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.
Yeah but I’m worried about why it went up in the US? I don’t care about authoritarian propaganda.
I can’t believe you would doubt the reliable reporting of the People’s Divine Monarchy of North Korea
It is probably based on numbers from the North Korean government
CIA propaganda, the poverty rate in the DPRK is -1%, and party approval rate is 102%
Source: from the DPRK, of course! Lying is illegal in glorious DRPK!
In my experience, it’s more akin to:
Source: Literally anything! That isn’t corrupt and Western!
“Like what?”
Source: Anything!
“Can I use Al Jazeera? Or Wikipedia? Or can you give me a few sources that I can look at?”
Source: No, those are corrupt and Western! You’re lying! Look at this UN report!
“This UN report says the opposite of what you said.”
Source: That’s because the UN is corrupt, and lying! And Western!
“Can you just tell me where you got this information in the first place? Even if it’s not ‘reliable’ per se, surely someone told it to you in the first place. Who was that? Where do you get your news?”
Source: Shut up! You’re sealioning! You’re being bad! You’re lying! Blocked. Cry some more!
Lmfao look at this link yogthos has sent to me before
https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen/
cracks me up
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.
Obviously you gonna look at the news from a blogpost! Thats the only reliable news source!
Someone told me a few days ago that Israel was striking Syria with nuclear weaponry, and the only reason I didn’t know about it was that I only consumed Western news sources.
They sent me an article that proved it! And a video of the explosion. Okay. I stopped talking with them shortly after that, after they said “Thank you for taking the bait. We’ve now come full circle,” without explaining what they meant by that.
Most of their arguments in conversations rely on strawmanning anyway, so it’s expected they don’t want you to look up any source except ones that agree with them. Especially ““NATOpedia”” 🙄 but this obscure ML post written 6 years ago on a niche forum is a completely valid source!
Cherry picking data has long been a problem. I recall a short piece from high school in the 80s called something like “How to Lie with Statistics.” It’s always stuck with me.
