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chibivesicle · 6 years ago

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Is Asirpa’s character trying to be too many things for GK readers?

As I have been reading GK and having a great dialogue with many other people about the series, I have had a few ideas stewing in the back of my mind. When I first started watching the anime, Asirpa was really my fav character b/c she was interesting and seemed to go against a lot of bad tropes that could be applied to her. I like strong and independent female characters, so I was glad to read about her. I started reading the manga and I really liked her character and began to have mixed feelings about how the anime had decided to depict her. I have already written about how I was disappointed in the second season of the anime here: https://chibivesicle.tumblr.com/post/181363749182/do-you-like-golden-kamuy-anime

I’ve been putting a lot of thought into how I’ve wanted to construct this argument. I’ve decided to tackle this by examining different aspects of Asirpa.

1.) Asirpa as a representative of the Hokkaido Ainu

When Asirpa is first introduced as a character in the manga, we have Sugimoto looking up at her as he thinks “An Ainu!” when they fight the bear that had not gone into hibernation and was a fallen kaumy.

She then takes him to her kotan and introduces him to her Huci, uncle Makanakkuru and her cousin Osoma. At the beginning of the manga, Asirpa is the readers guide to all things Ainu. She explains things like how her father made her menomakkiri for her. The concept of these personalized knives will come back in regards to Kironranke’s makkiri as “evidence”.

I obviously can’t speak for all other readers of the series but I perceive Asirpa’s character to be the guide to all things Ainu at the beginning of the manga. This likely was due to the fact that her character is Ainu and before the series was stable enough to not worry about being cut. Keep in mind that reader reviews and polls do make or break a manga series. I don’t think Noda was going for tons of other characters (Japanese or Ainu) at beginning to not overwhelm people.

She explains natural and weather events as well as hunting skills to Sugimoto (who really would have died many times over). For example the sudden temperature change with a drop of 30 degrees C here:

Explaining tureunpe for Sugimoto here with her Huci.

I really don’t want to dwell on this first point a whole lot. I think it is pretty clear that Asirpa is the reader’s introduction to the Hokkaido Ainu and she explains things to Sugimoto (and in turn to the reader).

What Asirpa’s character does not do, is explain racism or forced cultural assimilation. The random man from the whore house tries to threaten her by selling her into prostitution here, pointing out that she doesn’t have a tattoo yet (which were already banned by the Meiji government). Thankfully, since she is a strong female character she is able to defend herself and even gets extra comments from the girls stating that she showed the man who is the boss at that moment.

When Sugimoto and Asirpa catch Shiraishi with their modified squirrel traps, Shiraishi refuses to talk as Sugimoto questions him. This then leads Shiraishi to make the common racist remark that Asripa is a “pet” of Sugimoto’s likely in reference to the comment by Japanese that the Ainu were dogs (Ainu sounding similar to Inu (dog)).

Sugimoto is quick to attack Shiraishi’s racist remark as he physically threatens to break Shiraishi’s jaw but Asirpa simply states the following:

But other than these two early instances in the manga - most of the depictions of the Ainu are in the context that they are just doing Ainu things in the background. They live in their kotans and they are still hunting and fishing as they always have. This is clearly misleading since many of their practices were already being attacked by the government including the arrow traps but likely depending on locations this was difficult to enforce. Various info boxes in the manga report historical records of certain cultural practices still happening much past the time period when the government had already banned them.

To make a manga that would appeal to a wide audience one would have to walk a fine line of being historically accurate in regards to the terrible suffering faced by Asirpa and her community at that time and not making that the major aspect of the manga. The story is supposed to be about their quest for the gold not generations of cultural genocide. I don’t want to just ignore the historical injustices but at the same time the author is writing a story for a major reader base who likely don’t their own history in this area so . . . . yeah. I can’t tell how much of this is a result of the cultural context that the manga exists in where Japanese would not be a blunt about this topic even if many of us readers would want it to be much more upfront about these issues.

2.) Asirpa as a Leader

Throughout the manga, there are characters who have different skills and roles as leaders. In previous posts, I have used the terms large L, Leader vs small l leader. This has been my person way to distinguish between characters who have the ability to lead small groups of people vs those who have grand ideas or the gift to really inspire and lead many people for a cause that is far greater than they are.

The big L leaders that are adults in the series to date are:

Wilk/Noppera-bo/Asirpa’s father - he was a Russian Partisan, the child of a Polish political prisoner and a Sakhalin/Karafuto Ainu. His goal was to create a confederation of the different cultural groups in the Northern Far East to fight colonialism and imperialism.

Tsurumi/Hasegawa - former Japanese spy operating in Russia, turned military commander. de facto commander of the 27th. He wants to make Hokkaido an independent military state, that he is the dictator of as well as to manufacturer arms and medical supplies for WWI. He is a very charismatic leader and acts as a second father to many of the “lost” members of the 27th.

Hijikata - the not actually dead, former Vice commander of the Shinsengumi. Looking for a battle to truly fight and die in? Does he also want to establish another longer lasting Republic of Ezo? Will he take the concerns of all of the people on the island into consideration or was his relationship a marriage of convenience between him and Wilk in prison. Yet he can inspire men to follow him to death with little effort and is clearly charismatic as a leader.

Sofia - Wilk and Kiroranke’s partisan leader. Mastermind of the the assassination of the Tsar in 1881. Respected leader of Russian revolutionaries. Likely still looking to overturn the Tsarist government. Perhaps, she will shift her focus to Hokkaido now . . . .

The small l leaders that are adults in the series to date are:

Ogata - tactically astute and observant sniper formerly of the 27th and traitor to Tsurumi. Works well in tricky combat situations; e.g. Nikaido as his spotter, sniping and directing yakuza in Barato, defending against the 27th in Yubari, aiding Sugimoto against Koito, saving everyone on the mountain pass, rescuing Tanigaki in the swamp, shot out at the onsen etc. Sadly, no one takes him seriously even though he as been a good team member.

Tsukishima - the “mom” of the 27th. Tsurumi’s right hand man from Niigata, does some of his dirtiest deeds, and current leader of the small expedition team to Sakhalin/Karafuto. Tsukishima is intelligent and hardworking and knows some of his men well, for example Koito, so he was able to find underhanded ways to motivate him (those bromides of Tsurumi) but at times really struggled how to command and as a result control both Sugimoto and Tanigaki on Sakhalin.

Yulbars/Kiroranke - the only Ainu male character who was referred to as Kiroranke Nispa by Asirpa. He planned the stealing away of Asirpa at Abashiri with his cat partner in crime, Ogata. He leads the journey to Karafuto/Sakhalin with Asirpa, Shiraishi and Ogata so that Asirpa can remember the key to the gold as he educates her about her father’s past and also introduces her to Sofia. His background and skill in explosives as well as having the goal to free Sofia shows some leadership skills but made both Shiraishi and Ogata uncomfortable and ultimately neither of them trusted him but Shiraishi still cared about him as a friend.

Between these two groups of leaders, Asirpa clearly falls into the first, the big L Leader group. She throughout the story thus far has mediated and shaped the various teams and groups that she has been a part of. She respects most of the characters (she does care about Shiraishi but I worry about her copying Sugimoto’s bullying of him). With all of the Japanese male characters, she does not refer to them as Sugimoto-san or Shiraishi-san etc, she just calls them by their last names which says a lot about her personality. Only Kiroranke was spoken to with respect keeping the Nispa title, which is in part likely to the fact that Kiro was Wilk’s best friend and almost an uncle to her.

Asirpa was able to get anti-social characters like Ogata to participate in her “team building” activities and she always praised him when he assisted in hunting related things. Even if most of the other characters either stayed away from Ogata or fought with him (Sugimoto) she always treated him fairly.

I think her best example of persuasive leadership to date was with her ordering Ogata to protect Tanigaki in the swamp. Now other people will argue that Ogata didn’t do this b/c Asirpa told him to and instead will read it as an Ogata-Sugimoto conversation. But I will always see this as an order coming from Asirpa. Why? Asirpa is the one who orders Ogata to protect Tanigaki.

