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GreenCard78 posted:I'm kind of surprised to see Azerbaijan expanded. The northwest corner of Iran is populated by Azeris, who are the largest minority group in the country and are heavily concentrated in that region. Most of the world's Azeris (11-12 million) actually live in Iran, as against ~9 million in the Republic of Azerbaijan. They are generally very well integrated in Iranian society and government and display virtually no interest in separatism or joining the Republic of Azerbaijan. As an example of their integration, Ayatollah Khamenei is half-Azeri on his father's side. quote:Also, giving northern Afghanistan the tribal areas of Pakistan "these areas are ungovernable from a distant and centralized government, have fun!" The entire map is a staggeringly dumb and unworkable fantasy and almost every part of it exposes the people behind it to ridicule. The "Free Kurdistan" section is the weirdest. Looking at the area you were just talking about, the Republic of Azerbaijan will get the presently Iranian provinces of Ardebil and Gilan. Ardebil is populated by Azeris, but Gilan is not, but whatever we don't like the Iranians let's take more of their poo poo. Meanwhile, the Iranian provinces of East and West Azerbaijan, which contain the bulk of the Azeri people in Iran, as well as Tabriz (historically their principle city) will be awarded to Kurdistan. Presumably they get West Azerbaijan because there's a minority of Kurds among the large majority of Azeris, and they get East Azerbaijan because gently caress it who cares. Also Turkey will somehow be convinced to cede the eastern 1/4 of their country to Kurdistan and Armenia, probably because they're just so fond of Kurds and Armenians.
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Feb 5, 2013 19:22
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menino posted:I remember reading something about the pulling back of the Ming fleets resulting from a concern over increased nomadic activity on the north/western frontier. The gist of the article was that China was in a 200 year swing from land to naval power, however, so I'm sure the author was trying to pump up his argument a little bit. The problems were (A) Zero return on investment. China was a largely self-sufficient market and there was little interest in export or import, so the enormous expenses incurred by building the ships and underwriting voyages pretty much went down the toilet. The fleet pretty much sailed over to other places and told the local princes they were pissants compared to the Emperor, and being as they had never even imagined anything as impressive as the treasure fleet, they tended to offer tribute in whatever form they happened to have on hand, which was usually not all that valuable. (B) Military crisis on the northern frontier. The Ming Dynasty had risen up by overthrowing the Mongol Yuan dynasty, and they continued to have troubles with other Mongol groups for a long time afterwards. The Yongle Emperor, who had funded the voyages, died in battle with the Mongols. 25 years later his great-grandson, the Zhengtong Emperor, was actually captured by the Mongols and the dynasty nearly fell. At any rate, the Mongols remained a deadly threat, and before his death Yongle had temporarily cut off funding for the treasure fleet. His son ended the trips permanently. (B) Palace intrigue. Zheng He was a eunuch and a member of the court faction associated with the eunuchs. His fleet was constructed and his voyages were funded at a time when the eunuchs were very strong at court. After Yongle's death, his son the Hongxi Emperor favored a different court faction, the Confucian scholars and officials, who were were rivals to the eunuchs. The officials influenced the emperor to put a stop to Zheng He's voyages. After Hongxi's death, his son the Xuande Emperor ordered another foray, during which Zheng He died at sea; without Zheng He and with the eunuchs on the back foot, there wasn't much impetus at court to keep going. Even if the treasure fleet had kept going, however, they almost certainly wouldn't have discovered America, for the simple reason that there was no reason for them to go east across the Pacific. Europeans like Columbus went west across the Atlantic because they were looking for a quick route to Asia. The Chinese were less interested in foreign trade, and even if they had been on the case they wouldn't have gone east, because as far as they knew there was nothing out there but ocean. Columbus himself only thought to sail across the Atlantic because he had drastically underestimated the size of the planet and believed that the Indies were much closer than they actually were. This is why all of Zheng He's went south and west.
