I hate polls that demonstrate that some astronomical number of people are foolish. For example, there’s a a new poll from The Economist/YouGov that says:
- Forty-nine percent of Republicans believe it is definitely or probably true that “leaked email from some of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staffers contained code words for pedophilia, human trafficking and satanic ritual abuse.”
- Fifty-two percent of Republicans believe that President was definitely or probably born in Kenya.
- Fifty-nine percent of Republicans believe either than the climate is not changing (16%) or that it is changing but human activity isn’t a participating cause (43%).
The implication here, once you realize that Trump received just shy of 63 million votes, is that about 31 million people believe that Hillary Clinton is involved in satanic child abuse and pedophilia, that about 33 million people think Obama was born in another country, and that 37 million people are deeply misinformed or in denial about climate change. And these are just the Republicans. There are many independents and even a substantial number of Democrats who believe these asinine things.
It’s a wonder that more people don’t gargle Drano and die because it seems like a sensible thing to do.
I hate these polls because I find it demoralizing to be reminded about the critical thinking skills of so many of my fellow citizens.
I’d rather not know the details. I’d like to imagine that reason and real information might play some decisive roll in politics. But it doesn’t feel that way right now, and polls like this aren’t helping.
And half or more Dems think Putin changed the totals on the local voting machines?
Source.
another YouGov https:/today.yougov.com/news/2016/12/27/belief-conspiracies-largely-depends-political-iden
We have been bombarded for 12 months of “Fraud, Fraud its all in tha bag, FraaAAAAAAUUUUUUUD”
12 years worth of voting “Fraud, Fraud its all in tha bag, FraaAAAAAAUUUUUUUD”
NC is more despotic than Iran and Sierra Leone, Pennsylvania is more despotic than NC…
And you wonder why Dem’s think the Russians changed the vote count?
What color is the sky in the world you live in Mino? ‘Cause it sure as hell isn’t blue.
Believing that Russians changed the vote count is just idiotic to anyone familiar with how voting works in this country.
The conspiracy theories on the left about this are as every bit as idiotic is the belief that millions of illegal immigrants voted.
Go to caucus99 – they think voter fraud is responsible for Bernie losing the nomination.
What is the “source” for this YouGov crap? Show me the numbers and then show me the poling methods, just for starters.
AG
To anyone who follows polling YouGov is very familiar.
Their last national poll had Clinton +4, a miss of 1.8.
The data disputes what you want to believe – so your first instinct is to reject it.
My “first instinct” is to reject polling in toto as it stands today in the U.S., fladem. I follow my own instincts instead. Feet on the ground, eyes and ears open, nose to the wind.
When all of the polls…and people who follow polls, yourself doubtless included…were saying that Trump had no chance of winning the RatPublican nomination (and then later when they were equally unanimously saying that he had no chance to win the presidency), I consistently appeared here trying to tell y’all to be careful, that polls lie. The very construct under which they function is skewed mightily towards the status quo. There is no major poll available that is not part and parcel of that status quo.
They are all manned, managed and owned by people who have bought into the whole PermaGov Fix, the faux two-party system. They’re not necessarily lying on purpose…except of course the ones that are owned or at least heavily infiltrated by U.S. intelligence services…it’s just that’s where their heads are at. They operate on a middle class-and-above bias, with no real knowledge of that bias. They call people who are part of that system; they go into “safe” neighborhoods…safe for college educated, middle class worker bees, anyway…to do personal polling and they do not get the whole picture as a result. The shock and confusion on the faces of equivalent mainstream types in the media on Election Night when it began to dawn on them that they had totally missed the mood of flyover country is all you need to know about these people. Had there been TV cameras in the pollster offices you would have seen the same dumbfounded expressions.
More like a plotz, seems to me. (“Plotz“…Yiddish for a pratfall due to an unpleasant surprise.)
Independent, objective “polling” in a corporate-owned and dominated system like this one is nearly impossible. It simply takes too much money to run such a company unless it is financed by the system as it stands, and that system is now totally corrupt.
Sorry, brother or sister, but there it jolly well is.
Deal wid it.
Later…
ASG
P.S. That “It must be some sort of plot!!!” thing? It morphed into an initial “It wuz election fraud!!!” attitude. When that fizzled out, it morphed further into “It was them damned Russkies!!!”, and that’s where it remains today.
“Them damned Russkies” wouldn’t have had a chance to influence this election if the the system itself was not broken beyond all possibility of repair. Whether they did or didn’t becomes a moot question when analyzed from that point of view. They have their own problems. Bet on it. It’s on us to fix ours.
