#Probably just based on her general image rather than her policies as nobody seems to have any idea what she stands for

[the-busy-ghost]

Need a copy of that ‘One Fear’ t-shirt for the concept of Penny Mordaunt winning the Tory leadership bid

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

In a beige reception hall in a Des Moines suburb, over paper plates piled with the remains of a Monday morning continental breakfast, Sen. Bernie Sanders urged a packed house of Iowans to manifest their dreams. Imagine an America where cancer only kills you, rather than also rifling through your wallet. Visualize a future where no American child has to pay off her grandmother’s student loans. Cynicism is high and more than a quarter of us believe the American Dream is unattainable, but Sanders’s stump speech offered hope. “Everything is impossible until it’s not,” he said. The crowd went wild.

This speech was about issues but it was also a pitch for the semi-improbable Sanders campaign, itself. Before you stands a 78-year-old Jewish man, a self-described democratic socialist and an independent interloper in the Democratic Party, who is making his second try at the presidency after 30 years as a professional gadfly.

Yet here we are, five weeks later, and that same old People’s Grandpa is the candidate most likely to win a majority of delegates in the Democratic primary. Everything is impossible, after all, until it’s not. But the pundits say Sanders is risky, and the pundits are honorable men. Already, you can find headlines full of concern that even if he was viable in Iowa, Sanders won’t be able to win when it really counts. In other words: Sanders isn’t electable.

This whole concept of electability is frustrating to voters like Brooks Vander Kopsa of Granger, Iowa. Standing in the back of the crowd, he told me who is and isn’t electable makes no sense to him — but he’s not even sure it matters. “There’s all this talk about electability. ‘Oh, this person is so much more electable than that person.’ But when I look at policy and I look at track record, I don’t know who is more electable than Bernie,” he said. “So, electability. I guess I don’t know what that is.”

Is Sen. Bernie Sanders the most electable candidate? There’s no way to know.

STEPHEN MATUREN / GETTY IMAGES

Truth is, nobody does. For all the hands we’ve wrung dry over it in recent elections, electability isn’t a thing you can measure. It’s subjective, not objective — which is why Sanders isn’t the only candidate whose persona can be twisted one way to fit a narrative of unelectability, and another to tell a story of certain success. (Sen. Elizabeth Warren can attest to that.)

Political scientists study electability, but electability ain’t no science. Instead, researchers say, it’s basically a layer of ex post facto rationalization that we slather over a stack of psychological biases, media influence and self-fulfilling poll prophecies. It’s not bullshit, exactly; some people really are more likely to be elected than others. But the reasons behind it, and the ability to make assumptions based on it, well …

“[Electability] is this vague, floppy concept,” said Nichole Bauer, a professor of political communication at Louisiana State University. “We don’t know who is electable until someone is elected.”

“I’m not sure I’m who you want to talk to,” said Julie Brown of West Des Moines, arching her eyebrows and flashing the Elizabeth Warren button hidden under the flap of her canvas purse. She came to the Sanders rally with her teenage daughter, curious to understand why he was polling better than her favored candidate. As Sanders proxies worked the crowd, we huddled against a wall, talking about the ways electability and psychological biases overlap. “I think he is electable and that frustrates me,” she said. “It frustrates the female inside me. If Elizabeth Warren had had a heart attack, they would have put her six feet under.”

Determining who is electable inevitably pits candidates against each other, especially in an election year when the top priority for primary voters — by a long shot — is nominating someone who can take down the sitting president. Brown is a voter who sees “electability” as basically a reflection of whether a candidate can clear the hurdles presented by the electorate’s prejudices.

Months of talking about the primary — and wondering whether candidates will eventually win the general election — has made electability a hot buzzword of the 2020 election. But, scientists say, we’ve not put as much work into clearly establishing what it is.

When physicists suspect a thing exists, but can’t observe it directly, they start studying the stuff around it. You can’t see the particles, you can’t look at the black hole, but you can see what happens when they crash into something else. And that’s basically what political scientists have ended up doing with electability. To understand it better, researchers have looked at a couple of different kinds of social collisions: What voters like in a politician, and what those voters think other people like.

