"Dark Age Ahead" - Jane Jacobs

[Ceallachain]

Excerpts:

The difference between conquering and victim cultures is not owing to genetic discrepancies in intelligence or other inborn personal abilities among people, as racists persist in believing. Apart from variations in resistance to various diseases, the fates of cultures are not genetically influenced, let alone determined.

Successful invaders and conquerors are beneficiaries of "biogeography." The cultural ancestors of the "winners" got head starts as outstandingly productive farmers and herders, producing ample and varied foods that support large and dense populations. This allowed them to support individuals and institutions engaged in activities other than food production (religion, medicine, weaponry, etc.)

Northern and Western Europe pulled ahead of Mesopotamia not because Europeans have been wiser, but because they had the good luck to live in a more robust environment with higher rainfall in which vegetation grows quickly. Also, they herded cows and sheep, not goats.

China, with its greater rainfall, was the first to cast iron and invented the compass, gunpowder, paper and a printer with moveable type.

Jeopardized pillars of our US culture:
1. Community and Family
2. Higher Education
3. Effective practice of science and science-based technology
4. Taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities
5. Self-policing by the learned professions

[Angle]

China didn't invent iron, the Hittites did. Cast iron first appeared in Anatolia, i.e., modern day Turkey. Needless to say, Turkey doesn't enjoy the rainfall of, say, Ireland, or the west coast of Great Britain, but iron didn't originate there.

Jacobs doesn't even know her facts, much less her interpretations.

Encyclopaedia Britannica 2003, 'Iron Age':


The date of the full Iron Age, in which this metal for the most part replaced bronze in implements and weapons, varied geographically, beginning in the Middle East and southeastern Europe about 1200 BC but in China not until about 600 BC.

'But in ... not until.' Exactly. Enough said.



The cultural ancestors of the "winners" got head starts as outstandingly productive farmers and herders, producing ample and varied foods that support large and dense populations. This allowed them to support individuals and institutions engaged in activities other than food production (religion, medicine, weaponry, etc.)


This fucking bilge is refuted by the existence and successes of the Mongols. Who was cultural ancestor to the Mongols, except whoever gave them iron?

I'm gonna grass Jacobs up to the ADL 'cos she's a geographist, discriminating against pastures of colour.

Anyone, anyone holding an explanation as if in the palm of their hand, like Jacobs does, but like almost every thinker that every lived, is a fucking idiot. How presumptious of them to agree on their causes! I'm really just paraphrasing Nietzsche; and like anything, no matter how insignificant, or indistinguishably large, there are infinite causes - largely because we'll keep on adding those quarks, those leptons, those ideas about 'biogeography' to the world, and chose certain conditions over others - BECAUSE WE'RE If you're settled on a cause you're a fucking idiot. Race satisfies as an explanation because it accords with the facts: intelligent races = prosperous; savage races = not somewhere a civilized person would enjoy being. It's simply a cause among many, and one which works better than 'biogeography' because it accounts for hostilities between differing groups which idiots like Jacobs ignore completely. If you invite niggers, Mexicans, pakis, and chinks into your countries, they aren't going to instantiate rivalry because they come from a different weather system, or disagree with you about pastoralism on goat vs. cow, it's because they change the living conditions to their own, willfully or otherwise. THEY ARE DIFFERENT PEOPLES, WHATEVER THE CAUSE MAY BE FOR THAT. Racism accepts this, and moves on. Anti-racism searches on for the immutable essence of a thing. What the shit do weather systems or conquest have to do with anything? Idiot! Fuck causality, as Nietzsche might have said after one cream cake too many.