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I've moved on from BNW.
Crash Course lost me when the Greens stated that communism and capitalism have both done horrible things. While technically true, one has done nothing but. Same thing with CC for the Mongols and non-nomadic peoples. Both have done evils, but one never contributed to the better of humanity, just killed them.
I watched the geography episode from CC and it was so amazingly bad and ridden with anti-Western pro-communism propaganda, I ground my teeth away clenching my jaw so hard. Even the Greens realized that, which is why they had to take it down or face even more fallout. The girl will insult scientists one moment, stating that they aren't geographers and view things through a scientific lens, then go on to state another point a person she poisons the well against is using bad science. The kind five minutes ago she said wasn't science. She relates people she disagrees with to having ideas similar to Nazis even though the people weren't. Finally, a person with the "proper" idea is actually a noted communist, though she doesn't tell us he is.
My main problem with GG&S is he tries to use one, all-be-it big, reason to explain everything. Like most on here, I'm a huge history nut, but I also dabble in psychology, anthropology (got a B in 2007 on a paper because I stated European phenology is in part due to interbreeding with Neanderthals, 5 years before it was proven), geology, and my training is in biochemistry. Diamond's theory was always "no duh" to me. It doesn't explain why African people living in a sub-tropical environment never developed a civilization comparable to the Maya or Aztecs, despite the Maya living in an environment with similar disease epidemiology and the kicker of having no rivers, unlike their African counterparts. The Maya were even more isolated from Eurasia, didn't have beasts of burden, and wasted a whole bunch of time walking to the Yucatan when they could have been inventing civilization.
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My main criticism of Diamond is that his book is boring. The thesis is for the most part common sense.
I'm open to my ignorance changing, but maybe I should have been clearer. I'm talking about nomadic Mongols, and to a lesser extent nomadic peoples, never contributing. I'm not talking about nomadic people once they conquer a non-nomadic and assimilating, then losing most of their previous culture while still being the ruling class. Also, I'm not counting the Pax Mongolica protecting the Silk Road which helped culture and ideas (and disease) spread. That was a by-product of them protecting taxable income. Also not including things like Tamerlane being a huge patron of artists, scientists, and engineers, sending them back to Samarkand, the workers did it, not him.
But it wasn't a "by-product" at all, it was the result of active intervention by the Mongols. You can't just randomly discard major aspects of the Mongol Empire's impact for such arbitrary reasons. The Mongols protected the trade routes. They actively improved communications beyond that via the yam system. They engaged in forced removals of artisans across the empire, a major undertaking which caused a lot of new artistic and cultural forms to grow up. They were active patrons even without these removals of sciences and arts, most famously with Tusi's observatory. And patronage/removals do matter, because development of scholarship might be severely limited without it. Islamic art was permanently changed, the famous Chinese blue-and-white became makeable on a large scale, the first world history to actually use indigenous sources was created, religious minorities such as the Nestorians and Shi'is flourished, extremely important architecture such as the Soltaniyeh Dome was constructed. Nomads had literary culture for the first time in their history via the Secret History and the various Altan Debter-derived histories. Historians are (IIRC) now revisiting the Yuan and pointing out how a lot of Mongol innovations to the administration/commercial policy were a possible cause for the eventual commercial flourishing of the late Ming/Qing and an important part of China's administrative development.
If you mean that nomads themselves have generally been aids to transmission rather than creators of art themselves then, well, so what? If it wasn't for the Mongols and empires like them then these kinds of cultural exchange simply would not have happened. That counts as a contribution to the betterment of humanity. This isn't to say that the Empire's influence was a net positive (while the numbers usually given are probably wild exaggerations they still killed an awful lot of people) but you really can't just discount this stuff. They altered the world in a way beyond pure destruction, and if you ignore that you're missing a lot of the specifics of how Eurasian history developed.
Also Timur wasn't really a Mongol anyway. He was of Mongol descent but by all other measures he was a Turk emeshed in the era/region's Persianate culture.
A very cursory look at the contents of nomadic grave-sites across Eurasia will quickly discount this idea as well.
Likewise, relations between Eurasian nomads and settled peoples persistently involved loads of trade of animal-based products for agricultural goods. Obviously raiding and conflict happened too, but for overall economic development this a really important relationship throughout much of history.
That's an unfortunate byporduct of killing the with fire and cold steel. They cannot be infected afterwards.
More seriously: the pop density of Eastern Europe was low enough so the Plague could not spread so efficiently
The problem with Diamond is that it's really a bunch of essays that aren't very connected. The good parts (that rely heavily on other people's research it should be noted) are decent, but tons of chapters are just random meandering, pointless badly researched suppositions and not particularly great theories.
No, it was because nobody bothered researching the plague in Poland for decades so everyone kept regurgitating the same stats someone had compiled in the 40s and 50s without much evidence. Poland was just as badly affected by the plague as everywhere else (or at least there's no reason to suspect it wasn't).
There was an AskHistorians post about this I'll try to dig up (yes I know that's hardly a source by itself but they showed their working pretty well).
EDIT: Here it is.
We had an interesting narrative and then Tufto came with boring facts......
What next ? The Sea people wasnt an invasion from Atlantis ?
What next ? The Sea people wasnt an invasion from Atlantis ?
Don't be ridiculous. The Sea People were a race of demonic lizard-folk summoned by the Great Demon Ka. Atlantis was still recovering from its sturgeon tariff riots, it literally had bigger fish to fry.
What kind of tariff riots? Atlantis is in international waters so it is and was always a duty free zone, even a 1st grader knows that.
They weren't international waters at the time, though; they were solidly Atlantean territory, as it hadn't sunk beneath the waves at that point. Sturgeon imports were starting to be heavily taxed by a cash-strapped government, but as it had become such a staple food for the city itself this was having a severe effect on both long-distance merchants and the urban poor who united together against the immortal semi-deities whose every whim was law. And that's not even taking into account their recent involvement with the pyramid aliens ok I'll stop now.
So the reason to sink the city was to gain tax exemptions or to have a more direct access of sturgeons?