‘I’ve Been Polled!’ (2016)

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I don’t normally do an extra “best-of,” but I just stumbled over this post from 2016 and had to share it with you.

I’ve Been Polled

So there I was on the phone with the Marist College Poll, trying to answer dishonest questions honestly. I knew from my reading that the deck is routinely stacked by pollsters, to get the answers they want to get–but to experience it personally was frustrating. How can you have a decent conversation with people who just lie all the time? Whose idea of a clever question is “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”

If there was ever a time when opinion polls were reliable guides to public opinion, that time has passed. Now they’re just taste tests for toxic public policies.

I’ve Been Polled

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Wow, the Marist College Poll phoned me last night, soliciting my opinion on a myriad of issues.

I got kind of wound up, though, because a lot of the questions weren’t what I’d call honest questions. They contained presuppositions which I just wasn’t buying–and I had to tell them so.

For instance: “Do you consider yourself white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, etc.?” If I considered myself black, would that make me  black?

And then there were a bunch of questions that had to do with “a person in the process of transitioning from one sex to another.” Hold it! I don’t recognize that as a valid category. No matter what they do to you surgically, no matter how stereotypically you try to mimic the other sex, no matter what hormones they shoot you up with–if you’re a man, every single cell in your body will continue to be male, with male chromosomes. But they kept asking, and I had to keep answering, “That is not a valid category, those people are not in fact having their sex changed, it is an imbecility forced on our society by very wicked persons.”

Some of the questions in this poll reflected a deep dishonesty that has crept into our very language, making it extremely difficult to speak the truth, and maybe even impossible, at times.

How dishonest? Let us not forget that some of these pollsters had Hillary Clinton winning big, big, big, right up into Election Night. They lied to themselves, and believed it.

I know a few individuals who lie to themselves. You probably do, too. How does that work out for them?

When Solon the philosopher saw the first play ever put on in Athens, he didn’t like it. When they asked him why not, he said, “All that lying–and in public, too! Now it’s on a stage, but sooner or later it’ll get into our business.”

Lying can be habit-forming. Ask any politician.