.webp?h=10 "Harambe (No Eyes) - GRRRAAHHHH!! UGH UGH UGH!! OOOH OOOH OOOOH! HOOO HOOO! RAAAAHHHRR!! UGH! OOOOOOOHHHHHH!! GRAAAHHH!! RRRRRAAAAHHH! OOOOH! GRRRR!!")
The international standing of the US is literally never going to recover https://t.co/k21jJ9fv0z
— #1 Venlil Enjoyer (@EmpressThaliaa) January 27, 2025
Like I don't mean to be overdramatic, but this is straight up the end of the American century
โ #1 Venlil Enjoyer (@EmpressThaliaa) January 27, 2025
Itโs the fact that Americans have 0 idea how important it is that America has so many Allieโs around the world that Trump is just now cutting off one by one for absolutely no reason because he failed to communicate.
โ You were warned ๐บ๐ธ๐บ๐ธ (@Rickie99_) January 27, 2025
I canโt believe weโre burning down the world for literally no reason. I am never forgiving republicans
โ Flaming (@FlamingAUS) January 27, 2025
me when i have to end my alliances built up over a century because i'm bored
โ Amadรกn (@Mr_Elephant2004) January 27, 2025
its true lol. i think many countries are going to rely far less on the us now
โ pierbi (@pierbiwierbi) January 27, 2025
the hostility is insane, the amount of people on here who act like its deserved and shows the us is strong is insane aha. comes across as incredibly petty and weak
โ Jan202021 (@Dixie202021) January 27, 2025
losing power in the global south speed run (new record: 6 days)
โ SandstormRefrigerator (@Pokemonprimed) January 27, 2025
Yeah, it's basic diplomacy. America would lose badly in Sid Meyer's Civ right now.
โ Tom (@iamtomgranger) January 27, 2025
Anyway remittances from the US account for 3% of Colombia's GDP so a single deportation flight is pretty devastating to their national economy. And the threats worked immediately
So we are thankfully not going to be deprived of all the many things Colombia exports here. I don't know what those things are besides coffee and cocaine but X (formerly Twitter) informs me it's a lot and very important. Crisis averted.
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I might take some of the criticism seriously if it wasn't so batshit over-the-top insane. Like claiming it says the complete opposite of what it really does. I've seen them try to link him to HBD. It's nuts. He doesn't make any really controversial claims or use facts that are in dispute. All the criticism I've seen has been of a straw man.
It reminds me of the Black Athena bullshit in the '90s. That book really did suck. But it turned into a sport to write bad reviews of it. Everyone piled on. Everyone. Eventually there were over 100. And as they're competing to be the most scathing they go nuts. They end up denouncing a bunch of totally reasonable ideas that the author didn't come up with just because they were mentioned somewhere in the book. So after that, I don't take reviews too seriously.
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Sure, but there's a reason the criticisms started. You don't have to go all contrarian wing cuck and act like the book by someone with no history background, written in a time we had far less understanding of pre-columbian American societies is for some reason good or accurate. It's still shit even ignoring the r-slurred pile on.
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I might give a shit if he was trying to change our understanding of some historical event, but he's not. That's like me saying these people can't review the book because they don't have a biology background.
What you're not understanding is: It does not fricking matter. The book is not about pre-Columbian American societies. It's not about infectious disease. It's not about livestock. It's not about crops. We know a heck of a lot more about the flu than we did back then, and none of it matters at all in this book.
The historians are just butthurt that because the last thing they want is any link between science and their little playground. What's next? Outsiders might start pointing out some discrepancies. Like people in their "histories" marching and rowing at speeds ludicrously beyond anything humanly possible.
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He's literally making an argument as to why western societies prevailed over native societies.
BIPOC, It literally is. It's advertised as explaining why the west dominated those societies.
Again BIPOC, historians talk all the time about the insane exaggerations of older sources. The fact you think anyone would take this as a new discrepancy some outsider would point out shows how fricking moronic you are. Read any legitimate history book dealing with old sources and they will mention something about the numbers of men involved, the speed, the sketchy as frick timelines etc. This isn't new you dumb gorilla.
In short keep yourself safe.
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When you actively try to misunderstand everything I say it doesn't make me look r-slurred, it makes you look like an r-slured cute twink. Also you already look like one because that's what you are.
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What you're saying is fricking stupid. Imagine defending work that is r-slurred and widely dismissed. No one with any sense defends diamonds work.
His very basic argument that Guns, Germs and Steel enabled European societies to conquer the world can be dismissed by just looking at China or the Middle Eastern societies. Both had large cities, disease, firearms and access to steel. Both were completely dominated by the European powers up until the end of empire in the 20th century.
Gunpowder was even invented in China and arguable early cannon tactics were really perfected by the Turks.
India and Africa had access to European trade for steel and guns, had disease, in fact Africans were more resistant to a lot of the big killers than Europeans were, still dominated by the European powers.
His argument is r-slurred and so are you for believing it.
!historychads history slapfight.
The reason things fell apart for some societies and the euros dominated is societal structure. European societies proved more resilient and better capable of projecting power and control than these other societies. By Diamond's shit tier logic Rome never should have collapsed in the west nor Persia in the east. Both societies were more settled, experienced and seasoned by disease, and far superior technologically than what knocked them out.
Again please commit suicide
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His very basic argument that Guns, Germs and Steel enabled European societies to conquer the world
No it isn't. You're gonna have to actually read the book because various parts of this post are:
Not relevant to the book.
