Poll: Four in 10 Americans say they're willing to give up some civil liberties to fight terrorism

reply to post by jiggerj


I can see your side of things, but to Muslims they feel as much disdain towards fundamentalists as Christians do towards the Westboro Baptists.

I guess what that means that within all religions, there are going to be bad people, hiding behind the religion.

I remember growing up and listening to the news about the suicide bombers in Israel. I live in the U.K and I can remember having a discussion with a teacher in school and he said 'I'm just glad the I.R.A are catholics. If they were muslim, we would also be the victims of suicide bombers.'

What really grinds my gears is the fact that so called muslim clerics, brainwash youngsters into going out and making martyrs of themselves. Yet, it's not their children they are encouraging to do this, in fact if they feel that strong, why aren't they doing it themselves?

Religion should be about the brotherhood of man, looking out for each other, etc, etc. But when people see the foreign policies of the west, trying to convert them to a western lifestyle and killing innocent muslims in the name of this.This gives the clerics an opportunity to tap into the disaffected youth, promising them ridiculous claims of what lies in wait in paradise.

The only answer I can see in ending these problems is to do an about turn on foreign policy. But unfortunately, whilst we are living within a global economy, with corporations and banks dictating this policy I honestly cannot see this happening.

So, as far as that goes, Terrorism will continue, Liberties will be lost and the losers? Well that's the ordinary people who really just wanna work, earn money to support their families and make life as comfortable as possible for themselves.

You have to look at the poll in a little broader context
www.huffingtonpost.com...

By a 61 to 31 percent margin, the Time/CNN/ORC International poll found, Americans are more concerned that new anti-terrorism policies will excessively restrict civil liberties than that government will fail to enact strong, new anti-terrorism policies. A plurality of people, 49 percent, would not be willing to give up civil liberties if it were necessary to curb terrorism, compared to 40 percent who would.

I can't remember where I read this but after 9/11 over 70% of people were willing to give up more civil liberties for protection from terrorism. There were a couple of additional data points that showed this number coming down over the years and this 40% is the lowest it's been since 9/11

Is that the same 4 out of 10 supported by or working for the 'government' at the non government/taxpayers expense?

reply to post by Cobaltic1978


I agree with you on those points!!!!

So I will let you speak for me in addition to my comments to Jiggerj!

This is a reply to some of the kneejerk reactions against polls throughout this thread. Polls CAN be scientific and representative if done correctly, to assume that a poll is fallacious simply because it's a poll, is illogical. The purpose of a poll is to question a sample of the population, not the population itself, otherwise you would be utilizing a census. To get a standard bell curve from a population all you would need is 30 participants, assuming your research methods and techniques were rigorous, random, and free of bias. Thus, the sample of 606 should not be of concern.

However, what should concern you readers is the margin of error. Apparently as a whole it is 4%, and within some groups and questions as high as 8.5%. They either did not spend a lot of money for training, needed a larger sample size, or simply contained a high amount of human error, as those confidence intervals are fairly high. Secondly, the report does not describe how the phone numbers were obtained, thus I cannot assume it was through random digit production, or even a simple random sample at that, leaving me to conclude that it was not random, meaning it is not representative, which would tie into the high confidence intervals. Furthermore not everyone has access to a phone, and perhaps nowadays even less have a landline phone, this could have possibly skewed their findings. The article also made no mention of how the interviews were conducted in terms of who administered them, how many interviewers were involved, and what type of training they had, if any. There was no description of question order, warm up questions, or even any hint to the type of demographic questions they said to have asked. Lastly, some of the questions they asked were vague, leading, double-barreled, and not exhaustive. All of this leads to poor representation, not because it is a poll, but because the methods behind the poll are weak.

"Methodology"

Originally posted by seeker1963
reply to post by jiggerj

 

Glad to see you alive and kicking my friend!

I agree with you 100%

Now I must add, who is allowing this nonsense to happen in our country?

Our hands are bound by our own constitution - freedom of religion. The only way around it is to not acknowledge Islam as a religion. I'm pretty sure there is a law against inciting violence. I'm sure there are many passages in Islamic texts that do just that.

But, I know it's only a dream. Muslims will become a majority in the U.S. and other civilized countries. They will vote in clerics to public offices and install sharia law. I'm thinking it'll take about 50 years - maybe sooner, but no later. If I were to die today and come back to life a hundred years from now, I'd see that the U.S. has become an insane asylum. All women will be wearing sheets in 2113. Christians and infidels will be running for theirs lives, with most of them in prison for life. Gays will all be put down by then. Israel will be gone, with our weapons being the main force. Science will be thrown back a thousand years, or just outright forbidden.

No, I'm not coming back to see that.

A statement I found interesting from the article:

The 40% who worry that someone in their family will become a victim of terrorism is up six percentage points from a 2011 CNN poll, conducted on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.

That makes it easier to understand why 40% of the people would be willing to give up some liberties. It's natural to want to protect your family.

My question is how did we get to the point where 2 out of 5 people believe their family will be victimized by terrorism? I hate typing the initials "MSM," but could it be that their sensational coverage of a relatively few events has poisoned the American mind?