When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_(geological_formati... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_in_the_American_Sou... [2] https://politicartoons.livejournal.com/4422659.html
African Americans are glad to be living in the US, and they're deeply enmeshed in the fabric of American society. Slavery was a bad part of history (and of the present where it still exists) but it's not more "heart-breakingly tragic" that a large number of African Americans today live on fertile land in the Old South any moreso than a large number of Aficans living on all sorts of land including not-so-fertile in Africa.
In fact, let's take a step back instead of escalating the point. OP used a weird term for the context without qualifying the tragedy. Yes, slavery and other systemic abuses existed and we see echoes and displays of it today. That is tragic. But the simple fact where people live isn't tragic. It's the why they live where they live, to a degree.
Plus I believe rural blacks in the South just want to work good land, which by this point they often own. It's an agricultural area, the most people live on the best land. And further, the weather is more similar to Africa, hotter sunnier more humid. Subtropical. And then plus they're segregating of their own accord, they like each other they go to the same churches they share recipes for soul and Creole food, cook that pig good, share the crops. Sing together. Elect black representatives to go to Washington for them, being in a majority, that's another thing. Electing black Senators, that changes the game. And for that they need to be together in one place.
No, but specifically targeting Black people for marginalization by doing things like removing their ability to vote does count as being "treated worse".
>... just want to work good land, which by this point they often own.
If you think that the end of slavery automatically resulted in Black people owning land they farm on you need to read about what actually happens.
that is to say, the rich organic deposits of the black belt allowed slavery in the plantation model, creating the black belt as a racial profile.
From legacy software to political systems, when there's cruft or weird behavior there's almost always some environmental factor that shaped the decision to build it that way, even (especially) if the people who made the decision weren't conscious of why.
"Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracks and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, ’tis not a half-penny matter,—away they go cluttering like hey-go mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it."
I admit that when I was younger I was much more eager to just tear it all down and start anew...but with experience I have come to see things are never quite so easy. Things are the way they are for a reason, and it is important to know what those reasons are before attempting to modify the things.
People misinterpret Chesterton's fence as an argument against changing things, but it's actually just about what I quoted above. It has no verdict on whether or not something should be changed. It just argues that you should make a strong effort to figure out why it is how it is before attempting to do so.
I'd argue that if you don't at least do the exercise your attempts to change things will probably fail, since whatever you try to do will likely fail to capture something necessary in the old system.
Keep in mind though that it doesn't always work. Sometimes the reason for the fence is forgotten. Sometimes the reason is deeply perverse and there never was a good reason. Sometimes the reason is obsolete.
However, some times the circumstances that gave rise to the fence are gone! You still need to do the work to show that this is true, or at least some best effort. But if after a cursory check there is no compelling reason, retorting "ah but there may still be some use, go search the wisdom of the ancients further" is a terrible response. That is how you calcify debt and become unable to adapt to changing circumstances.
There is a balance between preserving out of an abundance of caution and tearing it all down because it was inconvenient or "new is better."
We already have plenty of innate status quo bias. We don't need to heap more on top without good reason.
That having been said, I also think you're underestimating the degree to which it's easy to verify the value of legacy practices.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
Search for the phrase "And then there’s manioc. This is a tuber native to the Americas." Read the extended block quote afterwards and the first few paragraphs after the block quote. If anything, Chesterton's Fence is insufficient--if a certain practice works, it sometimes works for reasons that even the practitioners can't explain.
Furthermore, I can point to numerous examples of catastrophic failure directly caused by insufficient status quo bias, like tearing apart cities because it's the 20th century and we need to build freeways straight through the middle of them, or communism. So it's a lot more complicated than you're making it out to be.
On the other hand, if you dig into the history of colonization, indigenous cultures had a massive home field advantage, and it was common for Western colonies to utterly fail, either starving to death in the same lands that indigenous people were able to survive in or in some cases, completely defecting from their original culture and joining indigenous populations.