And, in that way, Julie Brown isn’t wrong about electability and bias, Bauer told me. Social scientists do use voters’ biases to understand what electability is and what it might look like.

Is former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg the most electable candidate? There’s no way to know.

MARK FELIX / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

A lot of this comes from experimental studies — contrived situations where researchers present participants with information about hypothetical candidates and ask them questions about how likeable that imaginary person is, or how much leadership ability they assume the candidate would possess. It’s not the real world, but it does tell us something. Specifically, Bauer told me, voters’ conception of who can get elected appears to be based on who has been elected in the past. “And we always think about men,” Bauer said.

For example, men generally have lower pitched voices than women — and there’s a lot of research suggesting that people are more willing to vote for somebody whose voice pitch is more, well, manly. In a 2016 paper, researchers made recordings of five men and five women speaking the same sentence: “I urge you to vote for me this November.” They played these recordings for 393 men and 411 women, all of whom were participants in the Cooperative Congressional Election Study — a nationally representative survey that’s used to track all kinds of voter behavior and opinions.

Participants were randomly assigned to listen to either five pairs of male voices or five pairs of female voices, and were asked which of each pair they’d prefer to vote for. Across the board, participants preferred to vote for the candidate with the lower-pitched voice, regardless of if that candidate was male or female. And the effect was clearer for participants over 40 — you know, the people most likely to turn out to vote.

But it’s not like someone’s voice means much when it comes to actually governing. The people who did this study of voice pitch later went back and analyzed whether the voice pitch of sitting members of Congress correlated with their legislative activity, the holding of leadership positions or their influence in setting legislative priorities. Lo and behold, having a deeper voice does not make you a better politician. Voters just apparently sorta think it does.

Is Sen. Elizabeth Warren the most electable candidate? There’s no way to know.

JEREMY HOGAN / ECHOES WIRE / BARCROFT MEDIA VIA GETTY IMAGES

Studies like this run somewhat counter to actual electoral outcomes, though, said Cindy Kam, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. Yes, studies suggest that voters hold female candidates to higher standards than their male counterparts — women who get elected to public office tend to be more qualified for the jobs they hold than men who get elected, for example. And women are significantly underrepresented in public office. But that’s not the whole story because, while biases exist, women who do run seem to do about as well as men when it comes to getting elected.

Racial bias, on the other hand, more clearly factors into outcomes of who actually wins elections, Kam and other experts said. Studies have found that white voters see black and Latino candidates as more ideologically extreme and less competent. There’s also evidence white voters resist coming out to vote for black candidates even when they share an ideology with that candidate. And black women still rely on the black electorate to win their races.

Even Barack Obama, who won the presidency, probably didn’t get the votes a similarly positioned white candidate would have. In their 2012 book “The End of Race?” political scientists Donald Kinder and Allison Dale-Riddle analyzed voter data from the 2008 presidential election. Based on party identification, you’d have expected any candidate put forth by the Democratic party that year to pull in 55.5 percent of white voters. Instead, Obama got 43.3 percent of the white vote. He won the presidency, but with lower enthusiasm and turnout among whites than a similar white candidate would likely have had, Kam said.

So it’s fair to say that our notion of electability is, at some level, related to our individual knee-jerk social biases — things like the color of a person’s skin, or the way they present their gender to the world. We take those ingredients and we make assumptions about that person. We make assumptions about what other people might think about that person. We make assumptions about what researchers want us to say when they ask about our biases. We make a stew — reactions and reactions to reactions. It’s virtually impossible to avoid bias in perceptions of electability, said Alan Abramowitz, professor of political science at Emory University. “Just about anything that affects how you feel about a candidate could affect assessment of electability,” he said.

