[HN Gopher] When old historic maps overlap with modern political...
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When old historic maps overlap with modern political maps
Author : yread
Score : 324 points
Date : 2022-05-11 13:19 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| I saw this phenomenon in practice in the Czech Republic... You
| see, Czechs and Slovaks are almost the same people with almost
| the same language. The historical difference? The Czech Republic
| was part of the Holy Roman Empire while Slovakia was part of
| Hungary for most of the same period.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| I'm sceptical, it's too easy to cherry-pick data to make it look
| supportive of one's political agenda. Not saying it's the case
| here, I just wouldn't trust too much "obvious" patterns and easy
| to understand maps from a twitter thread. More often than not,
| such threads are omitting data that doesn't support the view of
| the author. Reality is rarely obvious and simple.
| LeanderK wrote:
| I totally assumed the examples to be cherry picked but it's
| still fun to look at. Not every past border is visible on
| modern maps, but still some are clearly the consequence of
| those, for example the german maps where the old GDR is the
| reason for the high rate of atheism or popularity of more
| extreme parties.
|
| I think that often past borders are the consequence of
| different demographics, which clearly translate into modern
| differences.
| hammock wrote:
| By definition the examples are cherry-picked. I noticed he
| didn't pull up old Visigoth ranges, nomadic farmers or
| Babylonian borders.
|
| 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.
| derbOac wrote:
| When I was reading through the examples I sort of wondered
| why sometimes these geopolitical phenomena persist, and other
| times not.
|
| 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.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Pretty much this. Without deep historical analysis, this
| doesn't mean anything. It's like amateur etymology that is
| based on how similar certain words are, which typically gets
| things laughably wrong.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Absolutely right to be skeptical. The regional demographics in
| many of these overlapped regions have gone through
| comprehensive changes over centuries under drastically
| different regimes. The map about English posessions in 1154 vs.
| first round of French presidential election is just an absolute
| straw-grasping joke. ~900 year's worth of cultural,
| demographic, and economic shifts reduced to basic visual
| pattern recognition AKA the thing that causes people to see
| Jesus on a piece of toast.
|
| 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.
| alephxyz wrote:
| It's more of a weak indirect correlation between historical map
| -> economic prosperity -> political preferences. The modern
| political maps for France, Germany, Portugal and Romania at
| least are essentially proxies for GDP per capita (not sure
| about the others).
| hammock wrote:
| One might add something to the front of your analysis, as
| maps don't form out of thin air. In fact, those lines on a
| map are formally called "political borders."
|
| _historical governance_ - > historical map & economic
| prosperity -> political preferences
| lrem wrote:
| Political borders also don't just happen to be drawn on a
| piece of paper. They tend to snap to physical barriers,
| mostly rivers and mountain ranges.
| not2b wrote:
| Oh, come on: he had numerous examples from all over the world
| where the political implications are quite different. The
| author's view was simply that old political boundaries have
| lingering effects, and he demonstrated that very well.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| As I said, I'm not saying it's the case here. It's just
| collateral damage of the disinformation age we live in. I'm
| not trusting "trends" in data unless I spend 1 or more hours
| looking it up myself and hoping I can avoid being mislead.
|
| 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.
| rob_c wrote:
| Thanks for sharing OP
| Imnimo wrote:
| Not sure I totally buy the Mexico one. The correspondence just
| isn't as strong as in some of the other ones, and in some places
| is confounded by modern state borders.
| soared wrote:
| I don't know that these are all cause and effect, but just
| interesting overlays. The Mexico one is clear to Americans -
| people who immigrate from Mexico choose to stay nearer to
| Mexico. Similar cultures, weather, etc. The areas previously
| being a part of Mexico is just coincidence.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| There were a substantial number of people of Spanish-Imperial
| descent (of a variety of conditions) who didn't just move
| south when the border moved. Even now you see old families
| who identify as Mexican with the submotto "we didn't cross
| the border, the border crossed us". Keep in mind that much of
| that area was under Spanish and/or Mexican control for almost
| twice as long as it has been in the US (~1550-1846 vs
| 1846-present).
| valarauko wrote:
| Do we have any numbers for how many Mexican-Americans are
| of this descent?
