Planitia

I have a yen for fantasy geography. Some might say I just generally live in Cloud Cuckoo Land, but I’ve always been keen on maps. I wrote a post on here imagining that Great Britain had been divided in the same way as North and South Korea and the way things would be for us if it had, which may have helped make the situation over there more vivid. Well, right now we’re in a very divided kingdom, as evinced by the divisive “Unite The Kingdom” march last weekend in London, and of course in a sense I’d prefer us to be even more divided in the sense that I believe strongly in Scottish independence. I’ve taken to writing “U”K recently too, and the divisions are of course not simply geographical. This is an artifact of social media, bots and AI, among other things, orchestrated of course by those who profit from division, and I mean that literally, I mean, you know all this. We all do.

I’m very, very White, and I’m from East Kent. My sister, I’m pretty sure, votes Reform. As a White person, I’m racist, sometimes consciously and deliberately so and at other times unconsciously so. Last weekend I made the observation to another White person that all White people are racist, which I firmly accept, and he appeared to take exception to this. I’m not sure whether I should explain this or not, or whether if I do, it will reach the right ears. It’s absolutely not about being a self-hating White person, any more than opposition to Zionism makes someone a self-hating Jew, but about recognising one’s privilege and working against one’s own racism. The point at which a White person decides they’re not racist is also the point at which they will stop becoming less racist.

A few months ago I was at a vigil for the victims in Palestine when a White guy involved in an anti-immigration protest stood up at the front and said “I’m not racist”. This is factually untrue, not because of his motivations for being on the demo but because he’s White and therefore racist. He’s in the position of being able to be oblivious to his racism, as do I much of the time, because of our White privilege. The problem with being able to perceive himself as racist is similar to my problem of being able to perceive myself as breathing or having a heartbeat, and also due to the fact that racism tends to be conceptualised as something one does, perhaps consciously, rather than being a product of living in a White supermacist society such as this one. Ironically, this is one reason why I’m only a very reluctant Remainer. To me, the EU is a club of rich nations which have looted and stolen money and resources from the rest of the world, consisting largely of racialised people, and are continuing to do so through megacorps and banks. One interesting fact about the European Union which a lot of people seem to gloss over is that an early adopter and possibly the inventor of that term was none other than British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, who wanted a White homeland for Europeans as he saw them. Another irony is that the reason we’re getting so many asylum seekers is that we’ve left the EU and therefore the Dublin III Regulation, which prevented people from making more than one application in a signatory state, which the “U”K no longer is. So Brexit is responsible for this.

If you’re White, at least if you live in a White majority country, the chances are you will have grown up without the enforced education of what it means to be a member of a racialised minority, and that obliviousness involves unconscious bias. I’ve used this example before, but the woman in Central Park who threatened to call the police on a Black birdwatcher out of fear was unaware of the danger she was putting him in by doing so because she was able to conceive of the police as primarily an institution which upheld the law without being much of a threat to racialised people when the reality is very different. Fear is also important here. If you can get someone to be afraid, you can get them to be less fair and more irrational, and to make decisions which endanger others, which they may no longer perceive as individuals but as dominated by a particular immutable characteristic. I was kidnapped by a White man in 1989 CE, and became disproportionately afraid of White men in general for maybe a year or so afterwards. In fact I found my fear of them expanding and including more White men in a manner I found quite worrying and discussed in therapy. Suppose instead of that I’d been kidnapped by a Black person. I probably would’ve experienced the same effect the other way round, and would’ve become more racist than I already am. If I didn’t get the chance to process that and come to terms with it in some way, it might’ve become a fixed feature of my personality. Transferring this to homophobia, I used to know a man who was homophobic because he was sexually abused a lot in his independent school by other males. I don’t know whether he still is because it was a long time ago now and I’ve long since lost touch with him. You don’t necessarily have much control over your prejudice, and whereas it’s undesirable it isn’t an accusation to call someone racist. It might be inaccurate, but it’s an observation.