Ogata is in a very powerful position, he’s atop the grain silo, he’s in a very relaxed position with his body language, and he’s got his rifle at ready. Everything about this shows that Ogata is the one in the safe position. Yet, Asirpa is the one who says this. Sugimoto wouldn’t think to ask Ogata to protect Tanigaki, later even when they are looking for Anehata in the swamp, Sugimoto tells Asirpa never to order someone like Ogata to save him in a similar situation since he doesn’t trust he would nor does he think he would do it. Ogata retorts back that he needs a reason to protect him and he correctly states that Tanigaki is following them on Tsurumi’s orders.

Sugimoto fills in part of the background that Tanigaki did not kill Tamai and co as Ogata has concluded and that they were killed by a bear (set into motion by Sugimoto’s actions). I find Sugimoto’s lines to Ogata to be self-projection. At this point, Ogata has not willingly ate brains so Sugimoto thinking of an Asirpa punishment that he would not want to have but Ogata is likely not swayed by this. He later does eat reindeer brains and nods that they indeed taste like Yuk with Asirpa on Karafuto/Sakhalin.

Instead, there is a panel of a very firm looking Asirpa, she’s got a sweat drop but the entire time you can see that she’s kept eye contact with him. She also explained that Tanigaki just wanted to go back to the Matagi and was healed by his time with her Huci. Ogata does a major cat stare down at Asirpa, but he does state that his options are limited. Asirpa only breaks eye contact with Ogata after she follows his gaze to the group of Ainu men who are certain Tanigaki is the culprit, and she realizes that they need to hurry to save them.

Yet, despite his stand off with her, he ultimately saves Tanigaki just as she had requested and did not harm anyone in the process and even sacrificed his cloak and his rifle case with his decoy. That is saying a lot for a man who hides himself in the cloak and was likely already thinking about where he will get another case to cover the rifle. . .

The key point is that Asirpa was able to convince Ogata to do something and she didn’t need to manipulate him or bait him with something. He followed her orders. Flashbacks seem to indicate that Tsurumi was in part likely ordering Ogata to perform certain actions but with a reward attached, Asirpa’s lack of manipulation was likely a factor that convinced him to follow her request.

3.) Asirpa as an innocent

The cast of GK is full of grown men who are broken to varying degrees and dealing with the impact of PTSD in the first major event of what we would now call modern warfare. Sugimoto survived by fighting with a level of brutality that made him seem like a demon. Tanigaki ran away from home in a quest for revenge and as a tondouhei in the 7th fought in the war. Ogata is a man who was damaged from his very birth and somehow ended up in the 7th (we still need to know his reason for enlisting or if he was drafted). Kiroranke passed himself off as an Ainu volunteer but once his Partisan past is revealed, it shows he’s been though countless traumatic events. Tsukishima had a similar background to Ogata with a broken home and was on death row after the Sino-Japanese war. Hijikata is a ghost of the former shougante and missed his chance to die at Hakodate. All of these men have killed others and none are dealing with ways to heal, instead they’ve all thrown themselves in the hunt for the gold since many of them are good at killing. Recent events revealed that Kiro truly was attempting to acquire the gold for the future of the native peoples. However, Sugimoto is doing this for the money (and the woman he loves), Tanigaki is doing it to run away from facing his problems and revenge, Tsukishima is doing this b/c he feels likely trapped by Tsurumi, and Ogata, well, his still unclear motives changed on the the ice but a part of him likely figured he’d be good at this b/c he thinks he’d be good at it since Ogata thinks he is broken.

The entire time, Asirpa has been traveling around Hokkaido with these men who have killed and will kill again while she has kept her vow to not kill anyone in the process. Again, I’ve already pointed out that Asirpa has occasionally drawn her bow at other humans in the story making her walk a fine line. This finally comes to ahead when she accidentally shoots Ogata in the right eye. She is “saved” by Sugimoto’s quick thinking even though his scream is the event that startles her and causes her to shoot him in the first place. . . .

Sugimoto wants to keep Asirpa’s innocence in the whole situation but the longer this quest goes, the more and more chances she will have to either violate her “no kill” policy. The entire concept is hypocritical and likely we as readers are supposed to wonder how she maintains her own personal values in such a dangerous game.

There are other innocent characters in the series; Shiraishi, Inkarmat, Cikapasi, Enonoka and Ryu I guess. I mean Ryu is a dog so it is hard for him to do evil human deeds. Shiraishi, while not a morally upstanding member of society, is one of more innocent adults, he has not harmed another person and he has become loyal and dependable. Inkarmat also has not killed anyone (as far as we know) and instead thought she was acting with the best intentions for Asirpa and Wilk; but she is a trickster so her methods are similar to Shiraishi. Cikapasi is younger than Asirpa and is being forced to take care of himself and others. His encounter with Enonoka has been positive for him, he’s seen a more mature peer and she’s gently getting him to become more responsible for his own fate. I think the character growth for all of the above is that they have much easier tasks to achieve; learn to help and care for others, let go of the past and how to become more responsible.

What is different between these innocent characters and Asirpa is that no one is as driven to uphold their moral code as she is. Asirpa wants to understand who her father was, why he entrusted the gold to her, and what she will do with the “power” derived from it. Asirpa doesn’t just have to uphold her personal values, she has to do it in the context of a quest where her father designed it so that you would have to murder and skin a man to get the answer you are looking for.

Asirpa’s innocence also puts her relationships with other characters in an unequal balance. Ogata wanted to release her from the stress of being the key to the gold, Sugimoto is lying to her to protect her from the very same thing. These characters are seeing the need to protect her innocence as a reason to not be honest and straightforward with her.

4.) Asirpa as mixed race

So Asirpa is first introduced as a Hokkaido Ainu character. But very quickly it is revealed that her parents are both dead and that she has a unique appearance, where she has blue eyes - like her father. When Sugimoto first meets Hijikata, he makes a comment about how she must have some Russian blood in her background. Slowly it unfolds that Hijakata knew that Noppera-bou was not a Hokkaido Ainu, revealing to Nagakura, Ushiyama, Ienaga and Ogata that he is a Partisan fighting against the Russian government and that he likely has other comrades that are hiding among the Hokkaido Ainu [Kiroranke].

Her eye color is frequently referred to - when she first meets Inkarmat, she mentions that her eyes are just like her father’s.

All of this is linking Asirpa to her father and how her eyes are a direct physical trait to him and how she is to inherit his legacy. In chapter 73, Asirpa has her dream about her time with her father and he speaks of how she is mixed race and that this is beautiful and important. Interestingly, he refers to his blood as being different (as a Polish-Karafuto Ainu) with that of her mother a Hokkaido Ainu. The mixing of these different people resulted in her and that she will be a new woman for the future and she will lead the Ainu b/c of the strength that she has from this combination.

This is the first half of the flashback that she will finally remember as they are attempting to reach Russia with Kiroranke, Sofia, Shiraishi and Ogata. What is most important though is that Wilk is a person who saw strength through diversity and that this would be the best way to save their people from the imperial and colonial powers and the death of their cultures and absorption into these empires as minorities lacking the rights of the ruling majority.

Wilk’s link to Russia is very subtly mentioned here as Sugimoto, Shiraishi and Ogata are crossing over the Daisetsuzan mountain range. Asirpa sets up a small rodent trap and explains that it is used by a small indigenous group in Russia uses to catch squirrels.

Asirpa is a Hokkaido Ainu, there is no way she would have learned about a trapping method used by a native group in Russia from her community. Only one person would have taught her that and from the very beginning of the manga we’ve known that she was taught by her father. I wonder if this is a reference to Kiro being a Tatar who grew up on the Amur river or another group as well. . . .

All of these events are subtle clues to Wilk’s backstory and what he was hoping to achieve for the native peoples of the region.

Besides Wilk being a mixed race character, Kiroranke is another main character who is mixed race as well. When he is trying to convince Inkarmat that they are on the same “side” he states that his son are Hokkaido Ainu and therefore their causes are the same. Only much later does he explain his background as a Tatar on the Amur River with Karafuto Ainu heritage as well.

