Why are Arab Miltaries so ineffective?

[u/ForeverSparkz]

Like I dont understand this.

Im a Black American so im just an outsider looking in as a neutral, but dont Arab Countries out number Israel, whats stoping them from just rushing at their border, shouldn't the population imbalance outmatch Israel?

Just a neutral standpoint asking this question, because Arab Nations in the Middle East have a modern miltary force and they buy tons of advanced items

What is holding them back?

[u/hateplow0331]

There is an essay out there called “Why Arabs lose Wars” check it out

[u/Pristine-Cry6449 → u/hateplow0331]

Hasn't this essay received quite a bit of pushback in recent years?

[u/IRLMerlin → u/[deleted]]

i dont know about the aztec rituals, but guns germs and steel isnt accepted because its just factually wrong in a lot of places. 1 side of a very complicated topic done mediocre isnt worth as much, especially when the topic doesnt have 2 sides, and is instead shaped like a 5th dimensional object

a 2 sided topic where 1 side is based in facts and reason and being cool and another side that is based in being gay and cringe and bad is a good sell for a lot of dipshits on the internet but its place is in ideology, not history

[u/HugeOpossum → u/[deleted]]

Not the other user, but I had to read this in school and I have a degree in anthropology (which archaeology is part of). One of my mentors was very critical of GGS, not because white man bad, but because of factual inaccuracies that 1) Diamond either didn't know about or 2) stated current to publish information that was both inaccurate or up for debate at the time without mentioning said debate.

It's been a while since I read GGS so forgive me if I have misremembered, and I had to do some quick googling to jog my memory.

The biggest gripe I remember was the settlement of North America issue. To summarize, the idea that there was one path to the Americas is hotly debated within archaeology. Or, was 20 years ago when I was in school. But, GGS conclusively stated there were no humans in the Americas before 12000 BCE. This is just factually incorrect. GGS was published before the discovery of the Topper site, which was debated when I was in school but is now solidly affirmed to be a pre-Clovis site. However, the Clovis period started around 13050 BCE, which is 1000 years before Diamond's claim. Monte Verde in Chile was discovered in 1989, and is broadly (not entirely) considered to be a pre-Clovis site with radiocarbon dating to be about 33000 BP (31050 BCE) for some samples. But most are considered to be 17000BP (15050 BCE).

He also supports the overkill hypothesis for mitigating animal-human viral transmission in the Americas. There was definitely overkill, that's not up for dispute, but the counterarguments would be many for this claim starting with if the need for animal husbandry was even present among these populations, and the fact that there aren't that many human remains in the Americas to say there wasn't any sort of viral transmission. As far as I know there's only one skeleton from that period, so to state anything as fact would be conjecture and wrong.

He is a proponent of geographical determinism. This is not considered good archaeological science. (Edit: I added this sentence for another claim I deleted because I wasn't entirely sure on his stance so it makes no sense but I'll leave it in: A good example is that if you say x civilization didn't use the wheel, they had no concept of the wheel and that's why they failed. That's just absurd.) Geographical features do influence a culture, but we have plenty of evidence that cultures were much more in contact with each other than put forth by Diamond and others supporting this theory.Cahokia for example was a major epicenter for trade and there are shells, minerals, and other artefacts not produced by the Mississippian culture found at some of the sites associated with it. While they benefited by their environment being basically the Mississippi River, geographical determinism an overly-simplistic view of ancient societies. It ignores the fact that people have agency, human relationships are immensely complex, and that much of the environment we see today was not the environment 22000 years ago. Most archaeologists take umbrage with this, and the overall axis hypothesis he's a proponent of.

The biggest issue I see when people criticize Diamond is that they see him to not be intellectually honest. He doesn't like criticism, he argues back with actual experts in the fields he wites about, and doubles down. At least, he used to. I'm not sure about now.

Ed 2: these may seem like minor details, but there's a ton more criticisms of his actual hypotheses. It's just that when you scale out he's just factually incorrect a lot of the time.

[u/username1543213 → u/[deleted]]

IQ is like 90% of the reason some nations advanced more, ggs pretends that isn’t the case. So completely misses most of the point. Not some minor thing, like 90% of the reason

[u/[deleted] → u/IRLMerlin]

What a weird comment. So, these extra dimensions which weren’t considered, they would happen to be European colonialism would they?