It is the things you think you know that aren't so that give you the most grief. Can you believe that there are millions of ordinary people roaming the streets of the United States who actually think we should invade Africa whenever we feel like it? There are more of them than there are people who think we should maintain an army capable of militarily conquering China. Most people simply don't understand the scope of things and a world scale. This is true of just about every endeavor engaged in from warfare to pontificating about "knowing" precisely the exact temperature of the entire planet and whether or not it has increased a degree over the last 10,000 years.
Geography is real and cartography is both a science and a weapon. It can be used to inform and also to misinform. If you ever visit Les Invalides, take the time to visit the map room where the French have for centuries maintained exact scale models of all of the fortresses, their own and their enemies, on their frontier. It includes all of the geography around these fortresses so that the strengths and weaknesses can be assessed by the commanders and strategists faced with either attacking or defending them.
4 comments:
I would love to see that map room in Paris - never found my way there.
Those map people on West Wing started out sounding like crack pots, but as you point out, our perceptions should be questioned. Great graphic.
Interesting graphic from the Right Stuff. The video excerpt was even MORE interesting, if that's possible, in that it kinda-sorta validated my biases against academics as a class ("pass a law to teach geography using THIS map." Heh.). The only thing wrong with "western civilization" in this day and age is the fact we aren't aggressively defending it... it's much more chic to tear it down or demean it.
Yes the bit in the clip about how Mercator exaggerated western Europe was a little hard to swallow given the day and age in which it was made and the Industrial Revolution. I'm afraid that western civilization has morphed into 3rd world chic and that is what it is busy defending. Western culture, civilization went to the mats and lost out to multiculturalism. You see it everyday in their news coverage and watching Greek arrest a political party for daring to stand up for the rights of native born Greeks. It was the same thing with the UKIP in England until they started winning most of the by-elections and local elections and own the EU representation for Britain.
It was a fascinating room to a young military history buff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus%C3%A9e_des_Plans-Reliefs
I enjoyed the witty urbanity of dr. flox in the video clip and contrast it with the protesters in the rest of the show. It was prelude to the question asked of the idiot in charge of the national park service last week about how it was exactly that the Occupy crowd devastated the National Parks they 'occupied' for a month without ever getting a single ticket or citation while veterans who had the temerity to visit war memorials during the notquiteshutdown were ticketed by the dozen by his park police.
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