A Different Take On The Casualties Map (from the Top 10 Idiots today)

I am not going to offer any direct commentary on what this map does or does not prove. That's not my purpose in making it. But I do find the results quite interesting. It basically uses the data from the "Purple America" map, where voting percentages were represented as a spectrum of colors from Red (100% Bush) to Blue (100% Kerry).

The map has to adjust for population density or it is nonsense. Guess what? The more people who live in an area, the more who will be in the armed forces, the more armed forces casualties. The map (both of them actually) reflects the fact that more casualties came from urban areas than rural. No duh.

or am I missing something?

What I found most interesting about this map is that even in "red" states, many of the indicators were from blue counties. Now, sure, there are some red-ish counties in states that the Democrats won, as well. And some of California is actually purplish. But there is no real concentration of red in the blue states the way there is a concentration of blue in the red states.

It was my understanding that the original map used density as well as volume to indicate a higher number of soldiers from one particular area (in other words, not just more dots, but dots with little or no space between them). I can attest to that. My original idea was to overlay the dots on a colored map like this one, but the problem was that the clusters were so dark you couldn't see the colors of the counties behind them.

I also don't mean to imply that liberals are more or less patriotic than conservatives. I don't want to get into that. I just want to make it superbly clear that they aren't LESS patriotic, and that they certainly haven't sacrificed LESS than conservatives.

I think that unless the map is adjusted for population density it basically says that our Iraq war dead are more likely to come from cities than rural areas. That is rather obvious isn't it? Randomly select 1700 people from the entire US population. Each of your selections is more likely to come from an urban (blue) area than a rural (red) area.

But I could be wrong.