Is "Guns, Germs and Steel" accurate or is it just some bullshit used to justify white guilt?

>Diamond

Revelation 2:9 “I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.”

>people STILL don't realize that those two things are the opposite of mutually exclusive

It was an interesting read, but ultimately overambitious, superficial, out of Diamond's depth and written with a conclusion in mind that it goes about trying to prove rather than examining the facts and then drawing a conclusion.

Honestly the idea that the differences between western and non-western civilisation could be examined and explained in just under 500 pages is a bit far-fetched. Nevertheless it kept me reading all the way through.

I was a little confused however at how he derided environmental determinism resulting in biological and societal differences but then goes into great detail about how this same phenomenon; this user said something similarThere are real, observable, repeatable, testable, social/economic/environmental/educational strata controlled data showing differences between many different aspects of western and non-western people and society. I hate to say it, but I think Diamond wrote this with a bit of a political agenda, shame really because a book in this style written in a critical way by a real anthropologist (or numerous experts in different fields) would be simply incredible, I just doubt that it will ever happen :(

Environmental factors = the weather be racist.

European culture is so rich it has earned its right feel superior. Strength and intelligence prevails, as it should be.

How would they explain pre-colonial Africa?

>Both of his parents were from East European Jewish families who had emigrated to the United States

I read through a couple of his books pretty passively and noticed he reuses some case studies to support dissimilar arguments. I had not gotten around to GG&S but I might avoid it now

What does Jewishness have to do with anything?

>le white people only conquered the world because of steel and guns

Yeah faggot, and who do you suppose is responsible for the innovations and genius that allowed white people to secure those things? They didn't dig guns and steel out of the fucking ground

>>b,b,but Europeans have an advantage due to being a bunch of competitive, small nations eternally fighting each other and having to constantly make new weapons etc. to not get taken over! Weak nations like China with no competing powers din have a chance.

I have a strong feeling nobody in this thread has read this book.

I have. It was required reading in a high school AP class I took.

As much as I hate to appear as a paranoid /pol/ guy, I can't help, looking back on it now, but feel like they were trying to push an agenda.

Me and pretty much everyone else in the class read that book and thought it was good.

The teacher did not even pretend to provide an opposing view.

What? White guilt? It was forever ago when I read it, but it just seemed to be about how society is able to sustain itself due to a surplus of food, and how if we have more food, society can allocate resources for building stuff and science and buttstuff etc.

I don't remember them hammering whites for being a successful race, lol.

MAKE ARYAN BARBARISM GREAT AGAIN

pieurheimat.ytmnd.com

WHY U WHITE MANN HAV SO MUCH CAHGO N WE NGNININS HAVE SO LIL

that's because we niggers have soul while the white man is soulless, he sold his soul for the power

I say! You indigenous fellows are far stronger and wiser than my white brethren. For good heavens gaze upon me! I cannot even hold this bow or pull it back! Surely if you wanted to take her by force and plant your vigorouslysuperior seed in my fair wife I would not resist; would that I even could.

Jared Diamond, the man, the historian, he is gifted in all verse, in all hearse. To believe in him is to believe in god. Those that see him are blinded by his radiance, his glistening sweet nectar gliding off his bare chest. He rubs the nectar gently down the crest. For those that can see, you are blind because seeing is believing. Does not one not one who doth not speak not one not? Every time, everywhere, everywhere we go to time and space and see Jared the Diamond, for he is a diamond. He is the diamond which we speak of and for which we eat off. There is no other solution the prevalence of his existence in this orange world of dissolution and -poof-. Diamond, he is a master of the universe of the grand universe and of all the universes which exists inside this universe which doth not exist. So, who is it that we speak to? Yes, I am he. You are not he but I am he. He-he-he-he-he-he. Exactly. Come cast and be spit upon and see the true Jared Diamond for what he speaks to you and me and who and poo. Roo, the dinosaur that seeks to seek and see. You and I are kin. King of the skin kind and kind of akin that which we kind of pin down to this best and whatever. Bit by bit. This is a city like all the rest, beaver. Talk about your family, your sister, your verse. Don't listen to the grandmother's advice about our solid kiss behind the bushes in front of your dad's corvet. Hand me the chocolate stick and stick it down my dick. Wow, here we go again and we see that Jared of Diamond City has come on me and come on you and come. Spit on thy hands, son? Are you there, son? Wash your thumbs in the presence of the magnificent non-powerful and worthless Jared Diamond. But seriously, Diamond is dumb as heck. Don't listen to me, don't listen to Diamonds, don't listen to your grandma, well, do listen to your grandma, well, unless your grandma is a bad person, because even grandmas can be bad people. We have unsuccessfully coped with the natural beauty of infidelity. It sucks. It. Sucks. What is your blood type? My blood time is something that I have no idea what it is or what it might be. I am charmed by your highway strip, you know. That highway strip that leads to us. Anus. And I love you but I gotta go. And I will always love you. And I miss Jared, diamond man. Go away.

