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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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The choice of regions feels cherry-picked to inflate the blue area on the map. Why else would they include Mongolia, or include only the least-dense regions of the US and Russia while excluding the major population centers?
While South Africa certainly has a lot of murders, both absolute and per capita, this map could easily be draw with a lot less blue on it.
For real, they picked the most barren places on earth (except Europe). Most of the land mass of Canada, Australia, and Greenland are deserted. Midwest US is all farmland. No one lives in Siberia
Yes, but just having pretty much all of Europe is a lot of people. So not as cherry picked as many maps that cherry pick.
Yes, I'm pretty sure that's the whole point. I'm guessing they could pick one or two Central American or other African countries and get the same balance.
Also, picking on SA specifically smacks of the whole apartheid hangover thing that's going on.
Like, comparing it to China or India?
Comparing absolute numbers in a statistic like this is particularly egregious. At least make it per-capita. May as well compare the number of murders per year in the continental US to the number of murders per year in the entire polar regions. Shock, horror, American so violent!
For example, using absolute numbers from Wikipedia...
South Africa: 27,272
Haiti + Philippines + Ecuador: 28,509
That map would look very different.
You're right that using absolute numbers in the first place is bad practice.