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Comment by yunohn | Hacker News Reader

The vast majority of items are manufactured in Asia now, especially globes. By your logic, should they unilaterally start printing Asia in the center?

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Unilaterally? If they want to use maps that center Asia in their education and work, who is stopping them? In fact I'd wager they start their education by learning about the geography of Asia first.

I'm puzzled by this demonization of simply observing the world from the perspective of one's own culture. Blaming Europeans for putting Europe in the center of their maps is like blaming Italians for teaching Italian in school, and not some globally-representative language (maybe English or Chinese) chosen without local "bias".

Though your mention of "especially globes" has me wondering how they would place Asia in the center of a globe...

Saying there is a bias is not an accusation of wrong doing or "demonization".

Not necessarily, but usually. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36422476 linked a clip from the West Wing that blames biased Eurocentric maps for perpetuating colonialism.

It's crazy how populists and misinformation agents have successfully convinced people that any mention of a potential bias is an "woke" attack on their whole personality and world view.

Only if you count bad evangelists as "misinformation agents". There are unfortunately plenty of bad actors who have persistently tried to use it as a social cudgel and an excuse to fight for social dominance, shield oneself from being questioned (including self-reflection), and to write others off. To be frank, it is no wonder people view it as an attack when that is exactly what it has been used for.

For a similar patterns of bad behavior by the same actors look at the utterly terrible framing and naming of white priveledge, where not having problems nobody should have to deal with is phrased as if not being discriminated against is a moral problem!

This isn’t my logic, it’s the logic of the map designers.

It’s not important where they are made. It’s important where they are designed.

I expect there’s lots of maps with Asia in the center, but I don’t expect people in the US to buy them.

First you said the center is decided by who made the maps.

Then you changed it to who designed the maps.

In your last sentence you implied that the buyers make the decision.

Make up your mind?

Globes?? They do not suffer (much?) from the map projection problem. And no, they should not be printing any part of the world in the center of the globe!

> Globes?? They do not suffer (much?) from the map projection problem.

They do if you try hard enough. Introducing the infamous Poland Globe:

https://www.maproomblog.com/2020/09/these-globes-are-uncanny...

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