Another aspect of racism which I’ve mentioned before here is its potential link to veganism, which I personally make and promote to a certain extent. I may be unusual for a vegan because I’m not interested in making anyone else vegan on the grounds that there’s already so much suffering and death in the world inherent in the food chain that any decisions we make to avoid animal products have little consequence for that. Veganism, though, is about everyone, i.e. all animals, and I do mean animals. I’m not going to reduce that circle merely to animals with brains or otherwise cephalised. But this post is not about veganism specifically. It’s easy to introduce racism into one’s veganism, for instance by ignoring the internalised oppression of soul food or the difficulty of eating a healthy plant-based diet in a food desert, but even without this there’s a racist element in it, one which I actually fully embrace despite being generally anti-racist. The issue is that indigenous peoples are never plant-based, and expecting them to be so will destroy their way of life. Although this is a long way down the road from where we are now, with the majority of even White people being carnist, ultimately the species indigenous people exploit don’t belong to them any more than slaves belong to slave “owners”, and in spite of the reverence they hold their prey in and no matter how efficiently they use the remains, they don’t have the right to kill them. And this is a serious problem, because for instance the Inuit will sometimes end their own lives because they can’t pursue the slaughter of seals. It’s a central part of the lives of thousands of non-White people and I do want to take that away, and some of them will probably kill themselves as a result. Therefore, I am absolutely and emphatically, actively and consciously racist. So yes, all White people are racist and I in particular am deliberately so, although the issue is unlikely to arise because of the focus on factory farming and vivisection, which is far more important. Marginalisation is nested. Partly for this reason also, I disagree with vegans who say veganism is a feminist issue because of the rape and forced birth involved. The deaths of half the chicks to enable the other half to lay eggs arises from their maleness, and in the wild it’s very likely that there are species whose females are always raped and wouldn’t exist if they weren’t, meaning that you can’t apply feminism to most other species, and again veganism trumps feminism there. At the same time, the issue of my racism against indigenous peoples, most of the time, is not a real problem because by the time veganism becomes a significant issue for them, they will probably have become assimilated into a scarcity-based economic system. However, there are also intermediate cases, such as the Faroese slaughter of pilot whales. On this issue, though, the slaughter is of wild animals rather than farmed ones and is on a smaller scale than the slaughter of farm animals in nearby countries, including Scotland. There is a sense in which whaling is actually the most humane form of slaughter because a one hundred ton animal can feed a lot more people than a thousand ewes whose total weight is the same, but I’d much rather there was none at all. So yeah, I’m racist, I know I am and I’m not planning to change in that respect, although I am in others.

Nonetheless, in other areas I am vigorously willing to discover and challenge my racism and White privilege. This doesn’t mean I have a guilt complex or think less of myself simply because I’m White, but I did grow up with the privilege of being able to be oblivious of racialisation because I was myself not racialised.

Given all that, I identify ethnically as a White person from northwest Europe, by which I mean an area including the islands of the North Atlantic, France, Benelux, Scandinavia and the German-speaking parts of Europe. That’s an area of seven million square kilometres, including fifteen sovereign states and covering 1.3% of the total surface of this planet. Most of the states involved are either part of the EU or have a special relationship with it. However, I’m not impressed with the EU unless it becomes a democratic federal state and it’s a case of it being the least worst option rather than something one can enthuse about. It’s just a mass of rich White people taking money and resources from the rest of the world and their own poor and making a massive pile of dosh. Nothing to celebrate.

However – well, indulge me, and this is where I get to the Tees-Exe Line and the Hexagon. Back in geography lessons, I’m not sure when, like probably every British schoolchild, I was taught about the line that can be drawn between the mouths of the Tees and the Exe rivers, northwest of which lie the highland areas of this island and southeast of which lie the “Lowlands”. Remember that name. This line divides the archipelago culturally too, with the northwest being more “Celtic”, although apparently the concept of Celtic identity is pretty nebulous and I tend to think the British parts of that area forget the Nordic influence. As I’ve mentioned before, in Scotland in particular edges are central, and one way in which this applies is with the water. Lochs, isles and firths are important to Scottish physical geography, influencing transport, language, economics, climate and doubtless a load of other things. Moving southwest of this line, though, brings one to an area with fewer islands, a less twiddly coastline and of course lower, flatter land. What it doesn’t do, however, is eliminate the sea. There’s the “German Ocean”/North Sea and the Manche/English Channel, and all the history and commerce which has taken place along its coasts. In Mediaeval times it sometimes consisted of territory straddling the two coasts and the English language is both Ingvaeonic and heavily influenced by French. The English crown made claims to France until surprisingly recently, in 1802 at the Treaty of Amiens due to France having become a republic. The White Ship and the subsequent arrival of the Anarchy was linked to the ferrying back and forth of royalty between France and England, and very significantly to me, Calais was only officially lost in January 1558.

