Is the U.S. evil?
The reputation of the U.S. has been taking a beating for decades now, and even more so since a lying adulterer gave up his office to a lying warmonger. Let's see if a few search engines can give us an idea of what people think...
Google gives 254 million results for good and 40.9 million results for evil, that is 86% good.
All right, but that just counts the number of pages. How about del.icio.us, pages that people actually read? 2294 results for good (Update: sorry, the link is dead) and 515 results for evil (Update: sorry, the link is dead), that is 82% good.
Interesting stuff. But in all fairness, Reddit deals a whole lot more with news, and should give a better zeitgeist than all the del.icio.us bookmarks thrown together. Counting only stories of the last month with a score over 1 (that is, at least two persons must have voted for the story) gives 2 results for good and 8 for evil, that is 20% good. Ow!
But check out those links! That's not proper news... Unfortunately, the Digg search gave no results whatsoever in the "World & business" category for these searches, even when searching a whole year, and no useful results in the other categories.
Anyway, it's a bit futile to get a semantically correct view. Reference.com's thesaurus entry for the adjective "evil" (Update: sorry, the link is dead) lists "good" among five other antonyms, for a total of six. "Good" (Update: sorry, the link is dead) has a total of 19 antonyms ("Evil" is only listed in the noun definition). So how about we test with "evil" against all the other antonyms, "moral", "righteous", "sinless", "upright", and "virtuous"?
| Site | Not evil | Evil | %Not evil |
|---|---|---|---|
| 39,600,000 | 40,900,000 | 49% | |
| del.icio.us | 242 (Update: sorry, the link is dead) | 515 | 32% |
| 7 | 8 | 47% |
In plain words, web pages, and bookmarked ones in particular, look a whole lot worse when looking for the "moral" antonyms of "evil", while news stories look a whole lot better. Who'da thunk? Of course, this method doesn't take into account spam and other #$@%. In any case, this seems to be a rubbish method for gauging public opinion.
No, I don't have a life right now. Thank you, and good night!
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