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Yes. GG&S might be wrong, but the claim that it's explicitly racist has always seemed to me to be an astonishingly tendentious misreading.

It turns out that there are lots of readers out there who wilfully confuse "is" for "ought". Even when an author goes out of their way to emphasise that they are only describing their view of reality, not in any way assigning virtue to it.

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Most of the GGS-hatred I've seen has come from people who hate that Diamond rejects racial differences or innate differences in will and spirit ("civilization", "culture" etc.) as an explanation.

Then there's some very few left-wing critics who hate it for basically the same reason, but with opposite sign, since it implicitly also rejects that western civilization or the white race is uniquely evil.

Then there's some grumbling from academics who hate a popularizer for all the reasons you'd expect.

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