Bad Neo-Nazi Maps
The National Rally is a French right wing party founded by former Nazi SS members and run by people with similar views. They’ve changed the party’s name and softened the rhetoric to broaden their appeal even if their positions have not changed much. They have predictably inhumane and ignorant views on immigration and if this map is any indication their ignorance of geography is also significant.
This map appeared in the journal “Cahiers de l’Europe“ in an issue about critical maritime routes. It has many of the hallmarks of artificial intelligence. The Gulf of Hormuz is located in the Red Sea (on the wrong side of the Arabian peninsula) while its strait is located at the Strait of Malacca, whose location on this map is off the coast of Australia. The Gulf of Aden is also off by almost 1,000 miles.
Moscow is shown at Istanbul, Cairo at Tripoli, and Colombo, Sri Lanka is located twice, once in Indonesia and another one in Somalia. Even Beijing (Pekin) is off by many hundreds of miles. The map also features an unmarked mystery city in the desert of western China. Norway and Sweden appear as an island, something I’ve seen in other AI generated maps. As a final touch the Atlantic Ocean is labeled in West Africa.
From an article in Liberation (France) (translated, admittedly by AI but vetted with my mild comprehension of French): “In this issue—dedicated to ‘Maritime Routes: A Crucial Issue for Europe’—one finds a history of the sea evidently cribbed from Wikipedia; didactic illustrations of Roman or Phoenician sailors worthy of a children’s magazine; a fair number of AI-generated images of ships; and a whole host of maps—most of which are illegible due to frankly atrocious editorial work.“
Ignorance of geography cultivates hatred and usually leads to bad decisions that we all pay the price for.
I find extremely fascinating that, in an age when it's so easy to validate your information to at least pretend to know, people don't even care to do so.
That said, What a map!