As Kiro reveals more about Wilk’s past for Asirpa, the revolutionary trio of Wilk, Kiro and Sofia emerges, a team that drew from the strength of each of their commitment to the cause as well as making a very effective team. Their team shows that women can be excellent leaders, that the unique background of each one of their lives brings out the best possible result and that they are a prime of example of diversity = strength.

Therefore, it couldn’t be any more obvious that Asirpa falls into this group where she will be a successful person and leader b/c she has the background to do so. If she just lived a simple life in her kotan, never learned to hunt, was not educated by her father she would not be a character with the ability to change things far beyond herself.

5.) Asirpa as an “idol”

As the story unfolds, the two main male characters, Sugimoto and Ogata independently figure out what her father’s plan for her future is; that she was being trained to be a populist revolutionary with a skill set to fight imperial powers through guerrilla warfare in the “frontier”.

This first comes out in chapters 136 & 137 when Sugimoto finds Wilk at Abarashi and confirms his identity by showing him her menomakkiri. Sugimoto then asks him why he set her up to be a major player for the gold.

Sugimoto wanted to avoid having the two meet since he doesn’t want Asirpa to come to terms with the fact that Wilk tattooed all of those prisoners and hid the gold and he killed his fellow Ainu comrades.

Wilk trained Asirpa from the start to become a partisan, or a Hokkaido version of a partisan at least based on the info that is revealed at this point. Wilk working with HIjikata, leads Sugimoto conclude that Wilk wants to use Asirpa the face and the leader of an Ainu independence movement and aid in the creation of an independent Hokkaido. He accuses him of setting her up to be an Ainu Joan of Arc.

Sugimoto is clearly upset with this as he sees Asirpa as a little sister and he has made it clear through his actions that at times, he feels that as an adult he gets to make decisions that are good for her even if it means withholding information or protecting her.

After Ogata shot and killed Wilk and injured Sugimoto as well, he continues to journey north under Kiro’s leadership for Asirpa to remember the key to the gold based on Wilk’s past and also the goal to break Sofia out of prison. Ogata has been observing Asirpa for a long time by this point, he immediately figured out who Asirpa was in Yubari, one of the few times he’s hand an internal dialogue.

As they travel north, Ogata has his fever dream flashback involving Yuusaku and the hypocrisy at the heart of Yuusaku’s philosophy instilled in him from their father. Asirpa and Ogata are both linked to their father’s visually by inheriting their eyes and the fact that both of their fathers had high expectations for their children. The irony is that Asirpa is supposed to become a leader like her father and up until this point she has been successful in being a leader and having the skills to lead in the future. In contrast, Ogata is the abandoned son, who likely has the skill set to be a military leader that his father so desperately wanted which was clearly lacking in Yuusaku. This leads to the awkward conversation in chapter 187 that he has with her as he loses it after she rejects him. . . What is most important about this is that unlike Sugimoto, Ogata bluntly calls out Asirpa. She has sworn that she will not kill anyone in the fight for the gold. But as their group learns more and more about Wilk’s unwavering dedication to the creation of a confederation of indigenous peoples of the far North East, it becomes clear even to Asirpa that she was trained in more than just hunting animals as any Ainu would.

Where Ogata likely gets his mental wires crossed is when he thinks that Wilk told Asirpa that she should not kill other humans. Thus, he sees Asirpa as just like Yuusaku, keeping his hands clean b/c Hanazawa told him that he alone must remain pure and not kill.

To date in the story there has been no scene or flashback where Wilk has told Asirpa that she must not kill others. As far as we know, Asirpa’s no killing policy is both an Ainu policy but also her own personal moral code. Until other evidence is revealed in the manga, I’m going with that. When she and Sugimoto first met, she made it very clear that she won’t kill in the quest for the gold and that she saved Ogata from Sugimoto b/c he promised her that he wouldn’t kill him in that instance.

Both Sugimoto and Ogata think that her father was setting her up to be an idol/martyr for the Ainu cause, but both are projecting their own problems onto her in this idol position. It is true that Wilk raised Asirpa to be a leader with an obvious partisan/revolutionary slant but he also instilled in her sense of the importance of her cultural identity and heritage and how they should preserve it against greater powers.

6.) Asirpa as a female character with agency

The cast of gk is dominated by male characters and definitely fails the Bechdel test, as Asirpa’s motivations are about her father (a man) and she is working with a man who she has a kid crush on, Sugimoto, and is interacting with very few women such as her Huci, her cousin Osoma and Inkarmat. Inkarmat only becomes involved with her b/c of a man, Wilk, so until the moment on the roof of the prison that Inkarmat realizes it is about Asirpa and not about Wilk.

The good thing is that Asirpa is a female character with agency and there are other female characters also with agency in the cast. She sees herself as a partner with Sugimoto and they have been reunited and have re-established their partnership. When Sugimoto abandoned her in Otaru, she rescued him and then punished him with the sutu.

I’ve stated in other meta that their partnership is still unequal and Sugimoto is “protecting” her by not telling her the full details but he at least isn’t treating her like a complete inferior in the partnership. But Asirpa entered this partnership viewing it as an equal so we know that her own approach to it has to do with her own involvement.

Asirpa has been able to order various adult men to do as she has asked, she gets them to pitch in to the cooking duties, saying citatap, and contributing to the team which is another remarkable skill.

This overlaps with another concept where Asirpa acts as a mother to all of these lost boys. She is always looking out for everyone and she has all of them obeying her like little chicks lined up for citatap feeding time here in chapter 119.

She has lost her family, so it is clear that one of her roles is to try to reform a family, just her family consists of a bunch of emotionally damaged Japanese war vets, a petty criminal and Inkarmat and Cikapasi to an extent. This is not exactly the best family to have but is what is happening with the people she encounters. One could write a lot more about Asirpa as a mothering character but I don’t want to dwell on that concept here.

Asirpa is not a character with agency in a vacuum, instead her decisions are being influenced by the adults around her. She was whisked away to Karafuto/Sakhalin by Kiro and Ogata to contribute to the Partisan cause but this really gave her distance from Sugimoto to realize that he was also influencing her decisions more than she was aware of which is good. The sad part is that Kiro died and she almost killed Ogata to get this perspective. In some ways this is very realistic, everyone influences each other through relationships and encounters. A good way to approach her agency is that she is almost like a child ruler. She inherited the secret to the gold and now adults are trying their best to use her for their own self interest. This in part has forced her to face issues the average kid wouldn’t have encountered at her age but this is part of the role her character is playing in the manga. I also try to remind myself that the concept of kids being immature and not little adults is a very new concept for most socieities so even though we as readers know that she is being asked to make decisions on things she shouldn’t, at the time it is less unusual. Yes, research has shown that kids and teens are different physiologically compared to adults with a lot of that in their brain development. But that was not known at the turn of the century so treating her more closely to an adult isn’t unusual or odd. Keep in mind Kiro became involved with the Partisans only a few years older than she is. . . .

Thankfully she isn’t the only female character with agency. Inkarmat wields a high amount of agency in the series, she is a drifter and uses that to her advantage. Unfortunately, she is motivated by her memories of her time with Wilk as a child and has spent too much of her adult life chasing after him or perhaps the memory of him . . . she wears his mother’s clothing and keeps using her divination to try to give her an answer about Wilk’s fate than what the facts have told her. But she does her best as a woman in a society where she lacks a lot of power to try to influence the hunt for the gold. It really is a shame that she and Kiro were unable to find something to unite them, but Tsurumi worked hard to make sure she would doubt him as much as possible.

Enonoka is another female character with agency. She is a business savy Karafuto Ainu girl who is also very good at ordering others to do things for her. She uses her knowledge of Japanese to help with this and I like that she is a strong character as well. I love the scene where she makes the deal with Koito for the use of the dogsleds and shakes his hand.

