CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: Readers of The Guardian are supporting war, according to this poll.

UPDATE: A persnickety reader emails with this shocking news:

When a web site invites people to participate in a “poll”, it is not actually a poll. The missing ingredient is representative sampling. In a self-selecting group, the results will be biased toward those who feel the strongest, or at least strongly enough to participate. For this reason, they cannot be deemed representative of the population as a whole. I suspect you already knew this.

You may have noticed disclaimers to this effect issued by reputable journalistic organisations engaged in such “polling”. I noticed that such a remark was omitted from your blog, but (as you have said) you are not a journalist.

Well, duh. No, unlike “journalists,” I assume that my readers aren’t idiots, and know that an online poll isn’t a scientific sampling.

I also assume that a sampling of Guardian readers, even if unscientific, is interesting when it goes in such an unexpected direction. Either (1) Guardian readers as a whole are persuaded, which isn’t implausible (I mean, if Mary McGrory is persuadable, there’s hope for anyone short of Noam Chomsky); or (2) pro-war people are so numerous and well-organized that they can flood a Guardian poll and overwhelm its natural tendency to go the other way, which is news in itself, no?

And — unlike those “journalists” you invoke — I think my readers are smart enough to figure this out on their own. But that’s where blogging differs from journalism, I guess.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The poll has swung the other way now, so I guess this has become a dog-bites-man story. Suspiciously, however, it wouldn’t let me vote.