Quote:
Originally Posted by kirant
Fun with stats (not picking on Americans here - just the first stats I found):
- ~6% of Americans in 2007 believe that it is "very likely" the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon was a stolen cruise missile instead of a plane. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion...iracy_theories
- ~4% of Americans in 2011 believe that there are "Lizard people" and ~5% believe that the government is controlling people through chemicals in plane exhaust. http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/p...ies_040213.pdf
To be fair, I can't tell how many of the polled are just trolling...but...at these small %s, strange things pop up. |
A couples polls on the crazy things people believe is quite different from a poll dealing with whether one supports actual physical acts of violence.
My hypothesis, and many others I'm sure, believe that the number of violent incidents that occur in the name of Islam has a correlation with the number of supporters they have within the religion- whether those supporters are willing to personally carry out the acts or not. The number willing to carry out these acts are bred from within the group of supporters, which would be much less likely to occur if the number of supporters and enablers was much smaller. Others seem to think radical Muslims would spring up and carry out atrocities, like we saw in France today, regardless of whether the number of supporters was large or small. And I'm not saying that radicals carry out these acts because they have a large fan base- I'm saying they are raised up from within that group, which would be much less likely to occur if the number of supporters was truly negligible.