It is quite surprising, to me at least, how crooked this morning’s Nielsen Poll turns out to be. I had thought it was the honest poll, but I was wrong.
For there are no Undecided. This conceals a million voters’ intentions, or indecisions; for, I think, the first time. All the calls were on landline. No young people, therefore, were rung. One third of it was on Thursday night, which is late night shopping, when many prosperous landline owners were out of the house, or commuting. One third was on Friday night, when most healthy persons were out of the house.
And there are, for the first time, state-based margins of error. 4.6 for NSW, 5.3 for Victoria, 5.9 for Queensland, 9 percent for South Australia/Northern Territory, and 7.9 for Western Australia. This might mean the Labor vote, two-party preferred, is 43.6, 56.3, 42.9, 49.0, and 55.9 in those states.
(Is Stirton, perhaps, with these figures, preparing an alibi? It could be so, old friend, it could be so. Why else would he do it?)
And there is mention here of Family First, but none of the KAP, the DLP, the PUP and One Nation; they come, apparently, under ‘other’; all 600,000 of them. It would be nice to know which of these got what and whether, in some seats in Queensland, Katter is getting, as he might be, 40 percent and Palmer, I hear, 60 percent.
It would be good to know too what the average age of the respondents was, and whether it was asked. I would put it between 69 and 72.
There is also the allegation that a million people are ‘uncommitted’ on who would be the better Prime Minister. A million haven’t made up their mind. It would be good to know how this question was asked; through a language barrier, say, or of a housewife anxious to get back to the stove. Because if all of the ‘uncommitted’ went to Gillard, the result would be 50-50. Do you know any of these million ‘uncommitted’ people? You should know one. You should know ten.
That Stirton is lying, and uncomfortable with his lies, is attested by his use, for the first time, of the word ‘landlines’, and his peculiar view that Rudd Labor getting 50 would not mean, could not mean, could not possibly mean, that he would win the day. Though Gillard won office with 50.1 percent he could not possibly, starting at 50, pick up as much as 0.1 percent in the coming eighty days; how could he? Let’s be realistic, how could he? There is a 2.6 margin of error and he could not possibly make it from 50 to 50.1; no way. With eighty days of Prime Ministership behind him, and four television debates, and he did cream Abbott in their last one, he might pick up the necessary ten thousand votes, eleven thousand, even, I would have thought. But what would I know.
But no; but no. The compulsory scenario is Rudd gets more votes but loses, and Stirton, on instruction, obediently says, yes, sir, that’s what’s going to happen, yes sirree Bob. It cannot be otherwise.
… We are talking about corruption here, for these things cannot happen by incompetence. Rudd losing for certain with 50 percent is not something you say out of incompetence, for Howard won with 48.1 percent in 1998, and Stirton knows this, it has to be, simply, corruption.
I ask him to sue me for this.
And if, as I constantly aver, the Katter preferences are being misallocated, and there are half a million of them, and the landlines understate the Labor vote by 1.5 percent, this result, even this result, puts Labor on 48 percent, and Abbott as preferred Prime Minister and Gillard on 46.
So there you go. I hereby state that this is a shonked, corrupted poll and by its wording it even admits it is, and I await court action from Stirton, or another.
Name:
This is just a thought experiment - how much would I have to pay to buy a fake poll result I want published by Nielsen Fairfax Poll?
How big a chunk out of $30 billion would that take? It might be a rational investment decision if the yield is high enough. African workers are happy with how much was it? A seat on the board is not needed if I have the audacity to send couriers to the pubs where the pollsters go for recreation and make friends before identifying the weakest ones most vulnerable to temptation.
More than ever before, after last weeks torrential outpouring of filth from Abbott and his patrons and matrons - fixing a poll was needed to keep up the collapsing facade of lies these criminal predators use to confuse the naive voters.
Standard practice in the spookcraft business. That I learned in my long and expensive American education.