Media narratives, in turn, often prey on these biases, which only makes them stronger. In lifting up electability as a marker of fitness, we’ve inadvertently created a system that caters to whatever our imagined lowest common denominator might be. You might want to vote for a black, female candidate, goes the narrative … but other voters are racist and sexist and so you can’t.

Because, of course, electability isn’t just about individual feelings.

When voters like Julie Brown and Brooks Vander Kopsa talk about whether Bernie Sanders is electable, they aren’t really talking about their own feelings. They’re talking about what they think other people feel, which is where polls come in.

“The average person knows a little about politics, but not a ton,” Stephen Utych, a professor of political science at Boise State University, said. And voters use polls as a source of information to fill in the gaps. “If I’m a Republican and other Republicans don’t like this person, I don’t know what it is, but there must be something wrong with them,” Utych said. We American voters really like to believe we’re independent, Kam agreed, but the reality is that we take a lot of cues from the herd.

But polls can become a bit of an ouroboros. Kam and Utych’s 2014 study found that candidates who were behind in the polls were rated less favorably by voters — and voters were less interested in seeking out information about those candidates.

The interaction of polls and media becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy, Abramowitz and Utych both said. And candidates can shift the perception of how electable they are by striking back at the media and crafting their own narratives. In a 2018 study, the share of voters who, after reading a candidate’s defense of their own electability, were willing to think the candidate could win the election more than doubled, rising from 15 percent to nearly 34 percent.

Is former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg the most electable candidate? There’s no way to know.

JEREMY HOGAN / ECHOES WIRE / BARCROFT MEDIA VIA GETTY IMAGES

This early in the election season, there’s still an opportunity to change the narrative – to grasp electability out of the jaws of defeat. And that’s the paradox that leads candidates like Sanders to spend months traversing the early primary states – breakfast to breakfast, handshake to handshake. Winning Iowa allowed Barack Obama to craft a narrative of electability around himself in 2008. Conversely, Bill Clinton lost Iowa and took second place in New Hampshire in 1992. But, from that, his campaign was able to spin a narrative of being the “comeback kid”, said Seth McKee, a professor of political science at Texas Tech University. “I think Iowa and New Hampshire matter so much in how the media portray the horse race after the votes have been cast,” he told me.

But building those narratives and harnessing those horses are dependent on the idea that voters have a good idea of what other voters want, or what other people’s deal breakers might be. And the psychology gets very tricky here. Frankly, experts said, voters aren’t great at knowing what’s going on in their own heads, let alone those of strangers.

A June 2019 Ipsos poll, for example, found that 74 percent of Democrats and Independents said they’d be comfortable voting for a female president, but only 33 percent of those same people believed their neighbors would be as open-minded.

The effect captured in that Ipsos poll is so common, social scientists use it in their research to make sure participants aren’t just blowing some woke-sounding smoke. “People aren’t stupid,” Bauer told me. If you just ask who they like as a candidate, they’ll figure out that you’re trying to see if they’re sexist. “But asking if you think they’ll win is asking if you think other people will vote for that candidate. It takes social desirability pressure off the individual.” But when polls turn up results like that, are they showing that Democrats are secretly more sexist than they let on? Are they showing Democrats are unfairly contemptuous of their fellow Americans? Maybe a little of both? It’s hard to say, but it does demonstrate how hard it is to predict electability based on what you think other people think.

Then there’s the issue that electability is not a fixed idea. What makes a candidate likable to the nation, as a whole, is in flux — tracking, experts say, with hardening partisan lines.

And voters see it, too. James Muhammad, a Californian visiting Iowa, was one of the other people I spoke to at the Sanders rally. When I asked him about electability, he just laughed. “Was Trump electable?” he said.

That’s a question academics are also asking. And it’s one that’s deeply tied up in attempts to understand what electability looks like to Democrats now. From what we can see in research on congressional races, which are more numerous, there’s something about electability that is shifting. Something fundamental.

Is former Vice President Joe Biden the most electable candidate? There’s no way to know.