Going further southeast, we have the Hexagon. France has this thing about being hexagonal, which to my mind excludes Britanny, Flanders, the Basque Country and French Catalonia (for want of a better term). Britanny still has somewhere to go due to its linguistic links to Cornwall, so that also belongs, so to speak, to the west of an extended Tees-Exe Line. On going into France, and in fact a long way into it towards Paris from the North Downs in Kent, one gets a strong impression of continuity. It basically feels and looks like Kent with different marks of human activity on it. Then there’s Benelux, a trio of countries which are closely associated with each other.

An apparent tangent:

On Mars, there are perhaps three words for extensive areas with distinctive features: vastitas, planum and planitia. Plana are plateaux, vastitas means “desert” and is just the large lowland area around the north polar ice cap where most of the ocean used to be, and there are also planitiae, the best known of which it Utopia Planitia, which is where they build the starships in ‘Star Trek’. A planitia is a low-lying area. It translates as “plain” in English, and one of the more interesting planitiae is Hellas, which includes the lowest-lying areas of the planet and was once thought to be instrumental in causing Tharsis to form near the antipodes of the planet. Planitia, then, is a low-lying area.

I think the area of the Low Countries, that near the coast and someway inland from Hauts De France and the area of this island southeast of the Tees-Exe Line could be considered a single geographical unit, and in fact should be considered a single political unit. Or rather, I don’t, but it would be sufficiently annoying that it constitutes a proposal. In the former France, this should include Picardie, Hauts de France, Grand-Est and Normandy. The capital should be Lille, or the capital should be polycentric. Why do I want this? Well, when I lived in East Kent and after I left, I felt it was weird how, far from celebrating our connections with places over the Channel, we all seemed to dig our heels in and become “extra extra English”. Lille was the closest big city to me and I’ve never been there, and to me that seems absurd. Dover is much closer to Calais than it is to London. The name Kent itself means “edge”, but it’s only on an edge if you ignore everywhere outside Britain. My home village has a vineyard which produces excellent wines. And yet the people living there basically ignore their position entirely and either act like France and the Low Countries are on the other side of the world or are affronted at the audacity of their neighbours visiting. And then of course there are the famous people in boats. Various problems there, one of which is that Calais and Dover are in different countries separated by thirty kilometres of often rough and very busy seas. This wouldn’t be a problem if we’d kept Calais in 1558.

So, why not forget about England entirely and just decide there’s a new country called Planitia comprising these areas. Put the capital in Lille, build some bridges and tunnels to link it together across the Channel similarly to the bridge linking Denmark and Sweden and celebrate the common history and culture. No more problems with boats because once the people reach Planitia, they’re in a unified political entity. It looks very roughly like this:

I have no idea why this came out so small. WordPress is not behaving itself today. Anyway, you get the idea. It’s a republic. It has a number of official languages, including French, Dutch, Letzebuergesch, West Frisian, English, Urdu, Hindi, Gujarati, Polish and so on. It unifies a diverse number of ethnicities with a lot in common. It has a large city in the middle of it on the island which does a lot of commercial stuff but needs its wealth redistributing more equally through the area.

In the meantime, out of the area is a kind of Celtic alliance, though not really Celtic, to the north and west, and a diminished hexagon of France to the south, extending to the Pyrenees and the Alps. As for Planitia, its cuisine, sadly, is far from vegan. It consists of pancakes, cheese on toast, loads of fish, bivalves, gastropods, various cheeses, wines (very nice, but are they vegan?), beer, cider, and more positively curries and general South Asian-influenced cuisines with plenty of chilli. People are not so keen on tea as some of them used to be. There’s Britpop with French lyrics, theatre in French, Dutch and English all in the same play, everyone learns each others’ languages in school including the South Asian ones and there’s existentialist Gothic literature. The former England has terrazzas and people hanging out having lunch for hours. Everyone drinks coffee. There is respect for learning for its own sake. Foreigners are so welcome they hardly count as foreigners at all beyond respect for their cultures. People are proud of their composite identity and how they’ve managed to bridge the gaps between the six nations composing their territory and people, often literally. The Channel has several bridges along its length which open in the middle like Tower Bridge to let the supertankers through. There are artificial islands offshore along both coasts. Many people cycle to work, Cannibis is legal for personal use and accordions and brass instruments play together. There’s probably a lot more rabies, unfortunately.