Unfortunately, I've seen this play out too many times. There is a trivial fence in the way of solving an expensive problem. Instead of taking action, months, or years pass trying to over- analyze the different ways to take down the fence. Since no one takes any action, the fence falls down on its own, causing severe outages and thousands, or millions of dollars in collateral damage.
In other words he did something because he thought it was okay to do it, he did it because he didn't like the way it was done, but he did not consider that in this case there might have been a reason why it was done the way it was and not the way he wanted it.
There were many things he could have changed, and improved things, but since he didn't bother finding out why things were they way they were changing things for the better was at best a random outcome.
I've seen so many people jump into a business, want to prove themselves, and start changing things without understanding the context in which that thing was built. (Similarly, though less often, businesses expanding into new products or markets.) "Tell me what will change if you stop doing X" is thus added to "Tell me what will change if you start doing Y".
To be fair, citing Chesterton's Fence just make me sound wise (and/or a little curmudgeonly); the better story for the point I'm making is the hospital bed where someone dies every Thursday morning at 10am ... only for video footage to reveal the cleaner unplugging machinery to plug in their vacuum cleaner every week.
Hard disagree. The difficulty of discovering the reasons for Chesterton's Fence and the impossibility of ever being certain that you have discovered them all means that it actually is a general prescription for caution / against change.
Of course, as always, it comes down to a judgement call. Do you understand the reasons for Chesterton's Fence well enough? Unfortunately, that's exactly the same situation one was in before the Chesterton's Fence metaphor was brought up, so either the metaphor is completely useless (by way of being disclaimed into oblivion) or it is a general prescription for caution / against change.
It’s against wanton and unwise change.
Considering nuance in qualification “disclaimed into oblivion” is needlessly derisive.
"of the two available interpretations of the principle, neither are plausible: weak formulations (which hold that precaution in the face of uncertain harms is permissible) are trivial, while strong formulations (which hold that precaution in the face of uncertain harms is required) are incoherent." [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle#The_pr...
It's the part not shown there that matters. The Russian partition (and to a lesser extent Austrian one) was the cause of the area in blue being poor and underdeveloped.
There was nothing particularly great in being under Prussian (German) occupation. It's that Russian occupation was so much worse, hell bent on robbing Poland on everything of any value.
> the first map with Poland [...] doesn't explain much.
Reasoning that disputes it:
> The Russian partition [...] was the cause of the area in blue being poor and underdeveloped
For these to be contradictory statements, the Russian partition must refer to something meaningfully different than what the map with Poland refers to. Is that true? I'm no history buff, I'll leave it up to others to say.
For anyone interested: the difference in voting exists, because the east part of Poland is less developed and more rural in general. I remember that it is so in part because of how the Russian occupation was mostly of “steal as much as we can” variety, especially compared to Germans. It is also one of the reasons that the west side has much denser railway network.
The Poland of after WWII has a similar area with the Poland of before WWII, but it has moved a lot towards West.
So the winners have been the Russians and the losers have been the Germans.
Poland was lucky because its large territorial losses to the Russian invaders have been somewhat compensated with territories taken from Germany.
The other Western neighbors of Russia have been much less lucky. The larger neighbors (Finland, Czechoslovakia, Romania) have lost large territories stolen by Russia without any compensation, while the smaller neighbors (the 3 lesser Baltic countries) have been incorporated completely in the Soviet Union.
I have written "the 3 lesser Baltic countries" because prior to WWII Finland was counted as the 4th Baltic country, since all 4 countries occupy the Eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, and they all form an enclave between Germanic-speaking people to the West and Slavic-speaking people to the East (the main languages in Finland and Estonia are Uralic, while the main languages in Lithuania and Latvia belong to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European languages).
For example, in the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact from 1939, the Russians have written explicitly their intentions to occupy all the 4 Baltic countries (Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia) and also Romania, and the Germans agreed with this, while the Russians agreed that the countries of Western Europe should belong to Germany.
