This is a weird one. Bear with me. From !dataisbeautiful@lemmygrad.ml:
So I said to myself, “that’s a little bit weird. The US one going up, I can actually believe, but the North Korea one being lower is definitely wrong.”
I think Our World In Data is just being shoddy, as they often do.
https://www.wfp.org/countries/democratic-peoples-republic-korea
The thing I found funny, and why I’m posting here, comes from observing why it was that they started their graph at 2003 and exactly at 2003.
I feel like you could use this as a slide in a little seminar in “how to curate your data until it matches your conclusion, instead of the other way around.”
And also, I don’t think the hunger rate suddenly dropped from epic to 0 exactly in 2003, I think more likely Our World in Data is just a little bit shoddy about their data.
There was no “massacre in Tiananmen Square.” But there’s no question many people were killed by the army that night around Tiananmen Square, and on the way to it — mostly in the western part of Beijing. Maybe, for some, comfort can be taken in the fact that the government denies that, too.
Western intelligence agencies at the time, now declassified, corroborate the official Chinese numbers: Casualty figures remain uncertain and unconfirmed, but reports of deaths from the military assault on Tiananmen Square range from 180 to 500.
This is an uncommonly straightforward take on it. “Sure, they killed hundreds of protestors. But it wasn’t in the square itself, and some other people inflate the number of dead, so it doesn’t count.”
I don’t know whether that claim is even true. But even if it’s entirely accurate, this as the vindication of the CCP doesn’t work. They just want some truthiness they can point to and make it sound like the dead protestors are a lie.