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I don't (I'd imagine it's of a similar quality to people
| in the US northeast whose ancestors came over on the
| Mayflower). However, I wouldn't be surprised at the
| finding that their presence has had a network effect (and
| a cultural effect) that encouraged people coming from
| Mexico more recently to settle in that area rather than
| (for example) spread into the Louisiana Purchase
| territory, for the same reasons that immigration from
| other countries also tends to settle and self-perpetuate
| in enclaves.
| Imnimo wrote:
| Sure, I just mean that the line is a lot fuzzier than most of
| the other examples. Like if you showed me just the modern
| Polish map in the first one, I could clearly draw a pretty
| accurate approximation of the historical German border. But I
| don't think you could get nearly as accurate of a historical
| Mexican border from the modern population map. And in few
| areas where you can, it's also a modern border (Texas-
| Louisiana for example).
|
| It's just a less compelling example than the others.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| One other way to think about this particular map of
| Poland/Germany is in context of 19th century industrialization.
| After WW2 the entire western half of Poland benefitted from
| remnants of a robust industrial infrastructure - especially rail.
| Here in Lower Silesia we still benefit from it in many ways.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I wonder if things are going to change significantly with all of
| the covid related movement.
| perrylaj wrote:
| Anecdotally, the movement I've seen largely results in
| consolidation of 'like-minds', rather than a culture-mixing
| diaspora that results in a greater balance of varied
| perspectives. I hope my limited experience isn't the norm, but
| I suspect it is.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| I agree, from a US perspective.
|
| 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.
| BenoitP wrote:
| There's an interesting one linking geology and politics in the
| north of France, kinda like the Alabama one:
|
| 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'etait 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...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coron_(house)
| rootsudo wrote:
| So what came first? The people who live there and their opinions
| or observations and borders?
| hk__2 wrote:
| Some examples, especially the one about the "English" possessions
| in 1154 vs. elections results in 2022 vs where Brits are living
| in 2020 look very fishy. You have to try really hard if you want
| to see (or invent) a correlation between those, because they
| really don't match at all.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| England and France in 1154 are practically different nations
| with very different cultures compared to England and France in
| 2022, not to mention nine centuries' worth of evolving
| relations between those two.
|
| 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.
| jhgb wrote:
| I thought that "political maps" simply meant sovereign state
| borders (as it does in Czech, German, and possibly other
| languages as well), and that this would be about unchanging
| borders. For example Bohemia has had some pretty stable natural
| borders. But in this case "political map" means a map of election
| results? Is that a common usage in English?
| smcl wrote:
| In English it has in my experience just referred to maps that
| emphasise human layers more than geological ones. Like you
| would see national borders, state or county borders,
| settlements marked on the map, rather than contours, terrain
| etc. I guess this does make it suitable for looking at
| electoral results but I think the "political" here refers to
| this - administrative divisions, not election or polling
| t-3 wrote:
| To clarify what was said by the other respondents, "political
| maps" referring to sovereign state borders is a term composed
| of two words (and is probably one word in some other
| languages?), while "political maps" referring to maps of
| politics is two terms composed to express a modification of the
| idea of a map (which is almost always a political map in the
| first sense unless otherwise stated).
| gbear605 wrote:
| As a native English speaker "political map" means to me both
| specifically "sovereign state borders" and generally "a map
| that relates to politics". If I'm on Google Maps and there's a
| button that says "show political map", I would expect country
| borders, but if someone tells me "here are some political maps"
| then I'm expecting anything that has to do with politics.
| spicyusername wrote:
| In a way it would be surprising if we didn't see trends like
| this.
|
| Reminds me of this quote:
|
| Everything is what it is because it got that way. - D'Arcy
| Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form
| enasterosophes wrote:
| I had the same thought. What, do people think the politics of a
| region gets routinely shuffled without any influence from
| geographical or historical context?
| twic wrote:
| At some point i read that the reason the south-west of England is
| a stronghold for the Liberal Democrat party is due to the soil: i
| think it was that the soil there is suitable for dairy farming,
| and something about the economic structure of dairy farming led
| its well-off population to support the Liberals rather than the
| Tories, and that has persisted. But i can neither remember the
| explanation clearly, or find a source for it now. Sorry!
| weeksie wrote:
| Whenever I see this kind of persistence, it underscores how
| important path dependency is when trying to understand how things
| got to be the way they are.
|
| 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.
