>Odd take on causality.

If you have something to say say it like a man. This is an internet comment section, not a bunch of mean girls pretending to run a parent teacher association.

>It’s perfectly reasonable to say that an event was caused by earlier events and also that different actions in the intervening years could have produced different outcomes.

The problem is that it's a meaningless statement. Everything "has its origins" or "was caused by" the prior situation which has its origins (or whatever comparable verbiage you prefer) in a nearly infinite set of things that created the immediate necessary preconditions. Like if the middle east didn't suck you might not have got Colombus when you did and the resultant effects. Or if the middle east sucked a little more you might not have gotten Marco Polo when you did having the resultant effects. But this all just devolves into a stupid "look how smart I am" exercise where we're all just basically listing things that came before and circle jerk about the ways they put their metaphorical thumbs on the scale of the future.

sexism aside, they did say exactly what they meant.