SCOTT EISEN / GETTY IMAGES

“I think there is an idea in the media of a centrist, usually white, not necessarily college educated voter who is the one at play and that probably has influenced the way the media is covering it,” said Joshua Darr, a FiveThirtyEight contributor and professor of political science at Louisiana State University. That assumption of the power of the centrist voter is, to some extent, evidence based. Historically, being moderate and appealing to centrist voters was a great way to win congressional elections, Utych and Abramowitz both told me. But that’s been changing. Abramowitz’s analysis of the 2018 House elections turned up evidence that an incumbent candidate’s past voting record — whether they were more moderate or not — didn’t really make much of a difference in whether they won or lost, regardless of party. What’s more, he told me, the number of moderate members in Congress has been falling for decades. Forty-eight percent of the 95th Congress (1977-79) fell within the moderate range of ideology,1 compared to just 16 percent of the 115th Congress (2017-19), Abramowitz found.

Ideologues are elected more often than they used to be. Outsiders are elected more often, too. And the percentage of true swing voters is shrinking, Utych said. So does that mean someone like Sanders is more electable and someone like former Vice President Joe Biden is less electable? Electability here becomes a game of divining which group is more important to winning — swing voters or the partisan base. But that’s no more accurate than trying to estimate how sexist your neighbors are. “Which segment is bigger … there’s not great information on that,” Utych said. “Anything you say is just guessing.”

Even attempts to pin electability down subjectively leave you chasing your own tail, said Elizabeth Simas, a professor of political science at the University of Houston. We know from decades of research that voters have a tendency to line up their assumptions about who is electable line with the person they want to be elected. Maybe that means people just want to maintain some kind of cognitive consistency. “But it’s just always going to be impossible to parse out whether someone supports a candidate because of electability, or if a candidate is perceived as electable because they are the preferred candidate,” Simas said.

And there’s no better place to see that ambiguity than at a primary campaign rally. Skirting the edges of a cheering crowd, Brown and Vander Kopsa basically both want the same things — a candidate who cares about average people, a candidate who will be a game-changer and think outside the box. They both suspect other voters aren’t engaged or doing the research necessary to know who meets those criteria. What they don’t agree on is whether Bernie Sanders is inside the box, or out of it.

[guiltybystanders]

This was meant to be a text post, now it’s a ficlet oops

What I think Lotor will be in future seasons: Evil. (Maybe a redemption arc for his generals, but he’s still a Bad Dude.)

What my Dream Lotor™ would be: A third option (worse than the immediate freedom of Voltron, but better than continued enslavement/imperialism of Zarkon.)

(Accidentally wrote a mini fic about “what if Lotor wasn’t a completely garbage dude?” oops too bad he’s trash, if only)

Lotor, half Altean, half of the race that his father has just decided to raze to the ground, sent away to the edges of the galaxy where he sees the height of the Galra’s cruelty in conquest. (The Galrans rage for their home destroyed, seemingly hacked apart by Voltron, following the orders of the Emperor they think Voltron tried to assassinate, taking out their sadness and anger on the local populations with mindless violence.) Lotor, who grows up with the soldiers sneering at him, even if he is the prince, because of his pointy ears and long, white hair. Lotor, feeling lost and angry and like he doesn’t have a place, who genuinely hates the harm Galra imperialism is doing to the universe. Lotor, who mourns the death of Altea even thought he never went there himself. Lotor, who feels an ambition growing in him, who has decided he will use the power and privilege of his birthright to tear down the very empire he was born to inherit.

Lotor finds his generals slowly. One by one, he convinces them to join his cause. First was Acxa. Sentinels bring her in, having caught her stealing supplies from the base. She struggles against their grip, despite her injuries. She spits at his face when they say his name. Her family might be killed for this, and she knows it. 

“She took down three sentinels before we caught her,” they tell him. 

“Interesting,” he says. “How would you like to come work for me?” Everyone in the room protests, but none more than her.

“I’m no Galra,” she hisses at him. The supplies, his sentinels tell him, were meant for her mother, a native inhabitant of the planet.

