Jared Diamond being full of shit doesn’t make the material conditions irrelevant.

a lot of it originated with the gun germs and steel book placing an overimportance on geography

I mean, there's something undeniably influential about geography on certain cultural and economic trends. It isn't a coincidence that England and Japan both became globe-spanning naval powers. And the impact of herd animals on the cultivation of disease is as undeniable today as it was a thousand years ago.

Im not saying that the south wasnt the region where slavery was the most prominent, but the south was in no way more disposed to slavery because hundreds of millions of years ago plate tectonics caused there to be a ridge formed in the south that just so happened to cause rivers to end abruptly, and people built mills there, and it’s more fertile, and oh uh a bunch of whites imported actual people as slaves because the land was just so good for slavery.

I think you're reading a bit too much into the graph headlines. The plate tectonics creating a fertile region had a political consequence because it concentrated agricultural workers in a well-defined strip of land. Those agricultural workers had a socio-economic interest that was sharply distinct from the urban shipping centers along the coast and the ranch land to the north.

This doesn't guarantee slavery. The Lakes of Minnesota and the California Valley were both fertile agricultural lands that failed to produce an active slave trade. But it does guarantee a concentration of particular industries. Not coincidentally, Minnesota and California have larger and more active labor movements concentrated in the areas where dense populations of agg workers live.

So what explains the graphic im malding about in the first place? Not geography.

Absolutely geography. That was the ahem bedrock of the split in regional concentrations of population, economic activities common to the region, and subsequent political formations within these regions.

Where the theory ultimately falls apart, though, is in assuming the political divides need to be this sharp or the populations this heterogeneous. Alabama doesn't have to be a western-oriented state scarred by settler colonialism. That strip of tectonic activity didn't summon Columbus from the ether or split the Democratic Party over desegregation. It didn't foster a slave markets in Manhattan or on the banks of the Potomic and it didn't drive the native tribes west of the Mississippi.

The shape we're seeing in the data is human history crashing like a wave on the shores of the coast and depositing individuals in the cracks left by geography. A different history would have brought different people with different socio-economic fate. But you'd still see farmers congregating along the rich soil, and those farmers would share a common interest, and that would mean something for the strip of land that wasn't as true outside it.

Yeah that whole theory of how Europe took control of the world always sounds so bogus to me. It's bogus because up until Europe started taking slaves from Africa and America, they weren't the most technologically or scientifically advanced or whatever. The middle east and India had already lapped Europe in terms of math, astronomy, medicine, etc.

The middle east in particular was so much more advanced that the Renaissance in part occurred because of Latin translations of Arabic texts from literally 400 years beforehand.

Instead of scientific racism, its “hwite ppl are superior because cold winters forced them to develop complex society because otherwise they would freeze to death le natural selection”

A lot of skull measurer bros do say that though. Funny thing though I've spoken with Afrocentric people who think the same thing but take it to a different conclusion. They think that white people's behavior throughout history is the result of the harsh winters that they evolved in. They think that going through harsh winters made Europeans more cruel and violent than people of color. Now I don't put much stock into race science, even if it's punching up at whites, but it was admittedly amusing to listen to.

What is the reason that Europe colonised the world and not the other way round though? Other countries had similar levels of ore in the ground and so on, so theoretically they could've advanced at the same time and decided to invade the rest of the world.

I definitely don't put the answer down to whites being genetically smarter, and I don't have a decided answer, but I read read a book by Yannis Varoufakis where he states that Europe's invasion and colonisation of the world comes down to the need for surplus in colder countries.

Paraphrasing, in colder countries you need to stockpile grain and so on for the winter, while in warmer places there's an abundance of food around you at all times, especially in times when populations weren't so big.

The existence of the stockpiled grain then necessitated debt, as in winter time you'd feed people your grain at a cost - a cost that they could not pay at that time. To enforce the debt, you then need a bank of sorts with the backing of force to make sure the debt is repaid. Money and force begets more money and force, and eventually there becomes a high concentration of power in the hands of the few with great armies, with the mind to get more money through force.

From my own thoughts, geographically, your country might also have an advantage if you're by the sea, because you would create a Naval force, a key instrument in the ability to go around the world plundering.

What would you give as an alternative answer? I don't think this answer dictates that white people are inherently smarter back then or today.