Idiocracy Watch

New poll results released today suggest that Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, is less popular today than the leader of Quebec’s separatist party, Gilles Duceppe.

Respondents were asked the simple question: “If an election to choose the Prime Minister were held this afternoon, who would you vote for?”

A full 50% of those polled indicated they would vote for Michael Ignatieff, the unofficial leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, who is expected to be elected leader of his party later this month at the Liberal Party Leadership Convention. Surprisingly, Harper received a 0% rating, indicating a noticeable dip in his previous polling figures.

These results agree with similar polls that have recently indicated that Canadians are favouring Ignatieff over the Conservative Party Prime Minister.

When asked to explain their choices in the poll, responses varied. One long time Alberta resident replied, “‘[I'd] rather have Prime Minister Duceppe than Prime Minister Harper – at least Duceppe doesn’t hide his agenda from the public.”

Another person and soon-to-be lawyer said, “I generally try not to vote for people who support violating the Charter and contitutional principles. I’m funny that way; I sort of think we should be respecting those things.”

Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada, who have yet to elect a member of parliament, and Jack Layton, leader of the NDP, also received more votes than Harper.

Canadians wondering whether or not they are headed into an election season might find these results telling. The Liberal leadership must be feeling confident with Ignatieff as their choice of leader. With Harper’s popularity dropping consistently, the time to call an election may be closer at hand than was thought just weeks ago.

What is clear is that the Conservative Party must be getting very nervous about their leadership. Given the heavy-handed style of governance that Harper has enacted as leader of the party, it may be only a matter of time before public cracks in the party ranks begin to show themselves in response to the lack of popularity. Conservative MPs will want to distance themselves from a leader who doesn’t seem to have the support once imagined.

The full set of poll results can be found here.

(The poll was conducted online by Idiocracy Watch, during the week of April 21-25, 2009. A fuller explanation of how online polls ought to be interpreted can also be found here.)

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Stephen Harper on the outside looking in.

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GET THE VOTE OUT!!

Today will be the last day to vote on the poll to elect the new PM of Canada. I will do the statistical analysis and send results to all leaders. And that’s a promise. 

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Stephen Harper consults his inner circle.

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For the second time now Karlheinz Schreiber has promised to tell spectacular and amazing tales of political corruption and deceit, referring to the years during which he paid former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby on behalf of defense contractors.

After watching the CBC for two days of his latest testimony in front of the Oliphant Inquiry, I am officially tagging Karlheinz Schreiber as the most boring storyteller in Canadian History, possibly ever!

True, Mulroney has admitted to receiving secret payments via envelopes stuffed in cash, and he deserves to pay the price for his actions. But as far as stories go?

Come on, Schreiber! Deliver something new and saucy. Throw in some details about secret sex parties on parliament hill. Maybe you have stories about times you and random MPs might have done blow at Studio 54 in the 70’s, and narrowly escaped the ‘feds’ in exciting car chases. You could at least throw in a little tale about, oh I don’t know, random arms dealers you know who did crazy things in far-off places? Please, anything but this constant drivel you provide–”I don’t remember.”; “Maybe.”; “Mulroney was hamstrung.”; Blah, blah, blah.

During the live coverage devoted to Schreiber’s testimony so far, Schreiber could easily have knocked off a few ripping yarns. Instead, watching Schreiber’s amazing tales ia a lot like watching Count Floyd and his Scary Stories–all hype and no substance. Yet the press is insistent on covering it all, in depth.

Many of us have experienced other such let-downs: Bre-X, Y2K, Jesus’s Perpetual 2nd Coming, Independence Day (the movie), and Star Wars Episode One. Like those, I suppose this is just another over-hyped event that I wasted some of my precious life on.

I suspect the DVD sales of his Oliphant testimony will flop, and Schreiber will be exposed not only as a boring storyteller, but as an opportunist, after which time he will be deported to face justice in far off places.

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Ignatieff makes his entrance.