| derbOac wrote:
| One thing that's become very interesting to me is whether
| there's a way to formalize the presence of these kinds of path
| dependencies in models (sociological, psychological,
| epidemiological, system, whatever) so they don't become these
| kind of implicit ghost (butterfly?) effects that are mismodeled
| and misinterpreted. How do we avoid overlooking them? Seems
| like it's something that happens a lot.
| falling_ wrote:
| Isn't that the point of version control? Just make a list of
| (encountered problem) -> (enacted solution) mappings to keep
| track.
| pstuart wrote:
| Brings to mind the 5 monkeys experiment:
| https://www.proserveit.com/blog/five-monkeys-experiment-less...
| bbarnett wrote:
| Sadly, all that will come from this article, is that a PHB
| who knows nothing about our field, will read a random tech ad
| (which is written as a blog/review/article), and proclaim
| that product X is perfect, whatdayamean it's not usable for
| us, it's not even helpful?!, just deploy it or you're fired,
| you stupid monkeys.
| philwelch wrote:
| This experiment is one of my pet peeves, at least in terms of
| how it's usually used as a parable. Yes, in this particular
| situation, the monkeys are being irrational. But they are
| only being irrational because they are in a completely
| artificial environment that was deliberately constructed for
| the purpose of gaslighting them.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Chesterton's fence.
|
| 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.
| api wrote:
| > 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.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > It has no verdict on whether or not something should be
| changed.
|
| 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.
| antihero wrote:
| It isn't against change, it's about making the correct
| change and correct amount of change to achieve the
| desired result, which can often be no change.
|
| It's against wanton and unwise change.
|
| Considering nuance in qualification "disclaimed into
| oblivion" is needlessly derisive.
| [deleted]
| philwelch wrote:
| I think the way you're conflating "for caution" and
| "against change" is a bit of sleight of hand though. I
| would definitely agree that it's a prescription _for
| caution_ , but not necessarily _against change_.
| fsckboy wrote:
| the bias you detect is actually the bias of the changers;
| from experience we learn that the people who agitate for
| change are overwhelmingly likely to not look into the
| reasons things are the way they are.
| Spellman wrote:
| Yup. I've often seen Chesterson's Fence trotted out as an
| argument to never change anything. Or at least place
| onerous burden of proof on the new change to prove itself.
|
| 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.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| The problem with Charleston's fence is that most of the
| time the reason the fence needs to be removed isn't "I
| don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.", but
| that the fence is actively a problem.
|
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| I think plenty of people err on either side of this
| question. It's an eternal controversy, and as you say,
| there is a balance.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| tshaddox wrote:
| The problem with a naive interpretation of Chesterton's fence
| is that it encourages stasis in cases where we don't have the
| knowledge or resources necessary to "fully" understand the
| reasons (or whether any even exist) for the current state of
| affairs. And in fact, there's no way to _guarantee_ that we
| "fully" understand all reasons for the current state of
| affairs. Thus Chesterton's fence essentially deteriorates
| into the precautionary principle, which is bad epistemology.
| This quote from Wikipedia's section on criticism of the
| precautionary principle applies just as well to Chesterton's
| fence:
|
| "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...
| lordleft wrote:
| From Tristram Shandy:
|
| "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."
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| Great... Now do the Middle East. That one should be fun.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's a bird, it's a plane, it's.. the seljuk turks
| rodelrod wrote:
| In many cases, because both overlap with geographical features:
| the Carpathians in Romania, the Pontic-Caspian steppe in Ukraine,
| the green mountainous Portugal north of the Tagus vs the flat
| "montado" landscape to the south.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| >because both overlap
|
| 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
|
| like the original post implied, than Geo ->
| old empire Geo -> current day politics
|
| as you implied; unless I missed your point.
|
| 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?
| rodelrod wrote:
| Putting it in these terms, what I'm trying to say is
| something like: geography - economy - old
| empire geography - economy - current day politics
|
| The biggest caveat to this is that the importance of
| geography is conditioned by technology, and technology
| changes over time. So a more detailed model could be
| something like: geography + current tech -
| agriculture/commerce/industry/military - economy/culture -
| politics
|
| See how the dominant powers changed with the shift from
| bronze to iron or with the development of open ocean
| navigation.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Makes sense.
|
| 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.
