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this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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politics
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As a person who's organized petitions for widely felt issues, the impact isn't strictly from a raw percentage of participation (though it's a significant factor when that number is large). The impact comes from the number of people involved. Of the roughly 1 million doctors in the country, 1% were so against the concept that they chose to take direct action.
If that many people were moved to action, how many are against it but not ready or willing to fight? How many felt it wouldn't matter if they signed? How many more didn't hear about it?
Yeah, it’s still impactful, I just also got curious about the number of doctors in the US and figured it was silly to look it up and not share.
Imagine if 4m citizens signed a petition, I don't think anyone would be arguing that "but it's not even 2% of the population!"
Right, I'm sure many doctors are well aware of what demons the right are. I could see some organized effort to target doctors and sic the insane RW nutjobs on them in a campaign of stochastic terrorism.
That, or lean on people with the ability to punish them at their jobs, or have some way to make them unemployed.
At the same time it's risky to use small percentages of big populations even if it looks big. If you cast a net big enough, you can drum up thousands of pretty much anyone for pretty much anything (I wonder how many nurses you or doctors you could get to say they're anti-vaxx). Not saying this doesn't hold water but just take with a grain of salt.
Agreed, and the right wing definitely does organize disinfo campaigns that exploit this. I remember the stupid anti-science right wingers trying to make a lot of hay with the Oregon Petition. Sure, they had a lot of people that had no business weighing in, but they had PhDs in that list, ya'll, and they had, get this, over 31,000 of them overall, ya'll!
The general population is not known for either their critical thinking skills, knowing the difference between engineering and science, and their numeracy, so it was a clever scheme...