Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Switchboard >

Who in Fuck ARE these people? And WHERE ARE THEY???

15:56 / 27.12.01

From that bastion of News and Information, USA TODAY:

quote:Bush dominates most-admired poll

By Laurence McQuillan, USA TODAY

CRAWFORD, Texas — President Bush is admired by more Americans than any man since the Gallup Poll began asking "What man do you admire most?" in 1948.

When the USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll asked respondents to name the living man they admire most, 39% chose Bush. Last year, President Clinton and Pope John Paul II tied for first place with 6%.

I really just - well I know I live in a bubble, but I'm continually astounded.

16:06 / 27.12.01

i don't know who they are, but i think they're somewhere on the clipboards of creative pollsters and chaos statisticians. or so i hope...

16:13 / 27.12.01

I just feel like they've gotta be making at least some of this shit up. I cannot BELIEVE only about 10% of the country does not support this war (and, coincidentally enough, I seem to know and read ALL of that 10%).

THE most admired man ever in a Gallup Poll? Hmmm.

It all comes off as just a hare stalinist to me.

gentleman loser

22:05 / 27.12.01

A. The vast majority of the public are clueless. That is the conclusion that I have come to.

B. 39% ain't a majority, thank god.

C. Find a scapegoat, distract the public.

It's a strategy as old as politics and usually works. Remember, a few months ago one third of polled Americans supported internment camps for Arabs. I wasn't surprised when i saw this, but I was never more ashamed to be a U.S. citizen.

Also see: Requiring Arabs, including those who are U.S. citizens, to carry a special ID:

Support: 49% Oppose 49%

If you can scare people enough and economic times are bad, you can get the public to swallow all kinds of injustice. Read some history and look at the success of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Milosevic, etc. Getting people to throw their rights away (and those of their fellow citizens) is pretty easy.

D. The mainstream press exists to reinforce the status quo.

Journalism and reporting facts are long dead.

E. Do people lie to pollsters? Absolutely. If someone called me out at random for a poll, I'd refuse to take it. That's how paranoid I've gotten.

F. Do you accept polls as a true representation of public opinion? I don't. Unfortunately, most people seem to. Polls are usually manipulated to fit the agenda of whoever's taking them.

Where are these people? All around you!

Fascism is alive and well and living on your block.

[ 28-12-2001: Message edited by: gentleman loser ]

22:44 / 27.12.01

I can beat that.

According to today's Herald Sun, 85% of Victorians think the PM was right to turn away the Tampa (ship carrying refugees). The depressing thing about this statistic is that, considering how thick the pro-government, anti-refugee propaganda is, it's a surprisingly good result (i.e., 15% of Herald Sun readers think he was wrong - they certainly didn't get that from anything the paper printed).

But the capper for the survey is this one:

quote: 88 percent disagree with psychologically infertile women, such as lesbians who feel they can't have sex with a man, being allowed access to tax-payer funded IVF.

How much brain damage would you have to have to even answer a question like that?

22:44 / 27.12.01

Or pose it?

11:35 / 28.12.01

Ah well, looks like Dubya's critical hiding-in-a-bunkerness has been conveniently forgotten in the wake of his "string 'em up" rhetoric. Pity.

12:55 / 28.12.01

Don't worry. Dubya will fuck it up sooner or later (probably sooner.) He's still a minority President, and whatever his current popular support, I don't think he'll manage what constitutes a very delicate balancing act between the various disparate factions that make up his backers.

Plus, I doubt his popularity will endure another three years of 'string 'em up' unless he really does manage, in three years, to make the world safe from terrorism. I'd be giving pretty long odds on that one.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

12:56 / 28.12.01

I heard that American English departments are ready to open up an entire new branch of studies on the tortured syntax that Bush and similarly IQ deprived people use, it's apparently a 'valid dialect' and not a response to poor education or stupidity...

And I think the only person not to come out of a war perceived by the majority as a success as a top bloke was Churchill.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

19:48 / 28.12.01

This is only tangentially relevant, but I figure the people replying to/reading this post are the most likely to appreciate/be able to answer this...
OK. Any US 'lithers- Who's Al Franken? Cos I picked up his "Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot" for 50p in a charity shop last week, purely on the basis of the title. And so far, it rocks.
But- is it true that (as Mr Franken says), while you can't get US citizenship if you were EVER a Communist, you can't get US citizenship if you were a Nazi BETWEEN 1939 and 1945?
(Although I do like Franken's following poing that that does make a kind of sense... at least you know someone who joined the Nazis in '46 ain't just a fairweather friend...)
So far I get the impression that Franken is a PJ O'Rourke for the left. But I'm only about 20 pages in, so I could be incredibly wrong here.
And back to the topic of GWB's popularity... I'm torn between two images of Bill Hicks- one is that he's back here with us, now, really laying into Dubya... which makes me smile.
The other is that he's still dead, and I always remember the look of glee on his face when he said "Bush lost- YEAH!" the last time round. Then I imagine him performing intricate aerial maneouvres in his grave. And that makes me do a sad face.

