer than Sub-Saharan Africa

Yeah Africans are fucking stupid dude. Europeans were using petroleum and uranium back before Jesus!

Lolberals can't stand it when reality disagrees with them.
Reality often disagrees with them, which is why they are in a state of constant buttdevestation.

>Stone Age
No
>Rest of the post
Leave your basement for once you ignorant obruni

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_petroleum_industry
>Four thousand years ago, according to Herodotus and confirmed by Diodorus Siculus, asphalt was used in the construction of the walls and towers of Babylon; there were oil pits near Ardericca (near Babylon), and a pitch spring on Zacynthus (Ionian islands, Greece)

If only the negroids appreciated shiny stones as much as the white man.

This is actually really funny because Bananas were much more helpful to the development of African Societies than Iron.

Lesotho is a major producer of hydroelectric power which they sell to South Africa.

Yeah yeah yeah but that's a very primitive application of it. I meant in its modern usage as petrol.

But disease makes a huge difference. If one rainforest, you can stack millions of people together in one place and be perfectly safe, and in another, any large group of people begins to die off, that's a pretty huge distinction in environment.

This is a non point about a non point.

The Congo is the size of all of Western Europe, including the isles. It had far less navigable waterway. Saying that there is oil below the Nuba Mountains, so Liberia should have be rich is like saying Paris has good broadband so so should St. Petersberg.

>"dei can't farm nuffin and shiet" t. Jared Diamond
>white farmers arrive and farm successfully
Really engages the almond Francis turbine

>People with 20th century industrial farming technology perform better than people with oxen and hoes
>This is supposed to be shocking

You're retarded

I'm pretty oxen didn't even exist native to sub-saharan africa. I know they had cattle in the Horn but this was brought over in ancient times from Egypt.

This only strengthens your point though.

>20th century industrial farming
>mechanized agriculture existed in the XIXc.
Yeah, they had plentiful tractors and combined harvesters in bumfuck XIXc. Cape Colony. Try again, spook apologist.

but Africans already did farm shit

They're getting back on their feet, just need to do something about the droughts.

>those poor almonds at the side barely getting activated at all

They weren't producing bigger harvests than the Nguni or Sotho-Tswana

Have they tried advancing past the iron age with their equally big harvests? As of 2017, apparently not.

It's a chicken and egg situation both caused the other to rise in importance

Moron, it's significantly easier to farm when you invade a foreign land with 20th century technology and begin industrial scale work thanks to the backing of a 1st world nation across the world

Please explain the natural selection forces involved in driving down africans IQ?
I'm sure there is an explanation as to why low IQ is better for living in Africa's environment...

>when you invade a foreign land with 20th century technology
What are you talking about. Cape Colony has been there since the XVIIc. What modern XXc. technology did they have?

>live on continent where its always nice and warm
>abundance of animals and plants to eat
>therefore there's no need to plan ahead for winter like in europe so a high iq isn't necessary
>all you need is fast legs and a lot of stamina to catch animals and eat them

there's literally no reason to have an iq above 80 if you live in Africa. It's just a waste

>What the fuck is this pseudo-science

If difficult climates breed intelligent people then surely Berber desert tribesmen would be the master race, or alternatively Inuit peoples? These people are constantly planning their next moves because if they don't and fuck they'll actually die, whereas in prehistoric Europe they could fall back on hunting and gathering if the harvest didn't go as well.

>there's no need to plan ahead for winter like in europe
Those freezing Sicilian winters, right?

I've literally seen it all. Someone has tried to claim that African climates are better for humans than a European climate because muh masterrace.

pic related.

>all these resources just got up and left and black people are stupid
>what is imperialism

>refuse to acknowledge Africa as perhaps the biggest epicenter of natural resources on the planet?
Tell us how petroleum and uranium is good for staring a civilization, in a world where nobody has any use of petroleum or uranium.

If African soil is so terrible how did Brits manage to turn their colonies into agricultural powerhouses?

>Zimbabwe is all of Africa
Cute now go be ignorant somewhere else

>when you invade a foreign land with 20th century technology
How'd they manage that when all the European colonies were founded in the 19th century or earlier?