Goebbels would applaud and approve of these Machiavellian LNP agitprop machinations but it ain’t over til its over and another ninety more days will pass B4 the fat lady sings – bored or no board.
Another intelligent assessment from you Bob. The polls continually ignore Palmer and Katter who cannot be ignored for the many disillusioned voters who will rush to vote against the 2 major parties. Many Labor voters who will never vote Liberal will park their protest votes with Katter or Palmer.
The latest Roy Morgan gave Palmer and Katter a small mention.
Do any insiders know what numbers Labour’s own polling is throwing up? If they are wildly out of kilter…
If they are to landlines also, they may not be.
You don’t have to know. Just look at the body language and facial expressions of Labor members. What irks me though, is how Murdoch journalists often say “A Labor backbencher said to me…blah blah”….now in my wildest dreams I could not imagine ANY Labor politician providing sustenance and employment for these liars. BOB:-hasn’t the Labor leadership forbidden members to talk to these scum. If they talk to them they will only lie. All Murdoch journalists should be banned from approaching elected Labor members. Why is it not so? BAH!
“However, Fairfax Media has been told directly by some MPs previously counted as firmly in the Gillard camp, that while they do not want a ballot, they have formed the view that she should nonetheless stand down to give the party the best chance of a recovery in the polls” Mark Kenny’
“One strong supporter of Mr Rudd dismissed the argument that he could not be installed despite his overwhelming popularity…….He said it was now widely accepted across the party that Ms Gillard needed to go”
“The view of some former staunch supporters is that not only can she not win the election, but she almost certainly cannot lift the primary vote from where it now sits” Barrie Cassidy.
I have told you before Bob. Take it your creed:
“It is safer to trust nobody”
Rootin’, just this minute I have commented on the right living by the creed Shakespeare here alludes to
Unless this general evil they maintain,
All men are bad and in their badness reign
at least such an outlook carries with it it’s own punishment
Sorry, point taken, far more preferable as a life choice, but my comment was never meant to be a guide for life.
Sometimes the sting in my old (favourite) question from the historic MMPI personality survey rushes to my mind when I see certain comments(or ‘black ops’ and certain other assorted conspiracies).
Now then, Bob, I don’t mean that it fits any of the commenters here (in particular) just that the words fit the comments sometimes.
Bob
I don’t really understand the obsession we have with opinion polls. They are, as you point out, just random and often wrong samples of small groups of people. The questions asked are often misleading or misinterpreted.
So why do we bother? People make all sorts of decisions that go against the ‘popular’ view. Opinion polls should be ignored.
I urge you to stop the scribbling at Aussie’s as you pour over the daily dross - treat yourself to Dom’s tuna salad roll, a skim milk latte and the sports section. It’ll tell you more about what’s going on than the polls will.
I am beginning to think you are a devious, lying cunt.
Do not provoke me any further.
Or a a devious, lying Clint. It was Mr Eastwood who played the part of Joe Kidd aptly a bounty hunter turned hired gunslinger.
Sorry? I was agreeing with you! I think the polls are wrong and was saying that we should not bother believing them.
And you used a vile term of abuse to describe someone who has written to you saying how brilliant your book is and much I appreciate your writing.
I take great offence at that word.
With the unrelenting smear campaign being run by the LNP, together with the three commercial TV networks each running a 30 minute LNP commercial each night[**], I’m surprised their numbers aren’t worse.
The LNP crooks want the perception out there that the ALP stinks.
Look at how the crooks spun the menu affair around - Mal Brough was caught red-handed AGAIN telling another blatant lie, and the gutless Australian media ran away from it and let him get away with that lie, too.
[** These LNP ads run on 7 and 9 at 6pm and Faux-10 runs theirs at five - but, when were the worthless options of paid Tory stooges redefined as 'The News'?]
Don’t know what is happening with these polls. Essential Media still showing 2PP ALP 46 - Coalition 54. In other words - no change. Now are EM being particularly lazy and using last poll results or is there something seriously skewed re Newspoll, Morgan and Nielson?