With regards to eastern territories, Poland may reclaim some of those right now if it is insistent :)
First of all, it was not Russia but USSR who took your lands; second, USSR did not give these lands to Russia (even in the form of RSFSR) but to other russophobic eastern european countries.
You are grown-ups now. Sort it out between yourselves.
They (USSR was Russian-lead) were literally allied with Nazi-Germany and agreed to split Europe with them. They executed 20000+ Polish people in Katyn alone.
So?
Dear krzyk! Do you consider jews people?
Russians (USSR, potato-potato) at that time were exterminating most of people that had any kind of education - because those were potential "traitors".
Most Jews were intelligence class, which was considered enemy of the "working class".
Indeed, many of eastern european countries used the period of Nazi occupation to get rid of as many jews and gypsies as possible. I'm not going to point fingers but you should double-check your history.
Not countries, but stupid people. There a lot of those that envy others.
Same happened in Soviet occupation but for different reasons. Either way EE was f**ed. Check why there were so many Jews in Eastern Europe when comparing to Western (they found save place here because they weren't so much persecuted like in the West).
Or maybe lets see what happened in Ukraine which was under USSR occupation before the WW2 - Holodomor which resulted in up to 3 - 5.5 million people dead, which is close to Holocaust numbers.
When Soviet army marched everyone hid their daughters and wifes, to this day our grandparents tell stories how they were in the basements, or escaped to the west just not to be taken by Soviet soldiers.
On the other hand some parts of Poland were consider by Nazis as their land and they didn't rape or kill citizens, but they had obligatory conscription of capable man - many of them tried to hide and died if they were found.
I would just argue that Nazi-germany's industrial-scale extermination of jews, homosexuals, handicapped etc is still worse. Anyway - it is arguing semantics and definitions. :)
Somehow people forget that the Nazis wanted to kill or enslave all Slavs[1] within their "lebensraum" territories.
[1] They also considered Estonians and Finns as "Mongoloids" and as such subhuman although both were elevated to "Aryan" status following the winter war.
The Belarussian / Polish border today is almost exactly the border between Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. So "historically eastern Poland" is not right there. Some like to think of the whole Commonwelth as Poland, which really dominated there. But in this case whole Belarus and Ukraine are "eastern Poland".
That's what poles tried to restore when got chance to recreate their state after WWI, as I understand. The full commonwealth. But only got to the borders we know as the pre-1939 Poland.
BTW, Ukraine is mostly the part of the GDL annexed by the Kingdom of Poland during the Union of Lublin. The todays Belarus / Ukraine border goes by this line.
There are overlap maps in wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_Co...
Going deeper in history of GDL, Russia and Poland uncovers more.
[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GUS_languages1931_Po...
The longer the rule of the Ottoman empire, the less developed the region tends to be. With the exception of Istanbul proper, of course, it was the main beneficiary of all the plunder.
Edit: I am writing this from a vacation in Slovenia, which is basically a Slavic-speaking Austria, with the exceptions of cities like Koper and Piran, which look like a Slavic-speaking Italy.
historical governance -> historical map & economic prosperity -> political preferences
I think that often past borders are the consequence of different demographics, which clearly translate into modern differences.
That doesn't take away from the insight that certain political histories still resonate today.
Just as you can find examples of geologic features (like mountain ranges or rivers) influencing political divides, so too can you find examples of geologic features not influencing them. Doesn't mean the former is "misleading" or something.
For example, at one time long ago in the US, politics were dominated by "frontier-interior" versus "urban-coastal" dynamics, and then as the US grew, and the civil war came about, it established a lot of the geopolitical patterns evident today (although I'd argue the urban-rural distinction is maybe reemerged in a more distributed way today).
To explain cherry-picking versus something else, you'd want a theory for why patterns sometimes change and other times remain the same.
