Anti war protest in D.C.

[DVaut1]

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No Jackass

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Nice name calling. Way to bring the conversation down to your level.

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Considering I'm a self-admitted donkey at the poker table, calling me a jackass might be close to the mark.

[Roybert]

I only counted 553 people. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[Roybert]

Point taken.

[DVaut1]

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On a side note, on the news last night I heard that a poll was released saying that 68% of all Americans were now opposed to the war in Iraq. I saw the poll myself, though, and to me, it looked more like 23%. The newscaster who read the results of the poll didn't even conduct it, so he was really just guessing if the results were accurate. Plus, I'm betting he was liberal, so you know what that means ...

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But there's a bigger issue which you've ignored...and I'll say it slowly...were they any wide-angle photos of the poll? It's one thing to view a poll merely through the lens of regular camera. But those dirty, liberal hucksters in the MSM media won't show you a wide-angle poll, will they!?!?!?

I've seen polls before, and here's how I judge if the polls are scientifically meangingful: first, I establish a control. If the pollsters don't survey enough respondents to fit into some concert venue (my control) - well, using this completely arbitary and useless standard, the poll isn't valid. We all know this because we've been to concerts and seen polls and taken photos. This logic is therefore airtight.

Therefore, only 10k people were there, and the Iraq war has broad popular support. This is just a guess, but any other guess is wrong.

[Roybert]

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On a side note, on the news last night I heard that a poll was released saying that 68% of all Americans were now opposed to the war in Iraq. I saw the poll myself, though, and to me, it looked more like 23%. The newscaster who read the results of the poll didn't even conduct it, so he was really just guessing if the results were accurate. Plus, I'm betting he was liberal, so you know what that means ...

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But there's a bigger issue which you've ignored...and I'll say it slowly...were they any wide-angle photos of the poll? It's one thing to view a poll merely through the lens of regular camera. But those dirty, liberal hucksters in the MSM media won't show you a wide-angle poll, will they!?!?!?

I've seen polls before, and here's how I judge if the polls are scientifically meangingful: first, I establish a control. If the pollsters don't survey enough respondents to fit into some concert venue (my control) - well, using this completely arbitary and useless standard, the poll isn't valid. We all know this because we've been to concerts and seen polls and taken photos. This logic is therefore airtight.

Therefore, only 10k people were there, and the Iraq war has broad popular support. This is just a guess, but any other guess is wrong.

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nh, Jackass [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[jaxmike]

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So I don't see why "people who were there" are claiming they know how many people there were.

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Much better to hear from people who weren't there. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

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You are missing the point. The point is that NO ONE knows exactly how many people are in the crowd. People IN the cannot give an accurate number because they CANNOT comprehend the size while inside the crowd. The only way to measure the crowd is through aerial observations and statistics. But even then it cannot compensate for the motivation of the people for being present in DC at the time.

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If it was a march, or if the attendees had to pass through a limited number of points to get there, you can get a fairly good idea of their number by the amount of time it takes them to pass through. I believe this is how figures for marches are usually arrived at. I don't know if that was the case here.

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I think that its a combination. There are "accurate" counts by people organizing these types of events. However, these are usually exaggerated, no matter what the cause. For controlled entry events (such as concerts, sports, etc. crowd counts are easily established within a small margin of error. Without a statistical method of counting population for events such as the one in question there can be no reliable guess.

[jaxmike]

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I would rather have a quote from the Capitol Hill police, they are probably more accurate

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So long as they weren't actually there.

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Stop being an idiot please.

[jaxmike]

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The Capitol is at the other end of the mall, the Capitol police weren’t involved.

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Sorry, I thought it was held at the Capitol end of the Mall.

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National Park police would be a better source since they have primary jurisdiction, but they haven’t released any numbers yet.

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Agreed.

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The bigger issue, which Jackass is dodging is that if this was such a huge success, why are there no wide angle crowd photos? All the photos were tight “tunnel shots” or shots of speakers. This is a trick that we use when we are photographing concerts. If the crowd is small, we’ll shoot a tight shot of the band from behind the most people so you see a lot of heads in front of the stage. If the crowd is huge, we shoot the crowd from the stage or shoot wide panoramas. When the rallies for Vietnam and AIDS were in DC there were all these photos showing seas of bodies spreading out from the speaker’s platforms. These are strangely missing from this event..

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I haven't looked for photos, because I don't really care.

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As far as crowd estimations, one of the best ways is comparative analysis against a control. Ever been to an outdoor concert at a pavilion? I don’t know where you live but the largest one around here is Nissan Pavilion, it holds about 25,000 in the pavilion and on the lawn. We know this because of the number of tickets sold. If you’ve ever been up front or on stage at a large event and turned around, that’s a huge sea of humanity. So based on that, plus time spent in DC when the Mall was really packed 500K+ is where my guess (and it is a guess) of around 10,000 comes from since the crowd at the Sheehan rally would not have come close to filling Nissan.

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I believe Nissan Pavilion was called Wolf Trap, or am I thinking of a different outdoor concert venue?

I have been to Wolf Trap before, its in Gainesville (I believe). That's near where my Uncle lives now and about 40 minutes from where I used to live in Northern Va.

[elwoodblues]

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Stop being an idiot please.

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Now THAT'S rich.