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Have you lost faith in market analysts over the past months? Do you sometimes feel you’d be better off flipping coins or reading chicken entrails to determine the future of the economy than listening to what analysts have to say? We at Idiocracy Watch wonder about these very things.

The G-20 emergency meeting was a fascinating exercise in economic policy-making. If you take our leaders’ actions as an indicator, then in times of economic crisis and massive deficit spending it seems the most important thing to do as a politician is to resort to groupthink. Forget about the analysts–their opinions seem to be as valuable as a Zimbabwean dollar when it comes to medium and long term market predictions. What is most important for politicians is that no other politician is thinking outside the box that you are currently sitting in. If you find one who is outside of that box, in other words, if they are not doing what you are doing, AND if they happen to get something right…well you’re pretty much screwed!

That’s why the London meeting was so successful. Politicians are all currently in the dark as far as predicting a recovery goes, so the focus has shifted to making sure everyone is on exactly the same page. So long as they all act in exactly the same way, then not one of them can be singled out for doing anything particularly wrong. Apparently, in times of crisis, the fear of standing out in a crowd is a powerful political motivator.

Ironically, its that very same mentality that got us into this current mess in the first place. In the (only very slightly paraphrased) words of one top bank investor who made a lot of money in underwriting bad mortgages, “We knew what we were doing made no sense, and that under more rational conditions we would never lend that much money to those particular individuals, but everyone else was lending money to those very people. If everyone else is doing it, then you have to do it whether it makes sense or not.”

You tell us: What have we learned? And What precisely is the benefit of everyone thinking the same way?

Sounds to me like the slide towards an idiocracy.

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The many faces of Stephen Harper.

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So we’ve added a poll to the sidebar of the site. It’s right over there, just off to the side of our website.

Why would we do this? From a scientific point of view Web-based polling is essentially useless. The sample is unscientific and biased (they all read a particular blog, and have particular leanings specific to that blog, and are all the kinds of people who like to fill out Web-based polls), making the results impossible to generalize. The questions are ad hoc and biased. The statistics are fundamentally unsound, since Web-based polls use a straight percentage to report results. In fact, there is nothing particularly useful about the results of Web-based polling–even from the site administrator’s perspective.

Yet, anyone familiar with organizations like CNN, who use Web-based polling extensively in their daily news casting, are led to believe that there is something true in the results offered up by Web-based polling. That is most certainly not the case.

So what’s the point? Well, Web-based polls are useful as advertising gimmicks. They allow an organization to create the illusion of open participation in their online community of interested individuals. They offer a way to drive traffic to a web site that is more interesting than the straight pitch. Compare:

(A) “What do you think? Tell us online by participating in our poll..” (very exciting, no?)

(B) “Check out our website.” (booooooring.)

Of course, driving traffic to a site facilitates branding, and delivers a demographic as a means of driving advertising revenue. In the vernacular of the corporation, its a “value add“.

Here at Idiocracy Watch we don’t seek ad revenue (can you find an add on our site?), so you may be wondering why we added polls to the site?

Simple. I just get a kick out of seeing what a less-than-random bunch of individuals is motivated to click on a web page. And that’s the thing that I haven’t stressed so far. For a site like Idiocracy Watch, polls are ridiculous, but oddly compelling. They allow users to see what another group of people who are kind of like them (insofar as they visit the same site) are thinking about a particular question. Here’s a (so-so) analogy: Web-based polls are like looking around at the crowd while listening to someone spout off on top of a soapbox. I provide the content and the polls–you click a button and check out what the other bystanders were thinking about the very same thing.

The cool think about Web-based polls is that they are generally anonymous. Nobody gets to know who clicked what.

Our online polls will address questions that are biased, leading, untested and possibly offensive (in a non-charter-violating sense of the term). We will ask questions the answers to which will probably never influence policy. Sometimes you will wonder if the question was formulated while one (or both) of us was drunk. That is entirely possible.

Even so, I urge you to participate in the Idiocracy Watch polls. And I urge you not to lurk on the poll results. Instead answer the frickin’ question and only then check out the results. After all, if you want to consume random useless data, add some of your own to the pile.

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