Here I guess it didn’t help that the first map was trying to convey a link between Macron voters and British inhabitants. Anytime I see suggested links between voters, culture, immigration, etc. I’m prudent. It’s surely interesting in its own, but I can’t resist asking myself "why is the author mentioning this? Did he came across this data and then found interesting correlations? Or was he looking for trends that would bring support to some views he has? It’d be ok-ish if such approach was open, like, "here’s my thesis, and here’s data supporting this thesis." But when there’s no thesis, just "interesting trends", pretending it’s up to the reader to make his own conclusions… More often than not, it’s a dishonest cherry-picking with some more or less forced untold conclusions waiting to be made.
So, I just stay away from such articles, even if I know some of them aren’t dishonest. It’s collateral damage of the disinformation war.
The map about Charlemagne's empire vs. 6 original members of the future EU is a joke too. The latter was a product of the reality of post-WWII European politics (Iron Curtain, Allied occupation of Germany and Austria, and Spain being a neutral country ruled by de facto dictatorship). It's fun to look at patterns and think they are neat. It is absolutely not fine to pretend these resemblances somehow have a direct & causal relationship without properly navigating the long and complex multi-faceted history behind them.
Reminds me of this quote:
Everything is what it is because it got that way. - D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form
https://twitter.com/Valen10Francois/status/15240407292108881...
Why these political maps are more likely to be caused by internal migration and not historical holdovers? Because the Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska, PO, yellow-orange on the map) received more votes in areas with more (internal) immigration. Not just in the west but also in the cities in the east.
While these aren't unrelated, this is a long-time rooted vs freshly settled divide more than it is historical.
A coal basin [1] predicts low revenues [2] and political votes for far right [3].
I'm no political or demographical historian, but the gist of the story IMHO is that there was a coal boom. People settled there, and not much else was invested in the region. So when coal mines went bust, no other industry could convert the workers; it created low revenue zones and it fed discontent, which can be seen in the votes.
"Au nord, c'était les corons", as the song says. [4]
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bassin_minier_du_Nord-Pas-de-C...
[2] https://www.comeetie.fr/galerie/francepixels/#map/revenus/Rd...
[3] https://www.francetvinfo.fr/elections/infographies-resultats...
> Research published in September 2020 overlaid maps of the highly affected COVID-19 areas with the HOLC maps, showing that those areas marked “risky” to lenders because they contained minority residents were the same neighborhoods most ravaged by COVID-19.
Some maps do overlap very well but in that case it only looks interesting because we want to see a causation link where there is correlation.
So sorry for the harsh words but I actually find this upsetting.
I still found it really cool to see how much an impact geography and path dependence has on our current state. I may be over generous, but when they show maps like the Alabama one where an ancient sediment deposit is correlated with farm size, racial makeup, and election results I think they are giving an example of how there can be common causes tied to geographies over long periods of time.
You're completely correct that simply overlaying the Austrian Empire's borders on a map of Romania's election results does not prove a causal link. It is much more likely that there is an underlying common cause (geographic feature, ethnic makeup, etc.). Pointing out these correlations is fun to me, as I'm able to speculate on the possible common causes.
Think about the countless numbers of ways you could overlay any sort of historical map over some map representing any kind of relevant statistic. A smaller but still countless number of them will have strong correlations by pure chance alone. This is a simple fact of statistics.
The author here is filtering out exactly those that happen to have those kinds of correlations backed by some preconceived ideas the author has about how the causality is supposed to work and uses them to fuel his hypotheses, while ignoring the uncountable number of map overlays that don't show these correlations.
This is bog standard selection bias.
For people who would like to see a demonstration of the effect yolo69420 is pointing out, you can visit the website below [1]. It, among other things, shows how Nicholas Cage movies are correlated with swimming pool drownings.
I completely agree that the Twitter post does not prove there is a direct causal relationship between the maps they compare, nor even that there exists a common cause. I would contend that this is a very high standard to hold for interesting content on the internet. If you would like to hold to this standard, you will likely come to more robust and defensible conclusions than myself.
