SPIEGEL ONLINE "Fixes" Its New Poll

(By Ray D.)

Big Media Hits the Reset Button...Again

Erased: Another Poll Bites the Dust

You may have noticed that SPIEGEL ONLINE's original poll asking whether visitors would favor Bush or Kerry is gone. It is quite amazing that this happened just a day after Medienkritik pointed the poll out to its visitors. The old poll has been replaced with a new "improved" poll. It has more choices, and best of all for SPON, Bush is in single digits way behind Nader. Be sure to vote on it!

+++VOTE HERE+++

(Just scroll down, make your choice: Bush, Kerry, Nader, other, I wouldn't vote; then just click "Abstimmen".)

The Results at the Time this Article was Posted

Maybe SPIEGEL ONLINE has already forgotten about its March run-in with Medienkritik and the blogosphere. Let's remind them of our presence. Go click guerilla go!

UPDATE: If you have a minute, vote on this as well.

Comments

[Scott]

Geez, in the space of about 90 seconds more than 40 votes for sKerry were registered. I've heard of fast, but...

Maybe it's only the people who vote for Bush who are being served the VOTEID cookie.

[Ray D.]

Hey Scott,

Yeah, pretty amazing. But don't lose heart. I don't think they can keep that pace up unless they are really manipulating the thing. Everybody go vote and we'll see what happens.

---Ray D.

[Hector]

Why doesn't SPON just change its name to HASS Online?

[Scott]

Speaking of funny numbers at SPON, has anyone else noticed the "interactive graphic"? They seem to have over-estimated the populations of several states that begin with U, V and W. Or did you know that the population of Washington is over 61 million?

[Mike Moore]

Who cares what the Spiegel poll says? You guys have way too much time on your hands...

[jo]

You guys have way too much time on your hands...

Relax! It's Friday afternoon!

[meister]

@scott

"They seem to have over-estimated the populations of several states that begin with U, V and W. Or did you know that the population of Washington is over 61 million?"

buy some glasses, it is 6.1 million not 61 million!

[Scott]

@meister Then they fixed it. Looks like SPON reads Medienkritk! :-)

[hm]

I smell a fish.
Bush votes don't seem to be counted, even with the cleanto.net suffix, while Kerry voter are counted.
Perhaps some foot soldier at SPON could be enticed to spill the beans?

[Lexile]

Hi,
For security reasons, after voting, please remove all cookies when closing your browser. I guess the people voting for Kerry on this poll know about this...

[Joe N.]

Lex, I'm sure they do - they're the expert at stuffing ballot boxes. It's said that there are 50000 people, mainly 'snowbirds' from NY and NJ, who will be voting twice, at home and in Florida.

Charming.

Why don't we give SPON a scare and NOT Click-Geurilla-Speilen. That would be as odd to them as actually doing it.

[Ray D.]

Hey Everyone,

Is it me or has SPON now taken the second poll offline as well? The poll is still visible and I tried to view the results and it took me to a list of other polls they have without showing me any results...

Let me know...thanks.

---Ray D.

[Downer]

@Ray D.

Yes, you are right. There is an automatic onward transfer to "Alle aktuellen SPIEGEL-ONLINE-Votes" - "All currently SPIEGEL-ONLINE-Votes".

http://www1.spiegel.de/active/vote/fcgi/vote.fcgi?voteid=2518&choice=1&x=33&y=5

[Gabi]

http://www.conceptwizard.com/ger/pipe_ger.html

Not everyone who criticized Sidney Hillman in 1944 was anti-Semitic, nor is everyone who criticizes President Bush's Jewish advisers today. But there is good reason to suspect anti-Semitism when someone focuses an adviser named Hillman (then) or Wolfowitz (now) and ignores equally influential advisers whose names do not sound Jewish. We still do not seem to have learned the lesson that the major political parties must condemn such incendiary statements and clearly disown the authors. Failure to call anti-Semitism by its name lowers the standards of acceptable discourse and wrongly treats the culprits as legitimate participants in the mainstream political culture, a status they surely do not deserve.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/print.php3?what=article&id=4309

[Sock Puppet of Doom]

Totally oftopic but... Does Hess sound jewish to you Gabi? My Great Grandmother was a jewess. I am both of German and Jewish decent. In the United States you can't tell who is or is not a Jew based on the last name. Only in tribal and racist EUrope are such things even important.

I hope I voted at SPON but since I can't read german I will never know.

