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Joseph Koppenhout's avatar

I really enjoyed this essay.

About 6th months ago, I came across r/askhistorians writings on him and was quite surprised. As I first read him when I was a teenager, Diamond had a big impact on me, and though as I grew up and read more I did find some of his arguments had flaws, I always found that the basic insight was solid. It was interesting to hear their critiques, but they didn't sit right with me.

On a particular level, it does feel like Diamond's book has the simple disadvantage of being a hugely successful work doing something (big history) controversial around a topics that people are sensitive about. This invites a kind of vitriolic public criticism and 'exposure' of 'wrongness' that, especially on a site like Reddit, is very enjoyable for people to engage in. The issue with Reddit in particular is that it is not a space that is intended for reasoned academic debate, giving space only to controversialists and not to people who would point out that maybe Diamond isn't so bad.

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Rumi Khan's avatar

Thank you for posting this essay. I have been sick and tired of the weirdly uneducated and overly emotional misreading and attacks on GSG, which isn't a perfect book but isn't what everyone says it is. It was always a pain to have to produce a fractional collection of rebuts each time so I'm glad you've done the work of putting them all in one place! A valuable reference for sure.

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