Sofia is another female character who is the leader of the Russian Partisans. I was hoping for more from her character with her introduction and brief time with Kiro, Ogata, Shiraishi and Asirpa. But she will be back, Asirpa said she would fine her when she needs to and I think that will be the case.

Last but not least, Umeko, Sugimoto’s love also is a character with agency. She chose Toraji and when Sugimoto returned, she supported Toraji and pretty much showed that she would support him not matter what happened even if Sugimoto beat his ass.

Out of all of these women, Asirpa is the woman with the most possible power and agency. This leads into my last point.

7.) Asirpa as the future.

Asirpa is supposed to represent the future of the Ainu. This is embodied in the name that Wilk gave her. She would be a new and innovative leader for her people. She was trained in the ways of hunting like a boy would have been but is a girl. Based on the previous 6 points, they all combine to make Asirpa a character who is set to inherit the “future” and the power that comes with it. She hasn’t been as damaged as the adult characters but she will be altered due to this entire experience. She is the one who ultimately is the key to finding the gold and the decision to find it will likely come down to her.

Will she fulfill her father’s goals for her? Likely not, as she learned from the journey but will continue to question if the gold is something that should be found.

So I just described many of the roles that Asirpa is playing in the manga. What does this all mean and how do I as a reader feel about this?

I think that Asirpa’s character is doing too much in the manga in the context of the story.

I don’t think it was done intentionally, but as the story developed she got more roles and events tied to her. I personally think this is a disservice to readers b/c she’s too multifaceted and I fear many readers will simplify her role as to not find all of these angles to be too confusing.

The anime took this approach - Asirpa became an Ainu girl who is super cute and is tied to a man who is a former Russian revolutionary who wanted her to have the secret to the gold to lead the Ainu.

This is something that I really have been thinking about seriously since it is hard to get a grasp of how her character is being understood in the context of this being a Japanese manga. Do Japanese readers look at Asirpa the same way that I’ve listed above? Do they see beyond the fact that she is cute? I was talking with a friend of a friend in Japan who is Japanese and he simply saw Asirpa as a cute spunky female character. Did he see her as a girl torn between her culture and the forced assimilation of her people and lost of her culture and racial discrimination? Likely not.

In dialogue with American Ainu, I have also learned that Asirpa is being used as a cute mascot for cultural tourism where her family is from in Hokkaido. It seems like a misuse of a character who is playing all of these complex roles in the manga to be reduced to a friendly cute native welcoming you to be a cultural voyeur as you eat Ainu cuisine and say “Hinna hinna.” You can visit her culture but she can’t actually practice her culture. This seems to be a quite the difference from what her character is doing within the manga.

I wonder if she makes a good icon b/c she is a cute, nonthreatening native welcoming you to enjoy her culture but not fighting back for her rights? I keep dwelling on the idea that a lot of readers in the English language fandom did not like Kiroranke’s character. Is this b/c he is a threatening man who was fighting back against the government and imperialism? What if Asirpa were actually a male character? Would a male Asirpa being fulfilling all of these roles in the manga that she is? Likely not. One part of me likes the fact that Asirpa is mixed race, this is a good thing to bring up to Japanese readers who still struggle with their own approach to mixed race people and still stick to the idea that they are a homogeneous people and nation forgetting that they have a poor history with native peoples that have been oppressively ruled by them for centuries. The other part of me would have preferred she be a normal Hokkaido Ainu and instead be linked to Wilk being a Partisan Ainu native who worked with Sofia and Kiro as a non-mixed race Karafuto Ainu. By having Asirpa, Wilk and Kiro as mixed race it still leaves non-mixed race Ainu out of the story as having less power and agency.

#golden kamuy #gk meta #asirpa #asirpa as an ainu #ainu #sugimoto saichi #wilk #kiroranke #sofia #tsurumi tokushirou #ogata hyakunosuke #inkarmat #fighting imperialism #lone female leader #girl among men

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archergabriella · 4 years ago

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Does Zoloft Cure Premature Ejaculation Top Ideas

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mathematicianadda · 5 years ago

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The Big Lock-Down Math-Off, Match 18

Welcome to the eighteenth match in this year’s Big Math-Off. Take a look at the two interesting bits of maths below, and vote for your favourite.

You can still submit pitches, and anyone can enter: instructions are in the announcement post.

Here are today’s two pitches.

Matthew Scroggs – A surprising fact about quadrilaterals

Matthew Scroggs is one of the editors of Chalkdust, a magazine for the mathematically curious, and blogs at mscroggs.co.uk. He tweets at @mscroggs.

Recently, I came across a surprising fact: if you take any quadrilateral and join the midpoints of its sides, then you will form a parallelogram.

The blue quadrilaterals are all parallelograms.

The first thing I thought when I read this was: “oooh, that’s neat.” The second thing I thought was: “why?” It’s not too difficult to show why this is true; you might like to pause here and try to work out why yourself before reading on…

To show why this is true, I started by letting $\mathbf{a}$, $\mathbf{b}$, $\mathbf{c}$ and $\mathbf{d}$ be the position vectors of the vertices of our quadrilateral. The position vectors of the midpoints of the edges are the averages of the position vectors of the two ends of the edge, as shown below.

The position vectors of the corners

The midpoints of the edges

We want to show that the orange and blue vectors below are equal (as this is true of opposite sides of a parallelogram).

We can work these vectors out: the orange vector is $$\frac{\mathbf{d}+\mathbf{a}}2-\frac{\mathbf{a}+\mathbf{b}}2=\frac{\mathbf{d}-\mathbf{b}}2,$$ and the blue vector is $$\frac{\mathbf{c}+\mathbf{d}}2-\frac{\mathbf{b}+\mathbf{c}}2=\frac{\mathbf{d}-\mathbf{b}}2.$$

In the same way, we can show that the other two vectors that make up the inner quadrilateral are equal, and so the inner quadrilateral is a parallelogram.

Going backwards

Even though I now saw why the surprising fact was true, my wondering was not over. I started to think about going backwards.

It’s easy to see that if the outer quadrilateral is a square, then the inner quadrilateral will also be a square.

If the outer quadrilateral is a square, then the inner quadrilateral is also a square.

It’s less obvious if the reverse is true: if the inner quadrilateral is a square, must the outer quadrilateral also be a square? At first, I thought this felt likely to be true, but after a bit of playing around, I found that there are many non-square quadrilaterals whose inner quadrilaterals are squares. Here are a few:

A kite, a trapezium, a delta kite, an irregular quadrilateral and a cross-quadrilateral whose innner quadrilaterals are all a square.

There are in fact infinitely many quadrilaterals whose inner quadrilataral is a square. You can explore them in this Geogebra applet by dragging around the blue point:

As you drag the point around, you may notice that you can’t get the outer quadrilateral to be a non-square rectangle (or even a non-square parallelogram). I’ll leave you to figure out why not…

Andrew Stacey – What’s the time, Mister Wolf?

Andrew Stacey writes about maths at loopspace.mathforge.org and tweets at @mathforge.

Knowing the right time can be a difficult task. At the moment, I’m having trouble remembering what day it is let alone the number of milliseconds that passed since midnight. Fortunately, computers can do these things without getting distracted. But even there the answer is not always completely obvious.

For a program I wrote recently I wanted to know the time very accurately. I was messing around with making a clock and wanted smooth transitions for the seconds counter, meaning that I needed to know the time more precisely than the nearest second.

There was a snag, however. The environment that I was using didn’t have a single clock that I could use. It had two clocks, neither of which did by itself what I wanted. One clock told me the time, but only to an accuracy of seconds. The other clock measured in milliseconds, but only told me the time elapsed from the start of the program.

Think of one as a normal clock where you can see the hours, minutes, and seconds but no more, and the other as a stopwatch that has been started at some random juncture.

My question was: How could I use these to tell the time?

Obviously, I wanted to take the hours, minutes, and seconds from the clock. Those were accurate – in fact, there is presumably a more accurate clock inside the device that I was programming which ensures that what this clock tells me is correct. It is the milliseconds that cause the difficulty.