He leans over and whispers in her ear, “Neither am I.”

Zethrid is wasted doing mindless heavy lifting on some base in the middle of nowhere. She may not be a tactician, but he’d have to be an idiot to not see her warrior spirit simmering just below the surface. 

“Who is she?” he asks the general giving him a tour.

“Her?” The general waves a dismissive hand. “Nobody. Just a halfbreed we use for menial labor.” Her nose flares and her ears twitch and she grits her teeth, but she doesn’t say anything. She can’t afford to.

“Hmmm. Interesting. Have her transferred to my ship at once.” The general splutters, face coloring at being told up by this brat, this little upstart with pointy ears and long, white hair with nothing going for him beyond his royal parentage. “Is there something wrong?” Lotor asks with a smile. “You said yourself she was easily replaceable.”

When he gets back to his ship, she’s waiting for him, strong enough to break someone in half but never given enough power to be allowed to do so. He promotes her to Sargent on the spot. Her smile, glinting back at him, is more deadly than he could ever hope to be.

No one seems to realize Narti is really the one in charge of the base. She places her hands on the backs and arms of the people making decisions and they do what she wants. No one seems to have any memory of her when he brings her up. When they scan the room, their eyes jump right over her, as if she wasn’t there. She stands in the corner and pets her cat and watches him wherever he goes. He can tell that if she wanted him gone, he’d already be off the base. He approaches her the night before they leave.

“Come with me,” he says, “and you won’t have to hide the fact that you’re the one with the power.”

She tilts her head at him, stroking her cat, and that single gesture conveys it all. It says, “Why come take orders from you when I can be in control of everything here?”

“Because,” he answers, “I’m going to destroy the Galra Empire.” She doesn’t react, but he thinks she’s considering. “Think it over. We leave tomorrow if you want in.”

He doesn’t even realize she’s on board until after they’ve broken from the atmosphere of the planet they left behind and he sees her next to Acxa, rubbing behind the ears of her cat.

Ezor is charming and sweet and funny and no one realizes she’s made off with the money of half the squadron until a varga after the fact, time she used to get far, far away from them. Though the other patrons of the bar didn’t seem very fond of her, they don’t sell her out, far too happy to see Galran soldiers lose their money. Lotor makes sure to track her down alone, lest any of his men want recompense. 

He finds her by her shadow, which she casts despite being seemingly invisible.

“Incredible,” he tells her. “What you could do with a power like that.”

“You saw what I can do with a power like this,” she says, “and you’re not getting your money back.”

“Actually, I was looking to give you more money.” She squints at him, suspicious. “I was rather hoping you would come to work for me.” 

“Are you joking? I’ve been notified by the Galra a thousand times about your gross nationalism and racial purity crap.”

“And I’m the spitting image of ‘racial purity.’” She cracks a small smile at that.

“Very sweet of you to offer, but I’m going to have to decline. People around here might not like me and my heritage very much, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to up and enslave them.”

“Ah, but my plan is to stop that very enslavement.” She cocks her head at him, motions for him to continue. “The Galra Empire needs to burn. My goal is to make it a controlled one.”

She laughs at him. “Ten out of ten delivery, though a tad too overdramatic. But you’ve piqued my interest. Go ahead and tell me your grand plan.”

With his four generals in place, other people like him, people shunted aside and ignored and abused by their nationalistic empire, they get to work. They start loosening the laws on enslaved planets, slowly but surely improving condition of living. They allow the governments of the planets they conquer to stay in place, leaving them with whispers of future alliances when Lotor’s power is more consolidated. Acxa fiddles with the wording on a document that will outlaw slavery for five months straight. Zethrid builds houses and resettles towns on the planets they land on. Narti touches the arms and backs of visiting general, plants thoughts in their heads of giving rights to their conquered lands. Ezor spies on their enemies, slipping in and out off chambers unseen, reporting back the information they need to know. Lotor fights alongside his own soldiers, protecting them and bolstering their spirits and never asking them to do something he wouldn’t do himself. He builds up their love and respect for him, until they are loyal to him, not the Galra Empire. He looks into tax policy, works on lowering the income gap between Galra citizens and winning over the common people by growing the middle class, setting it up so that when he outlaws slave labor the average Galra citizen won’t uprise over price hikes. He makes his ship a true meritocracy, burying the class distinctions his father clung to even before his transformation and allowing members of any planet to serve in his crew. 

