Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1957 Editor's Choice: 19
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The word liberal...
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...is not an expletive in this or any other country. It is an expletive among the same crowd of language incompetents who saw the -ic off Democratic and put it on atheist. As for Glenn's use of the polls, the polls have their failings, massive ones, but his point is that you can draw the same conclusions about polls of other groups as the FUD people on the right are drawing about the polls about Muslims.
All demagoguery, all the time. Have you watched V for Vendetta?
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No, both with the same skepticism
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Both are by reputable polling institutions, so let's assume they're correct.
Zahed, this is not a good assumption. That they employed standard technique is a reasonable assumption, but polls are done in response to requests or commissions, and the polling institution may or may not have complete control over the study -- as to its scope or the precise questions to ask.
A comprehensive study on the subject would be enlightening. That would include, minimally, preliminarily getting numbers from all the target populations on what these people meant by such terms as "violence against civilians" and "terrorist". These data would have to be analyzed before coming up with a poll that then asked their attitudes and concurrently asked them to match their definitions of the above terms to the categories produced by the first study.
The result would state that people X felt Y about term Z, by which they meant definition W.
Then an analysis of confounding factors would also have to be done -- for instance, there is widespread belief from parts of the Middle East all the way to South Asia that attacks from the air are both unfair and cowardly (that is, bombing raids and helicopter attacks) because they don't allow their targets, be they civilian or military, the opportunity to fight back. This will have a huge influence on the questions that were asked, and is confounding, since it doesn't come out in the analysis.
At the end of the day, it is very hard to boil issues like this down to sound-bite-sized questions. And studies that do things like tape interviews to get better understanding of the sample population's views, have difficult (and to the polling companies, expensive) problems with coding the results.
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@zenwick
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Or maybe Iranians generally remember the missile attacks during the Iran-Iraq war. Not every view in other countries is forged with one eye fixed on the Americans.
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@zahed
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I only assumed they were correct for the sake of argument, since the reaction the two polls is so disproportionate.
I know, I do the same thing. I guess I am generally lamenting the fact that everything gets done with such imprecision and goes spiralling off into such weird two-dimensional disputes. It's very tough, and very expensive, to get real information on such volatile subjects, but we have unemployed demographers working other jobs in this country, and we keep talking about making sacrifices. Maybe the first sacrifice should be to spend the money, time, and effort to understand the problems we need to solve.
I keep hoping, but I also keep thinking we're all gonna fry.
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I really wonder how that poll would go
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Unless American Muslims favor suicide attacks on civilian populations
Really, this would be hard to predict. Obviously, the majority don't believe in attacks on civilians at all, we already have that. Of those who do, as multiple people have mentioned, they may have very specific examples in mind (the same way Dershowitz does when he advocates torture).
And then, there is the problem that the most devout believe that suicide is a grievous sin. This feeling is strong enough that some media outlets, Al Jazeera for example, use the word "martyr" to refer to suicide bombers because they don't want to use the word "suicide" (i.e. they believe using "martyr" is more objective than "suicide").
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Refuse to condemn...
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]used when reporting a response listed as DK/Refused (don't know or refused to answer) is pure McCarthyism. It's down there with pronouncing anyone who takes the fifth guilty.
I highly recommend you watch the Star Trek episode Drumhead.
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@L.W.M.
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Are you trying to tell us that these poor Christians escaped the brutal Islamic dictator Saddam? Where did they hide from his evil Islamic terror? In a mosque?
If you remember, "nothing happens in Iraq without Saddam knowing about it." If they were in Iraq, then they were there because he knew about it and supported their terrorism.
I got a 77%