Clearly, if I knew the value of one clock at a significant moment for the other then I could use that information to calculate the number of milliseconds in the current second. For example, if I knew the precise time – to the millisecond – that the program started then I could just use that together with the number of milliseconds since then to get the precise current time.

Or if I knew the number of milliseconds at which the clock ticks over from, say, $18:42:24$ to $18:42:25$ then I could use that marker to adjust the milliseconds to know the precise current time. If that happened, say, at $48134$ milliseconds since the program started then I know that the seconds tick over when the stopwatch reads some thousands and $134$ milliseconds, so I simply take the current millisecond reading, say $78341$, subtract $134$, $78341 – 134 = 78207$, then drop the thousands to result in the current millisecond reading, in this case of $207$.

This suggests a strategy: watch the clock and at the moment that the seconds change on the clock note the time on the stopwatch.

But there’s another snag. It’s as if I’m blinking when I look at these clocks so I don’t notice the exact moment that the seconds change. All I can do is notice that they’ve changed since the last time I looked. Admittedly, I’m “blinking” at about sixty times a second, but to get an accuracy of milliseconds then this isn’t fast enough.

It’s time (ha ha) to deploy Math.

Let $a$ denote the actual number of thousandths of a second when the clock clicks over from one second to the next. In the example above, we would have $a = 134$ (but in the program we don’t know what value this is). Every time the program blinks we note the time on the clock and the stopwatch. We are looking for a time when the seconds change on the clock. When this happens, we make special note of the time on the stopwatch and the previous reading on the stopwatch before the change. Let’s call these $b$ and $c$, with $b$ the previous reading and $c$ the current reading.

Now the actual time on the stopwatch when the clock ticked over will have been some thousands plus $a$. That is, there is some $d$ such that the time on the stopwatch was $1000d + a$. So we have the inequality:

\[ b \lt 1000d + a \le c \]

which we can rearrange to an inequality for $a$:

\[ b – 1000d \lt a \le c – 1000d\]

So when the clock ticks over we get an interval in which $a$ lies.

Every second, therefore, we get new information on where $a$ can be found. We keep a running record of our current “interval of knowledge” and when a new interval comes in then we intersect with the current interval to update it.

In the specific circumstance, our intervals are roughly $\frac{1}{60}$th of a second in width. If we assume that they are uniformly distributed, subject to the constraint that they contain $a$, then we can consider an interval of width $\frac{1}{60}$ to be determined by its lower limit which must lie in the interval $[a – \frac{1}{60}, a]$ so we can model this by a random variable uniform on that interval.

Then given a family of such $X_{i}$, our current “interval of knowledge” is found by intersecting all the intervals $[X_{i}, X_{i} + \frac{1}{60}]$. As we intersect these, the lower bound is the maximum of the lower bounds of these intervals and the upper bound is the minimum of their upper bounds. So our interval of knowledge is:

\[ \left [ \max (X_{i}), \min (X_{i}) + \frac{1}{60} \right ] \]

Its width is therefore modelled by:

\[\min (X_{i}) + \frac{1}{60} – \max (X_{i}) = \frac{1}{60} – (\max (X_{i}) – \min (X_{i})) \]

Now life is always easier if we standardise to $[0,1]$. So let us assume that $Y_{i}$ is uniform on $[0,1]$. The distribution of $\max (Y_{i})$ is $n y^{n-1}$ where $n$ is the number of readings. This comes from differentiating the cumulative distribution, starting from the fact that:

\[ P(\max (Y_{i}) \le y) = \prod P(Y_{i} \le y) = y^{n} \]

So the expected value of $\max (Y_{i})$ is:

\[ \int {0}^{1} y n y^{n-1} d y = n \int {0}^{1} y^{n} d y = \frac{n}{n+1} \]

and of $\min (Y_{i})$ is $1 – \frac{n}{n+1} = \frac{1}{n+1}$. Therefore, the expected value of $\min (Y_{i}) – \max (Y_{i}) + 1$ is

\[ \frac{1}{n+1} – \frac{n}{n+1} + 1 = \frac{1 – n + n+1}{n+1} = \frac{2}{n+1} \]

Rescaling to the $X_{i}$ simply means multiplying by $\frac{1}{60}$.

So we expect that our ignorance about $a$ to be approximately $\frac{1}{30(n+1)}$ after $n$ seconds. Since we’re reading milliseconds, we should have a good idea of $a$ when $30(n+1) \gt 1000$, or $n \gt 33$.

After half a minute, then, we should have a good idea as to where $a$ actually lies and we should then be able to get a fully accurate time, including milliseconds.

Of course, there are implementation issues. What should we do before we know $a$ accurately? And if we update our knowledge and so refine our estimate of $a$, do we change in a snap or should we change gradually? There’s also an issue of how to correctly convert our readings of $b$ and $c$ into the interval for $a$ since we have to subtract $1000d$ but don’t know what $d$ is. But these are mere technicalities.

By combining our knowledge, we’ve upgraded our seconds-accurate clock and milliseconds-accurate stopwatch to a milliseconds-accurate clock. So I can make my fancy display clock have nice transitions between the seconds.

So, which bit of maths made you say “Aha!” the loudest? Vote:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

The poll closes at 9am BST on Sunday the 17th, when the next match starts.

If you’ve been inspired to share your own bit of maths, look at the announcement post for how to send it in. The Big Lockdown Math-Off will keep running until we run out of pitches or we’re allowed outside again, whichever comes first.

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klbmsw · 5 years ago

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Just remember VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO.

The enemy is in the WH, in the GOP....

This is a table I swiped from a blog. It’s the current Trump approval/disapproval ratings from virtually all the major pollsters, effective today. Fox News, whose pollsters are independent of the cable network and legitimate (unlike their onscreen propagandists), published a poll last week that showed ALL four of the top Democratic candidates beating Trump like Ali beat Liston. Which didn’t go over well with the Ochre Ogre:

“There's something going on at Fox, I'll tell you right now. And I'm not happy with it. Fox has changed. My worst polls have always been from Fox. I think Fox is making a big mistake. Because, you know, I'm the one that calls the shots on that—on the really big debates.”

Kinda’ tells you everything, doesn’t it? Don’t publish the truth: publish only what I want you to publish, because “I’m calling the shots.” Said every tin-pot dictator in history.

Note, however, that Fox’s polling figures give Trump the fourth-best results out of a field of twenty-two pollsters. So if he thinks Fox News is out to get him, he’ll need to increase his Adderall dosage after seeing the Quinnipiac numbers. Rasmussen is where it always is, of course, giving Trump his highest approval rating of the bunch at 46.4%. Unlike Fox News’ pollsters (Beacon Research and Shaw & Company), Rasmussen is conducted in-house and they’re always, always, ALWAYS the most favorable to Trump. Which statistically, would be impossible if they were polling Democrats and Republicans evenly—which apparently, they don’t.

Real Clear Politics publishes a daily aggregate of presidential approve/disapprove figures too, but the pollsters they use aren’t consistent from day to day. Today for example, RCP is running aggregate of NBC/WSJ, Rasmussen, Fox News, Reuters, Economist, Politico, Gallup, and The Hill. And from that bunch, Trump’s average approve/disapprove this morning is 43.4%/54.3% — leaving him with a spread of 10.9 points. They’ll update it tomorrow, but possibly with a different field of pollsters, so it’s hard to say how precise they are.

But in both the RCP aggregate giving Trump a 10.9 point spread and in this table, giving him an 11.7 point spread, as things stand today, he’s in deep shit. Those are devastating numbers.

Of course, neither of these clusters of polls take into account A) the state of the economy a year from now, and B) any assistance the Republicans might receive from their friends in Moscow. And since Mitch McConnell refuses to bring to the floor any legislation that will block them, they WILL.

