True Left

Our enemy Duchesne is back to his favourite subject:

https://www.eurocanadian.ca/2021/10/almost-all-greatest-cartographers-history-white-men.html

A supremely high proportion of the greatest cartographers in history — reaching 100% after 1400 — were white men. This will be the first article in a long series of future articles about the far higher accomplishments of white men in all the endeavors of human existence.
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The focus of this article, however, is solely on the unsurpassed cartographic achievements of Europeans, a rather neglected subject, but a telltale about the unique ability of the European mind to be conscious of the totality of the world beyond the parochial, to strive for the unknown and master it.

That's why we call them Homo Hubris.

the marvelous European age of discovery would begin in the fifteenth century, preceded by the world eventful travels of Marco Polo (1254-1324), which found expression in the Catalan Atlas of 1375, a synthesis of medieval mappa mundi and the travel literature of the time, showing compass-lines, and a rather accurate delineation of the Mediterranean. The fourteenth century also saw the emergence of the mariner's compass, which made it possible to determine from the location of a ship any coastal feature, harbor or island..
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Waldseemüller was also the first to map South America as a continent separate from Asia, the first to create a printed wall map of Europe, and the first to emphasize the scientific importance of surveying and to use a forerunner to the theodolite, which he called the polimetrum, an optical instrument for measuring angles.

There were other European cartographers but none as great as Gerardus Mercator, who solved the perennial problem of how to translate the spherical Earth into the flatness of a map. What Mercator realized, among other things beyond my expertise, is that to create a proper projection of the globe onto a flat surface "the spacing of the parallels of latitude would have to be made progressively larger away from the equator toward the poles" and that "the spreading of the parallels would have to be in exactly the same proportion as the spreading of the meridians" (John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers). Mercator was not a lone soldier; in 1570 a man named Abraham Ortelius, though not a cartographer himself, published the first edition of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, which incorporated seventy maps created by many cartographers.
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Once the age of discoveries intersected with the rise of modern science and the development of geodesy, which began as a surveying technique to determine with accuracy positions on Earth, which involved the invention of accurate measuring instruments and the development of new mathematical techniques, all of which happened in Europe, it stands to reason that all subsequent cartographers in history would be European. Some of the surveying tools and techniques which allowed for detailed hydrographic surveying of sea chores and islands, the topography of lands, heights of hills and mountains, included the general use of the plane table, for establishing and recording angles; the method of triangulation to determine distance of remote objects without going there; angle, distance, and elevation-measuring instruments...and John Harrison's (1693-1776) 'longitude' clock, which finally solved the problem of determining longitude at sea. The men behind all these new techniques were 100 percent from Europe.

It is said that the Cassini family were the first to start mapping the interior of France, with César-François Cassini (1714-84) being the most illustrious in the utilization of new surveying tools such as triangulation and establishing that the Earth was flattened at the poles, and in the production of an accurate map of France.

James Cook (1728-1779) is best known as one of the greatest explorers ever, for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean, reaching the southeastern coast of Australia for the first time in history, circumnavigating New Zealand, crossing the Antarctic Circle three times, and exploring the Northwest passage all the way to the Bering Strait. He embodied the Faustian spirit of exploration in its purest form, driven solely by a will to explore without economic self-interest or missionary zeal; confessing to an ambition which "leads me not only farther than any man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go".

Again, that's why we call them Homo Hubris.

What many don't know is that Cook was also one of the greatest cartographers in history. His voyages were models of reconnaissance mapping. He produced the first hydrographic surveys of the coast of Newfoundland based on precise triangulation. He discovered New Zealand and mapped its entire coastline using the sextant, which measures the angular distance between two visible objects. He surveyed and mapped South Georgia. In his search of the Northwest Passage, he mapped the coast all the way to the Bering Strait.

This is a kernel of what this man accomplished. Today he is disdained as a "colonizer"

That's what he was! A colonizer is not absolved by drawing maps!

even though Cook exhibited "an entirely new civilized attitude towards the natives of the lands".

For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cook

Shortly after leaving Hawaii Island, however, Resolution's foremast broke, so the ships returned to Kealakekua Bay for repairs.

