Reply #20: It's all based on probabilities and populations. [View All]

[backscatter712]

I imagine the math is relatively straightforward, though I don't have what Karl Rove has in front of him in terms of figuring out the variables and estimating the probabilities.

But I imagine it's sort of like the lottery. The odds of a single individual winning the lottery are infinitessimal. But millions and millions of people buy lottery tickets, which means that over the course of a few weeks, the odds of one of the tickets sold being a winning ticket approaches 100%. Eventually, someone will win the lottery, though it's probably not going to be you.

You'd probably have to do some research to find the number of potentially violent individuals in the population - the target demographic for right-wing violent rhetoric, calculate the odds of driving one over the edge into committing an act of violence, figure that each individual person's odds of flipping out is very small, but in a large enough population, the odds that somebody will go postal given enough months and years of being saturated with violent rhetoric and images approaches 100%.

Where's a statistics major when we need one?

The way I figure, Karl Rove, Rupert Murdoch and their ilk have already done the research and the math.