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Feb 14, 2013 05:14
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I don't know why but I find this hysterical.  Guatemala is a small country but they are in the big leagues for horror. Maps!  For some political loading, the current president of Guatemala, Otto Perez Molina, was a highly-placed military officer and even director of military intelligence during the time these massacres were being carried out. He eventually came to lead the faction that was in favor of negotiations to end the civil war, and he represented the military in the 1996 peace talks, but he was very likely involved in serious war crimes before that. Lots and lots of soldiers and former soldiers who participated in atrocities and assassinations remain at large and immune to prosecution, and the dictator (Efrain Rios Montt) who presided over the worst abuses is only now coming to trial, which is itself a cause for unease because there are a lot of other criminals who may take action to avert their own prosecution. No telling what those evil shits would have done with Belize if they'd got their hands on it, so thank God for the Commonwealth I guess?
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Feb 22, 2013 04:45
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Ammat The Ankh posted:And when did the U.S. intervene in Mexico during the Cold War? Or are they including the Mexican-American war and the Mexican Revolution? They indicate pretty clearly in the legend that the map shows interventions since 1890, which is a reasonable starting date for tracking US military adventures in Latin America. The USA intervened militarily two times during the Mexican Revolution; for much of 1914 we occupied the port of Veracruz, and in 1916-1917 the US Army diddled around the border failing to do anything useful about Pancho Villa.
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Apr 5, 2013 04:29
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Eiba posted:That bigfoot/booze map seems odd... it lists Massachusetts as a state where beer and liquor are sold anywhere, but I work in a grocery store in Massachusetts and have to routinely explain to folks from out of state that Massachusetts doesn't sell alcohol in grocery stores. Iowa is also colored as "liquor at specialty stores only", but liquor has been available in grocery stores for maybe 10 years, and it was expanded to convenience stores and other retailers in 2011 or so. I think their source for state liquor regulations is just painfully out of date.
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Jun 2, 2013 00:52
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stereobreadsticks posted:Also interesting that there is apparently a huge concentration of ethnic islands in the Midwest In rural Iowa where I grew up, most counties will have a principle city that serves as county seat and has a population of at least a few thousand, and then a number of small towns surrounding it that have only a few hundred residents. Those smaller communities tend to be totally ethnically homogeneous, generally German although some counties are have Dutch or Scandinavian, and as a result they're referred to as "colonies". The people tend to be descended from the original colonists, to the point that we used to make fun of them in high school--if they didn't check with their parents they could easily date a cousin by mistake. I think the best known of these are the Amana Colonies, which were founded in Eastern Iowa by German pietists in the 1840s. Most of the colonies weren't founded for religious reasons, though. It was just that industrialization and political upheaval in Central and Northern Europe drove emigration, which mostly ended up in the United States. The American Midwest was just beginning to be settled at the time, so when the immigrants got to the USA that area had a lot of freely available farmland while still being relatively accessible, hence the ethnic islands.
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Jun 7, 2013 18:50
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:Any idea why Bukhara(/Bohkra) isn't part of Russia in this map? I thought they had taken over by that point. Khiva and Bokhara were conquered by the Russian Empire in the mid-18th century but remained nominally independent as Russian protectorates until they were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1920. I believe they they continued to exist as SSRs for another few years until Soviet Central Asia was pacified and reorganized into something similar to the current borders.
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Jul 2, 2013 21:29
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prefect posted:The weird thing about Hawaii is that the biggest part of their traffic seems to be back-and-forth with the continental US. If it were used as a stopping point on the way to Asia/Australia/et cetera, that would seem to make more sense. Modern cargo ships generally have sufficient range that they can proceed directly from Hong Kong to LA (just for example) without needing to make stops on the way, so unless a ship is picking up or dropping off something in Hawaii there's no reason to go there. I wouldn't be surprised if goods produced in Asia and sold in Hawaii were typically shipped right past Hawaii to LA, warehoused, then put on a different boat and sent to Hawaii.
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Jul 12, 2013 21:07
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PrinceRandom posted:Greater Texas? Texans had some interesting fantasies about the size of their Republic. In addition to the bits that lie outside the modern state of Texas, there were fair chunks of it across the Nueces and Pecos rivers that were effectively under Mexican administration, and were only "redeemed" during the Mexican-American War.
