Numerous polls since mid February have found that a sizeable majority of Russians support the war in Ukraine – the so-called “special military operation”. For example, in poll taken 25–27th February, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center found that 68% of respondents supported the war, compared to only 22% opposed.
It should be noted that the Russian Public Opinion Research Center is state-controlled. Yet independent organisations have documented similar levels of support. According to surveys carried out by the respected Levada Center, approval of Vladimir Putin rose sharply from 71% to 83% between early February and early March:
However, it’s still possible that support for the war is overstated. After all, respondents might be scared to reveal their true beliefs, even in ostensibly ‘anonymous’ surveys. Since the war began, Russian authorities have arrested thousands of people for taking part in public protests.
A new survey demonstrates that support for the war likely is overstated, though still very substantial. Philipp Chapkovski and Max Schaub conducted what’s called a ‘list experiment’ – a method designed to gauge public opinion on issues where people might not be willing to reveal their true beliefs. Here’s how it works.
You divide your sample in two at random: half of respondents read a list of three statements, and the other half read a list of four statements (the three original statements, plus a fourth). The fourth statement corresponds to the issue you’re interested in, while the other three correspond to different issues.
Below is an image from Chapkovski and Schaub’s survey, for illustration. Half of respondents saw the list on the left, and the other half saw the list on the right. They were asked to say how many of the statements they supported (but not which ones). Note: only the list on the left includes the statement “Actions of Russian armed forces in Ukraine”.
By compring the average number of statements selected by the two groups of respondents, the researchers were able to estimate support for the war in Ukraine without asking directly. For example, if the average in the left-hand group was 2.5, and the average in the right-hand group was 2, it could be inferred that 50% of respondents support the war.
This is more or less what the researchers found, as shown in the chart below. Note: they also included a question directly asking respondents about their support for the war, in order to estimate the degree of bias in opinion polls.
In the list experiment, support for the war was 53%, compared to 68% when asking directly. This suggests that opinion polls overstate support for the way by about 15 percentage points. But it also suggests that support for the war is substantial even after correcting for biased responding.
And note: highly educated Russians, as well as those living in urban areas, were overrepresented in Chapkovski and Schaub’s sample. Since such individuals are more liberal than average, and hence less likely to support the war, 53% constitutes a lower bound for the true level of support.
Overall, it seems that most Russians do support the war, although their level of support is somewhat overstated in opinion polls.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
When I had my own children (1990s) my mother gave me a set of Just William books she had read to me as a child in the 1960s/70s and I read them to my children. Even then (twenty years ago) I was gobsmacked by the rich language and artfully crafted sentences. Maybe one reason why they’re amending old books is to hide the decline in literacy?
The decline in literacy, numeracy, reason. A decline in education standards, knowledge bases, and the propensity to debate rationally has reduced the maturity of thought to playground taunts, devoid of substance, and nothing approaching what used to be called wisdom. The written word has survived for thousands of years as a means of imparting knowledge and mind stimulation, today it is little short of a propaganda leaflet.
Yes, I will be amazed if anyone can read at all in the future…they’ll have giant emoji texting thumbs though!!
I can’t remember how many times I’ve heard people say…(including members of my own family!!)
”Oh we didn’t read the book we watched the film!! Arghh!!
I can’t even imagine most modern children getting to grips with some of the books we did.. the wind in the willows..Alice in wonderland…takes more than a 30 second emoji..message…..no chance….!!
SPAM.
REPORTED.
What strikes me is the stark and disgusting hypocrisy that The Cult of Woke are guilty of demonstrating. For instance, which is liable to cause more damage to young minds; Roald Dahl calling the nasty women/naughty boys in his works of fiction ”fat” and ”ugly”, or the sexually explicit material ( both in text and picture format ) taught to kids in primary school these days? Which one of those examples is going to make parents exceedingly uncomfortable? I’ll wait…
Further to the double-standards and lunacy of what is permitted from the Woke Barmy Army vs literary legends in novels, we have examples such as the ‘Pride’ parade monstrosities, which basically amount to degenerate exhibitionists getting their thrills by poncing about with their bits hanging out, displaying their butt-naked, sicko selves to all and sundry, including families. I mean, we literally have men wearing masks and nothing else, but that’s OK because it’s about ”diversity” and celebrating ”inclusivity” FFS! Did the cesspits of societies just vomit their contents onto the streets of the US and Canada this month? And is this what we must expect every single year from here on in?
