VirtualExile

OCD Bug is forever entranced by questions like: how many countries are there?  Why are there even countries?  Because there is no definitive answer to these kinds of abstract questions.  What is a country?  There are 194 universally "recognized" countries -- countries that all agree they are all countries, under international diplomatic agreements.  But then there are other candidates for countryhood -- countries that not all the other countries recognize as countries.

Is this 194 number going to be a relatively stable thing over time?  500 years from now there will be around 200 countries, but probably different countries from those we see today, with different territorial lines.

Occasionally I've seen on Twitter animated graphics that show the changes in country names and borders over time, across a continental scale.  How we humans organize ourselves into overlapping and hierarchical groups is always fascinating to OCD Bug.  Oh, Australia is the only country that occupies an entire continent!  And I've written before about how Europe isn't really a continent -- that anybody treats it as a continent is racist, because geographically it simply isn't -- it is part of Eurasia.  White people need their own imaginary continent, though, to feel special.  You yellow people over there live in a separate continent (Asia), because we (European) white people say so!

When I was a little kid, one of my favorite books in the house was an atlas.  I loved poring over that, looking at the borders and railroad lines (this was the early 1970s, heh) and resource symbols.  It had some historical maps showing before and after various wars.  So fascinating to an OCD kid.  While the other kids were outside playing basketball or something, I was exploring maps.

Here I sit wishing we had a more functional and comprehensive world government, looking out for the survival of our individuals, our species, our planet and the species we share it with, the universe, etc.  But we're divided into roughly 200 countries, and many of them are not democracies, so ... creating a world government would be viewed as tyrannical excess, one "country" conquering all the others.  Nationalisms ... hey, we're all humans, the same species, why can't we forget about this country bullshit and just all work together?

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Oh, weird, I went to the Wikipedia article about Africa and it has a button to show the map either with or without national borders.  If I could so easily delete national borders!  Click a virtual button with my trackpad!  Poof!  All borders are gone!