Pepperoni and pineapple is the perfect pizza combo.
Hot pineapple - certainly! Most likely as part of a pork skewer or shaved onto my al pastor tacos.
Or a ring BBQ’d next to a patty and then topping said patty in the sandwich.
No: only once you have added red onions does it become perfect.
Granted.
Generally, my opinion of an issue is derived without paying any attention to how many people are publicly protesting about it; so it isn’t going to be affected by whether somebody’s idiot enough to pay a crowd to do so; although the reasons protestors give may cause me to pay attention to a factor about the issue I might otherwise have not considered.
If I haven’t otherwise formed a firm opinion on a particular issue, however, my opinion may in part be affected by who is protesting about it – and that’s likely to include who is paying the protestors. Voted other, and thank you, Velocity, for the option.
I went around and around on the paid-for protesting crowd, and was leaning towards ‘other’ in that it would absolutely make me do MUCH more research into the cause, wanting to know what was buried under it to justify the outside payment.
But, after the third go around or so, I figured it would, ever so slightly make me less supportive. I mean the above means it already triggered doubts, and even if the research came up squeaky clean (I doubt) I’d still probably have lingering doubts that I missed something. So, an increased negative response, even if not directly because of the paid status.
I am deeply opinionated about most issues and would most likely not be swayed by whether or not the protesters were paid. As ParallelLines noted, it might make me seek to become more informed about the issue – and, finding out who was paying them could make a significant difference, if it was not one of the issues I could easily pidgeonhole.
I would view the protest more negatively because if they can’t raise a crowd without payment, it must not be that significant a cause.
I judge any cause on its merits. If it makes sense, needs to be done and/or is in the public interest, I support it; if not, I don’t. But that doesn’t depend in the least on whether anyone’s paid demonstrators for that cause. It would make me think less of the person who paid them, because I don’t think fake grassroots campaigns are good for democracy or public discourse, but it wouldn’t change my views on the cause itself.
i guess it depends on what we mean by “change my view.” It wouldn’t go from “pro” to “con.” But it would go from “I like this movement” to “I like this movement but I have negative feelings about the use of paid demonstrators. I don’t like that.”
Correct.
To comment a bit on my own poll:
One of the biggest advantages that corporations or well-moneyed interests have against protesters is that they can count on fatigue to eventually get the protesters to quit. The demonstrators need to make financial ends meet, get tired of standing all day, get discouraged, and the corporation just outlasts them.
I see nothing wrong, in principle, with paying protesters money so that the fatigue factor is eliminated. With a high enough daily wage, demonstrators will have no incentive to quit; indeed, they will probably hope the protest lasts as long as possible. This makes it a level playing field.
Sure, people may argue that this makes the protest insincere if the demonstrators are there partly for money rather than genuine support for the cause, but at the end of the day, a paid person holding a sign poses just as much of a beneficial nuisance as an unpaid person.
Well, in that case the corporation could pay counter-protestors to appear on the scene carrying signs supporting the corporation, making a mess of any messaging the original protestors had. If they are all just hired contractors with no skin in the game, the meaning of the protest is diminished?
Isn’t that exactly how we do election campaigns?
I just assumed they were only there for the paycheck, a much less glamorous version of a movie extra
I (briefly) dated a Pulitzer prize winner
Was it Roger Ebert? (He’s the only Pulitzer Prize winner I know.)
I and two other students once went to a Nobel Prize winner’s office (Ilya Prigogine) to get an autograph (a little strange in retrospect, but whatever) and he had some of his books on the shelf & signed them for/gave them to us.
No, he is not my type
In my re-do of the poll I was hoping that adding a request to skip it if it doesn’t apply to you in bold text would minimize the number of voters in that category. I guess it helped somewhat, since “I cannot or will not follow a simple request to skip polls that don’t apply to me” isn’t the top result at least, but I am disappointed that it’s currently the fourth highest.
As far as I’m concerned, those votes don’t count, because they have nothing to do with the question I was trying to answer with that poll. But now I have to do the work to subtract those votes from the results because so many people insist that we must have that option in every poll.
For what it’s worth, that’s not what I at least have been requesting. If the poll really doesn’t apply to me then I do just skip it; I have, for instance, no idea what’s the best movie out of 27 of which I’ve seen at most two; I’ll just skip that one, and not complain about it. It’s not every poll, but only the ones where I do have a clear opinion but there’s neither a choice for my actual opinion nor a choice for other that I object to – say ‘does your alarm go off in the morning before or after 6AM?’ when my answer is ‘it varies’.