▪️This meme presents a cartoonish version of the history of child mortality, as you can see from the attached chart. Child mortality rates plummeted most sharply in the 1800s and early 1900s, it wasn’t as if the 1950s was the starting point of the phenomenon.
▪️Vaccines were a component of lowering child mortality, but a fairly minor one. It was industrialization and the resulting dramatic increase in wealth that turned the world from a place where ~1/2 of children didn’t reach adulthood into one where child mortality is extremely rare.
▪️Most of the decrease comes from advancements like abundant and reliable food supplies, sewers, clean drinking water, central heating, cheap clothing, understanding germs and bacteria, antibiotics and access to hospitals.
▪️Pretending vaccines were singularly responsible for lowering child mortality is white washing the main reason for the improvement; the dramatic increase in wealth and advancements from the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the places where child mortality is still a big problem are the least industrialized areas.
▪️This statistic is just made up. The reality is that there hasn’t been a real study on this since 2013, when Pew did a poll. They found that Democrats were actually more than twice as likely as Republicans to report ever using food stamps (22% vs 10%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/07/12/the-politics-and-demographics-of-food-stamp-recipients/
▪️Obviously, those percentages could have changed over the past decade, but it’s very likely that Dems still receive more SNAP benefits. Certainly, without an actual study or poll the claim should be thrown out, as it wildly contradicts a previous study.
▪️The meme probably comes from a 2024 analysis by Social Explorer, which found that 78.7% of US counties with the largest increase in SNAP since 2010 voted for Trump in 2020. But that tells us nothing about the actual number of Republicans (or Democrats) who are receiving benefits, just county-wide trends.
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▪️I was playing around with the new Grokipedia and it already seems much better than Wikipedia (which admittedly isn’t saying much). I was looking for a topic that is politically polarizing that I also knew a lot about, so used “Kenosha unrest shooting” to compare the two.
▪️A key component to the shooting was understanding the broader context behind the Kenosha riots and who Kyle Rittenhouse ended up shooting. Wikipedia simply says that Jacob Blake was shot by police and was paralyzed, thus unrest. Grokipedia gives a much more in-depth account so the reader can see that Blake was a serial criminal with a warrant who had a knife and was resisting arrest while fleeing with children in his car.
▪️When it comes to those who were shot, Wikipedia just gives the names and ages. Grokipedia goes in-depth on each person and about their violent criminal history and mental instability that night.
▪️Part of the left wing mythology over Rittenhouse was removing the context and ...