OK, all that’s a bit stereotypical, but what I’m saying is, can we for goodness’s sake forget that we’re living on an island and stop pretending we’re some special people apart rather than accept our unity with the rest of Europe? In this scenario there’s either no EU or Planitia is a province of a democratic European republic. The people in boats is a self-inflicted problem caused by leaving the EU, and also they’re people running from situations so appalling most people in Britain can’t even imagine them. They’re often people whose education has been paid for by another country and we get their talents, skills and experience for free, but instead of that we house them in crappy hotels and pay them a pittance when they could be contributing massively to the economy.

We can keep the St George’s cross though. A Turk who’s the patron saint of Palestine is fine by me. A red cross on an orange field with a couple of fleurs des lyses in the corners would seem appropriate.

Are Humans Embarrassing Or Boring?

This is not either/or, incidentally. We might theoretically be neither embarrassing nor boring or we might be both. Also, when I say “embarrassing”, I might be better off saying something like “shameful” or “social pariahs”. Please bear with me.

This is the famous “pale blue dot” photograph taken by one of the Voyager spacecraft on Valentine’s Day 1990, at which point it was beyond the orbit of Neptune. There is a minute fleck in this picture which I thought at first was a bit of dust on the screen. I tend to make similar mistakes whenever I see this image. Nonetheless, the “ray” on the right hand side has a tiny dot in it, and that’s Earth. Carl Sagan, the popular science guy, once said the following of this picture:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Carl Sagan, ‘Pale Blue Dot’, (c) 1994.

This observation has a lot in common with Douglas Adams’s Total Perspective Vortex storyline from the Secondary Phase of ‘The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy’, where he imagines a machine which drives people insane by showing them how insignificant they are in a vast Universe. This doesn’t succeed in Zaphod’s case, either because his ego is the size of the Universe or because he was actually in a simulated universe set up for his benefit, or strictly speaking his deficit.

The Fermi Paradox, which in case it’s somehow passed you by I will restate here, was voiced by the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, although Konstantin Tsiolkovskii had said something similar in 1933 and suggested the Zoo Hypothesis as a solution. Simply stated, it’s the apparent discrepancy between a Universe in which life is possible and the lack of evidence for the existence of aliens. That is, given that there is intelligent life on Earth, as is often claimed, and that Earth and the Sun are both quite unremarkable, why haven’t we had any contact with intelligent life forms from elsewhere in the Universe? Not only is there no apparent evidence today, but nor does there seem to have been any visitation from aliens at any time in the whole 4 600 million years since this planet formed. Since I’ve mentioned the Zoo Hypothesis, I should probably explain what that is. It’s the idea that we are known to aliens but they have chosen not to interfere with us, at least so far, so as to observe us as an interesting species.

This is actually the solution I favoured as a teenager. I liked the idea that there was a Galaxy teeming with intelligent life forms of various species out there with an ethic of non-interference, who were observing our species undetected. This is also very similar to the Prime Directive of the ‘Star Trek’ universe.

Right now, I have a much more depressing front runner as to the solution, although it’s not as much of a downer as the Great Filter, which now I’ve mentioned it I’ll have to outline, but later. At this moment, the most plausible explanation seems to me to be that phosphorus is relatively scarce. This argument goes as follows: non-carbon based life is unlikely because on this planet silicon is more abundant by far than carbon and yet there’s no silicon-based life here. Phosphorus is the rarest core element required for life as we know it, being incorporated in adenosine triphosphate and nucleic acids such as DNA, and it being so rare suggests that it wouldn’t be used unless there was no alternative. Then it turns out that phosphorus is even rare in our own solar system off-Earth. It’s ten times more concentrated in the human body than in the crust, and more than a thousand times as concentrated in the crust than in the matter of the solar system. Phosphorus only seems to form during a particular kind of supernova explosion, as opposed to within the star before it becomes a supernova and distribute the elements, meaning that phosphorus may only be at all common in certain parts of the Galaxy, and that also may prevent intelligent spacefaring civilisations from spreading far because they might have to take all their phosphorus with them or make it in situ. Moreover, it may be that as the Universe ages more phosphorus will accumulate and it will become more hospitable for life, which means we might just be really early.

