> Psychologically, we tend to view things nearer the top as ‘good’ and those lower as ‘bad.’

The oldest maps in the world and in Europe are oriented North at the top and the essential feature in the middle. For the Babylonians it was the Euphrates and Babylon itself. For the Europeans it was the Mediterranean. The implication that everyone sees up/North as better means that generations of Greek or Roman cartographers just accepted that the barbaric northernmost regions of Europe are "better", which is patently false.

Religions that use the cross as a holy symbol also use the Trinitarian formula (In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, amen) while making the cross. God the Son is the second in the trinity but is put at the bottom of the cross, while God the Holy Spirit is the third yet sits higher. This is also deeply rooted in people's psychology.

So I am not convinced of your argument.

No, the implication is that "North is up and up is good" is morally bad, and I find it really stupid to disagree with that.

> There it is, the implication that "North is up" is morally bad. Since it's an implication, it does not need to be read that way, but it's clearly there.

I see the statement that the decision of orientation might seem neutral but doesn't turn out that way, but I think reading it as making a moral judgment about any particular orientation might be a stretch. At most, I see it as advocating for the importance of seeing multiple orientations to be able to see the world from multiple perspectives.

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The Gall of the commenter to exploit such a Goode opportunity.

If you're sitting on the opposite side of a table looking at a map that a person on the other side laid out in front of them, you don't just see the map from the other side? You instead see details about volume, shape, distance between points, geometric similarity, colour, and so on? I sincerely just see the same map even if I'm across the table, except flipped. I'm not sure how it would impact my drawing a map, though that isn't really what the article talks about.

Can you read upside-down or does it become a jumble of lines? I can read upside-down with no special effort so maybe this is canceling something out.

This is all very interesting, but I'm sorry, personally I just feel the same as the poster you replied to. I don't experience this as anything weird, I just experience it as if I'm looking at a map from the top.

Same when people get their minds blown about the sizes of countries at different latitudes. Feels like I'm the only one who played with a globe as a kid...

> An "upside down" map is just as valid as a right side up map.

Is it as useful and/or efficient though? I could write a phrase in English from right to left and if you really wanted you could read it, but it would be highly inefficient.

An efficient society sometimes has to pick conventions (how to write text, how to print a map, what characters to use, etc) and I find not interesting to point that other conventions could have been used.

Maybe a better analogy would be English and why it's written and read left to right.

To me at least, it feels very wrong to see English written right to left, but I also know it wouldn't be objectively wrong.

I can turn my hand over and it still functions. I can turn lots of things over that still function. I can even set something on top of my upside-down mug. This is not mind blowing to me, your mileage may vary. I also don't seem to have this association with "the bottom of things is bad" so maybe that's why it doesn't seem so shocking or clever to flip things over.

ohhh… so thats why my coffee keeps spilling everywhere. I just thought my mug was defective. Hole faces upward: got it. These things really should come with an instruction manual.

The direction with which you perceive the mug is not any more arbitrary than that of the map, you are just prioritizing the direction gravity takes rather than its opposite, same as magnetism and the north.

You can change your entire system of reference and the setup still makes sense. Same with the map.

A lot of Americans don't consider countries in South America to be part of "The West".

Which is wild, cause Americans also love Rome and it's influence in western culture, and Latin America literally speaks languages that are direct descendants of Latin.

That’s why both Australia and South America were supposed to be integral part of the Western world. Only recently South America has become kind of unwelcome due to its political and economical misalignment.

People on HN regularly argue that Spaniards are not part of the west and it has nothing to do with direction nor culture. It is because a lot of mumbo jumbo that tries to imply but not openly say that they are not white enough.

> "The West" is Western Europe and it's colonial/cultural derivatives.

Yep. This is the definition I use.

I think you got their point exactly backwards. Their country is western by the standard you described, but people tell them it’s not because it’s not Western Europe, or the North America.

Oh shit I wasn't aware that this was the definition. Does this definition then include Philippines being from "The West"?

Absolutely! On the globe all countries lie to the west of something and simultaneously lie to the east of something.

Until just a few centuries ago most of the world population was split between Europe (West) and East Asia (East).

Plenty of people genuinely believed that if you were to navigate to the West of Europe you would fall off the border of the world (well, some still do).

> It gets unconfusing if you realize it just means White.

It definitely does not. Russia, for example, would be considered "White", but is decidedly not part of "the West".

It's no different than the South in the US which does not include Texas, New Mexica, Arizona, or any other states that are geographically South in the modern day US. Once you understand the historical aspect of the naming it makes sense. The category itself, regardless of its label, is useful.

In terms of Latin America being a part of the West or not, that's more interesting. I'm currently reading Samuel P. Huntington's "A Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" and in it he talks a lot about civilizations which he defines as the highest cultural grouping of people short of what makes us human. Language, law, and religion in Latin America largely derive from Europe, although there are other aspects like economics that tend can differ. Some people consider Latin America as part of the West, others believe it's peripheral to the West or its part of its own civilization as Huntington does.

As others have pointed out Russia is not part of the West and at least according to Huntington would be placed in the Orthodox Civilization. Interestingly Huntington also argues that Greece, despite being the center of Classical Civilization which is the bases for Western Civilization, is not a part of the West, rather they too are Orthodox.

Regardless of whether you agree with these groupings, I think distilling it down to skin color is incorrect and not useful. The West itself is not even remotely homogenous in this aspect. You wouldn't go to sections of the Deep South in the US and declare it as not being a part of the West anymore than you would include Belarus as part of the West.

Geographically "The West" only makes sense in Europe and Asia. Once you expand your scope, compass directions are meaningless and the term "The West" refers to certain philosophies, political, and cultural similarities. And even then, it also refers to a certain time frame.

> The West only makes sense in the Northern Hemisphere.

It doesn't even make sense there. It's not really a logical group of things that are geographically West of anything. The abstract cultural idea of "Western Civilization" or "the West" are poorly named.

What about Australia?

I’m not sure there is one simple & correct definition of “the West”.

But if you define "up" as the direction opposite to where gravity pulls things (which very much makes sense) then there is no possible situation in which north being up would be correct either. A compass needle never points up. You are mounting a map of something horizontal onto a vertical surface, it is just as correct - or depending on the alignment of the wall arguably even more correct - to put east up. You can only ever get at most two directions correct, after all.