Polls consistently show that people are tired of war and tired of being beaten up and muzzled and needled and disemployed by Share Value capitalists. Across the world most countries are quickly moving away from the warmongers and Share Value capitalists. From Africa to Latin America to India to Russia to China, the old strong cultures are lining up against the EU/UK/US sweatshops and wars. China is disconnecting from our sweatshoppers, no longer ready to provide their slave labor.
This change has exactly zero effect on US politicians, though the British system is somewhat more responsive to feedback. US media continues to maintain all the forms of insanity, Carbon and “virus” and genocide and war and Wall Street, at full 900 dB screech.
I find myself asking why the pollsters aren’t trying harder to talk directly to politicians. They know what’s going on here and elsewhere, and they could speak with authority. And then I remembered… George Gallup tried it once. I wrote about it only a month ago.
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Listening to a 1948 ‘Meet the Press’ show, which was simulcast on radio and early TV. The reporters were grilling George Gallup himself about the famously bad Dewey Wins polls.
At that time radio and newspaper journalists were mostly competent, though CBS was already developing into Deepstate Central. Meet the Press was supervised by Spivak, who continued to run it for the next 1000 years.
ALL of the reporters were unspeakably stupid. Boneheads. They asked serious-sounding but meaningless questions in a nasty tone. Gallup was a proper old-fashioned Expert, cautious and humble, always trying to counter-argue his own biases. Over and over the reporters came at him with dumb questions, never learning from experience or Gallup no matter how patiently he tried to explain.
At one point Gallup was illustrating how the form of a survey question can give different results. A Gallup poll asked “Do you think that prices in general will be higher, lower, or about the same, six months from now?” A Roper poll asked “Do you think that the prices of most of the things you buy will be higher, lower, or about the same six months from now?” Gallup found 14% thought higher. Roper found 54% thought higher.
The questions are clearly different. Roper called for direct experience (things you buy), while Gallup called for speculation (things in general). People know what they buy. They don’t know about generalities; they rely on what the media tells them, which was optimistic at the time. Gallup explained this point from every possible angle, and the reporters couldn’t absorb the difference between THEORY AND EXPERIENCE.
They only knew what media was saying BECAUSE THEY WERE THE ONES WHO WERE SAYING IT.
THEORY KILLS. EXPERIENCE SURVIVES.
Gallup repeated one general point that sounded like a message to the media and the viewers. He said that polling can be useful in commerce, where a company wants to know why people like or dislike a product, but polling serves no purpose in politics. A federal election poll is rarely valid and doesn’t provide useful information. Refusing to sell his product with lies is another mark of real Expertise. Modern pollsters have tried to send an even broader message, telling the media that campaigns and polls don’t affect the result. But media makes money from campaigns and polls, so the idiocy continues.
The broadest point of all is that ELECTIONS don’t change anything.
GOVERNMENT DOES WHAT IT WANTS.
That’s all.
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Polistra's Mill 