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I'd love to hear from the folks that downvoted this carefully neutral observation.

I don't think "European children will look at the map and feel less significant" is a carefully neutral observation. It's an assumption that European children feel superiority because their country is slightly bigger.

If anything, I expect the accurate sizes set the stage for feeling superiority over their ancestors colonizing huge lands while coming from tiny countries.

If we're talking about kids, they should just get taught this type of geography using a globe. You can get an accurate (enough) inflatable globe for like 3 euros, including shipping.

I think understand what you're trying to say, that the relative sizes of countries on the map is not of any particular importance, and that it certainly does not affect the pride one feels in one's country positively or negatively.

Yet, it was clearly very important for the governments of the formerly smaller countries to be shown to be larger on the official UN map. Otherwise, why bother with a vote?

Because it’s focusing purely on how big continents “look” without even mentioning the issue of actual size. That is not, in any credible sense, “carefully neutral”.

The entire point of the new projection was to reflect the relative size of the landmasses more accurately.

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