[MMMMMM]

Incisive and informative article here:

"Anti-War, My Foot
The phony peaceniks who protested in Washington.
By Christopher Hitchens
Updated Monday, Sept. 26, 2005, at 11:19 AM PT

Are they really "anti-war"?

Saturday's demonstration in Washington, in favor of immediate withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq, was the product of an opportunistic alliance between two other very disparate "coalitions." Here is how the New York Times (after a front-page and an inside headline, one of them reading "Speaking Up Against War" and one of them reading "Antiwar Rallies Staged in Washington and Other Cities") described the two constituenciess of the event:

The protests were largely sponsored by two groups, the Answer Coalition, which embodies a wide range of progressive political objectives, and United for Peace and Justice, which has a more narrow, antiwar focus.

The name of the reporter on this story was Michael Janofsky. I suppose that it is possible that he has never before come across "International ANSWER," the group run by the "Worker's World" party and fronted by Ramsey Clark, which openly supports Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and the "resistance" in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Clark himself finding extra time to volunteer as attorney for the génocidaires in Rwanda. Quite a "wide range of progressive political objectives" indeed, if that's the sort of thing you like. However, a dip into any database could have furnished Janofsky with well-researched and well-written articles by David Corn and Marc Cooper—to mention only two radical left journalists—who have exposed "International ANSWER" as a front for (depending on the day of the week) fascism, Stalinism, and jihadism.

The group self-lovingly calling itself "United for Peace and Justice" is by no means "narrow" in its "antiwar focus" but rather represents a very extended alliance between the Old and the New Left, some of it honorable and some of it redolent of the World Youth Congresses that used to bring credulous priests and fellow-traveling hacks together to discuss "peace" in East Berlin or Bucharest. Just to give you an example, from one who knows the sectarian makeup of the Left very well, I can tell you that the Worker's World Party—Ramsey Clark's core outfit—is the product of a split within the Trotskyist movement. These were the ones who felt that the Trotskyist majority, in 1956, was wrong to denounce the Russian invasion of Hungary. The WWP is the direct, lineal product of that depraved rump. If the "United for Peace and Justice" lot want to sink their differences with such riffraff and mount a joint demonstration, then they invite some principled political criticism on their own account. And those who just tag along … well, they just tag along.

To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as "antiwar" when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side. Was there a single placard saying, "No to Jihad"? Of course not. Or a single placard saying, "Yes to Kurdish self-determination" or "We support Afghan women's struggle"? Don't make me laugh. And this in a week when Afghans went back to the polls, and when Iraqis were preparing to do so, under a hail of fire from those who blow up mosques and U.N. buildings, behead aid workers and journalists, proclaim fatwahs against the wrong kind of Muslim, and utter hysterical diatribes against Jews and Hindus.

Some of the leading figures in this "movement," such as George Galloway and Michael Moore, are obnoxious enough to come right out and say that they support the Baathist-jihadist alliance. Others prefer to declare their sympathy in more surreptitious fashion. The easy way to tell what's going on is this: Just listen until they start to criticize such gangsters even a little, and then wait a few seconds before the speaker says that, bad as these people are, they were invented or created by the United States. That bad, huh? (You might think that such an accusation—these thugs were cloned by the American empire for God's sake—would lead to instant condemnation. But if you thought that, gentle reader, you would be wrong.)

The two preferred metaphors are, depending on the speaker, that the Bin-Ladenists are the fish that swim in the water of Muslim discontent or the mosquitoes that rise from the swamp of Muslim discontent. (Quite often, the same images are used in the same harangue.) The "fish in the water" is an old trope, borrowed from Mao's hoary theory of guerrilla warfare and possessing a certain appeal to comrades who used to pore over the Little Red Book. The mosquitoes are somehow new and hover above the water rather than slip through it. No matter. The toxic nature of the "water" or "swamp" is always the same: American support for Israel. Thus, the existence of the Taliban regime cannot be swamplike, presumably because mosquitoes are born and not made. The huge swamp that was Saddam's Iraq has only become a swamp since 2003. The organized murder of Muslims by Muslims in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan is only a logical reaction to the summit of globalizers at Davos. The stoning and veiling of women must be a reaction to Zionism. While the attack on the World Trade Center—well, who needs reminding that chickens, or is it mosquitoes, come home to roost?

There are only two serious attempts at swamp-draining currently under way. In Afghanistan and Iraq, agonizingly difficult efforts are in train to build roads, repair hospitals, hand out ballot papers, frame constitutions, encourage newspapers and satellite dishes, and generally evolve some healthy water in which civil-society fish may swim. But in each case, from within the swamp and across the borders, the most poisonous snakes and roaches are being recruited and paid to wreck the process and plunge people back into the ooze. How nice to have a "peace" movement that is either openly on the side of the vermin, or neutral as between them and the cleanup crew, and how delightful to have a press that refers to this partisanship, or this neutrality, as "progressive.""

http://www.slate.com/id/2126913/

It pays to know who organizes your rallies. In this case, it is Stalinists.

I think the following is the most trenchant observation by Hitchens in this piece: "To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as "antiwar" when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side."

My take is that A.N.S.W.E.R. is a despicable organization. Any genuine and self-respecting anti-war activist should try to encourage others of like mind to organize their OWN rallies in the future--without the infamous A.N.S.W.E.R. conducting the ceremonies.

Comments and observations, anyone?