Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Guage Of Support
Without a script to copy and paste from, I'm going to start this post with some paraphrasing. Terry Jones, the so-called pastor who plans to burn Korans on September 11, told Terry Moran of ABC News that his receipt of some 200 copies of the book are an indication of the support he enjoys across the country.
With that thought in mind, let's extend the apparently self-proclaimed pastor's logic to its mathematical conclusion. Assuming that the widely-cited figure of 300,000,000 is an accurate count of the population of the United States, we can determine (thanks to this handy calculator) that Jones enjoys the support of 0.00006666666666666667 of the American people. In other words, not even close to 1% of Americans physically support what Jones is planning to do.
I take some comfort in that tiny figure. With all of the media foolishness surrounding the incorrectly labeled "Ground Zero Mosque" having resulted in majorities of polled Americans being against its construction, I was beginning to doubt the character of many of my countrymen. Thankfully, the act of Islamophobia proposed by Jones is a bridge too far for almost all of us.
With that thought in mind, let's extend the apparently self-proclaimed pastor's logic to its mathematical conclusion. Assuming that the widely-cited figure of 300,000,000 is an accurate count of the population of the United States, we can determine (thanks to this handy calculator) that Jones enjoys the support of 0.00006666666666666667 of the American people. In other words, not even close to 1% of Americans physically support what Jones is planning to do.
I take some comfort in that tiny figure. With all of the media foolishness surrounding the incorrectly labeled "Ground Zero Mosque" having resulted in majorities of polled Americans being against its construction, I was beginning to doubt the character of many of my countrymen. Thankfully, the act of Islamophobia proposed by Jones is a bridge too far for almost all of us.
