Quote:
Originally Posted by chambers92
I believe the poll is a recent one from Haaretz. Which makes sense because Hamas was created in 1987 so there was no way Israelis would have felt the need for a dialogue with Hamas 20 years ago. Hamas didn't have any power or control over the Palestinian people back then..
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No shirt Shitlock!!! Why do you think I choose that particular time frame in the first place???
One of the problems of polls
Back in late 1972 (or maybe it was early 1973), as an experiment (as I recall it was Stanford University that conducted the experiment), a poll was taken in order to demonstrate the value of polls. This experiment consisted of a poll with one single question:
Which of the two choices do you feel would be more beneficial to you personally, in dealing with the current levels of inflation within the economy today?
A.) The government should order a seventy-five percent roll-back of all of your income.
B.) The military should launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack against Moscow.
At first, only the results of this poll were published, without actually publishing the poll question itself, or any of the polling data.
The published results of the poll concluded that: One hundred percent of the Americans polled, wanted the US to start a global nuclear war with the Soviet Union!!!
You can imagine the uproar, and panic, that this caused when the results were first made public. After a week or so, the entire experiment was published. This disclosure included the poll question, as well as all of the actual polling data.
How is any of this is relevant? By your argument, the US government choose to ignore the will of the American people, when it was decided to not start a nuclear war with the Soviets. The poll did after all, establish that one hundred percent of the people polled wanted a nuclear war with the Soviets. One hundred percent is a rather compelling majority.
As though any government is going to destroy all life on the planet, based on the published analysis of the results of one single poll.
Your poll is, as I have said before, completely meaningless.
First: There exists a difference between what a government can do, and cannot do. Just because a government cannot do something, does not mean that it will not do it. The word ‘will’ here, implies that a choice is possible. Thus there is a difference between what a government cannot do, and what any government will not do!
Second: In fact, all single polls are meaningless. The only real value of any poll, is to study trends in public opinion. In order to do this, the same poll must be given repeatedly, over a length of time, at regular intervals. Say on the order of once a week, for two, or three decades, for example. The more times that the poll is given the more useful the data will be.
Polls are like a movie. You have to watch the entire movie to find out what the story is about. If you cut out only one single frame from the movie, no matter how long you study that single frame, you are never going to learn what the movie is about. (Unless of course you have already seen the entire movie before, and you recognize the single frame that has been cut out.)