Woke cartography is stupid
Wow, nog nooit self só daarna gekyk nie… pic.twitter.com/wjPY6s1oM1
— Werner (@WernerToyota) January 10, 2023
Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice what can adequately explained with stupidity.
J.Kb’s Razor: Never attribute to bigotry what can adequately explained by other means.
Woke exists to violate J.Kb’s Razor.
The problem isn’t racism, bigotry, or unfairness.
The problem is topology.
The earth is a sphere and you can’t lay a sphere flat.
That is a Mercator projection map.
Every map has advantages and disadvantages, chosen for a reason.
Mercato projections have the advantage of consistent orientation. Everywhere on the map, north is up, south us down, west is left, and east is right. Longitude and latitude are at right angles so distances between two points are a straight line. That is done by sacrificing scale. Scale changes as latitude changes and it increases further north you go.
The right angle orientation makes it an easy map for novices to use.
It has nothing to do with diminishing Africa or privileging Europe. It’s a useful projection for maritime navigation.
The Mollweide projection attempts to keep scale but as you can see, longitude cants towards the polls so north is only up at the equator.
A Goode’s projection attempts to keep scale and orientation, but ends of creating dead spaces. You can’t draw a line between two points across oceans.
It’s a shitty map for navigation.
This dufus’s map attempts to keep orientation like a Mercator but proper scale, so ends up creating huge dead spaces between countries that eliminates relative positions.
There are real reasons of topology and cartography that maps look a certain way, and in none of them was “Africa is full of black people so I’m going to make it smaller to it seems less important” the motivating factor.
If you really want to teach kids about how the earth looks, don’t get a Woke teacher, get a fucking globe.