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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2953 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Has anyone been following the Unite The Kingdom/Raise The Colors rallies in the UK? Did they pull big numbers (the protesters have an incentive to inflate their numbers, of course, and the establishment has an incentive to deflate them)? Has there been a noticeable shift in the political discourse around them?

Casually following, mostly through osmosis not actively pursuing, I believed the protesters claimed 3mil attendees, the official number is ~110k. The official number has some smart-looking analysis backing it up, the protesters have drone footage that certainly seems to show a lot of people, but frankly I have no idea how to estimate large crowd sizes. My instinct is to believe the smaller number, if only because in almost every protest I can remember ever hearing numbers reported on, the police reported number is usually several times smaller than the protest leadership's claimed number.

the protesters have drone footage that certainly seems to show a lot of people

Not wanting to rain on that parade (which actually happened. The rain I mean), but when I've observed photos or footage from any politically related event it is always taken in a 'just so' way to provide a verisimilitude of larger attendance.

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