Addressed in the book.
The point that the book is actually trying to make.
And this just doesn't make any sense at all.
I can't read your mind to find out what you imagine "Diamond's logic" to be. So we have no common frame of reference to even have a discussion.
It seems you want to talk about why Europe came to be in a dominant in the Old World in the 1800s. Well, this is a pretty old-fashioned choice, but Mahan really has some insightful things to say. Like when he observes that...
!historychads do you see what I have to deal with here?
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You and
@Allende are both right, Guns germs and steel is a neat broad overview that makes lots of sense on the macro scale. When you get into the weeds historians all have sticks up their asses against one size fits all shit as they should, even when it makes literally perfect sense.
I was friends once with a native Hawaiian dude though who was majoring in their own history shit and they had a canned rant about 2 hours long about how the only reasons Hawaiians were so easily conquered/subjugated was because there was no iron in the soil of hawaii or some shit, basically point for point with the Jared Diamond shit, claimed if there was iron in hawaii they would have gone to the moon or something based on their historic propensity for finding hawaii with a survival rate of 1/1000 sea canoes.
So it's both a great book and also not meant to be gospel which Diamond made very clear throughout the book iirc but a lot of people read it like the bell curve or something and go full r-slur and miss the main points.
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!metashit I'm not reading ANY of this but RedactorGOD is on a roll lately, seems like every day he has someone new wrapped around his finger that is completely enraged at him
We need trans hedgehogs! Trans hedgehogs belong here! We love trans hedgehogs!
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That's the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me.
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I haven't and won't read any of this exchange
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Okay let's hear it then. What is his wise argument worth defending? It's definitely not what he found important enough to title his book after.
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Yes, that's the first part of it, but it doesn't get down to the root of it. You'd get what I mean if you had read the book.
Also you seem to be struggling with the phrase "conquer the world". It doesn't always mean literally instituting your own totalitarian regime across the planet. Like if somebody "conquered the world of women's basketball" we wouldn't have to start hiding in our attics.
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These are great powers in the Old World with indirect connections with Europe going back millenia. That's not what he was writing about. I mean ffs Turkey is a European country at this time. He was writing about places that had no kind of contact at all with Europeans until they showed up on a ship one day. Places where there's an extreme difference in technology between the invaders and the natives.
Not even joking, I'm having a really hard time following your logic because sometimes you're arguing against the book and sometimes you're against what you imagine is in the book.
Ohhhh I get it. Your imaginary straw man Diamond
wrote that once an empire gets guns, germs, and steel then it's pretty much invincible until the 20th century. Yeah, that's really stupid.
So you're saying straw
Diamond is wrong because China and Turkey had guns but they were "completely dominated by the European powers" throughout this period.
(Starting when? I'm assuming you mean 1532 with the Battle of Cajamarca. Silly me. You wouldn't know without reading the book. This whole time I've been assuming we're talking about ~1500-1900. If you'll indulge me, I'm going to continue to. You can have your straw man but you can't move him to a different time period.)
First problem with your argument: Ottoman Turkey was itself a European power. Until a century ago their capital was Adrianople.
Second problem with your argument: China was never "totally dominated" by Europe. That's so stupid I don't need to elaborate further. Turkey hasn't ever been "totally dominated" by Europeans either. If the French and Greeks had gotten their way in the early 1920s maybe you could say that. But they didn't. And it's not even within the time limit you set: "the end of empire in the 20th century". One of the biggest of those empires that ended was the Ottoman Empire.
Third problem with your argument: You imply that Europe didn't have any really big technological advantage over China and Turkey. I'm nitpicking a little here, but that's not true for China during all of this period. In the 1600s Chinese knew that Europe already had better technology. The gap gradually widened until the early 1800s. But throughout this whole time, the Chinese pretty well held their own, even going on the offensive on Formosa. Then steamships arrived and everything changed instantly. They couldn't be opposed at sea and they could go up rivers into the heart of China. This one technology made all the difference.
Anyway, I'm really confused as to what we're supposed to be arguing about. All I know is, you keep being wrong over and over.
!historychads I'm pretty tired now. The only history I want to think about now is in Sniper Elite 5.
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Now that I know you're just pretending to be r-slurred I'm not gonna take the bait anymore.
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I havent read the book, so I cant speak to whether its r-slurred or not, but I'm with redactor on the fact that most historians are r-slurred and spend more time trying to prove the lessons of history line up with their ideology than just helping the world to actually understand our history.
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What the frick do you think Diamond is doing?
Historians have always been a bit r-slurred dating back to Herodotus. What's important is the development over time of the Historiography. Right now the west is in this dumb shit DEI woke phase, but it's gone through Chud Phases, socialist phases, peasantry focused phase etc. Its the discussion between these phases that gets you to some semblance of the truth.
The problem is Diamond's ideas aren't just r-slurred for their ideologically filter, their actually just r-slurred starting points that don't make sense.
I listened to a very lib historian argue that the Byzantine empire was actually a form of Republic. I don't know if I agree but it was intriguing and he argued it well.
Versus diamond showing up with his
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Yeah, but its easy to read. If historians could stop being so socially r-slurred and try to give the rest of humanity some sort of factual narrative lens to see history through, these r-slurred ideas wouldnt stand a chance. So once again, its the historians' fault.
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