As everyone knows, polls are snapshots in time. Fifteen months out from Election Day, these figures can’t foretell the future. On the other hand, they don’t mean NOTHING. If Trump continues to blunder and tweet his brains out throughout the coming year—which is a certainty—and the Democrats don’t blow it—which is NEVER a certainty—the potential for a Trump rout in 2020 exists. This president has never been above 50% in ANY poll other than Rasmussen or Zogby. That’s unprecedented. Warren, Sanders, Harris and Biden are all trouncing him in the polls, even on his favorite cable channel. And as ignorant and minimalist-thinking as the Fox demographic is, they’re seeing the same numbers we are.

Never bet the farm on poll numbers. Never bet ANYTHING on them. On the other hand, don’t ignore them. These snapshots in time are snapshots in history. They tell the story of the moment. And a string of moments is the very definition of history.

I cringe whenever I hear Democrats berating any of the aforementioned candidates. The enemy is TRUMP. Not Sanders, not Biden, not Warren, not Harris. It’s Donald J. Trump. Let’s not blow the next election by demanding ideological purity again. I pledge to support whoever the candidate is over four more years of chaos, racism, corruption, and fascism. I hope you will too. If we just all agree to that, we’ll have this.

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fauzhee10069 · 7 years ago

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I've just been idly looking fics from One-Punch Man fandom in Archive of Our Own site. Initially inside the tags of SaiGenos pairing, unintentionally I found many amusing tags about Amai Mask, and this was only from the first page. So I decided to click Amai Mask tag and I search every amusing tags about him.

Out of 87 Works (and probably more) in Amai Mask | Sweet Mask tag, these are the tags I found:

#Amai Mask is a dick or amai is a dick

#Amai Mask is a jackass

#Amai Mask is rich and a bully

#Amai Mask is a little shit (twice)

#arrogant Amai (OK, this is right sometimes but not always)

#Sweet Mask & Tornado are the worst customers (they probably would, but I don’t think they would be rude without reason, for example Tatsumaki: probably she would be rude and pissed out if she gets poor service or feels belittled)

#Amai Mask is a creeper and I stand by that

#Sweet Mask is awful

#Sweet Mask is a douche bag

Wow, so many hate tags about him. Okay well, Amai first appearance both in manga and in anime was not bad at all, just a normal high rank hero and probably also serves as Public Relation in Hero Association. In Anime, Amai calmly congratulated Genos for became an S-Class Hero (he wasn’t even provoked by Genos’ cold nature when the later thought that Amai intended to bully him) and in manga, he accepted Saitama’s promotion to B-Class. Amai ‘s bad impression began to show during Chapter 36 (Punch 36) “Crash” right after Saitama defeated Boros and the S-Class Heroes defeated his minions. Amai came late yet he berates the S-Class heroes for not preventing City A's destruction, even though there was nothing they could have done to prevent it, Atomic Samurai was even pointing out that they only knew of the threat after they got out of the Hero Association HQ and found the city already in shambles. Amai’s attitude not only infuriated the S-Class Heroes but also the readers as well ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°). Later Amai mercilessly executed some Boros’ remaining minions (who were weak and ready to surrender) and Genos commented that Amai is similar to himself, except that Amai has absolutely no compassion or empathy for the monsters, not even the ones that have surrendered. Some chapters later, Amai was shown defeating a monster (Suppon) mercilessly and got cheered by his fans.

Besides AO3’s hate tags about him, previous reddit survey from OPM section granted him the “Worst Girl” title (based on the poll): 10k Hero Special Survey - RESULTS!!!

And look how TV Tropes describes him, even though the description straightly follows the canon story without any fabrication, the words they used are heavily hinted their dislike to his character XD.

I wonder, just a scene of him being an asshole in the redrawn manga, many people already deem him as unredeemable character, despite other chapters didn’t show him as douchebag. Some fics portrayed him as being normally rude to everyone, cocky and thinking like he is above/better than everyone. I think, Amai is one of many characters that many people misunderstand about him. This doesn’t mean that I’m okay or support what he said in Chapter 36 (when he berated about the S-Class Heroes’ failure), but instead of him just being unreasonable asshole or narcissist, I think what makes him said that is because he is such perfectionist person (his profile in databook also mentioned this). Amai is workaholic, perfectionist and professional to his jobs; FYI that he is a professional hero, a recording artist, a model, and a TV star. In his drama CD “Amai Mask’s Super Sweet Anguish”, it told the story during his early career, when he was having the first concert of his dome tour, despite his perfect appearance, he has an internal struggle due to the pressure he experiences every time before his live concerts. He has his usual ritual by going to the toilet to give himself a mental pep talk. One day, Amai had a problem and somewhat lost an idea to give the title of his new released song, Saitama accidentally entered the same toilet with Amai who the former thought that he was taking forever with his business. Long story short, Saitama calmed him down and (again) accidentally gave him great idea and finally Amai dropped the title of his new song. Amai who probably thought Saitama as a random crew greatly thanked him for it. So, while being perfectionist and has very high standard to his career, Amai is still a human who might have a moment of weakness sometimes. While normally being arrogant and rude, he doesn’t always behave that way to everyone (perhaps to certain people who he thinks annoying), also he could still feel grateful and thank to the person who helped him. Recent Special Chapter “Star” showed him being professional and perfectionist, Amai was performing a concert with a band in a concert stadium but was interrupted by the arrival of mysterious beings. Not wanting to ruin his concert, Amai continued his show (singing & dancing) while toying with the mysterious beings before eliminating them with a swift slice and uppercut, the audiences believed that it was part of the show. Amai was working well as a performer and as a hero, no one got hurt or scared and the concert was incredible success. The special chapter also showed what he was thought that he loves and appreciates his fans and the crews who helped him, this means that he won’t randomly rude to every person.

When Amai held such high standard to his career, he also expects the other to fulfill his high standard. This what makes his words seem bad and wrong in Chapter 36, he should know that not everyone could reach his standard because everybody has different talent, skills and pace of progression. Also his fault was that he refused to listen and didn’t want to understand what really happened before his late arrival, he ignored Atomic Samurai’s explanation/or perhaps he listened but didn’t believe it since he was too concerned about heroes’ professionalism and public views about them than observing and understanding the situation (I understand it since he acts as PR to HA). I think his disappointment made him overreacted and belittled the heroes, saying that their failure made them unworthy of being in the S-Class. This means that what is currently being shown about him and what I take for his character is that Amai is a workaholic, love his jobs as hero and entertainer, has very high standard to his career (and expects the others to follow his standard), despite this, he is still a human who might have a moment of weakness sometimes. While normally being arrogant and rude, he doesn’t always behave that way to everyone (perhaps to certain people who he thinks annoying), also he could still feel grateful and thank to the person who helped him. Amai really despises the evil (in his views) and would eliminate it with no mercy, very concerns about public view, would be harsh to the person who fails his expectation and (what people tend to forget) loves his fans and greatly appreciates the work of the crews that helped him perform and anyone who doesn’t fail in his eyes/disappoint him, he has his dark side but won’t randomly show it to random people.

He is not so positive but also not entirely negative as a character.

Edited!! Addition from reblogged:

I just re-watched episode 12 (S1E12). When everyone agree that Amai was being an asshole, I could see why he was late and didn’t immediately went to city A to save the world. As Metal Bat responded Amai’s criticism that the later himself was very late, Amai reasoned that since many S-class heroes already gathered in A city, he assumed that they were supposedly capable to handle the threat. He likely thought that perhaps his assistance wasn’t really needed and that’s why he didn’t rush to the spot but cared enough to observe the situation afterwards. He might be not as heroic as Mumen Rider who loves to handle every monsters with any threat levels despite only being C-Class hero or Tatsumaki who loves to chase every monsters and will get bored if not fighting them, but he has reasonable mindset like most people in general. My example of similar mindset is like this: I am an English interpreter, I was on my business trip in neighboring city. Suddenly at the central office came a colleague from England when I was away. Normally, I could helped translate during the business meeting between my boss who could not speak english and that colleague. But I remembered that I am not the only interpreter in central office and there was my friend there who also worked as English interpreter. Therefore, I don’t have to return immediately, no need to cancel my business trip as I believed that my friend already handled the communication between my boss and the foreign colleague.