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Sep 1, 2013 06:02
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Soviet Commubot posted:I'm somewhat surprised Berlin isn't more yellow, it's a fair bit bigger than Lyon. Going by a quick Google search, it seems Berlin made reduction of air pollution a major policy objective and adopted a comprehensive strategy to achieve the cleanest air possible, and succeeded. There's a study from 2011 that found that Berlin has the cleanest air of any major city in Europe.
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Sep 15, 2013 20:41
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Rincewind posted:A lot of the really egregious gerrymandering is probably on a level too small to show up on that scale, anyway. The worst gerrymandering generally takes place in densely populated areas which obviously show up as geographically smaller and harder to see. That map also lacks a certain level of detail that makes some areas look better than they are. Utah is a good example, because a quick glance at those districts makes it appear fairly reasonable, but if you looked at a map that showed the location of Salt Lake City you would see what they did. SLC is located at that tiny point where all four UT districts meet, split up into pieces so that Democratic votes can be safely neutralized by rural and suburban conservatives. It doesn't quite work, as Utah has a Democratic Rep. (Jim Matheson), but it's kind of an odd case because he's in an R+14 district and holds the seat by being one of the most conservative Democratic politicians in the country. At any rate, if Utah was like my state (Iowa) and had districts drawn by commission, they would probably have four deep red districts in the hinterlands plus a mildly blue one around SLC.
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Oct 4, 2013 20:11
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Peruser posted:I can't tell if Russia still owns Nope, it's colored and Russia is grayed out. It's kind of hilarious because basically the whole population was expelled in 1945 and replaced with ethnic Russians. Currently Russians are 85% of the population, Germans are less than 1%, and it's one of the Russian Federation's primary military bases. But hey, pretty borders!
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Oct 4, 2013 21:42
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Edible Hat posted:I don't understand how a guy like Steve King stays in office. He was initially elected in 2002 as the representative for IA-5. This was a new district for that 2002 election, and as Emanuel Collective explained it was drawn by a non-partisan commission on geographic and population lines. The result was a vertical strip across the westernmost 1/5 of the state. This area of Iowa is overwhelmingly rural and politically hyper-conservative, so this district was R+30 from the word go, probably one of the reddest in the USA. Also, as a new district, it had no incumbent and was an open seat. A bunch of different Republicans ran in the primary and none of them was able to win enough votes to carry the primary, which forced a nominating convention that finally selected Steve King by a narrow margin. The state Republican Party organization tends towards middle-of-the-road business conservatives (like the current governor), so they weren't fully behind him, but he got through it. He obviously cruised through the general, and until 2012 he enjoyed incumbency in a totally Republican district. Iowa lost a House seat in 2010 census and the reapportionment committee changed the outline of the district as it morphed into the new IA-4. The result was basically to set the state into quarters, with IA-1 and IA-2 on the east side carrying about a D+10 advantage and IA-3 and IA-4 on the west side carrying R+10. Roughly. It's actually kind of interesting case of how even a strictly geographic process can produce noncompetitive districts. Anyway, King was able to win again in 2012, though by a much lower margin than previous. The Democratic challenger in 2012 was unusually strong so he'll probably win that seat as long as he wants to keep it. King is also one of the most right-wing politicians in the country, up there with Michelle Bachmann, so he's invulnerable to primary challenge in the current environment. The only thing I can think of that could derail his career is if he somehow hosed up the farm bill and his constituents didn't get their subsidies.
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Oct 19, 2013 21:36
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Civilized Fishbot posted:What stops the dominating party from just refusing to accept any map that isn't pro-dominating party? There's clearly no longer a taboo on holding up government in order to obtain a political advantage. That's the case at the federal level but not at the state level. As an Iowan, my sense is that the party that refused to accept the non-partisan reapportionment system would be punished by the electorate. In any case, Iowa might be home to some firebrands like Steve King but it's very close to 50-50 D:R, and the state-level parties are tend to be moderate. The main leader of the reactionary movement in Iowa is a guy named Bob Vander Plaats, and he's tried to run for governor three different times, each time getting stuffed in the primary by a more moderate candidate with better ties to the business establishment.