Essential media have said on Sky News a number of times when their weekly polls get a regular segment that they differ because they are a rolling poll (virtually updated week by week) and new stats higher or lower take time to be totally factored in.
By the way, official unemployment stats are also done that way, with their survey numbers including a fresh 25% of the total every month.
Bob please do not use words for female anatomy to insult someone - I find it offensive and I will be forced to think less of you. It is sexist and bordering on an example of misogynistic language.
Do not read me then.
Bob: I agree with Vicki. Leave that sort of language to reactionary goons, please.
Can’t do that Bob, I find your blogs interesting and entertaining plus I enjoy the banter between your followers. I think that language used as an insult is vulgar and disrepectful to all women.
Vicki’s right, Bob. You could be less crotchety to her and use ‘penis’ instead. Then none of us would be offended.
It’s called English. In the case of ‘cunt’ it is Australian usage, as in ‘G’day cunt-features’ and refers exclusively to men. It has no more relevance, in an insulting way, to women than ‘pork’, the verb, has to pigs. It has no sexual content, any more than ‘shit’ or the American term ‘bum’, or the English term ‘arsehole’. It is usage. Get over it.
Read somebody else.
What are your thoughts on the discrepancy between EM poll results and the others?
Essential will be showing a creep-up of about one percent in a week or two, plus an Undecided of about 800,000 votes. In six weeks they will have Labor ahead.
And on election day, correctly, a Labor landslide.
Agreed Victoria.
An insult is an expression, statement whose very purpose is to degrade disgust and offend the target.
Many, many expressions used also tacitly imply that the object referred to is itself offensive and disgusting. Cunt, whose harsh ejective Saxon phonetic is totally at odds with the properties of the organ itself, which in Hindi is expressed in the phonetically soft warm, almost moist yoni . In all my time in those places, I never heard someone angrily called a yoni !
In the west, I think it is a word best avoided, as an insult that is, during the long and bumpy phase in history where women as a gender are still subject to trends which relegate them to asocial status they neither like or are prepared up with to put. Exceptions which may be highlighted only prove the rule.
I sense that one strategy to rescue the vagina from its co-opted purpose as a weapon for a man is to ‘reclaim’ it. This explains the recent experience I had in a trendy Chelsea pub with my 6 yr old grandson. He returned from a visit to the bookshelves in a far nook of the pub with a large slim volume whose title in large font murmured “Cunt Coloring Book”. Slightly smaller - Over 3 dozen cunts of every size and description for you to color. Crayons not included.
Neither he nor I were the uploaders :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDKYqHUIl-Y
By the way, a colleague named Victoria once was genuinely annoyed when I (just once) reduced it to Vicki, a diminutive well known among my relatives. Her explanation convinced me to avoid its repetition.
Dali, my name is Vicki (but no offence taken)- it is on my birth certificate. I once got detention (many, many years ago) for bringing my birth certificate to school and showing it to a teacher who insisted on calling me Victoria when I had told her that was not my name. In the end I refused to respond when she called me Victoria and was reprimanded for ‘dumb insolence’ hence the production of said birth certificate and detention. They didn’t have to care in those days if you missed your bus home and had a 3 mile walk home.
love that story; you must be a woman to be reckoned with if that is how you were in school
re the language: it bewilders me that in our sort-of-coming-out-of-patriarchy society it is not seen as at least unwise to use anything about women as an insult. Should join niggers in woodpiles as not suitable for civilised use
Vicki you shall be. Can’t be on the same team as that seemingly sadistic teacher.
Those three miles you must’ve been fueled by steam!
I find the word ‘dickhead’ quite apt and satisfying to use and for some reason, I don’t think males find it that offensive.
men are the dominant group in the patriarchal world, therefore they are less concerned at pejorative words based on their gender. It is like ‘nigger’ is a bit more hurtful than ‘whitey’, wog worse than pom, etc
some interesting facts about the power of the media in framing discourses, which affects Labor, aborigines, and women is at this link
http://newmatilda.com/2013/06/17/what-happens-when-women-arent-frame?utm_source=feedly
Yes, and also they are quite enamoured with their doodles and maybe not so enamoured with female genitalia- hence being called a cunt is considered to be pretty insulting.
