#Public Opinion | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

groundrunner100 · 6 months

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politijohn · 5 months

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Begging to lose an election when you ignore voters this badly…

#palestine #ceasefire #free palestine #israel #joe biden #war crimes #politics #us politics #news #current events #public opinion

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lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers · 1 year

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BuT tHe PuBlIc DoNt SuPpOrT tHe StRiKeS

#uk politics #strikes #industrial action #public opinion #nurses #rmt #teachers #postal workers #bigger majorities here than the Tories ever got

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theculturedmarxist · 6 months

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#public opinion #democracy #israel palestine conflict

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feckcops · 7 months

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The public wants to save the planet – as long as it doesn’t personally inconvenience them

“Back in July, Just Stop Oil (JSO) experienced something unusual – they found they were the ones being protested. An alternative group called Just Stop Pissing People Off attempted to block Just Stop Oil from engaging in disruptive protests and interrupted their events, saying that the climate crisis is real but that JSO is distracting and alienating people. The counter-protests tell us a great deal about Britain’s contradictory attitude to the climate crisis.

“Broadly, Brits understand that the climate crisis climate change is a major problem. 65% of us are worried about the climate crisis (versus just 28% who aren’t) while the same proportion supports the government’s aim of reducing Britain’s net carbon emissions to zero by 2050 ... Eight in 10 back more tree planting, subsidies for energy-efficient homes and higher taxes for high-carbon companies. 62% would support a requirement for all energy production to come from renewable sources. But this enthusiasm has its limits.

“When asked if they would back policies that would impose limits on what they personally can do, Brits quickly turn against them. For instance, two-thirds oppose the idea of a limit on how much meat they can buy, and a majority oppose banning petrol and diesel cars ... Even though 62% of voters back the idea of requiring all energy to be renewable, just 39% want to ban new North Sea oil fields, and a mere 32% want to prohibit the sale of gas boilers ...

“The British public is not as supportive of action on the climate crisis as many environmentalists would hope. We favour general, uncontentious ideas – net zero, tree-planting, tax rises on high-carbon companies – but when asked for our opinion on a climate policy that would directly affect us personally, we baulk. This is partly due to worries about the cost of living, but it’s also about avoiding personal inconvenience.

“Just Stop Pissing Everyone Off perfectly encapsulates the British attitude to the climate crisis: sure, it’s a problem, but not ours. As Homer Simpson once asked: ‘Can’t someone else do it?’”

#just stop oil #climate activists #climate activism #activism #climate crisis #climate breakdown #climate change #climate #tree planting #home insulation #low emission zones #renewable energy #renewables #oil and gas #fossil fuels #motorists #public opinion #brits #uk

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pratchettquotes · 6 months

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"Your Ankh-Morpork soldiers aren't in a position to protect you, however."

"Sir, you are right. You could have me killed right now," said de Worde simply. "You know that. I know that. But you won't, for three reasons. The officers of Borogravia tend towards honor. Everyone says that. That's why they don't surrender. And I bleed most distressingly. And you don't need to, because everyone's interested in you! Suddenly, it's all changed!"

"Interested in us?"

"Sir, in a sense you could help a lot right now. Apparently, people back in Ankh-Morpork were amazed when...look, have you heard about what we call 'human interest,' sir?"

"No."

De Worde tried to explain. Blouse listened with his mouth open, and at the end, said:

"Have I got this right? Although many people have been killed and wounded in this wretched war, it's not been of much 'interest' to your readers? But it is now, just because of us? Because of a little skirmish in a town they've never heard of? And because of it, we're suddenly a 'plucky little country' and people are telling your newspaper that your great city should be on our side?"

"Yes, Lieutenant. We put out a second edition last night, you see."

Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment

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reasonsforhope · 7 months

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"Major AI companies are racing to build superintelligent AI — for the benefit of you and me, they say. But did they ever pause to ask whether we actually want that?

Americans, by and large, don’t want it.

That’s the upshot of a new poll shared exclusively with Vox. The poll, commissioned by the think tank AI Policy Institute and conducted by YouGov, surveyed 1,118 Americans from across the age, gender, race, and political spectrums in early September. It reveals that 63 percent of voters say regulation should aim to actively prevent AI superintelligence.