I find it fun to speculate on possible common causes. If I had any actual ability to change things based on my conclusions, I'd likely increase my burden of proof to a much higher level like you suggest.
Sure, you could probably pick arbitrary political boundaries from different times and create maps that show the opposite trend. However, I would be surprised if there weren't correlative or causal factors, given that historical people reproduced and, in the case of many agrarian peoples, didn't migrate. It's possible that our collective ignorance of history makes this appear to be a novel fact, when we shouldn't be too surprised.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JwEYamjXpA&t=2461s)
Some of these maps are for time period not that distant from each other where the correlation is pretty straightforward, and those are probably telling at-least-partly-true narratives. For others, it's less clear. How many different modern and ancient maps are there which could conceivably have interesting (spurious) correlations?
Is the claimed correlation between Parliamentarian or Royalist support and Leave/Remain?
As an example: two Remain areas - Oxford and Brighton - one consistently royalist, the other consistently parliamentarian. Cornwall - supporting leave - consistently royalist, Kent - also supporting leave - consistently parliamentarian.
It's easy to see why old empires/countries were divided by geographical features due to military reasons. But why would it affect the current-day political climate directly?
I think the causal relation is more like
Geo -> old empire -> (more things) -> current day politics
Geo -> old empire
Geo -> current day politics
Edit: on a second thought, I think a factor that supports your point is that geographical feature would affect corresponding industries in certain area regardless of "historical divisions". Maybe this is what you mean?
geography → economy → old empire
geography → economy → current day politics
geography + current tech → agriculture/commerce/industry/military → economy/culture → politics
When you said geography features, I was more thinking of natural barrier (like rivers, mountains): they were very crucial in shaping the old country border, but should have less impact today if both sides are already in the same country. So it's interesting that some of political division are still present around them, which makes me think history has its (unproportional) influence than the geography itself. But I guess it's always multi-factor and hard to tell in vacuum.
It doesn't help that in most of examples in OP, the major difference between two (old) countries is the economic one, so a certain degree of Matthew effect is there.
1. the population of deer and boars: https://www.facebook.com/kartografiaekstremalna/photos/a.153...
2. the modern railway network: https://ziemianarozdrozu.pl/artykul/2861/mamy-%E2%80%9Enie-p...
3. the percentage of flats without a bathroom: https://www.miesiecznik.znak.com.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/...
4. the percentage of companies in the real estate sector: https://www.facebook.com/kartografiaekstremalna/photos/a.153...
5. unmarried couples with children: https://www.facebook.com/kartografiaekstremalna/photos/a.153...
6. the area of asbestos roofing: https://wbdata.pl/mapa-azbestu-w-polsce/
7. families where kids get gifts for Easter: https://www.facebook.com/kartografiaekstremalna/photos/a.153...
8. the name for Santa Claus: https://www.facebook.com/kartografiaekstremalna/posts/123501...
9. town names starting with the letter A: https://www.facebook.com/kartografiaekstremalna/photos/a.153...
10. average farm size: https://biqdata.wyborcza.pl/biqdata/7,159116,22094987,polski...
Interesting observation. It is hard to tell it apart, because it is the same line but different time.
I am no historian, so I shouldn't even try explaining. But for me, the "partitioning" explanation makes more sense, because during the communist time after WW2 there was a strong trend towards the unification of the country. If not for that, we would see even stronger divides at the other sides of the partition lines.
Any pattern can resemble each other when they are approximated on large enough scales because then all differences would be wiped out. Geopolitical boundaries do often survive in some forms throughout history, as we can see some resemblances of the divisions in Medieval France vs. modern French departments. However this is the product of mainly geographical divisions (terrain such as rivers, mountains, plateaus, etc.) and in Brittany's case, an ethnic culture historically unique relative to the rest of France.
