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Jared Diamond: Collapse

Collapse is about failed societies and why they fail, a fairly decent topic for the politics thread.
Guns, Germs, and Steel was pretty good, I have this one on my "to read" list.
 
Life was so much more satisfying when we believed in "native" humans living in harmony with their environment, and each other. Now we enjoy reading about how they fu*k up. Which icon will fall next? Margaret Mead?
 
_Collapse_ sounds like liberal propaganda. And Margaret Mead was exposed as a gullible socialist back in the 80s.
 
Elind said:
Life was so much more satisfying when we believed in "native" humans living in harmony with their environment, and each other. Now we enjoy reading about how they fu*k up. Which icon will fall next? Margaret Mead?
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Margaret Mead's work was refuted some time ago. I think Sagan writes about it in The Demon-Haunted World; turns out all those Samoan girls were just pulling her leg with the free love stories.
 
Cain said:
_Collapse_ sounds like liberal propaganda. And Margaret Mead was exposed as a gullible socialist back in the 80s.
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I see. You haven´t read it, you don´t know ◊◊◊◊ about it, but it must be liberal propaganda. Because you say so. Do you have any more gems of wisdom to share with us?
 
Cain said:
_Collapse_ sounds like liberal propaganda. And Margaret Mead was exposed as a gullible socialist back in the 80s.
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You're so contrary.

ETA: I've just started reading it, so far seems like a great book.
 
JamesDillon said:
Margaret Mead's work was refuted some time ago. I think Sagan writes about it in The Demon-Haunted World; turns out all those Samoan girls were just pulling her leg with the free love stories.
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Yes, there is a lesson to be learned about how people, including natives in far-flung, semi-isolated societies, will say things to josh with others. In an issue of the _NYT Magazine_ a reporter discussed Christian missionaries in South-east Asia(?). At first the husband was having a difficult time with the natives, and they tricked him into believing the word for "hammer" was "penis." He had lost his hammer so he'd constantly ask where it was, but instead he would aks where his penis was. "You mean you don't know? Can you describe what it looks like? How big it is?" And he'd make gestures, attempt to describe it, and then become frustrated with their laughter.

I'm just glad this board can still be personally amusing.
 
Guns, Germs and Steel was excellent. I got Collapse from the library a couple months ago and I only got about 1/4 of the way through it before I had to return it because I had a bunch of other things going on and I never should've taken it out at that time because I didn't have time to read it then, but the 1/4 that I read was also excellent too. It's just so interesting to see how different people in different places and times lived and what they had in common and what was different. I'm no archeology buff and in fact I usually find it pretty dry but somehow I find Diamond's books fantastic. I'm going to the library today and see if it's available to check out and if so I'm going to get it and finish it.
 
Chaos said:
I see. You haven´t read it, you don´t know ***** about it, but it must be liberal propaganda. Because you say so. Do you have any more gems of wisdom to share with us?
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I have read it, and it does contain some Liberal propaganda. Only a little, and it's near the end. :)
 
Guns, Germs and Steel was a great book. I consider it one of the 5 best science books I have ever read.

So when Diamond was coming to Seattle, I looked forward to hearing him speak. I started reading Collapse and was 1/3 of the way through it when he came to town. His talk was by far the worse I have ever attended. Some it was the organizers but he was awful. He made good points about the past and then misconstrued them into having some relevance to current days. I finished the book later despite his talk.

He is a great writer. He is a great historian. His extreme enviromentalist bias overcomes his intellect to such an extent that he turns into a idiot when making predictions. I am an environmentalist. I am quite worriend about global warming. But I hate it when reasonable concerns are so overblown as to be ludicrous.

Collapse is a mixture of excellent scholarship mixed nonsense. I learned a lot about the island of Hispaniola (Haiti and Dominican Republic) and his take on Rwanda is thought provoking. But his attempts to draw a parallel between societies that collapsed and the US are moronic.

He has five items that predict the possible collapse of a society. Three of them are weak and getting weaker. We have a surplus of food and it is getting greater. We have ample foreign trade and it is increasing. Our enemies weak and getting weaker (compared to the Nazis and the Soviets.) The one indicator against us is climate change which is real and getting worse.

If I remember correctly, the fifth indicator is how society reacts to impending signs of collapse. As countries get richer, they get more concerned about the enviroment so I think this is a good sign. But it does not really matter because his indicators indicate that there is no potential collapse and therefore no reason to worry about we do or do not react to a non-existant crisis.

Read the book with a huge grain of salt and you can learn a lot. But blindly following a man with blinders is not a good idea.

CBL
 
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