I hope this is either not true or that another form of life dominates the Universe, such as plasma-based life living in nebulae or the depths of space between the stars. Nonetheless many other explanations have been offered, one of which is primarily interesting for the purposes of this blog post because of its origin: the Dark Forest.

There’s a famous and celebrated trilogy of SF novels by the Chinese author 刘慈欣 (Liu Cixin). I won’t go into the details of the plot, but the overarching idea in it is that the reason we haven’t heard from aliens is that the rational approach to the existence of extraterrestrial life is to regard it as a threat, and therefore that they’re all hiding due to the threat, and making oneself known, as we have if there’s anyone out there, is foolish and suicidal. More generally Liu Cixin believes that we project artificial positivity onto aliens, regarding them as more enlightened and benevolent than it’s reasonable to expect them to be, while simultaneously underestimating the benevolence of humans. I don’t agree with this at all as I think it’s based on how groups of human beings have behaved under patriarchy towards each other and there’s no reason to suppose aliens have the same characteristics and history as our highly contingent tendencies. However, one interesting aspect of the Dark Forest hypothesis, as it’s known, is that it’s an idea from fiction which has turned out to be taken seriously by theorists dealing with the real Fermi Paradox, and the same is true of the two main ideas I want to talk about today.

The first of these is that we’re embarrassing, and for this I’ll go back to Douglas Adams. In ‘Life, The Universe And Everything’, the (obvious spoilers) premise is that the reason aliens are always invading Earth is that they find the game of cricket to be in extreme bad taste due to a devastating war early in Galactic history. Taking this up and running with it, what if the reason we are not in contact with aliens is that there’s something about the way we are which does something like make us a cognitohazard to them, or that our behaviour or values are so reprehensible that we can’t be accepted in polite society? Maybe we are metaphorically wearing our underpants on our heads, or are like the racist uncle who can’t resist making off-colour jokes.

To state this more clearly, there are intelligent life forms elsewhere in the Universe, and they are aware of our existence. The reason they don’t make contact is that there is something about us they find abhorrent, not physically speaking but along the lines of our customs, culture, values or practices. They find us rude or to have crossed a line they would never dream of doing. Alternatively, they can’t contact us safely because our behaviour constitutes something which would infect their psyche and cause severe damage to their civilisation.

There’s a peculiar visual phenomenon which I’m going to suggest you don’t Google (will that verb be dated soon?) called the McCullough Effect (I’ve deliberately spelt this wrong). It’s hazardous to search for this online, and I have reason to suppose it might be more hazardous for me than the average person. It takes the form of two patches of black and white stripes, one set horizontal and the other vertical. If you look at them for a few minutes, black and white horizontal stripes look pink and black and white vertical stripes green, for a period of about three months. The idea isn’t new, but as far as I know this is the only real world example that’s been discovered so far which works on neurotypical people with good colour vision. My hypothesis here is that there is something about us as humans, or possibly our dominant culture, which has a similarly but possibly more severe harmful effect on aliens who come into contact with us, and therefore we have been quarantined to protect the rest of the Galaxy. If this is true, it isn’t clear to us what it is or whether it’s all-pervasive or permanent.

There’s a less morally-neutral version of this possibility. Maybe our selfishness and materialism have led to us being cast out of the Galactic community, but we aren’t permanently bound to it, and if we free ourselves from it as a species they may make contact. This sounds a little like the idea of the “Fall Of Man”, and one shouldn’t underestimate the role mythology or spirituality may play in causing this idea. Or, it could be something we just can’t guess at, as with Douglas Adams’s example that it’s because some humans play cricket. It could be something as arbitrary as that, which will never occur to us because it’s part of being human. Maybe we’re being shunned, in other words.

The other possibility is suggested by Iain M Banks’s story ‘State Of The Art’. Obviously I need to flag up spoilers here too, but I also need to get on. In this novella, a post-scarcity civilisation called the Culture surreptitiously visits Earth in 1977 and decides that it’s so average that it’s not worth making contact with us. I didn’t get this from the story myself but apparently that’s how most people read it.