When his father falls ill and it’s finally his time to rise to power, Lotor puts down a rebellion by quoting the tenants of his own Galran heritage, and gives a speech to the people who had pushed him aside in the past. He hears them chant his name and knows, at least for now, they’re on his side. He smirks, because he’s just been given the reins of the very system he wants so badly to destroy. He knows he must move slowly, or else his newfound power will be ripped away from him before he can do any good with it. But still, he and his generals are in place. They’ll bide their time, making small changes that will better the quality of life for the planets they’ve invaded, getting the populace on their side through taking away the inordinate power and privilege of the military elite and giving it to the people. To appease the angry traditionalists and high ranked generals he’s pissed off, he’ll kill Voltron as a symbolic act, killing the destroyer of Daibazaal and ending the justification of their war. When his power is consolidated, he’ll replace the slavery on Galra run planets with high taxes on the reinstated, autonomous local governments. Then, he’ll gradually lower the taxes, and when enough time has passed, negotiate the freedom of the colonies to be their own independent states.

This way, his way, the Galra Empire will be destroyed. It will take years, and in that time many people will die because of the unfair subjugation of the very empire he leads, but when it’s over, there will have been no more wars, no more bloodshed, and the Galra, on whatever planet they have finally decided to call home, will still be left with allies so that the average citizen, brainwashed by propaganda, will not have to suffer for his father’s sins. He may not give the immediate freedom of Voltron, paid for by sacrifice (a freedom that will probably empower the citizens of non-Galran worlds more than his own, slow way) but he won’t continue his father’s bloody, mindless quest for power either. He will chose a third option.

[austindailyglobe-blog]

Can 9 Seconds Of Video Showing Abuse Of A Dog End Any NFL Hopes For Baylor's Ishmael Zamora?

The video of former Baylor receiver Ishmael Zamora disciplining his Rottweiler is not easy to watch. Shot last June by his roommate on what appears to be a smartphone, Zamora violently swings a leash at the dog, each blow landing with an explosive smack. Then he raises his left leg and shoves the dog with his foot. As he does this, Zamora is yelling. He looks very much like a man out of control.

No one might have known about the video had a former Baylor student, Shelby Ball, not reported it later that summer to animal control authorities in Waco, Texas, as well as to the Baylor police department. “Dogs can’t speak for themselves, I felt something had to be done,” she told Waco television station KXXV. When the station aired the video that it said it obtained exclusively, the outrage was instant.

Images of Zamora were blasted over the Internet. A flood of scorn soon followed. An online petition demanding he be kicked off Baylor’s team drew 188,188 messages of support. Newspaper columnists quoted experts who said many of those who abuse animals are also prone to domestic violence, though Zamora has never been linked to another incident. The first comment on the bottom of a Breitbart.com story about the video said he should be shot, another demanded he should be castrated, still another suggested he “should have his head cut off.”

His social media accounts filled with angry comments: “Racial things,” says Zamora, who is black. Others found his email address and threatened violence so graphic and extreme it made one person who saw them wonder about the mental stability of people who could conjure such acts against another human.

Within days, Zamora’s football career was in tatters. He was charged with a Class C misdemeanor, Baylor suspended him for the first three games of last season, ordered him to undergo counseling and said he couldn’t keep a pet for one year. Later, when he declared for the NFL draft, the league’s scouting combine refused to include him based on a policy of not inviting players who have been convicted of violence, using weapons, domestic abuse or sexual violence.

