671–680 of 755 posts
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59595952 https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/09/china/uyghur-tribunal-jud...
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One thing about claims (say display Crimea as part of Russia within Russia and as Ukraine elsewhere), but distorting SIZES of the places on maps according to someone's political preference is well... plain out ridiculous, laughable. It displays how messed up China is more than anything else. It's seriously hard to expect the place that does things like that, as a next superpower. You can't build a superpower on silly…
> You can't build a superpower on silly, 4-year-old level lies like that one. You absolutely can and must. That is, in fact, one of the prerogatives of a superpower.
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> So you mean the current administration then? All of them since the 80s at least (except for Trump, but he's not representative of the class "US leaders"). > And china seems to be focused on free global trade as well. Trade embargos are more known for the US. What do embargos have to do with anything? Chinese leaders might be OK with free global trade, given the kinds of controls they have on domestic market access,…
"except for Trump, but he's not representative of the class "US leaders"" He was the last elected US president and was almost elected a 2. time. So like it or not, but to the world, he is a very strong current representative of a US leader. And yes, a very nationalistic one at that. Who can be back to power very soon, or someone like him.
> He was the last elected US president and was almost elected a 2. time.
1) "US leaders" encompasses more than the presidency, and 2) at this point Trump is an n=1 aberration and no one can say if any patterns have changed.
The overall US leadership class has internalized the dogma of free trade, to the point of openly and uncritically accepting the national-level negatives (de-industrialization, etc.). I'm extremely skeptical that any other Republican besides Trump would deploy protectionist policies like tariffs or bully business leaders into doing something that puts the nation in front of their shareholders.
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One thing about claims (say display Crimea as part of Russia within Russia and as Ukraine elsewhere), but distorting SIZES of the places on maps according to someone's political preference is well... plain out ridiculous, laughable. It displays how messed up China is more than anything else. It's seriously hard to expect the place that does things like that, as a next superpower. You can't build a superpower on silly…
It's a mistake to treat "China" as one coherent entity with a single unified purpose, which chooses to prioritize the mapping issue front-of-mind. China has over a billion people. That one middle manager in the maps department is personally offended by territory appearing smaller, has zero relation to the rest of the country and shouldn't affect your opinion. Many bureaucrats in the USA draw stupid lines in sand that…
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> "China's leaders are nationalists" > And the US leaders are not? Way less so, as displayed in their commitments to free trade and globalization.
Haha, I have seen many speeches of the US presidents and they all come off as nationalist. I imagine it would be very hard to win an election in the US without mentioning that Americans are the coolest people on Earth or something like that.
Who cares about speeches? It's policy that matters. Chinese leaders actually pursue nationalist economic policy, while the US leaders dress up globalization with nationalist rhetoric.
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Golden Arches Theory was intended as a joke. Trying to "debunk" a joke, does nothing to negate the trend of increased economic cooperation leading to decreased conflict. I think the author's own response is fitting to the sentiment in your comment: I was both amazed and amused by how much the Golden Arches Theory had gotten around and how intensely certain people wanted to prove it wrong. They...insisted that politic…
> Golden Arches Theory was intended as a joke. Trying to "debunk" a joke, does nothing to negate the trend of increased economic cooperation leading to decreased conflict. I think you misunderstand. I wasn't specifically referring to the Golden Arches Theory as bunk, but the more general one you describe. It's bunk because it makes assumptions about motivations and strategies that aren't necessarily true, not because…
It's like patriotism, nationalism have become bad words in the USA. The USA and its values are really worth fighting for (am not even from the US), but this thing about "lets not be nationalistic", and if you criticize the CCP you hear "oh let's not be sinophobic" needs to stop.
All the 3rd world countries who got into the Belt and Road "co-operation" are really getting belted now.
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One thing about claims (say display Crimea as part of Russia within Russia and as Ukraine elsewhere), but distorting SIZES of the places on maps according to someone's political preference is well... plain out ridiculous, laughable. It displays how messed up China is more than anything else. It's seriously hard to expect the place that does things like that, as a next superpower. You can't build a superpower on silly…
You should see the Gerrymandering maps in the US. It’s map distortion for political power, not just political posture.
But those maps do describe reality.
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I say you remember incorrectly. Some map projections (see https://explainxkcd.com/977 > for an overview) make objects appear proportionally larger when we move from the equator to the poles, Greenland and Antarctica are greatly exaggerated. But this is motivated by stereometric reasons – everything on the same latitude is equally distorted – and not because the King wanted a huge Mappy McMapface.
> But this is motivated by stereometric reasons – everything on the same latitude is equally distorted Expanding on this; Mercator is useful for navigation because it's conformal, i.e. it preserves angles. When you're plotting the course of a ship, this is very convenient.
Only when maps were used for other purposes was there any reason to develop other projections.