To state this more clearly, the solution to the Fermi Paradox is this. We are in a vast and life-rich Galaxy, with plenty of advanced technological civilisations, and we just aren’t that interesting. It isn’t that there’s anything particularly wrong with us or that we’re being studied as the Zoo Hypothesis has it, just that we’re really boring and ordinary. In this scenario, there could be numerous planet-bound civilisations like ours which are also wondering where all the aliens are, but the advanced aliens have all been there and done that, and don’t have much interest in a history of a typical primitive but intelligent species living in a boring old ordinary solar system. We’re simply “Mostly Harmless”, to get back to H2G2. The scale of the Galaxy is such that paying any attention to us would be like getting fixated on a bit of mouldy bread accidentally dropped behind something in the kitchen, which might be interesting to a mycologist but unless it really starts to stink or something, they’re not going to pay much attention to it/us.

This explanation has the merit of according with what we already know about our apparent place in the Universe. We’re on a pale blue dot lost in the vastness of the Cosmos. I had to peer at that picture for a while before it registered with me that Earth wasn’t a random fleck of lint or a bit of dandruff. It is feasible that some kind of survey of the Galaxy could have been undertaken which picked us up, but it’s like a huge shoal of fish. There’s a species of fish called the Lanternfish. Actually there isn’t. There are more than thirty genera of this fish, and it’s a good illustration of my point that I didn’t even know that. The remarkable thing about lanternfish is that they are so numerous that there may be up to sixteen billion tonnes of them in the ocean and they may be the most populous vertebrate in the world. They live in the middle depths of the ocean throughour the world, and in that sense they are important. Their average weight is 250 milligrammes, so a low estimate of their global population is a million times that of the total population of humans in the world. But have we heard of them? Do we think much about them? They’re also one of the most diverse families of fish in terms of number of species, but this still doesn’t really matter to anyone apart fom a few specialist experts. Now consider a single lanternfish. Being a living being, of course it’s important and I’m not about to suggest that I consider it disposable or not worth keeping alive, but to the average person, who is going to care about or even think about such a fish? Maybe this is what the planet Earth and its human population is like to the Galactic community. There is maybe someone in an alien university thousands of light years away who has considered our civilisation as part of their PhD thesis, as a footnote somewhere in a book nobody will ever read, or whatever the alien equivalent of that is, but even that’s a pretty long shot. The sheer scale of the Galaxy supports this idea.

Both of these suggestions have in common that the question “where are all the aliens?” is kind of inverted. It’s more like the Biblical quote “Who is man that Thou art mindful of him?” Maybe the real question is why we would consider ourselves worthy of attention. On Earth, we are a big deal, a big fish in a small pond, but in the Galaxy perhaps we’ve either mistaken a fireplace for a urinal in the home of a prospective in-law or we’re like an individual lanternfish swimming a kilometre down in the Southern Ocean and nobody has any reason to care.

Blogging And Politeness

This one’s a bit navel-gazy because I have something else coming up which needs a lot of attention.

If you have a WordPress blog, you’re presumably aware that it gives you a Mercator projection map of the world with a kind of heat map on it showing which countries get views of your posts. I’ve pondered this map a lot, and it troubles me on one level that it’s Mercator at all for all the usual reasons which I’ll just go into briefly here.

The Mercator Projection aims to produce maps which preserve compass direction and is, I think, about five centuries old. It’s notorious for making the northernmost areas look much larger than the equatorial ones and although it does the same in the Southern Hemisphere this only really affects Antarctica because apart from that continent the land is closer to the equator than in the North. It also has the remarkable effect of being infinite. It has to be cut off at the top and the bottom because it will just continue to stretch the distances so that it never reaches the poles. I sometimes imagine it showing individual snowflakes at the top and bottom. There are also some other choices made about the Mercator Projection as I usually see it here in these isles. It puts London in the middle and the North Pole at the top. Hence it’s responsible, for example, for the phrase “Sub-Saharan Africa”, which I dislike because it makes it sound like the force of gravity acts in a north-south direction and that Afrika south of the Sahara is somehow inferior, literally so in fact. However, all map projections but one distort areas or compass directions. You can project a globe onto a dodecahedron or icosahedron whose faces intersect the surface, which has very little distortion (and may be familiar to GURPS roleplayers), but this messes up directions. The other thing you can do is create a spiral whose spacing is infinitely small and unravel it, producing a one-dimensional strip of the surface which distorts nothing and is infinitely long, but that’s a mathematical curiosity with little practical use on the global scale, and in any case has to sacrifice the whole idea of compass directions.

