The Internet is great at churning out slide shows of dancing kittens and YouTube videos of toddlers riding corgis, but it’s even better at churning out great (and not-so-great) infographics. If you’re judging by the charts’ usefulness and how well they convey information that would otherwise be difficult to visualize, my two favorites today definitely fall into the “not-so-great” category. They fail miserably as visual representations, as both could easily be replaced by a short sentence. But just because something is unnecessary doesn’t make it any less amusing — or, in the case of the second chart, profoundly depressing.
Here’s a tongue-in-cheek example from Matt Yglesias, who titled his post “How Many Popes Are Alive at Any Given Time in One Chart” and appends the snarky one liner, “In case you were having trouble keeping count.”
Good ol’ Benedict. He may have been a staunchly conservative traditionalist who sniffed at the reforms of Vatican II, promoted the incomprehensible Latin Mass (yeah, that’s a way to reach new audiences) and notably quoted a Byzantine emperor who called Islam “evil and inhuman,” but he sure broke new ground in the Living Popes category!
This chart from Mother Jones is far more sobering.
South Dakota, which recently passed a law allowing teachers to carry handguns in schools, has no mandatory waiting period for gun purchases. Yes, folks, it’s a quick in-and-out at the local Firearms “R” Us — no reflection needed before you take home a weapon able to mow down dozens of people in a matter of seconds. Abortion, on the other hand, now that’s a decision that requires some forethought. As Kate Sheppard notes, South Dakota has had a law on the books since 2011 mandating a 72-hour waiting period and a visit to a “crisis pregnancy center,” where women are often given “God doesn’t want you to kill your baby” lectures and told that abortion causes suicide and breast cancer, before undergoing the procedure. The same legislature that doesn’t want you to think twice before putting an AR-15 on your Visa then decided that women should not only be forced to think really, really hard for three days about their abortion, but that those same women were too stupid to do that thinking on the weekend:
Two weeks ago, the state legislature passed another new law excluding weekends and holidays from the 72-hour waiting period, which means a woman may actually have to wait five or six days between her first appointment and the actual abortion procedure.
Yeah, you know how foggy your brain gets on those long Saturday afternoons. The state legislature apparently feels that women in South Dakota leave their critical thinking skills at the office when they clock out on Friday evening.
Mother Jones provides this nice chart, which shows just how off-kilter the debate over “rights” in this country has become. Challenge the right to own firearms and you’re greeted with NRA lobbyists and Ted Nugent screaming about how Obama will have to pry his rifle from his cold, dead hands. Challenge a woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions, however, and the politicians in far too many red states will welcome you with open arms.
. . . So Well Read. . . 