Comment by AlexandrB
20 hours ago
What's the material difference between this and Trump's "my button is bigger"[1] nonsense or the renaming of various bodies of water? I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
My personal favourite equal-area projection is something like Boggs eumorphic[2] because it doesn't distort the east and westmost polar regions quite as badly. The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand, not whether it flatters the correct countries.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42549687
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggs_eumorphic_projection
The main difference is that the UN didn’t force anything and isn’t unilaterally deciding what projection to use. The countries decided together to use a new default when showing the world map, that’s it. You can still use whatever projection you want, nothing will happen to you.
> it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
That’s literally what the UN is for. The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts. It’s a forum for countries to discuss and agree on things, in practice that means mostly symbolic decisions pass. Which is fine, symbols and defaults matter
> The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts.
The UN's explicit purpose is to try and prevent conflict. One of the requirements to join is to renounce the right to use force in international relations except in self-defense.
They do that in a number of ways. One of those is to have these types of symbolic votes. The hope is that by having where everyone stands out in the open, whether on silly things or serious things, it will reduce conflict. Does it work? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Obviously world peace hasn't been achieved. It probably never will be. Nonetheless, that is the goal of the UN. They want to try to fix conflicts.
It aims at peace yes, but importantly it is an inter-national organisation, meaning it lives beside nations and doesn't have any formal power over them. In some cases the individual treaties negotiated at the UN result in the UN having some formal influence over member nations, but even then the concrete commitments are usually very limited. For examy the Paris agreement basically just says you have to make a few reports, with peer pressure being most of the enforcement.
In contrast the EU is (partially) a supernational organisation: in some fields the EU holds formal power over what happens in the member nations (because the member nations changed their national law to give EU that power).
>The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts.
It kinda is, it also have powers to authorize invasions. Not that any of this works in practice, but that's what is for.
Trump didn't unilaterally decide what the rest of the world calls two bodies of water, only the US
He doesn't even have the power to unilaterally declare what the US calls it. Names of geographic features are established by popular usage, not governments.
1 reply →
> I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
This is kind of personally embarrassing, but due to seeing Mercator maps all the time growing up it wasn't until later in life that I realized that Greenland isn't actually a gigantic landmass the size of Africa.
> The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand
Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.
> Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.
Precisely why, I suspect, the US voted against the change. (One of the reasons, at least) I mean, gee, I wonder why the country with the world's largest navy* would prefer maps where you can draw a line on the map between two points and it's the actual compass direction? (Give or take a bit of weirdness near the poles, where the difference between the Earth's rotational pole and its magnetic pole actually matters in a way it doesn't matter below the polar circles).
It's just a symbolic vote, of course, and nobody's navy is going to stop using the so-useful-for-maritime-navigation Mercator just because of this UN vote. But still, I would bet that factored into the reasoning. How much? Who knows, I certainly couldn't say. Except to suspect that it was a non-trivial factor.
* Largest by tonnage — China and Russia have more total ships, with the US in third place by ship count, but the US has nearly half the number of aircraft carriers in the entire world, 11 out of a total of 23, and aircraft carriers are some of the heaviest ships out there. Numbers are from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/largest-n...
I doubt that was a factor at all. As you say, voting for this wouldn’t change the maps a navy uses anyway. Besides, navies aren’t normally using world maps, they use maps for specific regions.
The vote was because the US is an intransigent rogue state at this point, and it doesn’t want to accept any outside influence whatsoever.
> many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.
What sort of tasks besides a size measuring contest is an equal area projection good for?
Besides size, there's distance. Like it's annoying how UK and France look much further apart than they actually are, and every sea/air route appears to not take the shortest path. I'd be fine with this change if it weren't about trying to make Africa look more important. They're just fixing a misleading map.
5 replies →
I'd bet a lot of money that Trump and all the others pushing for a U.S. "liberation" of Greenland also think it is a similar size to Africa, not 1/14th the size.
Africa is 14x larger, but near the same size on the maps our leaders have grown up with for 80+ years.
This has clearly influenced geopolitics. Which is the point of the UN. Which is just a container for what the countries of the world want to agree on. When the UN "doesn't work" for some thing it is because the countries of the world don't want to work together for that thing.
> This has clearly influenced geopolitics
Citation needed. This feels like the entire hubub from leftists about how schools use the normal map because of racism and not because its actually useful.
Of course they were lying the entire time.
For the purposes I use world maps for, correct relative sizing is the paramount thing I'm looking for in a projection. I generally use it to give me a rough idea of distances. Boggs seems inferior, at a glance I have no idea how far it is from NYC to London, for example. I feel like Mercator is similarly bad in terms of distances being uniform. What do you use maps for where Boggs is superior?
>I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
Symbols are arguably the most important aspect of geopolitics.
Yeah… the US condemnations of the Axis powers is what really turned the tide, joining into the war later was really a post-script right?
Counterpoint: the Cold War was pretty much all about geopolitical symbols, e.g. the Berlin Wall, nuclear deterrence, the Space Race, counting Olympic medals.
3 replies →
Nazi were big on symbols. And very good in their use of them for propaganda. Yes, they played role in getting support for their project.
And allies were engaged in that too.
It's not the most pressing issue in the world, but long-term, maps do shape conceptions about the world that we don't personally know. So it might be symbolic, but symbols are powerful.
That must be why we all live in awe and fear of giant, mighty Greenland.
The fact that Greenland looks so big and impressive in a Mercator map has probably influenced Trump's obsession with taking it on some level.
The UN is a body that is intended to facilitate global cooperation. This symbolic change better represents the body's members and updates an incorrect visualization, which leads to better cooperation and representation.
Trump's renaming changes serve his own whims and selfish ego, they perform the opposite effect and hinder global cooperation.
Happily Trump’s actions probably help global cooperation for all countries that’s aren’t the US.