Earlier quoted context omitted.
That people will have fewer cases of lung cancer.
Plain chalk is carcinogenic??
I'd assume getting roughly anything in your lungs frequently enough is carcinogenic.
This map is not upside down
341–350 of 540 posts
Re: This map is not upside down
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone from the southern hemisphere, the only thing more patronizing and infuriating than this is the insistence from the same moralizing group that my country isn’t part of “The West”, despite it being physically and culturally there.
"The West" is Western Europe and it's colonial/cultural derivatives. It hasn't been a directional term for centuries. Everyone intuitively knows this based on the usage but, every now and then, someone like you thinks they are clever and nobody else understands.
A lot of Americans don't consider countries in South America to be part of "The West".
Which is wild, cause Americans also love Rome and it's influence in western culture, and Latin America literally speaks languages that are direct descendants of Latin.
Re: This map is not upside down
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do wonder if early world explorers had been from the southern hemisphere and a tradition of "south up" was already established, if it would still look better to us to have more land on top.
I think the convention was born by magnetic north. I suppose it might also point to non magnetic south. Maybe a combination of the explorers and compass convention.
How would magnetic north decide this? There's no asymmetry to magnetic north and south.
Re: This map is not upside down
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
The West only makes sense in the Northern Hemisphere. I’m in Peru right now, and people talk about the local cultures in comparison to Western culture and I find it kind of confusing. They’re certainly not Eastern here. It gets unconfusing if you realize it just means White.
> It gets unconfusing if you realize it just means White. It definitely does not. Russia, for example, would be considered "White", but is decidedly not part of "the West".
Exactly.
Also the "only in the Northern Hemisphere" part goes out the window as soon as Australia is mentioned.
It doesn't matter that Canada and USA have strong Native populations, "it's different in the south".
In my view the "you're not West" discourse is just another tool to fuck with the souther hemisphere. Fucks you in the head to get this crap from "both sides".
Re: This map is not upside down
#345I do want to provocatively point out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_drip
Re: This map is not upside down
#346The moralizing that always accompanies (not) upside down maps is so tedious. It's a genuinely interesting example of how something can look so wrong and yet not be wrong at all. To try to extend that "wrong" feeling to some kind of moral failure on the viewers part is just silly. You (or society) are not a bad or prejudiced person for thinking this way, it's just that nearly all maps produced have chosen a different…
Oh? I think the outrage over making the reader feel like "a bad or prejudiced person" that accompanies any invitation to challenge assumptions is so tedious.
How come this culture war mindset infuses everything we do online now?
Nowhere does this map or its description even imply you are a bad person.
It's pure ... projection
Re: This map is not upside down
#347Re: This map is not upside down
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
But... it's a title, not a sentence. Many book titles are even a single word, which is even less a sentence. Why would a grammatical convention for sentences apply to book titles?
Heck if I know. All I know is I am a lot more worked up about the misuse of “less” when the correct word is “fewer”.
Which itself was simply the preference of a spinster who wrote a grammar book.
English has no rules like that, only preferences.
Re: This map is not upside down
#349The moralizing that always accompanies (not) upside down maps is so tedious. It's a genuinely interesting example of how something can look so wrong and yet not be wrong at all. To try to extend that "wrong" feeling to some kind of moral failure on the viewers part is just silly. You (or society) are not a bad or prejudiced person for thinking this way, it's just that nearly all maps produced have chosen a different…
Well, it's not "wrong" to balk at seeing the world from a different point of view than the convention dictates. What is "wrong" is any insistence that the conventional view is the correct (or "right") one. Moralizing is never a good thing, but it is quite in order to criticize attitudes that equates an upside map to an upside cup, or to evil mindsets, such attitudes are widespread. It's an invitation to accept that our conventions are - conventions, not truths. How "something can look so wrong and yet not be wrong at all" doesn't come naturally, it has to be learned through examples like this.
Re: This map is not upside down
#350There's a practical reason for the map to be north facing. If you use a compass, the needle points north. So, if you then orient your self and your map facing the same direction, it's easy to figure out headings and bearings because they'll match what you see on the compass. Even in the southern hemisphere, compass needles still point north. So, orienting maps north seems like a pragmatic thing to do.