The other half of Republicans think global warming will be a “good” thing…
More than half of all Democrats in 2006 believe Bush knew about the 911 attacks before they happened.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2011/04/more-than-half-of-democrats-believed-bush-knew-03522
4
Whoa! I did not know that. It does explain some of what I am observing, however…
That few???
They’re dumber than I thought!!!
AG
Yes, losing seems to have has this effect on people. No difference between believing that Putin hacked voting machines or that results in California or exit polls in New York proved a conspiracy against Bernie in the primaries. Add to that the Greg Palast nonsense that comes up every four years.
Humans are born insane. The purpose of education is to heal them. In this time and place, the educational enterprise has been completely abandoned. The result is a body politic with an emotional age of twenty seconds, obsessed with revenge for the birth trauma. Good outcomes are, as you point out, off the table.
No doubt Betsey DeVos is gonna fix all that. :::Cough:::
In primate societies, stupidity is a sign of submission. Especially with tougher living, people want a leader rather than institutional welfare. Trump has no contest in taking this ready subservience.
Or perhaps maybe… people are just sick of answering stupid poll questions? I know I rarely respond truthfully to a poll these days, if I respond at all.
You have to wonder if a lot of these responses are just more along the lines of people trying to poke the pollsters in the eye.
But then again, Trump did get elected…
One time I was visiting my late, great uncle, then 90 years old, in an old age home in the Bronx. While I was there, a young psychologist came in unannounced to administer a test to determine the state of his mental functions.
“Who is the president of the United States?” was the first question.
My uncle gave him a funny look and replied, “You mean YOU DON’T KNOW?”
That was the end of the test. As soon as he walked out, my uncle rattled off the list of every president from Warren G. Harding to Clinton. (Harding was president when he first arrived in the United States.)
As that American sage observed:
We can take satisfaction that two pundits have found their intellectual equals
I smell a bromance in the air.
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Oh, god. OMFG.
The comments at L,G, and M are a treasure. My favorite in that thread is comparing this George Orwell quote to Greenwald (and of course his followers;
The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
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Greenwald asks for substantive proof of Russian (Putin-directed or otherwise) meddling, or “hacking” of the election as so many pro-Clinton/Obama pundits have recklessly and repeatedly claimed. There is none. Loads and loads of propaganda; nothing new there. Most of what passes for journalism ever is little more than propaganda. But beyond that, no proof of “hacking” the election. Carlson is a hack, of course, but Greenwald’s analysis is sound: there is no substantive proof that ‘Russia stole the election from Clinton.’ Not sure why Obama’s getting involved with it; long term it’s hard to see how it credits him or his Presidency. The sheer hypocrisy on the part of the Clintonista pundits in this is astounding. What the fuck are they trying to even prove? They should state that clearly, for starters, and then show their proof that Russia was guilty in election 2016 of anything more than pulling the strings of a Republican presidential candidate that was ready, willing, and able to be their puppet. Anyone that can will be trying to use Trump going forward; why wouldn’t they have used him, and the feckless Republican Party, in the past? Terrible violation of norms. But who are we trying to kid? This is how politics has been played since the dawn of time.
Clinton and Obama, brilliant political strategists and tacticians that they are surely knew this as well as this comparison of Tucker Carlson and Glen Greenwald is lazy and self-serving.
Why did Clinton and Obama let Russia (and Trump) beat them? If it’s true, that Russia and Putin stole the election from Democrats, that’s the only question they really need to ask. In USA 2016 how could Clinton and Obama fuck this up? Of course, it’s the only answer they’ve failed to provide.
Good thoughts but I think you’re responding to arguments that no one’s really making. I, for one, don’t think Russia stole the election from the Democrats. The Democrats lost a winnable election.
It’s far more likely that the Comey letter and HRC’s flaws as a candidate were much more significant factors in late-deciders opting for Trump and a relatively significant amount of third party voters.
Still, using Wikileaks as a conduit to leak emails that proved no wrong-doing but were hyped up by Trump, the media, and anti-HRC partisans was important in creating a narrative that helped to elect Putin’s favored candidate. Did he know that was going to work? Of course not.. but it worked out for him.
I’ve been writing that this issue was going to blow up since well before election day because I’ve never seen it as a partisan issue. The strategy can be used against any candidate, even if particularly effective with someone like Clinton.
Thanks for this.
It’s a constant ploy to argue against a straw man. Virtually no one is arguing that Russia ‘stole’ the election. There are many reasons for the loss (she had one fucking job, and blew it), and in an election this close people can take their pick. But this issue, all by itself is troubling.