What could be more sought after than to walk around like an erect penis- or for one’s entire body to take the form of one huge phallus?
in ancient Athens metre high stone phalluses were all through the city. men do like to boast (and kid themselves).
so the words might stand for equivalent anatomical parts, but the conotations are not at all equal
Melanie Klein’s Good Breast Bad Breast theory might shed some light on the confusion some undeveloped egos experience into adulthood about the simultaneous desire/fear and attraction/discomfort to do with sex in general and genitalia in particular.
Hence the relegation of all such objects and topics to embarrassed titillation or macho crudity.
And, in time, just another careless inconsiderate bad habit with no thought of the drip drip drip of damage and subservience it engenders.
Cunt is a time honoured word for an item for which males have a love/hate relationship. A man can call a (male) mate a silly cunt and have it regarded as a form of endearment.
It still has some force to shock the narrow minded and the sheltered petals; that is why it is a useful term of abuse.
Don’t imagine, kiddies, that you will be able to censor Bob Ellis on his own blog.
Those favouring the BACWA (banning and censoring wowser agenda) can fuck off.
I truly do not remember ever feeling anything remotely in the hate vicinity for this most enticing feature of the terrain of a woman’s body.
Whether endearment or not is off the point. When that man’s man Schwarzenneger uses ‘girlie boy’ he puts women down.
A truly broadminded person can empathise with the resistance many women feel when their breasts and vaginas are ‘ripped off’ so to speak to give men a club.
M Ryutin
Thank you for explaining the Essential Media polling process.
DG I am not narrow minded and am not a particularly sheltered petal - growing up in London’s dock area has seen to that but I still believe that word used to insult is offensive. I am as entitled to my values being treated with respect as the next person and not to be labelled ‘narrow minded’ because I object to foul language. Dali and johnsalmond put it much more eloquently than I do. But I will add this - to attempt to counter an argument with insults is not a good response. Give me a clear and effective argument as to why that word should be treated as a colloquialism.I have lived in Australia for almost 40 years and have NEVER heard it used in public and yes I do go to the pub from time to time and yes I do have quite a few male friends and yes I do go to the football.
What exactly is wrong with the word cunt? It accurately and concisely defines a part of female anatomy, equally as well as vulva or vagina. It appeals to me as better than “pussy” or any other number of euphemisms. BTW, what do you call yours? Feel free not to answer; but I had a red-headed girlfriend (schooled in London) who called it her “squirrel”.
Is it “time to move on” from the cunts who have
falsified the poll results and their fellow travellers who come here to Table Talk to assist them?
Shall we or shall we not allow Sir Anthony the necrophilous Grand Inquisitor to have the last word on this – “time to move on” – he said hoping that the really existing persons responsible for public release of the big red box menu on the morning of June 11th could remain hidden with him in the electronic shadows while the corrupt MSM 4th estate light falls on the accused “wrongdoers” Sattler Akerman Tim and Juliar the anti-misogynist. Don’t the fabricated “polls” prove that the PM was guilty of the worst offenses to a few bullies in blue ties and those control freaks ready to molest women with their intrusions into their reproductive rights and sexual preferences?
This post originated as an enquiry into the blatant falsehood of the Stirton Poll. That poll was fabricated with intent to minimize damage to Sir Anthony from his campaign team’s rabid knee-jerk reaction to the PM’s speech to Women for Gillard - afraid that his lifelong cowardly weakness of using violence and forceful intimidation to compel women in authority to accommodate his demands – hoping that weakness would not be exposed yet again as it must again and again and again here and everywhere in the next eighty nine days.
Freedom of speech is so precious especially at times like these. The fifth estate is a place where independent individuals can exercise freedom of speech denied elsewhere and that is why it is unwise to attempt to impose limitations on free expression here.