Nine seconds of a video had come to define him. While it is a hard video to watch, the nine seconds are out of context and lack clarity. They raise questions. Does he actually strike the dog? Is he trying to injure the animal? Was this a regrettable moment of anger that happened to be caught on a phone or a brutal pattern of behavior finally exposed? Social media does not do nuance well and nobody likes to see a man kicking his dog. In today’s society, a viral video serves as opening statement, witness interrogation and jury deliberation all at once.

I had not heard of Zamora until the scouting combine refused to include him. Even then, I only knew of him in passing, a name attached to the more popular case of Oklahoma running back Joe Mixon, who also was not invited to the combine after a misdemeanor assault conviction for punching a woman in the head. I probably wouldn’t have given him another thought had I not spoken to Ken Herock, a former NFL general manager who runs a program preparing players for team interviews at the combine.

Herock, who describes himself as a “dog lover” and has owned the animals all his life, worked with a group that included Zamora before the combine invitations went out. Herock had seen the video in advance and was apprehensive about Zamora. But, as with all his clients, he vowed to be open-minded and met Zamora alone in a room. Instantly he was impressed. The player before him was nothing like the man on the phone screen swatting and kicking at his dog. Instead, he was humble, contrite and ashamed. The more they talked the more Herock liked him.

Asked about the incident, Zamora told Herock he was frustrated that day because his dog had gone to the bathroom on the living room floor before going upstairs and urinating on his roommate’s carpet. He said he was unsure how to discipline his Rottweiler and tried to scare it by smacking the door near the dog’s head.

“I felt bad for the kid,” Herock told me. “He was almost crying. He said: ‘I would never hurt that dog, he’s my baby.’ There was no b.s. with him. Believe me, I’ve been doing this a long time. Know when guy’s are b-sing. There was no b.s. at all with this kid.”

At the end of the session Herock wrote a report for Zamora as he does for all the players who go through his training. Among the words he wrote down were: “Smart.” “Good kid.” “I could trust him.”

“Unfortunately this is the world we live in,” Herock said. “People see one video on the Internet and they make up their mind.”

With Herock’s words in my mind, I arranged to speak with Zamora by phone. It appeared to be the first interview he had done in some time and he seemed nervous. Still, he did not duck questions or blame anyone else. He said he understood why people would watch the video and assume the worst about him. But he insisted it was not an accurate depiction of him. “The people who know me know that I am not the person I was portrayed as,” he said.

Zamora said he had always had dogs as a child in Houston and got the Rottweiler while he was at Baylor. He named the dog Guwop as a play on the mysterious nickname of hip-hop artist Gucci Mane. As he explained to Herock, he was flustered that day, unsure what to do after Guwop had twice gone to the bathroom in the space of a few minutes.

He said he did not strike Guwop directly or attempt to hurt the dog, rather aiming to hit the door beside the dog, hoping the noise would frighten his Rottweiler into not having more accidents.

“There were a lot of marks on the door after that,” he told me. “That’s why it sounded so loud [on the video].”

Zamora said he realizes that people who have seen the video are going to be skeptical of his explanation. He also admitted to kicking at his dog and he said this was wrong just as the idea of trying to discipline his dog by smacking the door with a leash was wrong too. He said he had no choice but to admit his blame and endure the criticism.

He did not say why his roommate was filming him at that moment but remembers telling the roommate he “didn’t think it was a good idea” to do so. He wasn’t aware the video had been seen anywhere else until several weeks later when someone in the Baylor football office called to say campus police wanted to talk to him.

Not long after, the vicious messages filled Zamora’s social media feeds. He did not go into detail about what people posted to his Twitter and Facebook accounts beyond what he said about them being “racial.” He said he tried to stay off the accounts and stopped posting on them.

“Where I come from and the way I was raised, this was just something I had to face,” he told me.

He said he saw the stories that suggested he could potentially commit domestic violence and seemed more upset about those than the comments on the bottom of stories or in his email.

  “I wouldn’t think of hitting a woman,” he said. “I grew up in a home of women, I wouldn’t even think of putting my hands on a woman or a child.”

