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Delete your effing maps, Kos!* [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-01-11

This diary is a response to Markos’ post Trump’s Greenland delusions of grandeur are based on a deceiving map. Respectfully submitted (note the use of effing in the title), by an establishment liberal Democrat who deeply feels lost in the wilderness of global maps, and is much short on hope that we can ever extract ourselves from the morass of trying to best represent an oblate spheroid in 2-D.

Markos, in his typically presumptuous and self-satisfied manner, posted something to fix that, but actually did just the opposite. In his diary, Markos supposedly identifies the problem of the Mercator projection (or “global stretch map”), summed up by this quote:

The thing is, that [stretch] map, which we all have deeply imprinted in our brains, is a lie. It’s a bald-faced lie that not only provides a distorted view of the world, but continues the ages-old tradition of minimizing the southern hemisphere.

Lies! The Mercator projection was first presented by the Flemish geographer and mapmaker Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It spread because it was particularly useful for navigation during the age of sail. It wasn’t about minimizing the global south; it was about finding, conquering and colonizing the world!

Modern Ortelius oval projection

1569. That’s nearly 20 years AFTER Battista Agnese’s Ortelius oval projection seen in the lead graphic. Look at that map. Remind you of something?

And it gets worse for Kos! The front hemisphere in Agnese’s map is identical to Petrus Apianus’s 1524 globular projection. 1524! Thats over 45 years before Markos’ so-called “age old tradition” of minimizing the global south. What’s more, the projection reached a wide audience via the surpassingly popular [warning, some browsers apparently having trouble with this link] Theatrum Orbis Terrarum by Abraham Ortelius beginning in 1570. The projection (and indeed Ortelius's maps) were widely copied by other mapmakers such as Giovanni Pietro Maffei, Fernando de Solis, and Matteo Ricci.

What is not clear about “surpassingly popular” and “widely copied”?!? All these before and current with this so-called ages-old tradition of minimizing the global south. What gall.

Rather than listen to the hubristic mansplainings of a self-important blogger-turned-publisher who thinks, just because he founded and curates one of the, if not the, most successful and important liberal/left blogs in the United States, he has anything coherent to opine regarding how best to represent our planet on a 2-D map, I’ll stick with those who know what they are talking about. See here and here, eg.

So, please, Markos, if you must, just stick to political analysis and organization, OK? It’s not like you have any track-record or expertise in either of those…

(*For those wondering about the title, you’re in the wrong diary.)

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/11/2296403/-Delete-your-effing-maps-Kos?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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