Shows how relatively static we are in class, location (often driven by class), and geographic connections (family). Not a lot of movement on the whole
It's just a less compelling example than the others.
Prior to COVID, it seemed like most people who moved long distances did so either for financial opportunity or to “come back home”. During COVID (and up to now) it seems like a lot of people are moving to places they’re more politically/ideologically/socially comfortable.
I think part of that is due to the expanded availability of remote work - but not all. My social circles are predominately conservative, and several of them have left jobs and took a significant cut in pay to move to more rural areas because they wanted to be away from the city. A couple of the more liberal people moved the opposite direction for the opposite reason.
I take exception with it being regarded as a pet-peeve. I think people who are broadly similar should be effectively represented, and sometimes that means having a seperate government.
To make the point clear (but not to say anything specific about socio-economics): it is fairer for socialists to have a socialist government, and hardcore capitalists to have a capitalist government- and not have to end up fighting constantly.
So, I'm happy that the people pictured are able to be represented independent of each other.
However, one must be very careful not to draw too hasty conclusions from supposedly simple geographical correlations. Two example from the Twitter thread:
"West Germany (1949-1990) was extraordinarily similar to Germania as planned by Caesar Augustus c. 1 AD, to East Francia at the Treaty of Verdun in 843 AD, and to the Confederation of the Rhine in 1808." -- Whether there existed really an elaborated, dedicated plan to extent Roman rule up to the Elbe, is quite controversial among historians. Be that as it may, the Romans where not successful anyway, so hypothetical borders East and North of the limes could not have had any practical impact. -- The borders of the Treaty of Verdun are indeed quite similar to those of West-Germany. But it lasted only 27 years (from 843 to the Treaty of Meerssen in 870), when its Western border moved more Eastwards (and even more in 880 with the Treaty of Ribemont). -- The Confederation of the Rhine was a short-lived alliance of Napolionic client states. It was formed in 1806, its extent in 1808, Mecklenburg and Saxonia, does not really fit the borders of later West-Germany and by 1812 Napoleon incorporated the Netherlands and all of North-West Germany up to the Elbe into France. -- So this similarities are simple coincidences. There are geographical elements (the Rhine, the Elbe, ...) which played a role in defining borders from time to time. But there are really a lot of them during the centuries, with the borders constantly changing.[3] So it is no wonder that one finds something that roughly fits modern borders at some time in the past.
As to the maps of "Catholicism and Nazism" (or rather Protestantism and Nazism): This maps clearly show that the election results from 5 March 1933 of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers' Party) correlate with Protestantism. However, the conclusion that Protestants were on average more responsible in Hitler's coming to power is not compelling. Even though Hitler had already become Reichs-Chancelor on 30 January, the NSDAP received "only" 43.9 % of the votes. What finally established his dictatorship was the "Enabling act" of 24 March 1933. Only the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) voted against it.[4] (The Communists were already been arrested or in hiding.) If you now look at a map of the opposing SPD's election results from 1933, you will see that it is also confessionally correlated, but this time with Protestantism.[5] To understand all this, one has to consider that there existed a dedicated Catholic party, the Deutsche Zentrumspartei (or short: "Das Zentrum"), that had a considerable loyal following of voters. This party played no role in the Protestant parts of Germany. Alas, when it become dangerous to oppose Hitler, this Catholic party sided with Hitler and only the (more "Protestant") SPD resisted.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_school
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_dur%C3%A9e
[3] Just look at this map from showing the extent of the "Holy Roman Empire" during the early 13th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire#/media/File:...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933#Voting_on...
These are not pet peeves at all, they are the persons pet loves. All examples are a type of "look at this great example, designed not to annoy or cause resentment at all, just the opposite! Aren't they cool and amazing?"
I think he probably meant to say, "pet projects".
François Valentin @Valen10Francois · 16h I realize that I've used that word completely incorrectly for ages!
https://twitter.com/Valen10Francois/status/15241607219023544...