[Ambrose Wolfinger]

I recall a fellow named Rudolf Hess, who was in the top five of the Nazi hierarchy until he flew to England in 1941, hoping to negotiate a peace agreement with Churchill. He was the last war criminal imprisoned in the Spandau prison in Berlin. I am quite sure he was not Jewish.

[Ray D.]

Hey,

Looks like they turned it back on. I think they shut it down overnight.

---Ray D.

[Harry in Atlanta]

While I actually do get to cast an official vote for President of the United States on Nov. 2, I have as of yet to understand the purpose of these polls in Germany that have no effect on anything whatsoever. Do the readers of SPON get some kind of emotional reward or high for participating in something so inconsequential that readers of Medienkritik mock them. It may be strange to say but I'll bet most, if not all, of these Kerry and Nader voters (I am assuming that most of Bush's votes are from the right-wing trolls, heh) actually believe that they are doing something important and worthwhile. I think they actually believe that by voting in this worthless exercise of propaganda that somehow they are either really going to effect the US election and/or they are actually participating in the election. Weird.

Anyhoo, people with this amount of delusions of granduer and narcissism should be at the minimum in therapy.

[Gabi]

The Telegraph in UK has a great article:

(Registrating is free!)

If Bush loses, the winner won't be Kerry: it will be Zarqawi
By Charles Moore
(Filed: 23/10/2004)

Earlier in the week, I was talking to a brisk, amusing, Toryish member of the Great and the Good. It had recently fallen to her to give away some prizes at a ceremony to do with helping the environment. Gripped with the desire to liven things up a bit, she said, she had dropped into her speech an aside about the "greatest human threat to the planet - Bush's re-election". There followed a moment's silence, and then a weird noise that it took her a second to recognise was tumultuous, orgasmic applause.

On the way home, she told me, she thought things over and felt uncomfortable. She did not repent of her dislike of the President of the United States, but she worried a little that people should feel so passionately, so certainly.

I think we should worry a lot. One of the criticisms thrown at George W Bush is that he is a menace because he believes that God is telling him what to do. A moral equivalence is set up, in which Osama bin Laden and Bush are presented as two sides of a fundamentalist coin. On Wednesday, a television programme tried to equate the Muslim Brotherhood, which advocates the violent destruction of all societies that do not conform to sharia law, with the American neo-conservative intellectuals who taught that people should revive their interest in Plato and the civilisation of the ancient Greeks. This is about as accurate as saying that the Nazi party and the Labour Party are the same, because both arose from the discontents of the working classes.

It is the critics themselves who are suffering from pseudo-religious certainty and superstition. Isn't there something self-righteous, slightly crazed, about directing such overwhelming anger at the man whose job it is to pick up the pieces of September 11 on behalf of the free world?

George W Bush as we see him today is a response to disorder, not its cause. Four years ago, he was the same as 99.9 per cent of Western politicians. He inherited the economic health and mental torpor of the Clinton years, when many people really had come to believe that the Western way of life was like a children's slide magically moving upwards towards ever greater pleasure and peace, in permanent defiance of the laws of political gravity. To the extent that Bush campaigned on foreign policy at all in 2000, his selling-point was that he didn't have one.

After some 2,500 Americans died in a day, he had to get one fast, so fast that he made some big mistakes. He resisted the idea of "nation-building", even as his policies of military intervention made it inevitable. Having had the maturity to choose able lieutenants, probably more intelligent than himself, in Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, he did not clearly adjudicate between their different versions of what ought to be done in post-war Iraq.

Understandably exasperated by the feeble multilateralism that had permitted genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s and hampered effective war in Kosovo, he did not see that determined unilateralism requires more, not less diplomacy. And whereas some conservative leaders resonate internationally (Margaret Thatcher was the patron saint of taxi drivers in six continents), George W Bush doesn't travel, literally or metaphorically.

But he has got the big idea. There is a global problem with Islamism. There is a problem of alliances between bad states and terror organisations that reach beyond state boundaries. There is an almost universal rottenness in the politics of the Arab world. There is an atrocious weakness or, as the UN oil-for-food scandal shows, worse than weakness, in many of the Western nations and international organisations that are supposed to help guarantee our security. And it is the duty of the most powerful nation on earth to do something about it.

The only big free country that has retained the untrammelled capacity to decide for itself has been decisive. The greatest terrorist hope about America - that it was not serious - has gone. And a huge, partly covert programme has begun to catch our foes and make us safer. It tempts fate to say it, but it is not mere chance that neither Britain nor America has suffered terrorist attack since 2001.