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Oct 20, 2013 00:10
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Lawman 0 posted:Whats up with bhutan are we afraid of the 'mighty dragon' or something or I guess we cant actually be assed to establish an embassy there? The second one, sort of. According to the CIA World Factbook (which I just looked up), Bhutan signed an agreement with the UK in 1910, by which they had local autonomy from British rule in India, but their foreign policy was controlled by Britain. After 1947 that role was assumed by India, and the UK and USA both communicate diplomatically with Bhutan via New Delhi.
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Oct 29, 2013 02:29
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Ditocoaf posted:I guess it's just weird to see such a perfect, omnipresent grid out in such a sparse area. Like, you'd expect more obvious arteries, with other roads only connecting actual places you'd travel to. There are arteries. Nearly all the roads in that picture are low volume gravel roads that are pretty much used only for agricultural work. The arterial roads aren't instantly evident from the aerial photograph because they tend to follow the grid as well for the most part. It makes sense to build them over the same places because it already provides the road bed and the right-of-way to construct it. So the grid roads that run between visible population centers are actually state highways designed to accommodate much more traffic, for example. quote:Now that there are actual major cities to connect, why is the grid maintained so perfectly, instead of merging more and more of the cells for larger fields and more flexible use? If you think about this question logically, there's almost no point in merging cells to create larger fields because the area of a gravel backroad dividing two 160-acre quarter sections is negligible relative to the total area of the said sections. Like a low-volume rural road might be 18 feet wide including shoulders (if any) and there's going to be a ditch to either side for drainage so just say it takes a 30 foot bite. A quarter section is 1/2 mile on each side, so that's 30 feet wide by 2640 feet long, which works out to a bit less than 2 acres. Two quarter sections add up to 320 acres, so after you go to the expense of tearing up that road you wind up increasing your usable land area by maybe .6% or .7%. You also still want to have the roads because you use them to move vehicles and equipment around your farmland without have to off-road everywhere.
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Jun 30, 2014 04:07
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withak posted:Those red ones located in the middle of nowhere must have some interesting outliers. I recognize the one in Iowa as Dallas County. Along with the state government there's a number of finance, insurance, and agribusiness companies with headquarters or significant operations in Des Moines, which is adjacent Polk County. High-earning people who work in Des Moines tend to commute in from Urbandale and West Des Moines, which are in Dallas County. Low-income people stay closer to their jobs in Des Moines proper, and then the rest of Dallas County is rural, so the median income is inflated. I'd guess the same kind of thing for the other counties you're looking at. made of bees posted:I know I've seen another 'shrinking Israel' map, which for some reason skipped from 1917 to 1967 or something like that. Now that we have the map here, it's also worth noting that they skip from 1982 to 2000 so as to omit the occupation of southern Lebanon.
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Jul 22, 2014 01:26
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Gleri posted:New York has historically had very strict drug laws. But, this may also reflect the influence of "broken windows" policing theory in New York. The contrast with Massachusetts and Pennsylvania is particularly striking though. Massachusetts decriminalized possession of marijuana for personal use in 2008, so that's why they've got basically zero arrests. quote:Edit: Any idea what the time period for the date is? The caption says 2012 data. Also the results are per capita and by county, and consistent throughout the state. If the trend was related strongly to quality of life policing you would expect to see lower numbers outside NYC, because dogmatic adherence to broken windows theory is more of an NYPD thing. In '73 the Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, was thinking about a presidential run. He was well-known as a liberal Republican to the point that his name was a signifier for the whole moderate-left wing of the GOP ("Rockefeller Republicans") and to some extent still is. To have any prayer of making it through the primary campaign he needed to curry favor with the right wing of the party, which he did by shepherding draconian narcotics legislation through the legislature. NY is still coping with the legacies of those laws, and that's a major reason they have an insane number of weed busts per capita. According to what I can find online, personal use is supposed to be decriminalized in New York, but there's an amusing little loophole where if the weed is in public view the police can arrest you. So if they suspect you possess marijuana, they tell you to empty your pockets, which means it is now in public view and you can be arrested! NY is moving towards greater liberalization, though, with Cuomo signing a medical marijuana law earlier this month.