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1673100415913672704?cxt=HHwWgIC-wdf9hbguAAAA
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1673092408031035392?cxt=HHwWgIC-kcirgrguAAAA
An example of a teaching aid for grade 9 kids in Canada. Google tells me this is age 14-15yrs. This is beyond disgusting but carry on censoring those incredibly offensive Agatha Christie novels!
http://librarypdf.catie.ca/ATI-20000s/26124.pdf
Utterly disgusting. The way in which the cards are written in a slightly humorous way as if it’s all just a bit of innocent fun is demonic.
That would be a mighty poor demon: Not really capable of anything but constantly blathering about his latest and most disgusting oral sex adventures (And then I ate … and it was soo much fun!) in a half-joking way. Poor dull creature. Talks a bit too much about nothing worthy of anyone’s interest, though.
Your sensitivities are just completely outdated! Everything involving consumption of human execreations is FUN for all of the family. In contrast to this, Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech, from start to finish full of negro and negroes, is offensive beyond the pale. The very notion that people of different races which all don’t exist could peacefully and productively cooperate with each other already is!
That’s how you ought to see the world: Eat shit and be grateful for the experience!
[distant sound of someone vomiting at the end of tunnel]
I probably do sound like some vanilla, prudey Mary Whitehouse. Well it was Top Trumps and Uno when I was a teenager!
No interest at all in what consenting adults wish to get up to in private but these people need to stop targeting kids with inappropriate material and keep their fetishes confined to sex clubs or S&M dungeons, and naturists can keep their bloody clothes on unless they’re in a designated nudist resort or beach. Just put it away and have some self-respect!
Forced exposure to pornographic material is a form of sexual harassment, especially if it is of a nature someone wouldn’t otherwise seek out. This includes comic-strip style depictions everybody can interpret correctly and pretty graphic descriptions of such content worded in a lightheartedly-sounding way. This is not at all about commensurate a dorks doing anything, it’s about forcing gay porn onto people who didn’t ask for that, see also reproduce versus recruit. That’s something those commensurate a dorks finally need to learn: It’s also a crime when you do it and the targets are not women.
We definitely didn’t get taught this at school in the ’90s either!
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1673347118231060487?cxt=HHwWjoCwgdOV9rguAAAA
But on what grounds can one argue against the promulgation of sexual perversion?
I’m being serious.
Contraception and abortion have uncoupled sex from the danger of procreation, so there is no need for marriage or commitment or love.
And notions of morality or shame or guilt have been vanquished as religion has been swept away.
Sex has become a leisure activity, and revolting acts are, I dunno, the equivalent of dangerous sports. So now the only grounds on which we are allowed to object are health and safety grounds.
Argueing against something is fighting a losing battle in the defensive because one’s opponents control what is or isn’t the topic. It’s better to argue in favour of something one would like to see instead, eg, families with children (and grandparents). Stand up for your country and its culture and traditions instead of being reduced to an isolated, hedonistic atom always busy hunting for more moments of passing physcial pleasure. Claw meaning back from the people who want to supplant it with black friday sales.
So I am arguing in favour of family values on the grounds of historical cultural norms?
When the woke crowd reply that historical cultural norms are patriarchal and oppressive and have no place in the modern world and need to be smashed, what do I say then?
No would be a good choice.
More general, Don’t debate idiots. They’ll first drag you down to their level and then, they’ll beat you with experience.
Say that family values have thousands of years of experience and have worked well while woke values have not been proven to be effective nor true.
I couldn’t get past F.
The instructions were interesting, “Discuss what it means in a sex-positive, identity-affirming context. Do not make fun of any topics, including ones you personally do not enjoy. You may have to explain sex positive to them,”
The sexual perverts are really enjoying sticking it to the religious and the social conservative crowd.
SPAM!
