So anyway let's go back to discussing the Lepanto for the zillionth time and Mafia LLLCMMIII.

The tendency to regurgitate from experts is even more tempting when discussing opaque and difficult to comprehend stuff like philosophy. How many lay people can understand Kant, Deleuze and Heidegger without the filter of people who have studied it for a while?

"I'm interested into hearing why he's a quack. When can we close the vote?"

You going to be around in a couple months, Putin? I started reading GG&S way back when it was published and put it down before I was 25% done with it because I thought the suggestions up to that point were flippant, racist, and based on a poor understanding of history. If you're *really* interested and will be around for it, I will figure out which box my copy is in and demolish its conclusions on this very forum.

Very few, but it's unlikely that Kant, Deleuze, or Heidegger could have written their own works without studying for awhile themselves. They were brilliant but not by chance.

Exactly so instead of amassing articles on empirical data we'd just be amassing articles on the semantics of Kantian and Deleuzian jargon. Anybody who was around for the numerous iterations of Obiwan's literary surveys/debates knows exactly what literary posturing looks like and what a deadend it can become.

The point is that discussing popular social science work needn't be more reliant on experts than any other higher brow discussion format for the casually interested.

"Couldn't the same be said of literary criticism and book reviews of fiction? It's not as if "smart people" and "established academics" haven't analyzed Watership Down at length."

Of course. But the basis for their analysis isn't necessarily empirical fact (e.g. what happened at such and such historic battle) but more subjective meaning. And even if the categories of literary criticism can reduce all of literature to a set of empirically verifiable answers, the number of elements we would study in fiction is greater than the two (narrative and methodology) for popular non-fiction. Beyond that, the plot and themes of fiction tend to be more applicable to personal experience--that is, a passage of a text can have personal meaning to a reader--whereas popular non-fiction is much less so.

"The tendency to regurgitate from experts is even more tempting when discussing opaque and difficult to comprehend stuff like philosophy."

This is true, so perhaps we can scratch Kant and Hegel from the lists. But Russell is pretty straightforward, as are the Greeks and Romans.

The value I see in book clubs is that they can provide an opportunity to discuss personal meaning of a text based on individual experience; this is not otherwise accessible to me. I think book clubs are a poor way of giving oneself an education or fact-checking a lengthy book.

I can't see what people find racist about Jared Diamonds books, especially not Guns, Germs and Steel.

Can somebody please given an example of a passage from Guns, Germs and Steel that was racist? Diamond has written in more than one of his books that we can modern society has a lot to learn from primitive societies, and some people have said this is harks back to the idea of the noble savage, and that supposedly is racist. I think this is a distortion of Diamond's message.

Other criticisms include factual errors. For example, one anthropologist criticized Diamond for citing a date of around 13K BCE for the arrival of humans in North America, while, apparently according to the reviewer there was research available at the time of publication that has pushed this date back a few thousand years. To me this is nit-picking and does not detract from Diamond's hypothesis. Diamond is communicating a big picture theory. If your primary interest is the arrival of the first humans in America then I suggest reading a more specialized book (perhaps After the Ice by Steven Mithen, which by the way is a great read).

Another critical reviewer said that while Diamond explained how Europeans were able to conquer the Americas (using guns, germs and steel), he said nothing of the the morality of the conquest. To me, such a criticism is beside the point, and nothing to do with the purpose of the book.

Diamond is criticized for being an geographical determinist. But I didn't get the impression that Diamond was saying the geography was all that mattered, rather that is was an important factor. Surely he is right in this regard. Take the Australian Aboriginals: Diamond points out that there were few plants or animals suitable for domestication. On this point he is right. To this date, the only form of native Australia life that has been domesticated for agriculture from Australia is the macadamia nut (that I am aware of).

Maybe I am just not educated enough to appreciate these criticisms. Okay, well perhaps what makes this book a good choice for the book club is the fact that is both hugely popular and controversial. I look forward to seeing this book deconstructed.

That should read... Can somebody please given an example of a passage from Guns, Germs and Steel that *is* racist?

"I'm not sure what Putin's background is, but wouldn't you rather see a critique from more established academics? If you have access to a repository of academic works, I'm sure you can find something there. "

No, this is a social exercise, not a professional one. It is like you are suggesting i go do a master in the area and get deep knowledge, when i have neithe the time of energy, and would rather a much broader knowledge anyway.

You can't have both depth and breadth, the human mind is finite. And discussing this with the webdip forums allows for a lot more breadth because we are many different people without the blinders of academic success. The institutional views which i'm sure develop.

Many academics tend to specialise and fail to see the big picture. Having a holistic view has it's own weaknesses but that does not speak to the value of either.

That said, if you're not interested, i don't really care.

@"Can somebody please given an example of a passage from Guns, Germs and Steel that *is* racist?"

Nope, but i haven't read it yet.

I have seen mixed criticism, like claims that european *had* to use their guns and steel for imperialism, because they had them.

But i don't know what Diamond actually said, and i believe the relevant logic is 'people who didn't have this level of technology couldn't have done this (so if anyone was going to, it had to be europeans)' which is rather the opposite - sufficient, not necessary.

If nobody else will be voting... We'll just go with diamond.

I'll leave this open for another 24 hours.

My preliminary thoughts on the book -

1 ) Diamond's theory of uneven development seems to have much more to do with germs than guns or steel. Resistance to disease seems to account for population disparities and thus corresponding higher levels of literacy/development in Eurasia. Societies more prone to warmaking, by contrast, like the societies Jared Diamond is most familiar with in New Guinea, did not.

2 ) Following that, I fail to see how Diamond is 'racist', as he goes to lengths to argue that differences in intelligence had nothing to do with these disparities and that in fact associating intelligence with economic development is one of the main fallacies that he targets. He argues instead that so-called "primitive" societies have more intelligent people than industrial societies because it takes more intelligence to survive in conditions where you were more likely to die from lack of food or warfare.

3) I would amend Diamond's claim that political homogeneity leads to stagnation by not having external threats to correct mistakes by saying that lack of political competition leads to stagnation. Politically fragmented areas of the world have not necessarily led to the formation of highly developed states. This would explain, for example, why Egypt's relative geographic isolation (the protection of the western desert) led to it losing its significance as a political power over a period of time despite having all the advantages that, according to Diamond, should have made it a persistent leader among nations.

All in all thought I have little to complain about. His biological take on history is very interesting and his thesis explains more than a lot of alternative approaches do.

The Martian