The whole definition of Asia is stupid as fuck

The whole definition of Asia is stupid as fuck.

They lumped Middle East, Persian-Indo, Chink, South East Asia into a single region without even cares about the differences of cultures, religions, characteristics of those people.

People from the Caucasus aren't asian, sand niggers aren't asian, and Russian of
western decent living in Siberia aren't asian

>Caucasian

That's not how continents work.

>The whole definition of Asia is stupid as fuck.
Not from a Greek standpoint.

No, the gooks aren't Asians. ASIA is a Greek geographical term that originally encompassed only Anatolia and the Levant, not some fucking slanty eyed shitholes.

The same is true for Africa and Europe. They grew to encompass different areas throughout history.

That comes from sticking with the Greek name 'Asia' while constantly discovering new land further east.

Asia and Europe are not real continents because the borders are completely arbitrary, but "Eurasia" is.

t. Geography pro

That is because what a continent is, has nothing to do with the humans who have dwelled there, their human history, their rape babies, inter-breeding, languages, etc, and it has everything to do with simple objective facts of physical geography and geology, which have historically proceeded (mostly) independently of the human condidtion, though of course some caveats must now be made now that we've gotten fairly good at manipulating our environment over the past (insert interval you think appropriate here: past few thousand years, past century, etc).

The simplest and best starting place for continents is plate tectonics, which then correspond to certain landmasses which are objectively /much/ larger than most of the rest of the landmasses (insert definition hereabouts). This gives exactly six continents to begin with, no more, no less: Eurasia, Australia, Africa, North America, South America, and Antarctica. The Arabian and Indian plates can be excused/subsumed by the simple fact of their very contiguous landmass with the rest of Asia, but it's still worth discussing. By plate tectonics alone, these two places have more of a claim to being their own continents than Europe ever did, the latter's status as a continent being a purely artificial invention. Once again, "continent" has nothing to do with people, and everything to do with landmasses (except inasmuch as people become able to create very huge landmasses). We can't even bore very deep holes into the earth; we just flit about on the surface for a bit and return to dust.

>human activity
>affecting plate tectonics

Also, are you aware that the theory of plate tectonics has only been widely accepted since the 1950s? Long after the idea of Europe, Asia, the Americas, etc. was constructed

You can clearly see that Asia and Europe are connected without having any idea about tectonic plates. "Europe" and "Asia" are arbitrary concepts.

From an ethno-linguistic perspective "Asia" should be pic related

Who is glorious Filipino continent here?

WE

World Island ftw

wut about africa

But the 'continents' as we know them have little to do with physical geography. They're a cultural construct in which the separate entity of 'Europe' only exists due to its historical importance

Both points suck.

The first point sucks because you clearly didn't read my post, where I make the point at the end that humans can only /very minimally/ manipulate their land-environment. But manipulate it we do. The next point is that we cannot at present manufacture anything on the scale of a continent, but we can certainly create meaningful landmasses (Chinese artificial islands to contest water rights, Kansai terminal) and destroy meaningful landmasses (Panama Canal, Suez Canal). Obviously none of these is on the scale of a continent but in addition to these the built environment is an objective, physical fact of the landscape, and consequently of geography. We just don't change the shape of the continents much, and for the above reasons.

Also, to the second point: please. The older definitions were flawed and are actually now, recently, replaceable with something definite and objective, which is my point.

When we speak of continents, we want to say something like " a very large contiguous landmass on earth". Referring to the plates literally undergirds and justifies our choices.

>ywn live in Amero-Afro-Eurasia

But the simple and objective facts of plate tectonics have proceeded absolutely, not "mostly" independent of human activity. The caveats drawn do not have a bearing on this fact, as was suggested by your post. In any event, that part isn't important.

Now if we can please discuss the second point thank you. You're correct in saying that we now have a more objective construction of what a 'continent' is, but this definition only has relevance in the context of geology. Historically, Europe has been depicted as a separate continent due to its perceived development apart from what we call Asia. Using the term 'Eurasia' outside of a geological context is pointless when one considers the great cultural diversity that makes up any continent.

For instance, Egypt has more in common with the wider Middle East than it does with say Ghana, yet Egypt and Ghana are on the same geological continent.

Caucasians are sandniggers tho

Your first assertion is plainly false. Please re-think what it means when humans march across a given path (erosion, however negligible).

My point this time (as before) is that humans, human activity, have obviously, historically had minute, non-zero effects on geology. Intellectual honesty and completeness of discussion requires that these be considered (especially since nowadays, we are slightly less pathetic at manipulating our physical environment).

I have no objection whatever to your statement that this point is "unimportant". But it's /true/, and you're clearly smart enough to recognize and concede that.

(cribbing Marx just now, no, I am not a Marxist, but he has a cute phrase that can be used here):

I understand the ethno-historical reasons for describing such-and-such continents. The point is to change those definitions.

Expanding on what I just said, let's get technical. /You are using an anthropocentric conception of what Egypt is, in order to justify something about its physical geography, which you would like to thus re-frame in terms of human geography./ You are assuming what you would like to demonstrate, which is an invalid technique of proof, because it defeats the purpose of the exercise.

Seen for what it is-a parcel of land where humans have lived-Egypt is of course first of all African. I will happily grant that Sinai is one of those fun borderlands where the discussion gets muddied, but Egypt the physical place is clearly African.

