2026-09-02 07:50 UTC
Bluesky is on day 3 of drama about Lake Ontario / America, and US-based people I hitherto respected seem unaware that:
- yes, cartography can be very political
- you do have to accept that a country's government has the right to officially rename things and that cartographers should not be the ones making the final call on whether or not this is "stupid"
- showing the locally official name is not an endorsement of the government, otherwise my god, we will never have maps of anything
Replies (1)
-
@solar_chase@mastodon.green 2026-09-02 07:51
- it is actually pretty common for things to be officially named different things by different governments. Harmless example, English-language maps show the German city that the Germans call München as Munich; nobody minds this, as far as I know. (Yours, someone who has tried to show what I regard as apolitical maps of power plants and transmission assets in places like Taiwan and Kashmir... sometimes you do just have to be the spreadsheet jockey).