Map projections are in a sense a question of etiquette, particularly if you’re trying to interact with the whole global population, or at least an evenly-distributed self-selected sample thereof. This is, I hope, what I’m trying to do. If you have a map which unnaturally shrinks certain areas and enlarges others, you are in a sense shrinking and enlarging the inhabitants. There are some other problems with this map too, and with any map which isn’t zoomable as far as I can tell. Micronations and smaller island nations are not really visible on it. There’s a list of countries accompanying the map, which helps, but you can’t see San Marino, Malta or Vatican City on this map, and whereas there are pop-ups as your cursor hovers over it, it’s like playing darts trying to find a small country in the Caribbean or Polynesia, for example. It’s also complicated by the way states claim territories. This is in fact a political map of the world, omitting, for instance, Antarctica because that’s not a country, and that’s fine, and a practical solution to some degree, but choices are always made with these things and they’re always political because everything is political.

When I was about ten, there were 225 countries in the world. There are now 193. At this rate, we should have world unity by 2280, assuming the reduction is linear. I don’t know why this decline has taken place. If you include Vatican City and Palestine, the number rises to 195, and of course that’s a political decision too. In fact, because everything is a political decision, whatever claim you make about even this number is going to tread on people’s toes. It’s all very touchy. For instance, I’ve mentioned Palestine now, which will probably offend some of my Israeli audience. And this is etiquette as well as politics. I remember a conversation I had in the early 1990s where I didn’t know how to refer to the northwestern part of the island of Ireland, and my interlocutor clearly had firm views on the idea that it was incontrovertibly part of the United Kingdom as if it wasn’t even controversial, when to me it really is very controversial indeed. I mention the date because of the Good Friday Agreement. But then maybe it’s important to clear the air sometimes and just be provocative. This relates to the universal polarisation problem which seems to have been worsened by the way people interact online, but was always at least potential if not actual, and was a lot worse in some parts of the globe than others, some of which were rather close to the English Midlands and Home Counties.

Consequently, as I sit here gaily typing away on this keyboard, always at the back of my mind is the awareness that the retinæ whereupon my words will be projected will have originated from zygotes of various genomes, karyotypes and locations onto which social construction will have projected ethnic and national characteristics, and I am bound to mess up from time to time, probably obliviously, and I will quite possibly never even find out what I’ve done wrong. It’s an adage of running a business, which this isn’t of course but still applies, that the majority of potential customers don’t give you feedback when they decide not to go with you. They just drift off never to be seen again. Certainly my own interaction with, say, a blog, answers to this description. But it means that whatever it was that put someone off is harder to discover, particularly if what one causes offence.

The above map is just for 2021 so far. The all-time map, dating back to I think about 2015 or so, still shows a similar picture and of course one of the things both maps incidentally show is that not many people read this blog. This is fine because I’m not really interested in getting a bigger audience, and its function is substantially somewhere to dump my thoughts and, I hope, improve my writing style. It doesn’t have an internally coherent set of topics either, hence the name. From the outside, there’s probably a pattern, but that’s going to arise from my personality, life history and identity. If it had a coherent theme, it might get more readers but that isn’t really my aim here. It is, however, mainly in English, and at a guess I’d say the second language on here is Ancient Greek, and that restricts the readership. It means many people will be reading it in a second language most of the time, and my readership will mainly be first-language English.

The biggest difference between the 2021 map and the all-time map is probably that the latter has more Afrikan countries represented, mainly on the Mediterranean coast. I wonder about this. I did blog quite a bit about North Afrikan concerns in the fairly recent past because of my feeling that North Afrika tends to be erased in the global consciousness to preserve an ethnic distinction between Black and non-Black people, and also due to the dominance of Arabic culture in the Maghreb, which tends to mask what’s going on in smaller communities there such as the Tuareg and Berbers. I haven’t done that so much recently because my own focus has moved somewhat southward in connection with the issues relating to BLM. Either of those things I will be mainly talking about as an outsider, though not entirely. For instance, the issue of what happened to some of my fairly recent ancestors being largely unknown is linked to the Atlantic slave trade and there are a few minor issues, but they’re trivial compared to proper full-scale racism, in which as a White person I am obviously part.