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Jul 30, 2014 19:20
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Yeah, I know that didn't really work out that well, but that's hardly surprising given the location. I would expect a Jewish Autonomous Oblast in East Prussia would have fared better, if only because it would've had a familiar climate and be connected to the rest of Europe. I can imagine some tension with its neighbors though, especially early on. Probably still less tension in the long run than Israel has with its Arab neighbors. Israel wound up being the destination for Europe's Jewish refugees partly because it was easier at the time. The Yishuv in British Palestine was already there as a kind of shadow state or at least a foundation on which a Jewish country could be created, and the Holy Land itself had a strong pull factor for Jewish immigration. Trying to carve out a state somewhere else would run into the problem of that place not having its own existing Jewish community to absorb and integrate the refugees, and of not being particularly attractive to its intended residents. Konigsberg may have been more better than Birobidzhan but not to the point that Jews from all over the world would have been trying to get in just because it was promised to them as their own state, as happened with Israel. The other merit to handing over Palestine is that the powers didn't have to give up anything themselves. The USSR wasn't about to give East Prussia over for a Jewish state because they were going to convert it into the world's largest military base. They had their own plans. On the other hand, a lot of the refugees would have preferred emigration to the USA even over Israel, only the USA had no interest in absorbing hundreds of thousands or millions of Jews. Creating Israel pushed all the costs onto the Arabs, who had no seat at the table.
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Jul 31, 2014 20:37
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Patter Song posted:Palestine turned into a heavily Christianized region after Constantine and Helena had their way with it and Jerusalem became one of the biggest centers of Christianity in the 5th-6th centuries, and after the massacre of the Jews of Palestine in the early 7th century for siding with the Sassanids against the Eastern Roman Empire the Jewish community in Palestine was pretty small by the time of the Arab conquests. Most of the early converts to Islam after the Arab conquests were various heretical Christians (Monophysites, Nestorians, etc.) who had no real loyalty to their former authorities in Constantinople, not Jews. Wouldn't it also be possible that a significant proportion of the Jewish population converted to Christianity between the 2nd and 7th century? That hypothesis has the added merit of accounting for genetic testing that indicated substantial similarities between Jewish and Palestinian Arab populations.
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Aug 4, 2014 05:28
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withak posted:Nice of them to allow space for a Jewish colony there in the lower left. There was a Jewish Quarter in the city, it's unlabelled but it made up a significant portion of the southeastern part of the city, near the Western Wall. There are Jewish colonies outside the city because when Zionists began purchasing land to establish them it was mostly infeasible to buy within Jerusalem itself. Outside the walls it was much cheaper and easier to come to terms with the owners.
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Aug 26, 2014 01:10
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Uncle Jam posted:Bacon was the hot poo poo fad food from like 4 years ago, I'm sure that map would have been solid bacon across the board then. You can even see how the scale is weighted for dark kale is only 2:1 but dark bacon is 8:1. No state had more kale mentions than bacon, its pretty deceiving. Oh, I get it. They just put their finger on the scale until they got the ratio of "Obama + Kale" to "Romney + Bacon" that they wanted. That's actually a pretty great political map, then.
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Sep 2, 2014 13:25
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khwarezm posted:Why do Americans get so defensive about stuff like the metric system or this. Because people are attached to certain practices in a sentimental way but lack any real justification or reason for clinging to them. Also Americans are very used to the notion that America is better than other countries in every way, and the imperial system is objectively inferior to metric even ignoring the fact that we're the lone holdout. As to the dates thing, it doesn't really matter which way you do it but personally I found that DD/MM/YYYY always made more sense to me.