Tensions rose, and a number of quarrels broke out between the Europeans and Hawaiians at Kealakekua Bay, including the theft of wood from a burial ground under Cook's orders.[61] An unknown group of Hawaiians took one of Cook's small boats. The evening when the cutter was taken, the people had become "insolent" even with threats to fire upon them.[62] Cook attempted to kidnap and ransom the King of Hawaiʻi, Kalaniʻōpuʻu.

But let's get back to the enemy article:

There are too many great European cartographers to suppress. Francis Beaufort produced in 1792 the first map of Ireland, as the great hydrographer of his generation. He instructed map -making explorers that "the height of all headlands, isolated hills, and remarkable peaks should be trigonometrically determined...The nature of the shore, whether high cliff, low rock, or flat beach...the material of the beach, mud, sand, gravel or stones" (John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers).

I wont say anything about the men who started mapping the interior of India, and only a few words about the ones who began land surveying and mapping the United States. One has to start with the mapping explorers Lewis and Clark, who conducted one of the most renowned journeys in history crossing the uncharted American West from August 1803 to September 1806, reporting about in detail about the geography and wildlife and producing about 140 maps of the area. They were followed by John Charles Frémont (1813-90), the first presidential Republican candidate, mapping explorer of the country between Missouri and the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and Upper California, and the "still and solitary grandeur" of the Great Salt Lake. And Almon Harris Thompson, the mapper of Colorado through the Grand Canyon, southern Utah, part of Arizona — topographical maps to illustrate rivers, canyons, mountains, with a geological perspective.

It goes without saying that they never asked permission from the existing inhabitants before doing any of this.

For all this, it has been estimated that in 1885 less than one-ninth of the land surface of the earth had been surveyed — which should not surprise us since the rest of the world remained asleep without much cartography other than the knowledge percolating from the West. The rest of the world was compelled to accept the cartographic directives of European men. In 1884, the West told the world to adopt the Greenwich meridian as the prime meridian of the world, dividing the Earth into the Eastern and the Western hemisphere. The prime meridian is the line of 0° longitude, the starting point for measuring distance both east and west around the Earth. The prime meridian set by white men over the world separates the eastern hemisphere from the western hemisphere, and it is the International Date Line, the imaginary line on Earth's surface defining the boundary between one day and the next.

And we are supposed to be grateful for this?

With the merger of the white technologies of aviation and the camera, including aerial photogrammetry, cartography was revolutionized yet again, leading the to the rapid mapping of the globe through the 20th century. From this point on, we are no longer speaking of trailblazers and mapping explorers as much as institutionalized cartographers assisted by scientists sitting on desks, who would go on to develop newer technologies, automation techniques, electronic distance-measuring instruments, inertial navigation systems, high resolution radars, remote sensing, and computers — revealing great geographic details at long distances These technologies allowed radar imagery to be converted into maps of impenetrable regions like the Amazon, including geologic and seismic mapping of the earth beneath. They also began to map the mountains, chasms, and plains beneath the oceans, with the use of deep-sea echo sounders, magnetometers, and underwater sonars. And the universe. Europeans had began mapping the moon back in the seventeenth century with the lunar cartographer Johannes Hevelius producing his famous Map of the Moon in 1647. Today, hundreds of teams of scientists are working with complex technologies, such as the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, mapping everything from the far reaches of the universe to the most infinitesimally small particles within it. This Faustian drive for mastery of the unknown has now produced (as of 2010), based on the ground-based telescopes of the 2MASS Redshift Survey, 3D images of 43,000 galaxies.

This is the most fundamental problem: Homo Hubris will never be satisfied. There will never come a point when they will say, "OK! We've done enough maps! We don't need any more maps! Let's finally stop!" Because to them it was never about needing the maps themselves. It was always and only ever about the self-gratification associated with doing something no one else had done before (without concern for how much violence had to be initiated along the way). The only way to stop them is to eliminate their bloodlines.

Don't let them suppress these incredible achievements away from white students for the sake of "increasing the self-esteem of non-mainstream students"!

I am reposting Duchesne's article, so I can hardly be accused of suppressing the information; if anything I am spreading it. However, I want people to see it as evidence of Western inferiority. By understanding what Homo Hubris is, the more we read about how they chose to spend their time and energy, surely the more we will despise them.

Bonus from the enemy comments:

It is quite possible that Chinese agriculture could feed a much larger number of people from the same area of fertile land than the Europeans could because the Chinese were much more vegetarian.

Yes, that was a big factor; European agriculture was mixed-crop livestock farming.

Yes.