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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • grue@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlGeorgia.
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    10 months ago

    I’m just as annoyed by the overuse of the Mercator projection as the next guy, but no, I don’t think we can blame it in this particular instance. Consider the similar case of a day/night map, which pretty clearly reads as 50/50 even when it’s Mercator:

    day/night map using Mercator projection

    (Upon further scrutiny comparing these two maps, I think the missing Antarctica might be a factor too.)

    Also, relevant XKCD.


  • grue@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlGeorgia.
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    10 months ago

    Nah, exactly 50% “of the world” is closer to Georgia than Georgia because the dividing line forms two perfect hemispheres. It just doesn’t seem like it because more of the world’s land area is closer to Georgia.

    The fact that the map fails to color in the oceans doesn’t help, of course.








  • The real bottom line is that when you create an underclass of people whose neighborhoods get firebombed or bulldozed when they get too affluent (see e.g. “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa and Auburn Avenue (formerly “the richest Negro street in the world”) in Atanta, respectively) and had generations of absent fathers due to persecution for things like “vagrancy”, of course they’re going to stop giving a shit about laws that bind but do not protect them! It’s entirely rational that people systematically excluded from being able to get ahead while acting within the law, and whose behaviors are deliberately criminalized in order to target them, would end up committing crimes at higher rates than the people benefiting from their oppression did. In other words, even if it’s true that they actually commit crimes at higher rates (as opposed to being accused at higher rates or being less likely to avoid conviction, as you pointed out, which just make the statistical bias even worse by compounding on top), even that is disingenous because it ignores that the disparity is caused by classism and institutional racism, not anything intrinsic to their race itself. The fiction that it’s somehow their own fault is like a society-wide version of “stop hitting yourself.”