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Encyclopedia WinterCampica - McCarthyism
Day Two at Winter Camp XXXIV covered the years from 1935 to 1960. In the footsteps of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, and in an effort to flush out the Communist-inspired ilk said to be lurking throughout Winter Camp, four teams of investigators set out to determine the extent of the problem.
The questions were clear, the information was out there, and the mathematical precision that produced the final result could not be contested. Everyone at Winter Camp became an informant, and was judged on their knowledge of their fellows. The investigative teams were polled on 32 dimensions of information, and were then challenged, given a fixed set of arithmetic operations, to devise a mathematical formula to estimate the extent of the problem and compute the number of Communist sympathizers lurking in the Winter Camp Universe. Questions included "Have you ever been in a parade?", "Have you seen the movie Star Wars in a theater?", and "Have you been quoted in a newspaper with circulation greater than 2000?".
The team led by Will Gagnon produced a guess of 141.6 left-wing radicals, raising the question of what 60% of a Communist really is. The Ethan Rein team processed the same data, but arrived at a rather different conclusion, arriving at a total of 3224. Scott Fults and his investigating force more than doubled the Rein calculations, concluding that Winter Camp was infested with 8151 Communists. The top estimate came from the team of Keith King, Tim Leong, Jeff Rand, and Joe Warren, whose interpretation of the data led to the inescapable conclusion that Winter Camp harbored 10,569 agents of anti-Americanism. Following the exercise, representatives of three teams joined forces to conclude that the maximum value to be derived from the data available and the mathematical constraints was 35, 11110 -once again, we wondered what a fractional Communist really meant. Communist only from Monday-Friday? Perhaps.
Entry Created: 01/15/2010 Last Update: 01/01/2021
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