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WOw, Fox says George Bush was voted as one of the top villains in History by 7000 College Students. 1st was Hitler, 2nd was Osama Ben Laden, and 3rd was George Bush. He ranked worse than Stalin and Mao. SO much for the folks who said he would go down in History as a "Good Guy" and one of our best Presidents. Can we call that "Karma?"
and no one really pays any attention to these silly polls. Next year he might be voted one of the most outstanding men in America. I would love to know who took the poll and what colleges they visited. This is not to say he was a great Pres. and I really don't think many have even said he would go down as a great President, but good guy, yes, I think he really is.
and you have just shown why these polls are so phony; you don't even have the right president...
OP did not put a link in his post and HE wrote the wrong president, George Bush. The poster you quoted just responded to the faulty OP. Obviously this is a troll thread.
Most right wingers really don't understand just how despised W is outside of the US. They will gladly say that Obama has ruined America's international reputation, however.
Yep -- as an American living outside of the US, I can attest to this. W is seen as the clumsy, dangerous buffoon that he is by virtually all global citizens, conservative and liberal alike. Obama gets a pretty tepid response these days ... most have mild feelings of good will toward him. Leave it to the yahoos though to think that Obama is the one who damaged our reputation abroad. Silly cons ... leave the statecraft to us.
Anyone who votes Bush third is a fool not worth conversing with. They lack even basic intellect and reasoning and have disqualified themselves from serious debate.
What the participants were asked. They were not asked who was a villain or hero. For those asking why so and so did make the list, it was a fixed list of 40 names.
Instructions for the participants were as follows: “Below is a list of historical figures. Please rate the intensity of your positive or negative feelings about each person (on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 = extremely negative, 4 = neutral, and 7 = extremely positive), and how important you think each person is (on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 = not at all important, 4 = fairly important, and 7 = extremely important). Please rate all the people, even if you don’t know much about them.” After this instruction the list of historical figures followed.
Since this was a cultural study and not a historical study, historians were avoided.
most were collected between 2007 and 2008, but the UK sample was collected in 2010. Social science students were preferred, and specialists majoring in history were avoided. Participants with more than 33% missing values were excluded from the overall analyses (175 cases) because they were deemed to have demonstrated insufficient knowledge/interest in historical figures.
Thank you--someone else read it.
Now, take what this means from the points of view of the correspondents. Each is going to rate the 40 historical figures based on what he knows of them from where he is.
There are three general trends that will occur.
1. The most polarized ratings are going to be figures from each respondent's own national history. For instance, the most polarized scores for Sun Yat-Sen are going to be from the Chinese...and since Sun Yat-Sen is the historical "loser" for most modern Chinese, that polarization is going to trend strongly to low ratings.
2. Figures that are long-known internationally will trend according to how they are generally treated internationally. Figures known internationally as "fathers of their nations" will trend high across the board. Figures known internationally as "righters of great wrongs" -- idealists--will trend high across the board, which would cause Abraham Lincoln to rate high internationally among US presidents. Great inventors of "good things" will rate high internationally as well. Most educational programs around the world will have had little or nothing bad to say about these people. These will tend to be pushed upward. Figures that are long-known internationally as "creators of great wrongs" are going to rate low with everyone.
3. Figures that are recently in international news are also going to trend according to how they were treated in international news. The recentness of the issue makes certain that a large percentage of respondents will have a definite opinion. Here is the thing about Bush: War is considered a great evil in the world. Remember that Bush took the case for war to the UN and, his was rejected by most nations in the world. Students from those nations that rejected Bush's case--which was practically all of them--will believe, then, that a great evil was perpetrated without good cause.
So you take someone like Einstein: Internationally long-know, positively known as a great thinker, and nobody has anything bad to say about him, so he rates at the top because he has lots of positive ratings and probably zero negative ratings.
The overall list is not particularly useful. More useful are the breakouts for specific types of groups, like the Catholic-Orthodox cluster.
Apparently none of the commentators decided to read the study before commenting on it.
BTW, except for the UK sample all the other samples were taken prior to Obama becoming president which is likely why he was not included on the fixed list of historical figures.
There may be lots a reasons to be critical of the current state of education around the world, but this study isn't one of them. The commentators on Fox's Red Eye were just proving their own ignorance.
Having nothing to do with FOX, I read about the poll, and it is not only biased, but clearly conducted in a way as to equate a moral equivalency of mass murder & genocide with a so call "unjust war".
Rate Bush as a bad guy/president all you want for several reasons, but he hardly equates to a top historical villain. To compare him with the likes of Hitler/Stalin/etc. that some of these real idiot kids did is just plain absurd.
Having nothing to do with FOX, I read about the poll, and it is not only biased, but clearly conducted in a way as to equate a moral equivalency of mass murder & genocide with a so call "unjust war".
Rate Bush as a bad guy/president all you want for several reasons, but he hardly equates to a top historical villain. To compare him with the likes of Hitler/Stalin/etc. that some of these real idiot kids did is just plain absurd.
But that is not what they were doing. The point of the study was not to come up with the top villain or hero. The point was to see to what extent responses would be similar among various cultural groups.
They were asked to: Please rate the intensity of your positive or negative feelings about each person and how important you think each person.
Even if you ranked your opinions of Bush as 1 or "extremely negative" doesn't necessarily mean that you think Bush is the worst villain in world history.
Well known current figures (most of study done in 2007/2008; UK done in 2010) who most people feel negative towards are going to gravitate to the bottom of the list. Opinions of Bush in 2007/2008 were not high in the US or elsewhere in the world. That doesn't mean that people think he is a worst villain than say Mao.
Yep -- as an American living outside of the US, I can attest to this. W is seen as the clumsy, dangerous buffoon that he is by virtually all global citizens, conservative and liberal alike. Obama gets a pretty tepid response these days ... most have mild feelings of good will toward him. Leave it to the yahoos though to think that Obama is the one who damaged our reputation abroad. Silly cons ... leave the statecraft to us.
Living outside of the US hardly makes you an authority. If I drive 3 hours north to Canada, does my opinion suddenly become authoritative? But worthless as long as I stay here in Bellevue, WA?
Silly libs, leave basic logic to us.
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