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In the blog, I discuss COVID-19 growth across the US, and discuss why we should take down Confederate statues. 371 words

==COVID-19 growth by state==

COVID-19 growth over the last week. Red is high growth, blue is low growth.

Let’s take a look at COVID-19 growth in the United States over the last seven days. In this map, dark red indicates a high percentage of growth (as much as 5.8% per day); light blue indicates a low amount of growth.

In this map, Florida leads with a 5.8% daily growth of COVID-19 cases over the last week. On the heels of Florida, we have Arizona (4.7%), Idaho (4.6%), South Carolina (4.6%), Montana (4.4%), Nevada (4.2%), and Texas (4.2%).

As Senator Marco Rubio pointed out, wearing a mask in public is a simple public heath issue, not a political issue. It’s important to continue wearing a mask in public (especially if indoors), avoid large public gatherings, and to practice social distancing.

==Confederate Statues==

I support taking down Confederate statutes, mainly because they were by and large put up in the 20th century to support Jim Crow laws.¹ I do not support what extremists are doing, tearing down statues of people like George Washington in places like Portland just because he owned slaves.²

What these extremists fail to do is distinguish between someone being a product of their time (George Washington owning slaves in the late 1700s, back when that was still a normal acceptable practice) vs. someone being malicious as per the values of their era (Confederates fighting a war to continue owning slaves, and their statue being put up in the 20th century to bolster Jim Crow). I saw this with some of the extremes of #MeToo (e.g. Nolan Bushnell was attacked for being the president of a company with was more openly sexual at work in the 1970s than would be acceptable today),³ and I am now seeing it in the wake of the George Floyd Protests.

In terms of southern culture: I lived in Georgia for two years. I have a distinct southern drawl in my voice. I love southern culture and southern hospitality and the people there. Southern culture does not mean we need to celebrate the subjugation of Black people.

==Notes==

The COVID-19 Data comes from the New York Times over at https://​github.​com/​nytimes/​covid-​19-​data The SVG map template is public domain, obtained from https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​File:​Electoral​College​2020.​svg The code to take the New York Times data and convert it in to a visual map is open source, available at https://​github.​com/​samboy/​covid-​19-​html

I originally posted the COVID-19 data at DailyKOS.

Footnotes

1. See https://​www.​splcenter.​org/​sites/​default/​files/​com_​whose_​heritage.​pdf or https://​www.​theatlantic.​com/​ideas/​archive/​2020/​06/​ole-​misss-​monument-​white-​supremacy/​613255/ for discussion of the checkered history of Confederate statues
2. https://​thehill.​com/​changing-​america/​respect/​equality/​503559-​george-​washington-​statue-​vandalized-​and-​toppled-​by
3. “Sex, Pong, And Pioneers: What Atari Was Really Like, According To Women Who Were There” by Cecilia D'Anastasio, published by Kotaku

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.