Thank God I have one of the original Ian Fleming paperbacks ‘Casino Royale’. In it, Bond drinks like a fish, chats up the ladies and smokes like a trooper. I mean he smokes for Britain – sixty a day! It’s all there in its unadulterated pristine form. How long though before Bond is just into physical fitness, chats up the gents, drinks herbal tea and eats vegan burgers! Also, I hear they want to make ‘him’ into a ‘her’. Anyway, for me, Connery was Bond although Lazenby did a good take on the character. Roger Moore was just a bit too smooth.
Definitely Connery was Bond personified as was Basil Rathbone as Sherlock and Christopher Lee as Dracula. I remain steadfast on that, everyone else was just a cheap impersonation. I always found Roger Moore to be very wooden in his acting actually.
That’s being very unkind to wood
I’ve been doing this for a long time. When I find them at an affordable price, I pick up old Folio Society editions. I’ve got a lovely two-book set of Boccaccio’s The Decameron, with woodcut illustrations from the 1950s, I, Claudius, Brideshead Revisited and a number of others. I’ve got books 100 years old or more. It’s my privilege to look after them, especially to protect them in this dark age.
I had cleared a lot of my collection in the past to make space, but have been buying big sets of books again of late. With paperbacks, older editions often get bundled together, cut price, by Amazon and are worth grabbing, given you can’t trust Kindle editions not to be ‘updated’. There’s something nice about older secondhand books, though.
The cult of woke is no different from ISIS, who vandalised and destroyed so many historic buildings and artifacts. In the Middle East, they dynamited them. Here, it’s people covering up murals, rewriting classic books, throwing paint and soup at art and destroying statues. The principle is the same, though, and the ‘wokeists’ are also known to wear black masks, assault people and commit terrorist acts.
The governments of the West just don’t want to stop them. Instead, they’ve made up the myth of ‘white supremacists’ and are attacking this essentially non-existent phantom as a way of subjugating the white majority populations of their countries before clamping down on everyone else.
Good advice. If there’s any hope for the future we can do our bit by preserving our heritage in written form.
Currently working my way through all the books I inherited from my parents and stuff I bought and read as a teenager, all physical volumes on my bookshelves. That will keep me going for a good many years.
Like TV and films I cannot face anything contemporary.
Same. I invariably look for older material now. I love secondhand bookshops, particularly big old ones piled high with ageing hardbacks. I’m gutted the video distributor Network has collapsed as they were the best resource for old TV shows in the UK.
Talking Pictures is decent. They do sometimes broadcast “warnings” but they didn’t want to- they were bullied into it I think by Ofcom. I read an interview with the owners somewhere. It’s a family business.
“Im Gwine to be courtin ya bimby” ————“Why I ain’t bout to be messin with niggers as black as you is” —————–Mark Twain.—- Censoring and sweeping under carpets is for COWARDS.
State organised book burning next?
You don’t need to burn them anymore: you just delete the file and replace it with a new one.
I started collecting old books I read in my childhood and youth some time ago; and a couple of years ago I also started collecting DVDs of classic films.
When you own something, they can’t cancel or corrupt it.
Delderfield: God is an Englishman (first in the Swann trilogy). Can you imagine any company publishing a book with that title now?
Back in the 70s I read pretty-much everything Delderfield had written. I recently found The Dreaming Suburb and The Avenue Goes to War …… I’m going to have to put my mind and energy into finding the rest of his books.
Looking on the positive side, censoring historical books gives Humanities graduates something useful to do, rather than going into politics
The removal of cultural and values of the Christian west and replaced by open borders free for all requires the dismantling of the past way of thinking that started some years ago in schools and universities and the censoring of books. But there is a fight back going on against this eradication of European values and culture and leading the way are the Poles and Hungarians who are becoming a huge thorn in the side of the open border EU
I hope you are right. My sense is that the good people of eastern europe have better memories and are more accutely aware of the threat of state tyranny and the suppression of basic moral values, communities, etc.
The Eastern Europeans are favourable to the EU rather to Russia, but they still want to maintain their culture by protecting their borders. If a country cannot protect its border then it cannot protect its values and customs. Poland and Hungary plus several other countries are defying migrant quotas that the EU seek to impose on them and try to brand them as racist and Islamophobic. I applaud the people and governments of Poland and Hungary for standing up for their culture.
This really how books are banned
Movie Fahrenheit 451 coming soon?
It is available on SKY now