In response to Joe Kidd’s unsupported and devious allegation of “obsession with polls”, Bob used the line:
“I am beginning to think you (Joe Kidd) are a devious, lying cunt.”
Although it is my opinion that it would be even more effective for us all who come here to be encouraging everyone we know to join us in shouting from the rooftops
“Tony Abbott is a devious lying cunt”
….I have to accept that some people might be offended by the word “cunt” of “dick” but the offensiveness of the devious lying cunt Abbott becoming the Head of Government of Australia is far worse a prospect.
I too suspect that Joe Kidd might be a devious lying cunt but that use of the term in no way is intended to be interpreted as relating in any way to any woman only to Joe Kidd and the dickhead Tony Abbott.
I lived in Tucson Arizona where the movie Joe Kidd was shot and the Tucson Mountains that surround the Old Tucson movie set were one of my favoured natural sanctuaries among the Saguaros – the sacred Warrior’s Canyon was where I procured a spear head shaped piece of rock I offered as a talisman to my 12 year old part Cherokee son when he was recovering from brain surgery at Tucson Medical Center to remove a tumour from an optic nerve – depriving him of vision in that eye.
Who are you really - Joe Kidd?
Table Talk really is not the place for anyone who might be offended by the use of any ordinary language like cunt or dickhead and if it comes to a choice between recommending that such people deprive themselves of access to the genius available here OR requesting that Bob impose limitations on use of the line:
Tony Abbott is a devious lying cunt
….then freedom of speech is too important to sacrifice and the visitors who are offended remain free to go to other blogs – I recommend the moderate progressive political blog - The Political Sword - for those who are offended by Bob’s use of the word cunt. That way all our liberties are reinforced and the devious lying cunt Abbott can be targeted and vigorously exposed every day in every way we are capable of.
The time has come for use of the fifth estate to organize to ensure Abbott is exposed and eradicated from the House of Representatives – the people of Warringah like the people of Bennelong in 2007, are the ones who will be charged with installing their representative on September 14th, 2013. Maxine McKew disposed of Howard. We can dispose of Abbott the same way using this medium.
Malcolm, I don’t usually use the word c**t, because my good mum never allowed us to say the Finnish equivalent ‘vittu’ (sorry mum)…
But I have to say that when these words are used in connection with Abbott, they have my blessing…(sorry mum, he would not make a good PM, OK)
(She is in heaven now, so she can’t she what I’m writing here.)
Of course I meant
“cunt” OR “dick”
not
“cunt” of “dick”
Why not then replace the vulgar word ‘cunt’ with ‘abbott’?
You could say; pardon me Madam but your abbott is showing.
In any case, one could say the abbott is the banana skin on the doorstep of our future political life.
The end will be nigh!
http://oosterman.wordpress.com/
I think it needs to be pointed out when someone is offended by an insult that is not intended for them. And the reasons why one is offended. It has been heartening to see some of the men on this blog being prepared to consider these issues.
But I would stop short of asking/cajoling a person not to say that insulting language. It is better for them to decide not to use that language themselves, after considering all of the issues.
Otherwise, unfortunate tones get introduced whereby the person feels they are being told off and they think that they are being pompously derided- that the thought police are hassling them. They resist because that kind of restraint is just doing what you’re told to do without agreeing with it.
It is better to ‘think lesser’ of them and give them the freedom to choose to say things or not. I do not want others to desist from saying ‘cunt’, just because it’s a rule being imposed on them. I would prefer that they didn’t use it for the reasons given throughout.
But it is important to bring up issues like this even though it is somewhat frustrating and tedious for all involved.
You shouldn’t have to agree with everything Bob has to say to be able to be here- being sycophantic is pretty unattractive.
There’s nothing more that I like than a good insult being thrown at the Libs et al- I don’t know, I just do. And so say all of us?
Apologies for how the paragraphs turned out.
Corrected.