Don't let your schooling interfere with your education.
~ Pete Seeger

Friday, May 30, 2008

The Uselessness of Internet Polls

Having an interest in Barak Obama, and not that shy about my support for his candidacy, I occasionally get emails from his campaign. A hazard of careless internet exploration, I suppose. One of these was a poll that indicated it was intended to discover what issues were of most concern to me. Well, fine. I don't have much time for these things, but do want to make my opinions known, probably just because I have a lot of them and people rarely ask what they are. So I cracked open the email and dived in.

A disappointment, to say the least. The poll included a list of issues, and you pick those that are most important to you. No room for comment or explanation. So I pick national security (among others). What does that mean? The campaign knows it's important to me, but they have no idea how. I guess they'll lump my response in with someone who thinks we should increase the size of the military and seal the borders, but what I mean is that we should cut our military budget by about 75 percent, withdraw our troops from most of the rest of the world, get out of Iraq, and start an Apollo-style project to change our energy use away from fossil and bio-fuels. In other words, I suspect the poll is actually more misleading than it is useful.

How do you put that into one stupid internet poll that gives you the option of clicking on a button?

No comments:

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
~Helen Keller

Reading List for Information about Transpeople

  • Becoming a Visible Man, by Jamison Green
  • Conundrum, by Jan Morris
  • Gender Outlaw, by Kate Bornstein
  • My Husband Betty, by Helen Boyd
  • Right Side Out, by Annah Moore
  • She's Not There, by Jennifer Boylan
  • The Riddle of Gender, by Deborah Rudacille
  • Trans Liberation, by Leslie Feinberg
  • Transgender Emergence, by Arlene Istar Lev
  • Transgender Warriors, by Leslie Feinberg
  • Transition and Beyond, by Reid Vanderburgh
  • True Selves, by Mildred Brown
  • What Becomes You, by Aaron Link Raz and Hilda Raz
  • Whipping Girl, by Julia Serano

I have come into this world to see this:
the sword drop from men's hands even at the height
of their arc of anger
because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound
and it is His - the Christ's, our
Beloved's.
~Hafiz