Newer Zealand: Under Australia Edition
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Well at least it’s on the map this time.
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.
Since they're so clearly cherry picking, they should have also added Antarctica
BREAKING: the entire moon has less crime than South Africa! That's 38 million sq km of no crime!
/s
Square kilometers?! But I thought the moon was round!
holy cherrypicking 🙏🥀💔
Land. Isnt. People.
South Africa has ~64 million people
Which is less than... Britain (~69 million)
Which is less area on the displayed map than the red section.
There are three kinds of falsehoods: lies; damned lies; and ~~statistics~~ poorly conceived maps.
Cartography is lying.
the map has tons of unpopulated area, barely any metro area, and the blue is still 5000 murders less than SA. at least balance it a bit better ✌️
Ever heard about Russia attacked Ukraine?
That is a good point! Russia 's doin some crime that is going to skew the data and make SA look like Switzerland.