Somerville, Mass. represent!

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.

The Catholic press has picked it up, too:

https://www.ncronline.org/news/california-bishops-scramble-tend-catholics-feeling-hunted-ice-agents

There are hints that the current government's actions are widening a cultural rift in the church. Considering how large the Catholic church is, I'm really interested to see how this plays out.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/trumps-immigration-agenda-widening-fissures-catholic-hierarchys-consensus

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.

To add all the other good comments here...

As a recording artist, it's nearly impossible to stand out unless you have a marketing machine behind you. That means a record label that can promote your work, get your songs placed on radio stations and streaming platforms, and (in the old days) manufacture and sell physical media through many different retailers.

As a touring performer, you also need a large crew of people working for you: booking venues, marketing your shows, ticketing, managing the logistics of set-up/tear-down/transportation, operating lights and sound during the show, etc.

In both of these scenarios, the musician is only one small cog in a large machine. And there are enough good musicians in the world that they are treated as largely interchangeable.

There is a significant group of conservative Catholics who view any change as a departure from the One True Faith™. You can still find churches that do not follow the modernizations from the Second Vatican Council, which happened back in the 1950s. Pope Francis was seen as a radical by many of these people.

Are you going to tell us the screenname?

Yugoslavia

I bet Spiderman. If the third Spiderverse movie ever comes out it'll be full woke.

I'll bet the lane is there purely to satisfy some requirement for including non-car infrastructure, regardless of whether it makes sense in this particular location. It's the same way we get fun bike lanes like these:

TIL my cat isn't the only weirdo who does this.

I wish the chart included more countries. I found the source data at Pew Research, and they only include 24 countries, unfortunately.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/06/11/us-image-declines-in-many-nations-amid-low-confidence-in-trump/