Bleak thoughts

I had a conversation with a fellow conservative about a year ago.

The question was "How will we know when the balloon has gone up and the rule-set changes to war-time footing?" It isn't like the other side will announce it. They gain advantage by running in stealth-mode as long as possible. And if fighting erupts in one region, it seems likely that the news will be suppressed to limit-the-spread.

Those who are "fundamentally remaking America" benefit from the boiling-frog paradox and will keep it up as long as possible.

How can one know?

The fellow conservative shared with me that he had asked a trusted clergyman the same question. Paraphrasing: The clergyman said "You will know that the Civil War went hot if you hear of death-squads visiting clergy of any flavor-or-stripe. At that point, some of the people you currently think of as neighbors and co-workers are enemy combatants and a different set of guidelines are activated."

Death-squads can be members of the status-quo moonlighting. They can be proxies for the status-quo.  They can be non status-quo as well. In times of upheaval, territory becomes a patchwork quilt that changes over time.

Not a great signal

Clergy getting visited by death-squads is not a great signal for most of us because the signal gets crushed by the noise. Except for some very rare exceptions (like the death of Samantha Wolls) the news will not get much ink.

May I suggest that we substitute Journalist/media person for clergyman? The news media amplifies every event that impacts their own industry and journalists/media assassinations is (historically) a robust marker of civil strife.

Number of reporters who were victims of homicide in 2022. May I remind you that "reporters" are small subset of "media".

Extracting information from "data"

"Data" and "Information" are not the same thing. One can look at a stream of data and reach one of four conclusions:

• Conclude that Condition A is TRUE when in fact it is TRUE
• Conclude that Condition A is NOT-TRUE when in fact it is NOT-TRUE
• Conclude that Condition A is TRUE when it is, in reality NOT-TRUE
• Conclude that Condition A is NOT-TRUE when it is, in reality TRUE

Obviously, we want to be in the top two conditions and not the bottom two.

These decisions become much tougher when there is little data.

One way to increase the data is to add proxies that are similar/like/less-severe. For example, I already added "media and Journalists" to reporters to increase the data. I am guessing that there are five assistants to every talking head when they head out to the field to "investigate" an incident. Those camera men and sound guy and the two-dudes in the up-load truck are at least as vulnerable as the talking head.

One might also add "assault" to "homicide" to enrich the flow of data because a homicide is an assault taken to the extreme (or perhaps the victim was unlucky).

The downside of enriching the data is that it can become too sensitive. The usual way to handle that is to "smooth" or "filter" the data.

Have you ever lost a contest and suggested "Hey, let's make it best two-out-of-three"? Or have you ever wondered why the World Series is Best of Seven Games?

In the first case you were intuitively attempting to "smooth" the data. You believe that you are superior to your opponent and random chance led to his prevailing over you. It is a similar idea that leads to the seven-games in the World Series.

THIS IS ONLY AN EXAMPLE: For example, even ordinary people become victims of homicides so the single homicide of a media person is probably random noise. 

But what are the odds of three journalists/media types getting whacked in a three month period?

The death-rate due to homicide in the US is about 0.5 per hundred-thousand per month. There are about 350,000 people employed in the broadcasting-and-content industry according to Statista. That implies that in an average month, two people employed in the industry will be victims of homicide.

Most of those will have assignable causes like jealous lover, robbery, business disputes, free-range emotionally-impaired people or drug/alcohol involvement. Those deaths are very unlikely to make national news.

So let's assume that less than 10% of the homicides are due to something other than "the usual reasons". That takes the base rate down to 0.2 homicides per month so the odds of three of those events happening in three consecutive months by random-chance is 0.2*0.2*0.2 (0.2 is 2 homicides per month * 10%) or a 12% chance. That means that there is an almost a 90% chance that the deaths were not random.

Testing the hypothesis

Let's look at France, a country with about 1/5 of the population as the United States and it has a homicide rate that is 1/5 the rate of the US.

On January 7, 2015 politically/religiously motivated assassins killed 12 journalists and wounded 11 others at Charlie Hebdo, a magazine that published satire.

Would a reasonable person assume that France was engaged in a civil war? Maybe. Maybe not. The nay-sayers might claim that a single incident does not indicate widespread, coordinated effort one usually associates with a civil war.

So maybe the "balloon" needs to comprehend that the data come from separate incidents.

---Disclaimers---

I am not advocating violence

I am not singling out any particular group. If you look at the last three months you would have to believe Pro-Palestinians are more likely to take matters into their own hands than traditional, Conservative Americans.

I am not singling out Journalists/Media out of personal animosity. I identify them for the same reason overwhelmed mothers slap their squalling kids across the mouth in the check-out lane at the grocery store: It is where the noise comes out. I single them out because they are seen by many as a seamless extension of a Let-Them-Eat-Cake out-of-touch government. I identify them because while they might suppress all kinds of news, they are hardwired to report news about media/journalists/celebrities. The signal will get through.