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Sep 12, 2014 13:54
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Disco Infiva posted:Is there something other than corn in Iowa? Pork. Other farm stuff. Iowa doesn't have an official state food and that map is associated with a list of recipes, so they probably picked sweet corn because they needed a vegetable and couldn't think of anything else for Iowa. I don't know why they indicated it as grilled, though, because traditionally it's boiled and covered with butter and salt. It's also kind of hard to explain how good it is because in most of the country it's been frozen and shipped a thousand miles, whereas during the season you buy it directly from farmers so it's as fresh as possible. It makes a huge difference in how it tastes. If Iowa had an official food in the context of something iconic that was actually invented in the state it would probably be the "walking taco" which is a repulsive Iowa State Fair food that consists of one of those small doritos bags crushed up and then filled with ground beef, lettuce, and shredded cheese. Like a taco, see, except you eat it with a plastic spoon while you're walking around the fair!
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Sep 22, 2014 13:44
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Slavs treating Germans badly after WW2 is a freebie. They were treating them like poo poo in a lot of ways before WW2. e.g. Prague confiscated German-owned large estates and distributed them to Czechs, attempted to suppress the German language, granted relief funds to Czechs and not to Germans during the Great Depression, etc. These efforts to suppress national feeling backfired and probably influenced the German population joining Nazi-affiliated parties in mass numbers after 1933. There's a tendency to forget about it because nobody paid a lot of attention at the time, and later on Czechoslovakia was seen more as a Democratic victim of fascism and Franco-British betrayal, but the first republic had a bad minority policy and that made a real contribution to its collapse. It was after WW2 that they just expelled all their Germans. icantfindaname posted:I like the Poles. Their national identity seems held together by hatred of their arch-nemesis Russia, and considering Russia is pretty lovely that's fine by me. I guess they're sort of bad on abortion issues? I can't think of much else. Anti-semitism was already mentioned, but speaking of Czechoslovakia the Polish government took advantage of the Munich Agreement to jump in and seize a small chunk for themselves. I guess you gotta make hay while the sun shines, even if it means colluding with the same Nazis who are chomping at the bit to invade you as well.
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Sep 24, 2014 22:51
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Konstantin posted:People in Nebraska sometimes buy jerseys of Nebraska alumni, but I would think Suh jerseys would be more popular than Helu ones. Other than that I'm not sure, most people who root for an NFL team in Nebraska choose the Chiefs or the Packers. My guess was that NFL gear barely moves the needle in Nebraska because everybody just buys Cornhusker junk, so if the Redskins had a big year there it's just they're at the top of a real small pile. There's also the possibility of a bump from people buying Redskins gear as a statement in favor of racism, since the state doesn't lack for retrograde morons.
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Sep 26, 2014 23:27
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OddObserver posted:(Also, what's the story with Kosovo?) It's already populated almost entirely by Kosovar Albanian Muslims, so apparently they decided there would be no alterations to its borders.
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Sep 29, 2014 22:02
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Jerry Cotton posted:Yeah I mean why is that? Why did they migrate to Argentina much more than the other countries (apparently)? The three countries with the largest Italian diaspora communities are actually Brazil, Argentina, and the USA, in that order. They make up proportionally more of the Italian population, because Argentina was less populous when it began receiving Italian immigration. Very rapid population growth and lack of economic opportunities in Italy triggered massive emigration. e.g. in Southern Italy the amount of agricultural land could not increase, but the population exploded, so the people had to go somewhere. In the case of Argentina, that country was undergoing significant expansion south into the Pampas and Patagonia throughout the 19th century and it became a major exporter of agricultural commodities, such as wheat and beef. Available land for production and demand for product expanded far faster than the labor force. One way of addressing the resulting shortage was seasonal immigration of Italian agricultural laborers. Argentina is in the southern hemisphere and it's growing season is effectively opposite Italy's. So Italian farm workers would bring in the Italian harvest, sail to Argentina to do theirs, then back to Europe in time for the Italian harvest, around and around, giving them year-round employment in an ordinarily seasonal field. These people were called "golondrinos," after migratory swallows. This also happened in Brazil and Uruguay. Over time increasing numbers of Italians settled permanently in South America. In the later part of the mass emigration-period Argentina (as well as Brazil and Uruguay) began to develop industry in urban centers, and many Italian immigrants sought work there. Sao Paulo, Brazil's premier industrial city, is the largest "Italian" city outside Italy itself.
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Jul 15, 2015 15:09
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