| t-3 wrote:
| It's been true throughout history and is still pretty
| true that most people never leave the area they were born
| in. This would cause geography, history, and internal
| politics to overlap in somewhat non-obvious ways.
| dijit wrote:
| That's really cool.
|
| 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.
| unmole wrote:
| The author seems to be a French speaker living in Paris. His
| usage was probably unintentional.
| blfr wrote:
| Almost certainly what you see in Poland is not persistence of old
| but fresh settlement. After WW2, Poland recovered these western
| lands from Germany but lost others in the east to USSR. A lot of
| people moved from there.
|
| 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.
| cheeseface wrote:
| In the end, culture and values change surprisingly slowly.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| True, but they do change; if e.g. an empire hangs around for
| long enough, the original culture will be lost or assimilated.
| See for example Christianity throughout Europe, plenty of
| examples of erased or merged cultures to the point where nobody
| knows what happened before. Or the lasting influence of
| colonization throughout the world. Or the change of culture and
| language that the US has throughout the Hollywood media-
| consuming world; listen to random people in western Europe and
| count how many Anglicisms they use in their native language.
| mkotowski wrote:
| Some more examples: - apparently ancient Egyptians had this
| problem with their own past, but I don't remember where I
| read this. If anyone has a source, I would be thankful. -
| pre-indoeuropean language families in Europe, only Basque
| remained that we know of
| m0llusk wrote:
| Sort of, but it is more like echoes. In the first and possibly
| most well known case the previously Prussian areas of Poland
| had all of the ethnic Germans forcibly removed. Because of this
| abrupt and extreme change there must be something else going on
| since the culture and values in fact changed quite suddenly and
| yet differentiation endures.
| tormeh wrote:
| The fascinating thing about the Poland example is that the
| Germans living in modern fay west-Poland were moved out and
| into what's now Germany. So the culture and people are gone.
| What you see are the political effects of better
| infrastructure.
| SergeGilette wrote:
| The work is just awesome. i'm not a fan of twitter, but i just
| subscribed. It's very interesting to see with evidence that
| history even centurys old weights a lot. Having the feeling it
| does is one thing, seing proof is another.
| mkotowski wrote:
| Quite funny, when I read the title before checking the link, I
| first thought exactly about Poland voting preferences.
|
| 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.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| The territory that today is western poland was part of Germany
| pre-1939. It wasn't an occupation, it was just that territory
| of that country. Afaik, most of what was eastern Poland
| pre-1939 and was occupied by the Russians, nowadays is no
| longer Polish territory. The boundaries migrated west.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Yes indeed.
|
| 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.
| thriftwy wrote:
| The german territories were given to Poland by USSR, not
| taken by Poland.
|
| With regards to eastern territories, Poland may reclaim
| some of those right now if it is insistent :)
| agapon wrote:
| Russian troll detected.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Seriously though, all of these russophobic eastern
| european countries are like: "Russia took our lands".
|
| 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.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Russia is officially the successor state of the USSR. So
| legally yes, the USSR is Russia in so far as anyone cares
| for the purposes of assigning blame.
| coddingtonbear wrote:
| I don't really want to get involved in this argument, but
| I think this is a situation where there's just a little
| bit of missing historical background that might help you
| two understand one another. What the upstream commenter
| is referring to is the fact that the land that was
| historically eastern Poland isn't part of Russia now --
| it's part of Ukraine and Belarus. Sure, the USSR (of
| which Russia is the successor state) is what performed
| that land transfer, but the land was not transferred to
| what is now Russia.
| klausjensen wrote:
| The Russian delusions around WW2 are astonishing.
|
| 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.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Yes, USSR had a pact with Nazi Germany. Until it hadn't.
|
| So?
| mkotowski wrote:
| Part of it was, yes. But going by the image from the tweet,
| there are many regions recovered, that belonged to the Second
| Polish Republic and still contained quite sizeable Polish-
| speaking population. [0]
|
| [0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GUS_languages193
| 1_Po...
| em-bee wrote:
| well, it depends on how far back you look in history. poland
| was split up between prussia, austria and russia in the 18th
| century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland#/media/File:Rze
| czpospol...
