Link Banana

Amos pegs it:

Sometimes a good graphic can put the issue into perspective.

Do go have a look at what would, in a perfect world, stop all related arguments cold.

The Economist did a recent survey about political positions in the two countries with a number of interesting results.

The gap between Britain and America is widest on religion: no surprise there, as Britain is famously a post-Christian society and Americans are, if anything, rediscovering the faith of their fathers. But the difference in views is so wide that even British Conservatives are a great deal more secular than American Democrats are. The two are a bit closer on social values (abortion, homosexuality and so forth), and they overlap on ideology (mainly, how active the state should be), with Britain’s Tories to the right of America’s Democrats.

They overlap again on how free their countries should be to intervene militarily (both the Tories and Labour are more hawkish than the Democrats). Britons are more international than the Americans, keener on free trade and globalisation. Views coincide most nearly on climate change—ironically, the area where the two governments have been least in step.

It worth giving the first graph in that article a look (as it summarizes the findings well), the more comprehensive second graph is here.

I’m a sucker for graphs. If someone made Crime and Punishment a graph I probably would have read it — and all those other books — in high school. My favorite lines on this one are about candy.

Speaking of America’s military… (I’m also getting tired of that opening, but I like the idea of having segues.) Matthew Yglesias has posted an interesting graph of the number of American troops in Iraq from invasion to date.  It’s interesting to see, though I have to agree with the commenters that it would be nice if the y-axis had started at 0 and not 100,000.