upvote me if you aren't a cuck

Jared diamond will never see what it is like to be a white man who is caged in this stupid society filled with white men who think that they are not in some sort of cage within this society and it's all really just a bunch of bullshit that no one knows how to control because all life really is is just a shit show where we all just live here and do a bunch of crap and eat crap and shit crap but we really never hit gold because gold comes from the ground and we come from the ground so we need something that didn't come from the ground to create something that comes from the ground because you can't really create something while being in something since you need room for creating stuff, well, that is just what I think is the truth like how this i is lower case when it should be uppercase. Love you guys.

There seems to be a pattern with Judeo-Bolshevism and the wish of deconstructing and destroying European culture and ideas

>The teacher did not even pretend to provide an opposing view.

This is the thing that keeps bothering me in education. Why not teach your pupils maybe one or two chapters of the powers of institutionalism as was explained in Violence and Social Orders?

Jewish Anti-Intellectualists are leading the way to "teach" Europeans and Americans on how to be multicultural.

may be they should teach israel how to be multi-cultural first

Why do you hate the Jews and their homeland so much? Do they not have the right to defend themselves against foreigners?

>just some bullshit used to justify white guilt"

You've clearly already made up your opinion. Regardless, the theory proposed is pretty solid and explains so much of why one group got to be so powerful while many others didn't. Your environment does determine what you're capable of. I don't see it as white guilt. If darker skinned people had been given access to all these resources they would have done the same things.

Ultimately it's not about white guilt. It's about how white people aren't better than POC, we were just historically a lot luckier.

Come on guys, cool it with the anti-semitic remarks. Veeky Forums is better than this

I personally dislike zionism because of the human rights abuses and war crimes. Sure, Hamas would do the exact same if they could, but at least they don't have the arrogance to consider themselves a shining example of humanitarian ideology and western democracy.

If I were American, I'd be angry with being perhaps the biggest foreign policy cuck in recorded history.

If you're interested in this sort of stuff, the economics literature on long-term growth is much better. Quantitative approaches that take into account both geography and memes/genes, very little in terms of "just-so stories".

Check out Rodrik; Acemoglu/Robinson; Chanda, Cook, and Putterman; Spolaore and Wacziarg; Comin, Easterly, and Gong; Putterman and Weil.

Because Africa is designed by God to be hard mode. Half the countries on the continent are landlocked and - surprise - most of the landlocked ones are also the shittiest ones.

Meanwhile Europe is just a bunch of peninsulas. It's like it was made for civilization growth.

What Jared Diamond believes: White people are not superior because they are superior because they originated from places with natural resources.

The truth: White people are superior because they originated from places with natural resources.

angola has oil, diamonds, isn't landlocked but is still backwards

switzerland is a landlocked country, so is luxembourg. rich as hell. landlocked is no excuse

i don't see how my remark here is anti-semitic

It's not the only factor, of course. But it still contributes a lot.

>switzerland is a landlocked country, so is luxembourg.