There are something like four dozen sovereign territories where nothing I’ve written on here has been read at all. This could sound a bit imperialist and egoistic – “I want to be heard all over the world” – but the real question is what are the factors, positive or negative, that lead to the distribution I see on this map. Actually, I am going to include the all-time map because this is getting silly:

Unsurprisingly, the darkest areas of this map are mainly English-speaking, namely these isles and the United States. In fact, the most readership of all is in this country, demonstrating that the local connection is at least as important as the language I use. The US is a close second, followed by Canada and Australia. The distribution of views is close to log-normal, also known as the 80:20 rule. Here’s a plot of the log-normal distribution:

(and here the limitations of the Chromebook I’m doing this on become apparent because I didn’t plot this myself, just copy-pasted it from a free source).

The darker blue line is the germanest. My blog has been viewed in just over a gross of countries. The thirtieth country on the list is Norway, with three dozen views, which is where a fifth of the number is reached. The notable absences are in southern Afrika, Outer Mongolia, Bolivia, Papua and Kalallit Nunaat (Greenland), and there are also no views from North Korea, Cuba or Suriname. The complete list of countries and territories which haven’t seen my blog is: Papua, North Korea, Kalaallit Nunaat, Outer Mongolia, Bolivia, Madagascar, Lesotho, Eswatini, Western Sahara, Senegal, The Gambia, Svalbard, Jordan, Syria, Iran, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Laos, Mauritania, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, Malawi, Sudan, South Sudan, Benin, Tchad, the Central African Republic, Afghanistan, Suriname, French Guyana, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Bhutan, Cuba, Haïti, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Vatican City, Andorra, and some small island nations in Polynesia, the Caribbean and possibly elsewhere. There are some outliers which I don’t fully understand, notably Romania, which I think resulted from me entitling one post Caveat Procrastinator, and unsurprisingly there are also hits from Romania for Transylvanian English. What these stats fail to capture is how much of a blog post is read. I imagine most of them are just briefly glanced at.

Some of the gaps in the list probably reflect political and development issues. For instance, it isn’t that surprising that central Afrikans don’t read my blog. Bolivia may be an example of this. There’s also the question of censorship, which can be summarised by this map:

The green countries on this map have the least censorship and the fuchsia the most. It’s probably worthwhile combining this with a global internet access map:

(Chromebook limitations are again apparent here). This second map is based on a composite statistic known as the Web Index, which has “no information” in the places where I have tended not to get any views. It attempts to combine ease of access, freedom of information and empowerment, so to some extent it includes the data on the previous map. It’s also notable that a number of the countries involved which are freest on that map also seem to have poor internet access, so it’s more like the governments concerned don’t consider the internet to be sufficiently influential in their countries to bother to do anything about it.

Besides all this though, I’m often concerned about a clash of values between what I write and those of people reading it, and perhaps between their values and my identity, in various ways, such as ethnicity and the fact that I’m quite left wing and vegan. I sometimes feel like there are whole swathes of the planet where I could not exist and might as well be underwater as far as I’m concerned, not because I have any enmity with the people there but because they wouldn’t tolerate various things about me. When I see that someone has read a blog post of mine from there, it gives me pause for thought. In particular, I tend to get quite bothered by clashes in political opinion. I’m aware that I’m to the left of practically everyone. This is my chart according to Political Compass:

I’m aware of the inadequacies of that site incidentally. But the thing is, I care about people and I’m interested in politics. The mere fact that I’m libertarian socialist does the opposite of stopping me from caring about people, whatever their political views are. Likewise, being a religious theist doesn’t stop me from caring about non-religious people for their own sake, but does the opposite. Same with being vegan. I am all these things because I care about you all, whoever you are who may be reading this.

It’s just very difficult to be polite to everyone, particularly when one knows very little about their country, background and life. Consequently, it’s incumbent upon me to learn as much as I can about the human world, so as to be able to empathise with all of humanity. It’s not achievable, but surely it’s a worthy goal.