Companies like OpenAI have made it clear that superintelligent AI — a system that is smarter than humans — is exactly what they’re trying to build. They call it artificial general intelligence (AGI) and they take it for granted that AGI should exist. “Our mission,” OpenAI’s website says, “is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”

But there’s a deeply weird and seldom remarked upon fact here: It’s not at all obvious that we should want to create AGI — which, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will be the first to tell you, comes with major risks, including the risk that all of humanity gets wiped out. And yet a handful of CEOs have decided, on behalf of everyone else, that AGI should exist.

Now, the only thing that gets discussed in public debate is how to control a hypothetical superhuman intelligence — not whether we actually want it. A premise has been ceded here that arguably never should have been...

Building AGI is a deeply political move. Why aren’t we treating it that way?

...Americans have learned a thing or two from the past decade in tech, and especially from the disastrous consequences of social media. They increasingly distrust tech executives and the idea that tech progress is positive by default. And they’re questioning whether the potential benefits of AGI justify the potential costs of developing it. After all, CEOs like Altman readily proclaim that AGI may well usher in mass unemployment, break the economic system, and change the entire world order. That’s if it doesn’t render us all extinct.

In the new AI Policy Institute/YouGov poll, the "better us [to have and invent it] than China” argument was presented five different ways in five different questions. Strikingly, each time, the majority of respondents rejected the argument. For example, 67 percent of voters said we should restrict how powerful AI models can become, even though that risks making American companies fall behind China. Only 14 percent disagreed.

Naturally, with any poll about a technology that doesn’t yet exist, there’s a bit of a challenge in interpreting the responses. But what a strong majority of the American public seems to be saying here is: just because we’re worried about a foreign power getting ahead, doesn’t mean that it makes sense to unleash upon ourselves a technology we think will severely harm us.

AGI, it turns out, is just not a popular idea in America.

“As we’re asking these poll questions and getting such lopsided results, it’s honestly a little bit surprising to me to see how lopsided it is,” Daniel Colson, the executive director of the AI Policy Institute, told me. “There’s actually quite a large disconnect between a lot of the elite discourse or discourse in the labs and what the American public wants.”

-via Vox, September 19, 2023

#united states #china #ai #artificial intelligence #superintelligence #ai ethics #general ai #computer science #public opinion #science and technology #ai boom #anti ai #international politics #good news #hope

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republicansaredomesticterrorists · 6 months

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Because fascist Netanyahu killed nearly 10x as many Palestian civilians as Hamas terrorists brutally murdered Israeli civilians. Hamas and Netanyahu both need to be removed.

You can always count on right-winger Netanyahu to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The world is sick of the endless cycle of terrorism against Israelis and the resulting over-reaction from the right-wing Israelis.

ENOUGH!

#israel hamas war #public opinion #Hamas terrorists #fascist Netanyahu

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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months

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"71% of Americans say they approve of labor unions. Only 40% of Americans say they approve of Joe Biden. Unions are more popular than the president, by a long mile. In fact, the popularity of organized labor is at a 60-year high."

-Hamilton Nolan

#labor #unions #biden #public opinion

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alwaysbewoke · 2 months

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groundrunner100 · 1 month

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Damn answer limit….

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eretzyisrael · 4 months

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Last week, a representative of an Israeli social threat intelligence firm Cyabra spoke at a Knesset session about how a coordinated influence campaign from Iraq was using bots in the first days of the war to impact public opinion.

I've discussed this a little, and I spent some more time looking at the bots attacking my account.

Social media allows attackers to quickly adjust their methods to see what is working and what isn't. I'm finding that they are getting more effective at their messaging.

The ones attacking me are specifically trying to turn the Israeli public against the war. They post almost exclusively in Hebrew. They are using a few vectors for their messaging that would resonate with Israelis: attacking Netanyahu's leadership, pretending to care about the hostages, and claiming that the IDF is hiding things from the public during the war and things are going badly.

When they create new bot accounts, they will use Jewish and Israeli iconography in their profiles - lots of Israeli flags, for example.