| Archelaos wrote:
| Those who want to dive deeper into the interrelation between
| history, geography, sociology and mentalities, I want to point to
| the Annales school[1], a group of French historians that formed
| in the late 1920s and had a big impact on historical studies,
| first in France and later world-wide. They are famous for their
| interest in what they called the "longue duree"[2], long-term
| historical processes.
|
| 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...
|
| [5] https://www.wahlen-in-deutschland.de/wuKarteSPD.htm
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Svoka wrote:
| [deleted]
| fguerraz wrote:
| This seems to be complete BS to me: all I see in these maps is a
| lot of confirmation bias, the author really sees what he wants to
| see.
|
| 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.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Just because the author used only confirmatory evidence doesn't
| mean that there isn't a correlation or a causal factor at play.
| The author didn't posit a theory; he merely pointed out that
| the maps are interesting. Which they are.
|
| 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.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| In academic language this is called "the many labels you can
| put to a population density chart".
| kllvql wrote:
| I completely understand your point. Misinterpreting correlation
| with causation is something that frequently bothers me in
| writings and discussions. In this case, however, I did find the
| correlations the author pointed out interesting. I did not
| interpret this as causal (the author may have made that claim,
| but I was more interested in the maps).
|
| 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.
| yolo69420 wrote:
| I don't quite think you understand. The data presented here
| absolutely does not allow for the conclusions you make
| particularly in your second paragraph. In fact the reality
| could be exactly the opposite way (i.e. geography has no
| influence on things like modern election results whatsoever)
| and you wouldn't know it based on this data.
|
| 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.
| daveslash wrote:
| Something similar that I find both fascinating and heart-
| breakingly tragic: The "Black Belt" in the U.S. Deep South. The
| Black Belt is both a geological term used to refer to the rich &
| dark soil [0] and a geopolitical term to refer to the high
| percentage of African Americans [1]. During the Cretaceous
| period, the shore-line at the time ran through the middle of
| Alabama and Mississippi, depositing rich organic deposits, which
| in turn allowed for plantations to thrive in those parts of the
| deep south. Even nearly 160 years after the Emancipation
| Proclamation, those counties still have some of the highest
| percentages of African American Populations. Overlaying the
| population demographic map on a a map of the cretaceous shoreline
| shows a correlation [2].
|
| [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
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _heart-breakingly tragic_
|
| 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.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Huh, didn't realise that the Voice of African Americans was a
| member of HN.
| bag_boy wrote:
| I did not know that African Americans got together, had a
| vote, and decided that they're happy to live in the US!
| tomrod wrote:
| Or that they voted that living in the South is tragic!
|
| 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| no vote necessary, Americans overwhelmingly are glad to
| live in America, and African Americans are not different.
| whycombinetor wrote:
| What's heartbreakingly tragic about this? Your statements reads
| as if a county having a high percentage of African American
| residents is negative.
| bag_boy wrote:
| Most of African Americans who live in the BB are descendants
| of slaves. They didn't want to be in the black belt.
| irrational wrote:
| Do they want to be in Africa? I doubt it. Slavery is bad,
| but that doesn't mean it is tragic that the descendants of
| those slaves are living in America.
| Robelius wrote:
| I think bag_boy was trying to highlight the tragedy that
| we can still see direct effects of slavery in the United
| States, not that it's tragic that descendants of Africans
| live in America
| daveslash wrote:
| I can't speak for bag_boy, but yes, that was more or less
| what I was getting at; while the correlation is
| fascinating, it's also sad to think about the "why" and
| "how" behind it. I didn't mean to kick a hornets nest...
| mistermann wrote:
| It isn't absolutely tragic, but there is surely some
| tragedy within the overall story, including in some
| lingering after effects.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It's the chattel slavery that's tragic.
| 333c wrote:
| Yep, this is cool, and it's mentioned in the thread!
| daveslash wrote:
| Oh! So it is!!! Oops, I didn't scroll down enough on the
| Twitter Thread to see! My bad - thank you!
| mcdonje wrote:
| Geopolitical version of technical debt.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Traveling around the Balkans, the old political divisions are
| absolutely striking.
|
| 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.
| shaftoe444 wrote:
| English historian Robert Tombs has lots of good examples of this
| for English history. Typically I can't find a good picture now
| but English Civil War vs Brexit voting patterns is a good
| example: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/files/2018/03/Screen-
| Shot-201....