Amai trusted those S-Class heroes’ capability to handle the threat and that is not really wrong. What is wrong is that his ignorance to believe what the heroes said in which they couldn't prevent the casualties as the attack that happened suddenly was so powerful that it destroyed the whole city in just one attack. He thought that was just their excuse and if I am one of the heroes I would also be annoyed at him just like everyone else LOL. Seems that he is so hard on heroes. I wish he would be more open-minded and trust his fellow heroes in the future.

We will see him more when we almost reach the climax of Garō arc but (spoiler): in the webcomic, Amai mocked the rest of the S-Class heroes for failing to protect humanity, you would probably hate him more XP. Though after Garō arc finished, Amai acknowledges and starts to appreciate Saitama’s beauty of power and probably will become his new fanboy. Sure, he was rude to Sugar Pop Boys boyband newbies, probably because they could be his future rivals in the entertainment world but unworthy as heroes. Perhaps the only hope that could make his character more redeemable and be more understood is when his backstory has been revealed.

It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t portray him bad in any fics we write, no- that’s not my point. We’re free to put any character to antagonist role and protagonist role and in OPM fandom, Amai himself often gets antagonistic roles and only one fic so far gives him a protagonist role. What intrigued me is that there are so many non-functional tags described him as being despicable being in their stories as if the writers really detest him so much, just one chapter & one episode about him being an asshole and he already earned this much hate (especially from manga-only readers) XD. Personally, I’d rather see the fics include him as antagonist with the simple tags like: #evil Amai, #antagonist Amai, #villain Amai, #Amai dislikes/hates__ etc though as a writer they’re free to express and tag their fic with anything in their minds, I just find it funny… that’s all.

I am not Amai’s fangirl, I don’t really like him too but I don’t despise his character either, in fact he is one of the characters that makes me curious and want to know more about him (besides Sonic-Flash’s relationship and Blast’s mysterious identity). I wish for some writers that someday will care enough to portray him in different light, when he becomes more sympathetic but not flawless, when he will be more than just one-dimensional jerk/asshole.

#amai mask #sweet mask #one punch man #my thoughts #opm webcomic spoilers #opm shitpost #Ikemen Kamen Amai Mask #handsomely masked sweet mask #amai is a jerk indeed #but he is not total jerk

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uk-news-talking-politics · 7 years ago

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Jeremy Corbyn is a politician. Stop pretending he's the messiah

By Chaminda Jayanetti

Back in the mid-1990s, there were certain things I didn't want to understand, and certain things I just couldn't.

I didn't want to understand the popularity of the Spice Girls, or why everyone supported Man United. But I knew the former were a successful gimmick while the latter were bagging glory-hunters with every title. I knew - I just didn't want to.

But I never got Tony Blair. Or rather, I never got how or why people loved him.

Early 1997 was strange. Adulation of Blair seemed universal. It wasn't just a political but a cultural moment. And it wasn't just about the shambolic Major government and its bigoted backbenchers. Blair was everything everyone wanted in a political leader at that point in time.

Except nobody is everything everyone wants. Not everyone wants motherhood and not everyone eats apple pie. What I saw was a man who would say literally anything to get elected. He'd face different ways on multiple issues and have no hesitation in politicising anything that would suit his needs. I never believed a word he said.

And the thing is, I think people sort of knew, deep down, that he was whispering whatever sweet nothings they wanted to hear, like an old-school courtship ritual. The public knew that he was surrounded by spin doctors. They knew they were being spun a yarn. It's just that the yarn sounded so good.

I've been reminded of that period in recent weeks. Jeremy Corbyn is not Tony Blair. Their politics are obviously very different. Their aims and worldview are diametrically opposed. And Corbyn does not have the same popularity as Blair at his peak - nor are the Tories yet as unpopular as they were two decades back.

But the fervent adulation of Corbyn by his ardent and growing mass of supporters at the very least matches, and if anything outstrips, what people felt towards Blair. For two years Corbyn was seen by supporters as a flawed but honest and decent leader who represented the one chance of taking Labour to the left. Even his most passionate fans were hoping, rather than believing, that the public would swing behind him.

That was then.

Follow the leader

It is hard to think of a British election that has more dramatically validated a political leader in the eyes of more people than 2017 and Corbyn. He lost, of course, but the political victory is his. And the transformation across different parts of Britain's body politic since then has been astonishing.

Labour MPs whose main concern about Corbyn was his electability are now sated. Others had ideological differences, preferring either reformist social democracy or outright Blairism. More were put off by his well documented links to various unsavouries.

But almost all have now publicly united behind Corbyn - some quietly, others with cringeworthy shows of public contrition in self-staged show trials in which they meekly volunteered for the dock. Perhaps the idea was to get senior centrists back into the shadow cabinet. If so, it worked as well as Mitt Romney's play to be Donald Trump's secretary of state - trading whatever credibility their old complaints had in return for the apparent prize of public humiliation. Corbyn simply stuck with those who'd stuck with him. He had every right to.

But Labour is a party. Uniting is what parties often do. Far worse have been the journalists. The real lesson of the election for journalists is 'don't make predictions' - at least, not predictions about voter behaviour. It's not the job of journalists to predict how tens of millions of people will vote.

Instead, journalists have debased themselves since the election with a wave of supinemea culpas and grovelling apologies for failing to predict that Corbyn would prosper. Whilst the right wing press returns to the day job of Tory leadership speculation, left of centre journalists have prostrated themselves before their new master - columnists and reporters, bending the knee.

Yesterday's men

It is a craven sight to behold. Journalists need to get off their knees. The apparent need of left-leaning journalists to be liked, or respected, or thought of as fundamentally 'good' by left-wing social media accounts - read those words again, social media accounts - is as far from the job description as Eoin Clarke is from a maths degree.

None of the real weaknesses in British political coverage - the obsession with Westminster shenanigans, the ignorance of unfashionable issues and causes (such as social housing until two weeks ago), the homogenous demographics, the echo chambers and social clubbishness, the treatment of the whole thing as a bit of a game - none of these are addressed or solved by apologising for calling the election wrong. None of them are solved by retracting words written when Corbyn's public approval ratings and election results were among the worst on record.

Beyond a desperation not to be seen as 'the bad guys', there's another factor driving the collective grovel - fear of missing out. Many centre-left types had long nurtured a utopian dream of a socialist Britain, but no longer dared believe it possible - and now, suddenly, everything seems possible. The polls show Jeremy Corbyn - Jeremy Corbyn- on course to be the next prime minister! Nationalisation! Taxing the rich! Redistribution! Socialism! And all delivered by the voters of Canterbury and Kensington!

For embittered, world-weary dreamers, it's as if the train they've waited their whole lives for has turned up out of nowhere and is about to leave the station. Everyone is scrambling to get on board. This is a ride no-one wants to miss out on.

And nobody wants to be left behind. The validation of being on 'the right side of history' is a crack pipe for the left. Those who criticised Corbyn are suddenly on the wrong side of history - on the team that's losing to the one that's winning wearing socialism shirts.

You, in your 40s, writing articles for Comment is Free on how Corbyn cannot win. Them, in their 20s, making 'Jez We Can' twitter memes that you dismissively laugh at - until suddenly they win. How old do you feel? Very bloody old. Jumping on the Corbyn bandwagon is now the ticket to eternal youth.

It all makes for mass psychodrama. What it doesn't amount to is journalism.

A politician by any other name

Having treated Corbyn as the devil incarnate for two years, the left-leaning media suddenly see him as the messiah, falling in line behind the activists with whom they overlap. Having previously picked at every single nit - were there really no seats on that train? - many are letting their hair down and joining in the fun. Corbyn is the real prime minister! The Tories have no mandate! The country wants an election! The DUP deal is a bung!

We have gone from over-scrutiny to under-scrutiny. Who checks and balances a messiah? But Jeremy Corbyn is neither devil nor messiah. He is what he has been for more than four decades - a politician.

His growing support bears more hallmarks of fandom than judgement. At first it's interest, then hope, then admiration, and then adulation - and then, finally, outright denial of reality. White is black and black is white. Like Blair before him, Corbyn comes across as honest, decent and sincere. And sometimes he is. But sometimes he's not.

