>> On Sat, 19 Jul 2003 17:47:38 -0700, Brad DeLong
>> <delong at econ.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> Are you saying that you think that Ho Chi Minh was better than Nguyen
>>> Van Thieu, that Mao Zedong was better than Chang Kaishek, and that Kim
>>> Il Sung was better than Syngman Rhee?
>> Are you asking this as a compound question, or as three distinct issues
>> which have three different answers? For example, if you are asking if
>> someone believes that Ho Chi Minh was better than Nguyen Van Thieu _and_
>> that Mao Zedong was better than Chang Kaishek _and_ that Kim Il Sung was
>> better than Syngman Rhee, I don't think you're going to get much of an
>> answer.
>
> In all three pairs, the first members are charismatic dictators who
> believed in the abolition of markets, the collectivization of
> agriculture, and the centralization of an enormous amount of power in the
> hands of the states. In all three pairs, the second members are corrupt
> comprador politicians of one sort or another. Answers tend to go
> together.
At thr risk of sounding pedantic, I must note that you have utterly failed to answer my question, and it appears that you have missed the point of my original post. If you'd like, I would be more than happy to explicate further on the ambiguities of the grammar of your original question. I feel confident that, if you had applied simple principles of grammar, you would have been able to obtain a clear and concise answer to your query without having to add the qualifiers and explications you've offered above-- none of which, I might add, relate at all to the grave matters of grammar and syntax which I discussed earlier.
I would ask you, in the future, to reply to the points I raised, rather than bringing in these somewhat speculative and unsupported claims, i.e., "answers tend to go together." This claim indicates that you have asked similar questions in the past (i.e., the "separate" questions I outlined above) and, by careful study of the answers, the "answers tend to go together." Bot you have offered no data to support this-- in fact, given your poor use of grammar in your original question, we must presume that this hypothetical data pool of yours is derived from a poorly-designed survey-- people may not have been able to determine what question you were asking. In other words, while you claim to derive peoples' political views from the answers to your questions, your questions are so poorly worded as to be useless.
And, unless I miss your intention (certainly possible, given the above), I gather that you are trying to determine whether Mr. Perrin's replies match those of others you've asked this poorly-worded question. Again, as I've explained, this question was so poorly composed that any results from a survey using them must be discarded as useless.
I would strongly suggest that you do the following. First, you must phrase the question(s) in the manner in which I suggested, in order to reduce any potential for ambiguity or misinterpretation. Second, I would suggest that you put these questions to a variety of people from a reresentative sample of the population before drawing any conclusions about their political values. Only then could you possibly present these same questions to Mr. Perrin (or anyone else) with an intent to measure or determine his or her political values.
I trust my notes have been helpful in this regard. Again, I offer these suggestons not out of malice, but in the free and open spirit of mutual enlightenment through rational discourse.
Yours in Christ, Brian Siano