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Comment by worik | Hacker News Reader

> book is plainly anti-racist and anybody who says otherwise probably never read it.

I read it.

It is deeply racist as none of the argument makes sense unless you look from a European POV from the end of the twentieth-century

It so happens that the industrial revolution happened in England and not India, and a bunch of European gangsters went on a three hundred year world wide rampage that is coming to an ignoble end now

Jarrad has some interest ideas but his euro centric POV is so deeply ingrained he cannot see it.

He is utterly racist. He does not know it, but it drips from all his writings

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I think you are agreeing with him.

Your quote > "It so happens that the industrial revolution happened in England and not India, and a bunch of European gangsters went on a three hundred year world wide rampage that is coming to an ignoble end now"

This is exactly what happened. The book agrees with this.

That is not being argued against.

What he is discussing is 'why did the industrial revolution happen in England?'. What lead up to that. Not that they didn't do bad things once they had the technology.

It was explicitly written with a European POC at the end of the 20th century. What else would you expect?

That doesn’t make something racist if you’re European writing during that period. Should all books by euros from 1950-2000 be discarded? I’m not sure I understand your argument.

He mistook his post hoc analysis for historical and geographical determinism

Not all writers do that

I think the geographical determinism is the whole point though, right?

That’s the argument is that geography contributed heavily to what we have today. Not that we’ll have this forever.

I remember reading about the East/West spread vs North/South spread of technology and it seems clever to me.

> I think the geographical determinism is the whole point though, right?

My point is that it is post hoc a theory to fit the facts.

I agree that he forces facts to fit his model, but that doesn't make the book racist. The entire point of his book is that environmental circumstances, not racial or cultural characteristics, explain the circumstance of European dominance in the modern era; this is explicitly anti-racist. (Inb4 Kafkatrap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36265324)

That's literally how creating a theory works. You don't "pre-hoc" explanations or there would be no point to scientific inquiry. Do you mean to say he's cherry-picking or displaying some other bias?

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