20:39 / 28.12.01

First lesson in any decent statistics course:

"you can make stats say what ever you want."

Given the right questions, I can show you a poll that says 75% of Jews though Hitler was misunderstood. Unless you can see the exact questions asked, how people were chosen, and the general rules of the questioning, consider the poll shit.

[ 28-12-2001: Message edited by: I Am ]

A

21:41 / 28.12.01

You don't have to be very cynical to think that the results of these polls are often, if not always, skewed to meet some sort of agenda. If someone has a completely ignorant, unjustifiable position on some topic, and they see that 85% of folks agree with their posisition, then that's justification enough.

Even if the figures aren't completely fabricated, it's pretty easy to push the figures in whichever direction you want by, say, asking them outside a Klan rally to folks wearing sheets.

Has anyone here ever been asked their opinion on anything for one of these polls?

10:58 / 29.12.01

Nice how they still ask about the most admired man isn't it..

Matthew Fluxington

19:19 / 29.12.01

Al Franken is a comedic writer (and occasional performer) who was the head writer for Saturday Night Live for a considerable chunk of time - he was one of the first writers, and came and went a few times over. He was a featured player for a while in the early 90s, and had a recurring character called Stuart Smalley whom he spun off into a film called Stuart Smalley Saves His Family. The whole character is a riff on 'self-help'. He's had a few failed tv shows, and has found his niche writing lefty comedic commentary. He's a regular guest on many different talk shows in the US.

He's in a dead-heat contest with Michael Moore for being America's lefty answer to Rush Limbaugh.

18:37 / 31.12.01

quote:Originally posted by count adam, part 2:
Even if the figures aren't completely fabricated, it's pretty easy to push the figures in whichever direction you want by, say, asking them outside a Klan rally to folks wearing sheets.

Don't even need to do that.

Who do you admire more?

A) Bush
B) Bin Laden
C) Sharon

If you had to pick one, who would you pick? My bet is that a list of people to choose from is associated with the question. Bush is probably the most known person on the list.

The Damned Yankee

05:06 / 01.01.02

D) The guy who locks all three into a steel cage, nods up to a manned machine gun, and tells them "We'll spare the first one of you to escape."

13:33 / 03.01.02

From the Gallup Site:

quote: The Number Of Interviews Or Sample Size Required :
One key question faced by Gallup statisticians: how many interviews does it take to provide an adequate cross-section of Americans? The answer is, not many -- that is, if the respondents to be interviewed are selected entirely at random, giving every adult American an equal probability of falling into the sample. The current US adult population in the continental United States is 187 million. The typical sample size for a Gallup poll which is designed to represent this general population is 1,000 national adults.

Um. OK. Does anyone else find that a bit disturbing?

10:40 / 04.01.02

the homogeneity of the public is no suprise..

i mean .. were all individuals.

17:41 / 05.01.02

quote:Originally posted by I Am:

Don't even need to do that.

Who do you admire more?

A) Bush
B) Bin Laden
C) Sharon

If you had to pick one, who would you pick? My bet is that a list of people to choose from is associated with the question. Bush is probably the most known person on the list.

I was kind of under the impression that it was an open question..

I mean, if these are pollsters who go around asking 'who is the most amdimred man in the world, a b or c?', why the fuck would anyone listen to anything they said..

23:23 / 05.01.02

You are all unique!

12:10 / 06.01.02

Every time I turn on the radio, I hear Bush say somehting that--purely from a grammatical point of view, let alone a political point of view--makes me want to vomit or laugh or cry or all simulteneously. Yesterday's was, in reference to some real or trumped up rumblings from the nearly dead "Democratic" party in the US: "Not over my dead body will they raise your taxes."

Can anyone here get your brain around that one?

(Al Franken wanted to title his book Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Liar but the publisher thought they could get in trouble for that.)

Both the NY Times and NPR, formerly somewhat reasonable sources on politics, have leaned so far to the right I simply cannot abide them anymore.

22:11 / 06.01.02

quote:Originally posted by The Most Useless Man Alive:

i mean .. were all individuals.
I'm not.[/python]

It occurs to me that if Bush hasn't made the world safe for free Amerikans etc etc. that his next election campaign will be fought on a 'you're gonna let the DEMOCRATS fight the war(s)?' ticket.

Tangent. I remember the UK elections in '97 and a little paranoid thought creeping into my brain- 'Blair will [narrate] the/an apocalypse'- I dismissed it then, but somehow I can't make it go away. (square brackets to denote untranslatable concept) another bod whose personal stock has risen immesurably with joe public due to the war.

don't take that too seriously. yet. definite 3am thought.