When Zamora was 8, his father, a Colombian immigrant, went home for his mother’s funeral. A few days later, the elder Zamora tried to return to the United States only to be stopped by authorities who told him there was a problem with his paperwork. His status has been in limbo ever since, leaving Zamora’s mother to raise Ishmael and his siblings alone. He said her strength is part of what has given him the ability to focus on school and football, and ignore the threats and attacks on social media.

Since the incident he has taken dog obedience training where he has learned better ways to react in moments like the one last summer. The instructor showed him how to use treats as rewards for good behavior – something he does now with good results. Because he left Baylor for the draft he was able to get Guwop back and has since added another dog, a Cane Corso.

As part of his punishment Zamora received counseling from an anger expert at Baylor and he described this too as a positive experience though he never felt he had a problem with anger before.

“He showed me that if I felt something was angering me I could take myself out of the situation,” Zamora said.

I asked Zamora who he relied upon the most for support at Baylor. He quickly said the team’s former strength and conditioning coach Kaz Kazadi had been his best sounding board. Kazadi, he said, was the one who told him to admit his mistakes and take responsibility. It was Kazadi, too, who constantly instructed him to keep his focus and not look at what was being said on his social media feeds.

Kazadi raved about Zamora when I called him a few days later, calling the receiver one of the team’s most dependable and likeable players; someone who always showed up on time for training sessions and worked tirelessly to get better.

“He puts the time in and he’s very moldable,” Kazadi said. “He adapts well.”

Kazadi said Zamora should be attractive to NFL teams because he is 6-foot-4 and nimble and can fight through defenders to leap and catch passes. Just as important, Kazadi said, is that Zamora is willing to block – something many receivers hate to do.

“He’s a guy who does the dirty work,” Kazadi said.

When the subject of the video came up, Kazadi sighed. He was clearly angered by the Internet attacks made on Zamora but he spoke in a measured tone, in part because it was the way he had spoken to Zamora when they worked together.

“There’s no excuse for what he did and he didn’t provide one,” Kazadi said. “He had to take ownership of the action and he understood there would be some reaction from some people. The thing I’m really proud of is when these comments got personal he did not become an evil person because of them.

“It was a really bad time for him,” Kazadi continued. “In this day of age, a mistake on video is a mistake that will last forever.”

Zamora, whose pro day was last Wednesday, must know that by now. His nine seconds on the Internet are an uncomfortable nine seconds. No matter what he does going forward they will always exist and he will have to explain them, realizing at the same time that many people will believe those nine seconds were a window into his soul rather than a brief moment of frustration. As author Jon Ronson wrote about the public’s reaction to viral clips in his 2016 book, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed”:

“For the first time in 180 years – since the stocks and pillory were outlawed – we have the power to determine the severity of some punishments.”

To what level do Ishmael Zamora’s nine seconds of viral video rise? Do his explanations and expressions of contrition matter? He has already been judged on the Internet. Now the NFL teams who watched him run the 40-yard dash in 4.52 seconds and jump 40 inches Wednesday must decide if the video and the reaction to it will push him off their draft boards. He is not a top prospect, considered to be a seventh-round pick or more likely a free agent. He is easy to write off if the outside pressure gets too hot.

“Look he’s also not like Michael Vick, he’s not done anything like that,” one NFL team adviser said in reference to the brutal dog fighting ring operated by the former star quarterback.

Zamora might not be a huge prospect but there have been dozens of undrafted receivers who went on to have big careers. The fact he is 6-4, a quick learner, is willing to block and played in Baylor’s complex offense should interest teams. Someone will probably gamble on his potential realizing that along with Zamora’s ability to leap over defensive backs will come nine seconds that can never be deleted.

“When things happen in life how will you overcome it?” Zamora said when we talked.

He’s about to find out.

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Can 9 Seconds Of Video Showing Abuse Of A Dog End Any NFL Hopes For Baylor’s Ishmael Zamora? was originally published on Austin Daily Globe