They'll use typically Jewish and Israeli names - lots of "Levy" and "Cohen" and "Friedman"s. And there is a hierarchy - some older bot accounts that have been around for several months that aren't specifically Israeli sounding are feeding a second tier, which might have 30-150 fake followers of other bots, and then the bottom tier will only have one or two followers. Nearly all of the bottom tier accounts have been created within the past few weeks.

Often, the accounts will start off by following and retweeting actual popular Zionist accounts (including mine) to make themselves look legitimate,. and sometimes this fools real people into following them, making it a little harder to identify them.

I don't know where they get their content, but it is getting much more sophisticated every day. Here is a video that was posted by hundreds of those bots where they use humor to try to demoralize Israelis into thinking the IDF is killing hostages and being killed by Hamas because of stupidity. This one seems to have been created by an Arab account but they added Hebrew messaging.

As I mentioned last week, Iranian-linked sites are bragging that they are learning Hebrew and studying the Israeli psyche to fine tune these sorts of messages and make them appear to be truly from Israelis.

To these botmasters, Israeli dissension on how to conduct the war and anti-government protests are a godsend. It makes some of their messages look like they really could be from left-wing Israelis, and some of their material may indeed be from a fringe of Israelis. The sheer number of bots makes it appear that Israelis are far more divided.

The good news is that their attempt to use these bots to get a ceasefire or demoralize the Israeli public means that Hamas is losing, badly. But every social media user must understand how extensive and sophisticated these campaigns are to manipulate you. Tens of thousands of fake accounts, with millions of messages, is not a small scale campaign.

#bots #fake twitter accounts #fake x accounts #cyabra #public opinion #influencing public opinion

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futurebird · 8 months

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I've been looking at some polls about how various demographics view trans issues and other LGBTQ issues. The polls are nearly always framed as if the subject is evaluating what other people (those LGBTs) are doing. I wonder if responses would shift if they started with questions like:

Have you ever had an impactful bad experience resulting from not understanding or fitting into gender norms?

Have you always felt 100% aligned with your gender?

etc.

Maybe I'm projecting, but I suspect there is a lot of collective psychic trauma from fears of not performing gender correctly, and feelings of uncertainty.

This ought to make people more sympathetic to trans issues, but when the framing other-izes trans people, some people may feel a need to create distance rather than finding common ground.

Leading with "Should people like this have no rights?" implies feeling connected to "those people" could get your rights taken away.

#polls #public opinion #lgbtq #trans people #everyone on this planet is gay

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feelingbitch · 1 month

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not sure if someone posted this already but ZDF (a german news source) published this survey on friday

Question: "Israel's military operation in the Gaza strip is justified despite the high amount of civilian victims" Answers: 18% of germans agree 69% disagree 13% don't know

so the majority of germans do not support israels military actions. for comparison, back in november 50% of germans believed that israels actions were justified. in january, the support was down to 25% and now 18%, which clearly shows that israel is continuing to lose popular support in germany.

the answers regarding humanitarian aid is even clearer

Question: "Humanitarian aid for the population in the Gaza strip: Should the West apply more pressure on Israel?" Answers: 87% of germans answered yes 7% no 6% don't know

87% is a pretty massive number, especially when you consider that germany is one of the biggest supporters of israel in europe and politicians have been pushing their pro-israel stance nonstop.

please dont let yourselves become defeatist and slow down your activism now that public opinion is more on our side than ever before. this is a time to continue escalating pressure on all our governments as less and less people are willing to stand behind their decisions.

#germany #israel #palestine #survey #public opinion #i wish they had asked whether germany should stop sending weapons to israel #that wouldve been a good question to include but oh well

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sadistic-softie · 2 months

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Ok...so...because of all the people that were (or are??) fucking idolizing *him* (why???), and all the (admittedly hilarious) memes, I legitimately feel too embarrassed to admit to someone's face that I like the fucking movie. Like...l would rather tell them one of my embarrassing secrets from middle school or some shit-

#american psycho #social stuff #idolization #public opinion #im being so serious #i can't admit it out loud #legitimately #embarrassing #lol #memes #patrick bateman #please #he is not a good role model #this should be so obvious #he is literally a fucking murderer #???#idk lmao

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fieriframes · 6 months

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[Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.]

#s19e02 all things new york #guy fieri #guyfieri #diners drive-ins and dives #public opinion #opinions

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