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Comment by JasonFruit | Hacker News Reader

I don't see what you see. For all its faults, this page seems to present the data without moral judgment (or anything of use, frankly). Maybe it means America is a powerhouse of arms production. No reason to jump to conclusions.

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Without moral judgement? Jump to conclusions? The favicon and main graphic shows a bomb with a cross through it. The actual domain is a pointed question designed to assign blame. The graphic is intentionally misleading (as others pointed out), hiding the raw numbers and showing them as the radius size instead of area, drastically inflating the apparent size. The quote at the bottom is from 1984 - a book about a dystopian government.

See my other post on how they're intentionally manipulating the data to make the circle relationships exponential, not linear. Why would they do this?

It looks to me like that was done to make the differences more visible. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to perceive at all some of the more subtle differences among countries. I still think you're grasping at justifications for an initial assumption that wasn't really supported by the page. I think that even more because I'm inclined to the same point of view you are, but didn't get that impression at all from the bare-bones visualization shared.

EDIT: Never mind, I didn't see the opening animation or the header and footer, because I opened it in another tab and didn't realize you could scroll the page. You're completely right and I'm an idiot.

The stark black and white colour scheme with bright red markings was chosen for a very specific reason.

You mean like the logos for Ace Hardware, Coca-Cola, Adobe, and Red Robin? I still don't see it. I think the assumption is made because the viewer projects their moral discomfort with arms distribution onto the objective page.

The page is intended to project a certain aura. The dramatic fade-in, the crossed-out weapon, and text in all caps were chosen for a specific reason. You can't possibly pretend it's impartial. The source data, a table, is presented impartially.

More importantly, as daenz pointed out, the circles are calculated to mislead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21566253

Oh my goodness, that header! I opened it in another tab and didn't see the initial animation or the huge, idiotic header. No wonder everyone is downvoting me! All I saw was the map, and the rightmost scrollbar was off the screen, so I missed the crap at the bottom too. Apparently I don't know how to use a web browser this morning!

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