| NeoTar wrote:
| I'm not sure what I am supposed to be concluding from this map.
|
| 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.
| julienreszka wrote:
| It's just a misleading graph.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Peeve: To cause to be annoyed or resentful. synonym: annoy.
|
| 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?"
| [deleted]
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I was very confused by that thread. I kept scrolling to find
| where he explained why it was a pet peeve of his.
| robbomacrae wrote:
| Same. Lets not tell any SEO/journalists this technique for
| keeping us reading an article we might have otherwise
| dismissed!
| 300bps wrote:
| I studied French for four years and I'm sure there are all
| kinds of things that I say in that language that would confuse
| native French speakers as much as Francois Valentin confused us
| with an errant use of "pet peeve".
|
| I think he probably meant to say, "pet projects".
| not2b wrote:
| My favorite is when a French colleague wanted to send some
| "demands" to a customer. He meant "questions", "demander" =
| "to ask", he didn't realize that "demand" has a very
| different implication in English. Fortunately this was caught
| before he sent that email.
| zen_of_prog wrote:
| My theory is that he misinterpreted https://xkcd.com/1138/
| [deleted]
| test1235 wrote:
| Author admits his mistake:
|
| Francois Valentin @Valen10Francois * 16h I realize that I've
| used that word completely incorrectly for ages!
|
| https://twitter.com/Valen10Francois/status/15241607219023544...
| irrational wrote:
| Thank you for the link. I too was confused how this could
| possibly be a pet peeve. I wonder what term he actually
| meant? Pet project?
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Another more serious mistake is that further down the thread he
| refers to the DDR as a "former Soviet Republic", which it
| absolutely was not.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Thank you. The overlays are enlightening, and I was confused by
| the title and the lack of negative commentary accompanying
| these maps.
| [deleted]
| Vinnl wrote:
| One interesting takeaway here is that it's somewhat likely that
| your own political convictions might be pretty different if only
| you had come to live elsewhere - sometimes not even that far
| away.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Probably... But this assumes there's no biological (or other)
| component that isn't stronger.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| You can see this more locally in the US with places that had
| redlining.
|
| > 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
| codeflo wrote:
| It looks like several territories that were once ruled by Austria
| tend to vote more to the right, if I'm reading the maps
| correctly. Is that a coincidence, or is there anything specific
| about the history of the Austrian Empire that (seemingly) caused
| generation-spanning right-wing resentment in its populace?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I don't really get why this annoys the author though?
| m0llusk wrote:
| It doesn't. He explains in the comments that he had long
| misunderstood this phrase. This is the first time that his
| misuse was noticed and corrected.
| jmull wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it doesn't and that the author misused an idiom
| (and probably is not a native English speaker).
| retrac wrote:
| If you look at human genetic populations, particularly several
| haplogroups prevalent among the first peoples to re-settle Europe
| after the ice age, and the Middle Eastern peoples they came from,
| as well as a later Y DNA group associated with the Germanic
| expansion in prehistory, the low prevalence areas today basically
| still outline the borders of the Roman Empire at its peak.
| odiroot wrote:
| Ironically, the first map with Poland although very popular (it
| comes up on Reddit on a weekly basis) doesn't explain much.
|
| 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.
| diordiderot wrote:
| It seems you make a claim in the first paragraph... Then
| provide reasoning to dispute it in the second?
| warpech wrote:
| You can see the result of the 123-year partitioning of Poland on
| many maps, to the extent that it has become a meme:
|
| 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...
| Bayart wrote:
| The partitioning of Poland or its << migration >> to the West ?
| Because as far as I'm aware, the split is due to the Western
| part being formerly German (including its population) rather
| than the Polish people itself having been split. Polish people
| are welcome to correct me, I'm not too familiar with history in
| this region aside from the broad stokes.
| krzyk wrote:
| Only parts were strictly German. And the German population
| was moved out to new borders, and Polish population from east
| (parts of current Ukraine, Belarussia and Latvia)
| warpech wrote:
| You are referring to the idea that some of these phenomena
| might not be due to the era of partitioning that ended in
| 1918 [1] but to the territorial changes after WW2 [2], in
| which people from former Eastern territories were relocated
| and mixed with the population of the "Regained Lands" in the
| West.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered_Territories
| moffkalast wrote:
| That's pretty dank alright.
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