I also don’t understand…AT ALL…why supposed (heh) progressives want to remove a serious issue from the upcoming fight.
Just looking at Trump’s cabinet is extremely troubling as far as Russian influence. Even if Wikileaks’s did not get anything from the Russians, the appointments themselves should get progressives shouting. Yet some supposed progressives want to dismiss it all, not just hacking, but the appointments.
Now why would that be?
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Shoot, forget the cabinet…just his Secretary of State is extremely troubling!
Something is going on, and if we don’t quickly figure out what, it will most likely be too late.
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Perfection.
I don’t think polls are a measure of what any of those people actually believe anymore.
They are an opportunity to demonstrate tribal loyalty. If Yes to that question is perceived to be good for my team, then Yes. What’s real doesn’t matter. (And yeah, conservatives are more likely to disregard reality entirely like this.)
It’s like asking a Raiders fan what they think of the Kansas City coaching staff.
You would have to ask questions repeatedly in a sneaky, non-political way like a psychology assessment to get at what people truly believe. Polling just doesn’t do that.
It’s very click-bait-y, though. And enraging. Both winners to the online press these days.
Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner!
“Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forfty percent of all people know that.”
– Homer J. Simpson
Well, maybe you can take some solace in the fact that “polls” also said that Donald Trump didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of beating Hillary Clinton. So yeah, fuck the polls. They don’t mean shit.
On the other hand, I will report to you, directly from the heart of Trumpistan, that yes, it is likely that more than 49% “believe” that Hillary Clinton was somehow, either directly or indirectly, involved in pedophilia, human trafficking and satanic ritual abuse. A caveat, though. Most of these people don’t really know anything about that accusation, but would automatically cast their vote in the affirmative once they realize that this story is a thing in the sphere of their world, even if they somehow missed the accusation because they are not regular direct consumers of Breitbart conspiracy theories. Most of their social media circles probably never quite caught up with that crazy assertion. But hey, they are all-in with it, I’m sure. Even if they are late to the game.
As for the Kenyan thing, that one is simply baked into the cake, Martin. That one is way past any reconsideration on their part. Nothing, not even a film of Obama’s mother breaking water and dropping Barack Hussein Obama, head-first onto the front steps of Kapiʻolani Medical Center, will convince these people.
On climate change, some of them might just be a bit more circumspect, though it would take a bit to get them to admit it. It is obvious that it is not acceptable in the tribe to express any doubts on this one. But as time goes by it is going to become more and more difficult to convince the rubes that they are not seeing what they are seeing. I just took a trip to Alaska with my father back in August. He is a right wing, Tea Party guy, who likes to publicly scoff at climate change. We had been to Alaska once before, in 2001. And when we stood at Portage Glacier and saw how far the glacier had receded in just 15 years, even he had to confess that “there is something going on”. He was stunned at how much of the glaciers had been lost. And frankly, so was I.
Like you, I don’t want to know the details about how stupid our country actually is. And since the election, I have withdrawn from most all things related to politics. But I know, and you know, that the time is nigh to pull the armor out of the closet and get ready to fight. I like to fancy myself a guy who is motivated and driven by reason and logic. But if this election showed my anything, it is that reason and logic are not going to win this battle. This is going to require guerilla warfare. And we are going to have to set aside some of our rational and logical preconceptions in order to reorient our way of thinking about what will be required in the years ahead. “Reason and real information” are going to be useful insofar as it will help keep us grounded as to the long term goal here. But there is going to be nothing “reasonable” in what we are going to have to do in order to fend off a complete implosion of our governing system in this country. Like you, I would love it if everyone would embrace critical thinking skills. But the fact of the matter is that humans, by and large, have never been creatures who regularly exercise those types of thought processes. We are still hostage to the rigid and compulsive processes which are innate to the reptilian portions of our brains. And while we might be able to take some comfort in the fact that we might see occasional glimpses of reason in our politics, we should probably not be fooled into thinking these are anything but mere outliers which will occur once in a while over time. We are in for a political period which will look a lot like the Mad Max movies of the 1980’s.
It’s a wonder more of them aren’t on 72-hour holds at any given moment.
“I’d like to imagine that reason and real information might play some decisive roll in politics.”
You wanna keep losing?
But remember a chunk of people answer this way because it’s a way to register that they are a republican and their tribe does not believe in global warming and hate HRC etc. etc. If it makes you feel better.
I suppose some might be nuts. On the other hand, if a pollster called me and asked these questions I’d probably agree to all sorts of silly things.
One thing is for sure… the political media sucks. I’ll bet 100% agree. Let’s do a poll.