I don't understand what John Kerry or Jacques Chirac think should be done about terrorism. Or rather, I think they think nothing much should be done. Kerry compares terrorism to prostitution - a permanent affliction that can be mitigated, but no more. You can move a few tarts off the street, introduce more clap clinics, insist on curtains in the red light district, but in the end, the oldest profession regroups. It's a very French attitude, and it reflects a truth about human nature. But prostitutes, unlike Islamist terrorists, are not determined to destroy our way of life (in fact, they have strong conservative motives for keeping it ticking along). You can't say to Osama bin Laden, as you might to Madame Claude: "You're entitled to your little ways, but just be discreet about it, will you?" His little ways are death, our death. It's him or us.

So who gains if Bush loses? The Labour Left, of course, and the political power of the European Union, the Guardian readers who have been writing magnificently counterproductive anti-Bush letters to the voters of Clark County, Ohio, and every twerp who says with a trembling lip that Mr Bush and Mr Blair have "blood on their hands"; not to mention every corrupt, undemocratic, "pragmatic" government in the Middle East that longs for a return to stasis.

But some rather more fearsome people gain too, such as the man who said of Americans in a document discovered earlier this year "…these are the biggest cowards of the lot, and we ask God to allow us to kill, and detain them, so that we can exchange them with our arrested sheikhs and brothers". He is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and it is probably he who killed Ken Bigley. Such men believe they have already changed the government in Spain; they will claim at once that they have done the same in the United States. They will be right.

And who loses? Iraqis about to have real elections of their own for the first time, Afghans who have already voted with more than expected success, Iranians trying to assert their own democracy against its clerical corruptions. And us. What one can see in each twist of the Iraq story - don't send the US Marines into Fallujah, don't send the Black Watch to help the Americans, do give in to Ken Bigley's kidnappers - is exactly what is meant by defeatism, an actual longing to lose. Whatever you think of the war, why would you want that?

John Howard, who joined in the war, won again in Australia this month. I think that Tony Blair will do the same. And I suspect, though it is close, that George W Bush will win, too. Like them or not, all three have put themselves on the right side of a battle that has to be won.

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;sessionid=BIXGQ1CP14QIVQFIQMFCM5OAVCBQYJVC?xml=/opinion/2004/10/23/do2301.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/10/23/ixop.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=48823

[Sock Puppet of Doom]

Gabi you really, really need your own blog.

[Gabi]

Sorry for the long article but I thought it is interesting for all and you have to be registered to be able to read. David may delete it ... tomorrow.

[Gabi]

Warum vertrauen Menschen diesem Menschen und glauben, er kenne und verbreite die WAHRHEIT? Es geht um Florian Rötzel. Wenn man auf diese url geht, erscheint ein Bild und eine kurze Biographie:

http://www.deutschland.de/beirat/detail.php?d=29&lang=1

Florian Rötzer
Herausgeber Telepolis

Kurzvita:
Florian Rötzer hat nach dem Studium der Philosophie in München als freier Autor und Journalist vor allem im Bereich Medientheorie und -ästhetik gearbeitet. 1995 hat er beim Heise Verlag die Zeitschrift Telepolis mit begründet und ist dort Chefredakteur.

Kommentar:
„Die Idee von deutschland.de, ein Portal in mehreren Sprachen für wichtige Informationen, Institutionen, Organisationen von der Politik über die Kultur und die Wirtschaft bis zum Unterhaltungsbereich aufzubauen, ist ebenso sinnvoll, wie es schwierig ist, eine angemessene Strukturierung und Auswahl zu treffen.“

Ganz aktuell schreibt er über die Doofheit der Bush-Anhänger:

Bush-Anhänger zeichnen sich durch Realitätsausblendung aus

Florian Rötzer 23.10.2004

"Nach einer aktuellen Umfrage glaubt die Mehrzahl der Bush-Anhänger noch immer, dass der Irak Massenvernichtungswaffen hatte und al-Qaida unterstützte

Umfragen scheint es vor der Präsidentenwahl in den USA bald wie Sand am Meer zu geben. An ihnen lässt sich, allerdings weniger zuverlässig, die Stimmung im Lande wie das Wetter bei Wetterberichten verfolgen. Verflüssigen sich dadurch die Standpunkte und passen sich neuen Bedingungen an? Oder verhärten sich Meinungen und werden nur noch resistenter gegenüber dem, was um sie herum vorgeht? Es mag einerseits beruhigend sein, wenn die in panischer Folge veröffentlichten Umfragen vielleicht doch nur wenig Einfluss auf den Wählerwillen haben sollten. Andererseits ist höchst beunruhigend, wenn bereits festgelegte Wähler offenbar nur zu bereit sind, Wirklichkeit auszublenden und Informationen nicht zur Kenntnis zu nehmen. ..."

