PSEUD: The Book

[Anonymous No.22107673]

[Anonymous No.22107682]

Took a community college history class where the teacher basically taught us straight from this book. When I got to real university and brought up some of things I learned from that class everyone laughed at me.

[Anonymous No.22107688]

>>22107682
greentext time

[Anonymous No.22107690]

>>22107682
I had a uni class structured around the blank slate by Pinker, which I group in with guns, germs and steel.

[Anonymous No.22107695]

>>22107690
>using popsci as a textbook in "university"
Ask me how I know you went to a shitty school.

[Anonymous No.22107828]

>>22107695
How do you know?

[Anonymous No.22107890]

>>22107828
Uh...well i uh...

You're stupid haha and you went to a school for stupid people

[Anonymous No.22108470]

Is it as godawful and patronizing as sapiens?

[Anonymous No.22108501]

>>22108470
No. Diamond doesn’t really present something that revolutionary in the book. I feel like the directionbrain retards have given it a mythical life as two caricatures it doesn’t actually contain. It’s NOT just some lefty twat’s apologism for why the west beat the rest. He sets up some fairly straightforward geographic rules like how movement east west is simpler than north south. Biomes and natural boundaries matter. In the big picture view his idea that local flora and fauna is determinative of potential is of course right. People get bogged down with the specifics and his defense of why things turned out like they did has too much circular “just so” reasoning. E.g. maybe you can make a horse out of a zebra. That it didn’t happen isn’t stunning evidencE it can’t happen. Even more so for crops, the precursors of which all sucked. His big evidence there is that maize supposedly sucked even more and took much more cultivating to get somewhere.
Again in the big picture is it true that you can’t turn anything into a staple crop? Yes. What the exact boundaries of “what if” is isn’t that clear.

The other part of the online debate is usually about how he defends primitive cultures. No surprise since he spent decades in PNG following natives around. He’s sympathetic to them and takes a strong “they’re clearly not morons” stance, based on their adapting to an environment that would kill any “smart” western visitor. Again, true as far as it goes. And he isn’t do extreme as the online caricature would have you believe. He notes they have severely backwards principles like killing the elderly (once you’re a burden you get an axe in the neck). But his point is more about it being a pragmatic solution even if it’s morally abhorrent.

It shouldn’t be so controversial when we’ve had the “fertile rivers start civilizations” story since the classic great man history era. Geographic realities matter and are to some extent determinative.

[Anonymous No.22108512]

>>22107828
You can't read greentext.

[Anonymous No.22108664]

>>22108501
Ok you complete fucking nigger. You can fuck off now. If the takeaway from that bumbling californian rigmarole was
>geography has some influence on history
Then he should have just written that one sentence and finished his shitty book. Diamond, the nigger - brings absolutely nothing new to the table, everything in the book beyond the statement of "geography has some bearing on history" is an overblown, obnoxious, shallow and bombastic mess, every single argument doesn't hold up to even a minute of scrutiny and here we have dumb shit eating faggots like you calling it a minor flaw. No, dumb nigger. The fact that all of his arguments are trash and all of his grandiose statements are unprovable is not a small criticism - it renders the entire book utterly moot.

[Anonymous No.22108736]

>>22108501
>. E.g. maybe you can make a horse out of a zebra.

If you could make a horse out of a zebra it would have been done by now. It's not as though a striped "horse" doesn't have appeal on the market.

It's actually a great book but it doesn't cover everything, namely the East. It's centered more on the West conquering the Americas.

[Anonymous No.22108814]

>>22108736
>it would have been done by now
You base this on a long list of tenuous assumptions that have been objectively demonstrated as false, by taming zebras. The points from the book are all like this, he just assumes and then dishonestly tries to bolster whatever random assumption popped in his head.
https://youtu.be/M98zPLJ2Ub0
This zebra has not been bred for domestication at all. You can reduce aggression in bred groups over a few generations.

[Anonymous No.22109710]