Nothing like an incendiary blanket statement to attract attention. The problem is: it's absolutely true.
My diary yesterday was a piece of fun. A link to an online quiz called "Is that a Terrorist or Conservative speaking? A quiz" which you can try here. It's simple: ten quotes are provided. All identifying information (example; name of religion mentioned) is removed. All you have to do is say where the quote came from; international terrorist mastermind, or [f]right wing goon. It will take two minutes of your day.
HelloQuizzy (a part of OKCupid) allows me to see rudimentary stats of the number of people that have taken the test, and changing the URL at the end of the test shows me the percentage of people that have scored worse than that particular score.
And after over 800 test takers, the proof is in. People really cannot tell the difference between a terrorist's words and a conservative's words.
More, below the fold...
At the time I'm writing this (11.35am EDT), 846 850 people have taken the test. It has been the 8th most taken test in the last 24 hours (thanks to the blogosphere). And as percentages, here's how people have scored.
For the vast majority of people (over 90% of the test takers), the phrases I chose could not be identified correctly at least a fifth of the time. And over half the test takers (57% of people) really had trouble distinguishing one statement source from the other half the time.
These phrases are hardly obscure either. Two of the phrases were deliberately used because they convey the same sentiment from both options, but most are well known phrases from Fox News celebrities and international merchants of death.
When polls are taken for voters, I've noticed that a thousand replies indicates that the poll has an accuracy of +/- 3% for a voting population the size of the United States. With 850 851 sets of data, I think this is pretty significant. And very, VERY revealing. There really is no discernible difference between the rantings of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to the rantings of Osama bin Laden.
Please: take the test yourself and see how you do. If the last 24 hours is any indication, I'm expecting quite a few more low scores (which indicates the phrases are hard to differentiate).