In my new book "Sun, snow, and seistas" I will discuss how all of human history is determined by latitude
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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Jarred Diamond is that you?
For all that people love to joke about Italy, don't they have just about the strongest left wing history in western Europe? Which I know isn't much, but still.
And Spain and former Yugoslavia
Italians have some of the best bangers amongst communist music.
materialism?
This is just racism IMO.
I've seen the Europeans are the superior race because evolution and their environment reasoning before.
Yeah, if I remember right, the one of the popular proto-racisms before they settled on pseudo-genetics was that people from warm climates are too passionate and only good for laborers and soldiers, people from cold climate's are too dispassionate and should be scientists, and only the people from [whoever is writing this shit today's home latitude] have the even temperament necessary to rule.
that was the roman idea, yeah.
Basically, though Owl remembered it backwards - Northeners from colder climates (Germanic tribes, Nords, Scots, etc) are in order to compensate for that more hot in body and thereby more passionate and quick to anger, with somewhat overheated brains but very strong bodies - great warriors and laborers, but poor in intellectual pursuits on average.
It was the opposite for people from Warmer climates, their bodies were 'colder' and their brains worked much better but their bodies were weak - great intellectuals and artists, poor warriors and laborers.
The Romans and Greeks, of course, being in the middle of these two poles had the best of both worlds. Or so the thinking went. It's also worth noting the Romans didn't see this as hereditary, exactly - it was thought that people moving to different temperature areas would cause them to have the same characteristics as the locals within just a few generations.
Europe, famously with a scorching equatorial climate.
China has some brutal winters and they have been continuously been one of the largest civilizations throughout all of history
China has every climate in the world pretty much. except maybe the mediterranean one.
So that's why China has always been based and didn't even need a cultural revolution.
Mainly because of rice being absolutely perfect to grow there and incredibly abundant in the correct conditions.
There's something to be said about how different grains impacted the social structures of many societies. Rice really incentivized massive families and communal structures. Wheat was easier to automate with tools and industry. North China and South China have a lot of interesting differences in societal habits as a result.
As a cook and history guy, food history is like...super informative. Who ate what during whatever period or place and how it got to the table is like the most historical materialism you can do. It's something id really like to study in a formal capacity
Yeah the types of foods that societies relied on are a much stronger influence on culture and development than weather imo. Of course the weather itself plays a role in which foods are available though and this leads to people misattributing the behaviour to the weather instead of correctly recognising that everything we've ever done socially revolves around the survival need to eat.
Rice can have multiple harvests in a year while wheat typically leaves a seasonal labor surplus that tended to be absorbed by military campains.
I often ask myself, "why are they like this?", but "they evolved different" is pseudoscientific. the material conditions that made capitalism started fairly recently. I haven't finished Black Marxism yet, but I reckon it has something to do with history.
If anything, cold winters promote hoarding surplus and going to war over it. Then turning to colonialism and stealing from countries with better weather. Source: the entire history of Europe.
One day we will rise up against our Inuit overlords.
Sure but not every culture has the same response to the same adversities. Some Inuit groups become far more collective during the winter months
It usually depends on if you are working from scarcity or surplus. One of the more interesting finds within cultural materialist anthropology, is that scarcity usually drives collective behaviors, while surplus usually drives wedges as more surplus can be gained from more fertile areas, better techniques, better knowledge of the land, etc, which means that it is inevitably unequally distributed if left alone.
And different societies have had different ways of dealing with this phenomena, with some cultures using shame and sarcasm to bring individuals with surplus back into the communal fold and have them distribute it, and others having large ceremonial gatherings where burning or bringing as much stuff as you can to the gathering is a way to secure prestige within the group. The group incentive is to use all of your surplus, thus start out at the same level as everyone else every year.
Most of Europe had similar traditions well into the medieval period, with modernity, and in particular capitalism, really driving the nail in the coffin on those particular set of behaviors, which is one of many reasons why capitalism is extremely misanthropic to it's core, as it promotes the exact opposite behavior.
I mean, the first successful communist revolution happened in a country famous for it's brutal winters.
My experience is that cold winters create isolation, not collectivism
In a capitalist society, it absolutely does. Each individual or familial unit is expected to live and produce their own surplus.
Recently my favorite reddit comment was a mod on r/auslaw in response to to Tickle versus Giggle, who had deleted a reactionaries response but there reply was "trans women are legally women in Australia, so this literally cannot be a loss for women", it's fun to have the prescriptivism of the law on your side, if only for I assume what is going to be a brief moment in history.
Tickle vs Giggle? For real? Im too in the literal opposite side of the earth to know what that is, but the name needs to change if its gonna be serious
Oh I have something incredible to show you lmao. Not sure how you missed this. https://hexbear.net/post/79979
Basically this Australian terf made a gender phrenology app for "biological women". A hexbear user posted about it. A bunch of people review bombed it, then someone linked the site to her on twitter while she was melting down over it and she nearly went on sky news to complain about what was then chapo.chat.
Twitter thread https://x.com/salltweets/status/1356804985732833283
Good memory. I vaguely recall this now that you mention it. I remember the skynews thing but didnt really get where it came from. I think at the time I would have been public wifi dependant and didnt keep that up
lmao apparently we helped kick off the outrage that lead to ongoing litigation against them.
hexbear shadow cabal
posting is praxis
is that a pig poop balls pickle rick
Roxane Tickle Vs Giggle for Girls. The Australian courts affirmed that under Australian law trans women are women and cannot be excluded from women's spaces due to being trans as it is discrimination.
Oi, u 'avin' a Giggle m8?
But...that is the Mediterranean. 45 degree summer afternoons and bleak 4 degree winters that are just cold enough to fuck everything up.
That, too. Siesta is a thing for a reason.
In Poland we have snow and yet we are vehemently anti-communist, sooooo nuh uh 
Jared Diamond, is that you?
A Braudel take? I'm not mad about it.
I was going to post "like how sometimes chatgpt is right about things" but yknow what chief i think those two corollaries might be interrelated