Herr Rötzer endet wie folgt:

"Und erschreckend ist, dass inmitten der Informationsgesellschaft oder, noch besser: der Wissensgesellschaft, in der sich die Menschen in den westlichen Ländern frei aus unterschiedlichen Quellen informieren und sich daraus eine eigene Meinung bilden könnten, gerade das Gegenteil zu geschehen scheint. Was nicht passt, wird ausgesperrt, gibt es nicht. Das ist eine schlechte Nachricht über den Zustand wahrscheinlich nicht nur der amerikanischen Politik und Mediengesellschaft, sondern auch über den Zustand der Demokratie."

Ja, genauso denke ich, wenn ich SEINE Beiträge lese. Was sagt das über ihn und seine deutschen Leser aus? Diese sich hier zeigende Arroganz und Gedanlenlosigkeit macht mich sprachlos.

Gibt es weblogs, die sich mit Telepolis auseinandersetzen? Fakten präsentieren, die dieser Mensch "aus seinen Gedanken aussperrt", damit es in sein Bild von Amerika paßt?

http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/18637/1.html

[hm]

Komisch, dieser Roetzer muss da was verwechselt haben, denn wenn von Realitätsausblendung die Rede ist, muss ich immer an Michael Moore Anhaenger denken...

[Downer]

Heute irgendwo aufgelesen:

"der washington times (also einem eher pro kerry-blatt blatt)"

Daran zeigt sich Unfähigkeit deutscher "Amerikakenner".

@Gabi

In Telepolis einen auf Argumenten basierenden Artikel zu finden, ist in etwa so wahrscheinlich, wie das Deutschland seine Engament für den Irak massiv aufstockt.

Das Bild hier sagt alles zu dem Thema:

http://images.andale.com/f2/114/104/6453215/1095648752691_Soldier.jpg

[cyllo]

@downer

"Das Bild hier sagt alles zu dem Thema:"

The picture is a fake, as you probably know. But there's an interesting bit of extra information about the mirror image of the United States flag which is "correctly displayed with the blue-backed field of stars to the upper left. (...) @downer

"Das Bild hier sagt alles zu dem Thema:"

The picture is a fake, as you know. But there's an interesting bit of extra information about the "mirror image of the United States flag which is correctly displayed with the blue-backed field of stars to the upper left. Regulations allow the flag to be displayed on the right sleeve of a soldier's uniform only if the star field is pointing to the soldier's front. The intent is that the flag should never bee seen in retreat - that is, with the star field (and presumably its wearer) facing away from battle."

http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/flagpatch.html

Wow.

[Downer]

Much funny. Thank you for the information, cyllo. But a good fake, I think.

[Gabi]

"Saddam, Gore told Clinton, must pay for trying to kill George H. W. Bush.

On the weekend of June 25-27, 1993, military retaliation followed. The Clinton administration struck hard with a volley of missiles on Baghdad. The strike killed a number of Iraqis but left Saddam in power and unscathed.

The Clinton administration did not seek U.N. approval for the strike, and some U.N. Security Council members were quite annoyed, including France’s representative, Jean-Bernard Merimee. ..."

More here about the truth that Saddam Hussein was a nice old man:

http://www.gcc.edu/news/faculty/editorials/kengor_10_19_04_unilateralstrike.htm

[Kees Rudolf]

Also hat der Florian Rötzer leider auch Philosophie studiert, zweifellos mit heissem Bemühen. Wie der jetzt denkt und schreibt! Und jetzt ist er Herausgeber der highbrow Zeitschrift Telepolis! Ein klares Beispiel davon wozu das Studium der Philosophie nützlich sein kann. Da bin ich neugierig was er so alles während seines Studiums gelesen hat.

[Mathesar]

"Diese sich hier zeigende Arroganz und Gedanlenlosigkeit macht mich sprachlos."

In der Tat, ein bemerkenswerter Artikel von Herrn Rötzer. Leider besteht halt immer das Problem, daß Personen, welche an Realitätsverlust leiden, dieses selbst nicht bemerken....sonst wäre es ja kein Realitätsverlust.