This anthropocentrism creeps into common human discussions of geography: "Largest cities" almost always means the highest populations, and rarely to area of defined boundaries (which may or may not themselves proceed from human terms. The happy thing about the plates is that they are an accident of the earth, which are again almost totally, but not one-hundred-point-zero-zero percent, independent of our activity).

Sorry for a late reply, I've been away from a computer.

You contradict yourself here and seem to confuse plate tectonics with geology. I fully acknowledge that human activity has had surface level effects on the Earth's surface in the form of erosion, building material, canal construction, etc. You acknowledge that the deepest we've ever reached is what, 2 miles? The earth's crust is 3 miles at its thinnest. How ever significant human activity is, we do not (yet) have the capability to impact huge-level processes such as plate tectonics.

I agree with your assertion that our recent and objective definition of a continent contradicts our long-held cultural definition and I would encourage the use of another term when describing the latter (although no such satisfactory term currently exists in the English language as far as I'm aware, correct me here if I'm wrong).

The fact is that anthropocentric categories such as 'Egypt' and 'Asia' may well be constructed, but they nonetheless have currency in the fields of history, anthropology, human geography, etc. As much as the concept of 'Europe' may be false on a geological level, it is nonetheless a useful unit for considering the often distinct history of Western Eurasia, but this of course opens a whole can of worms regarding Eurocentrism, inter-continental exchange and the like.

Not even gonna open this thread and so I'm sure it's been mentioned but I want to say it again

CONTINENTS ARE DIVIDED BY PHYSICAL GEOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS

Jesus Christ, I honestly don't love the way "autism" gets thrown around as an insult whenever people are highly invested in something, but you people are sorely fucking tempting me.

The Europe/Asia distinction IS FINE. It's DEAD FUCKING USEFUL. Sometimes you want to be able to talk about "European this" or "European that" and the boundaries make sense for cultural/historical reasons. Even the "arbitrary" boundary of the Urals is a sensible one, because it lets us distinguish between European Russia and Asian Russia and that's often a very useful distinction to make when talking about demographics, culture, dominant industries, weather and history and a dozen other things.

YES, we all realize it's just one landmass, any four-year-old with a map knows that. If you issue a commandment from on high that HENCEFORTH, THE CONTINENT IS EURASIA, AND EUROPE IS JUST A PENINSULA WITHIN EURASIA, people are going to shrug their shoulders and go on using the words Europe and Asia exactly the way they have for generations, specifying which subregion within Asia they mean when it's not clear from context. Nothing will actually change. So the only reason to do that is if you're ... well, autistically bothered by the fact that your average Joe uses the word "continent" somewhat differently than geologists do. But people in specialized fields use slightly different definitions for common words all the time and nobody gets bent out of shape about it.

It's like people who propose orthographic reforms for English that 'correct' the Great Vowel Shift, even though the fact that the English 'i' and Romance 'i' differ is causing approximately zero problems for anybody. Why waste your effort fixing something that's not a problem?

You can say the same thing for Africa.

>and nobody gets bent out of shape about it.
I break things and kick my cat every time someone says "deduction" when he is referring to induction.

Well, that's a little different in my opinion because that's just a case of incorrect usage that can in fact lead to misunderstandings. There's no field where they use the terms induction and deduction differently. That's just people getting it wrong, like people who confuse infer and imply.

A better example IMO is how the term "Marxist" means something slightly different in e.g. anthropology than how it's generally used (meaning a political/economic ideology). One can write an archaeological paper from a Marxist perspective without being a communist or a socialist in any way.

Even that's not a great example because it's much less intuitive: sometimes people new to the field do misunderstand what archaeologists etc mean when they talk about a Marxist perspective. Whereas even average people generally understand that we call Africa/Europe/Asia and North/South America different continents for historical/cultural/ease-of-use reasons, and that when geologists (and biologists) talk about continents their definitions are different, with more technical and less arbitrary criteria.

You shouldn't kick your cat, though.

>the city of Hungary

They are not my friend. Neither are Persians.

"Europa" and "Asia" make sense from a Hellenistic point of view, where the western shores are Europa, and the eastern shores are Asia. In between are the islands of Hellas. And from this perspective it's obviously a bit silly to try and define the "borders" of Europa and Asia.

I agree with you that the Europe/Asia distinction is useful for demographic, cultural, historical, etc. reasons. I would however question why Europe qualifies as its own continent whilst roughly comparable landmasses such as that of India do not. By the standards of language, culture, history and so on, India has as much a claim as Europe to being its own continent (even more if you consider geology, although, like you say, that isn't important for our purposes)/ I think the answer lies in the Eurocentric perspective that birthed the idea of human continents; through this, Europe was given the status of a continent while India was lumped with Asia or, at best, given the status of subcontinent.

I would never lobby for throwing away the Europe/Asia distinction, it's too useful. Should we not apply the same standard of 'continenthood' to the whole world though?

You're right in saying that your average Joe isn't going to suddenly stop thinking through their ingrained idea of what the continents are, but this could change over time. Textbooks constantly change; geography students now don't use the terms 'first', 'second' and 'third' world when talking about development -the same could become true of continents.

You may argue that it simply isn't important and, on a day-to-day sense, you're right. The idea of discrete continents does however shape how we think of the world. Thinking of Europe as its own continent whilst not doing the same for a landmass like India reinforces European identity whilst lumping the diverse people of Asia into one category.

>Russian of
>western decent living in Siberia aren't asian

Nice try Vladmir but you are halfbreed mongols