These are recent developments, much shorter than the timescale OP asks about

Is there a particular reason why /pol/ autists hate this book so much other than it advances a theory of civilization that isn't based on the genetic superiority of Nords? There isn't too much "white guilt" in the book unless you're a sensitive autist that somehow finds the notion that some of the West's good fortune comes from geographic luck an attack on your person.

anything that vaguely perturbs their fragile worldview is instantly jewish propaganda or some shit like that

why couldn't they domesticate the damn zebras

What is the alternative to geographical influences and genetic chance? Why do people believe one race, people, culture or nation to be the way it is for better or worse? Divine ruling, immaculate conception?

read it back in the day, very poorly written

there's not much room to maneuver outside of those two really
except for religious explanations I guess

Oil would be about as useful to pre- nineteenth century Angola (and Equatorial Guinea and all other oil-rich "states" in Africa) as offshore oil was to pre- nineteenth century Scotland. Oil as a commodity is a two hundred year old fad.

Diamonds are an even younger fad and literally useless.

African nations never had the opportunity to become tax havens either.

Zebras are very aggressive.

Institutionalism.

See for example Violence and Social Order. Or the more commonly known book: 'Why Nations Fall'

so were wolves

Not enough on the human factor in his book.

Lets be honest Hernan Cortez had Julius Caesar levels of competence and using theatrics and shrewd diplomacy he toppled and empire.

then domesticate them so they're not

>he actually thinks natural resources lead to prosperity
If you have rich oil/diamond/gold deposits it just makes you a ripe target for invasion, insurgency, and corporate takeovers. Even if rebel groups don't wind up taking over your oil fields and using the profits to fund terrorism, it's still terrible for long-term growth because you can make enough money to feed your family without needing to go to school or learn useful skills. The best resources for a developing nation are fertile soil, good ports, and a mild climate. South Africa, for example, has rocky coasts, bad weather, and is literally a desert for a good chunk of its territory.

Yeah, but we didn't domesticate wolves in the same way we domesticated horses. Dogs' ancestors were wolves that were less aggressive and came into human camps to get handouts, so it's more like them domesticating themselves.

I'm open to the idea of certain races being inherently inferior or superior, the problem is that you can't 'prove' it using real-life data. There's so much that can change results, and you can't exactly have a control group, so any attempts to show blacks being inferior or whites being inferior based on the success of nations is just unscientific.

Wolves aren't when you pick them up young apparently. We haven't domesticated Zebras now either.

no one has given it a real go

all the testing that has been done suggests that there is a link, though there isn't a huge amount of research
after the Bell Curve came out it became a naughty science and it can't really be studied in the West anymore
the fact that you can't study it should be enough to tell you what the results would be though

The Bell Curve is exactly the kind of unscientific research I'm talking about, fool.

that wasn't my point
read the post again

If you read where this is from it's from a time when people seriously wanted to domesticate them because it was useful for colonialists and looked cool. And they were hardly successful.

Well, whatever.
>the fact that you can't study it should be enough to tell you what the results would be though
This is the dumbest shit. There aren't major studies on the inherent superiority/inferiority of races because anyone doing research on it obviously has an agenda and won't be a good researcher.

>There aren't major studies on the inherent superiority/inferiority of races because anyone doing research on it obviously has an agenda and won't be a good researcher.

there it is. the dumbest shit i'll ever read on Veeky Forums.

>the Bell Curve
Charles Murray is former CIA operative and well known shill for various interests. This book in particular was financed by the pioneer fund, which is a pro-eugenics organisation. Many of his sources also happen to be researchers linked to the Fund. Race is far from the central issue of the book, but merely the one that most captured the American public's imagination- Murray mostly goes on about how the rich are actually high IQ patricians. It's obvious he has a clear agenda- dude's still a member of several high profile libertarian think-tanks which had a great impact in modern privatisation and education policies

Agenda or not agenda, every result coming out of full genome sequencing/GWAS has confirmed his positions. The only "objections" remaining are clueless idiots going on about muh epigenetics, as if it's some sort of magic that makes genes irrelevant.

>thinking research can be done without an agenda
haha alright my dudes