All of the following statements are demonstrably true:

• he can give compelling answers to challenging questions - when asked about the role of foreign policy in Islamic terrorism, he raised the issue of Western-induced instability and terror funding rather than slipping into old 'blowback' arguments • he can also be evasive - his answers to Andrew Neil on his views on Nato during the election campaign are a case in point • he can be principled - he broke with the Labour whip to vote against lowering the benefit cap in 2015 • he can be unprincipled - he then made no mention of the benefit cap in his 2017 manifesto • he can be honest - even when forced by his party to accept Trident renewal, he has maintained his personal opposition to it • he can be dishonest - he told Jeremy Paxman during the election campaign that he'd get rid of the welfare freeze, which was simply not the case • sometimes he prioritises those in most need - his manifesto took the bold but necessary step of pledging to abolish jobcentre sanctions • and sometimes he doesn't - his manifesto committed huge amounts to abolishing university tuition fees, which would mostly benefit high earning graduates, while leaving billions of welfare cuts untouched • he can happily face both ways on an issue - his election campaign was an exercise in being all things to all people on Brexit, smiling and nodding to Remainers while promising ardent Brexiters most of what they want

It should be obvious by now that Corbyn is a politician - a politician with left wing views that he does not always live up to, a man who sometimes practises what he preaches but at times clearly does not.

Politics is a messy business, not a place for the naive. And voting is a balanced judgement - most voters are not wholly supportive of whichever party or politician they vote for.

But his growing ranks of cheerleaders wish to simply see what they want to see, project what they want onto him, and contort all fact and reason to pretend that there are no questions, no downsides - and that anyone who raises those questions, or points out those downsides, is part of the cabal of dark forces out to bring down the messiah, destroy social justice, and keep the super rich in their luxury yachts.

Into orbit

If the Tory campaign demonstrated one thing - and it demonstrated many things - it's that hubris is a dangerous thing in politics.

The Corbynites have now caught the bug, acting as if election victory is all but inevitable, that history is on their side, and that government and socialism await. Maybe they are, maybe they do. Nothing can be predicted anymore.

But Labour assembled a coalition of voters - pro and anti Brexit, pro and anti Corbyn, tactically voting Lib Dems and outright anarchists, and many millions of voters turned off by Tory cuts and attracted by the Labour manifesto.

This is Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party now. He owns what it says, what it does, and what its representatives do. He owns what its councils do. He owns his frontbench and who he appoints to sit on it. What happens now, happens on his watch.

If Labour councils cut services, they do so in his name. If they kick housing campaigners around, it's his name on the business card. If Labour backs leaving the single market, he's signed off on it. If Labour doesn't find the money to reverse welfare cuts, that's his choice.

And if the Tories start spending in key areas such as schools, and Labour spends the summer protesting on the streets against a democratic election result, if Corbynites trigger a party civil war by trying to drive through rule changes at conference, if the leadership decides to go beyond the manifesto and embrace 'new left' pledges such as land value taxes and universal basic income, that may go down perfectly well with the electorate.

Or it may not.

But the next election will be an election to decide who governs Britain - and voters will treat Corbyn as a politician, even if his new disciples do not.

Chaminda Jayanetti is covering the general election for Politics.co.uk. He tweets here.

#author:Guest writer #Jeremy Corbyn #Labour

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zoe-truong · 8 years ago

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LBJ Library

I’ll be honest: I don’t know much about our US presidents at all. I know names and general ideas, but no successes, failures, or public perceptions. So, when we went to the LBJ Library, I was surprised.

I knew that LBJ served during the Viet Nam War, of which many Americans were not fond. Extrapolating from there it made sense that the US’s involvement in the war translated to disapproval of the President. Going through the exhibit, there were many instances to support this fact, but a lot of instances that were surprising to say the least.

Being President of the United States is difficult, especially after assuming responsibility following the assassination of the previous president. However, going through the exhibit showed that even in the hardest times, the strongest leaders can still accomplish incredible things. Lyndon B. Johnson was one of those people. Maybe for most people what burns in their memories of LBJ was the war, but for generations of people of color and disadvantaged communities, he was likely a hero. In my P4 I quoted Robert Lee’s book on leadership, where he denotes that “Some roles are more visibly “the leader” than others, but they can all contribute to the overall leadership effort.” (Lee-P4) This holds true across the spectrum of humanity. This fact is why we have multiple political parties, careers, and responsibilities. No one leader is alike, and how a person imagines a leader is subjective. Clearly, the ones who sing the tale that LBJ failed as a President are the ones who value America’s place as a world power through war. However, there are surely those who recognize the work that he did for civil rights was monumental. I went to the museum knowing that all of the information in there would surprise me, but nothing surprised me more than how hard pressed LBJ was to improve the lives of all Americans, even the ones that were constantly ostracized, beaten, and forgotten.

Even after much of the outrage involving desegregation, there was obvious racial discrimination. In spite of this polarized view of African-Americans, LBJ made it his stretch goal where he “[hoped] it may be said, a hundred years from now, that by working together we helped to make out country more just, more just for all of its people.” (LBJ) It’s incredible to look at America today, where a constant influx of stories concerning brutality, discrimination, and violence make it seem impossible for any president to properly reconcile the racial divides. However, imagining living in an America 50 years ago where these issues were at so more heightened of a level where the racism was outspoken and commonplace, it makes LBJ’s accomplishments astronomically impressive. He couldn’t have done it without a solid foundation, and I think this is where connecting LBJ to my P4 is indispensable.

Right now, I’m in the middle of my education, trying to figure out where I want to be 10, 20 years into the future. It’s always easy to look at history and see how clear people’s futures are through their actions; however, if we stood in their shoes while they were living them, they'd have just as much doubt or confusion as us. Some people will have a strong desire or passion, and LBJ definitely had this. I always believed that nurture presided over nature, because the impact of an environment can do a lot to a person’s mind. Sure nature does play a role in whether or a not a person will persist in spite of this environment, but nurture gives them a reason to think certain ways. LBJ is certainly a product of nurture in his rural upbringing. “Growing up, he felt the sting of rural poverty”(LBJ Library biography) and as a result sought to educate the poor himself. He went to a Teacher’s college and became a teacher for disadvantaged youths, which had set him on a lifelong journey to writing this wrong. This is what makes LBJ incredible. He recognized how widespread poverty is and how capable he is of bringing others out of this trouble. He had the luck to escape this life, gain an education, and work towards a political career, but did not forget the steps in his past that affected him.

Many people would work their way, ignoring the people who made their success possible and seeking only personal gain. LBJ remembered the hard times he, the children he taught, and many Americans went through. And when he became President, he made sure to give these people a voice through his Civil Rights Act of 1964, Social Security Act (creating Medicare and Medicaid) of 1965, and Voting Rights Act of 1965. This is the role that ethics plays in our lives. I stated that in P3 that the path to success will not be through a universal code of ethics, but instead through a universal understanding of ethical reasoning. There are many journeys a person can take to form this ethical reasoning. For LBJ, it was a childhood rooted in poverty and an early career dedicated to impoverished children. He learned compassion from the kids and decided it was his goal to eliminate this disparate America. I didn’t live this life, so my journey will be a starkly different one from LBJ’s. However, I can still take pointers from the things he did. This is the recognition of problems in society and finding the drive to fix it, in spite of my supposed career goals. And who knows, maybe my career goals are in fact the things I am passionate about? It certainly was for LBJ, as he was able to directly help all of America’s underrepresented through his presidency. For people like me, there are other ways to find this ethical reasoning. Whether it is through all of the potential volunteer work or classes I have, I can “[unweave] this network of connections by reading more, learning more, and challenging myself more.” (P3) It’s all about learning, and LBJ did that best. He was constantly learning, from his opponents, from his coworkers, from his life.

The most important thing he learned was that racism was thriving in America and that as president of the United States, no one was more suited to help end it than him. I think it’s telling of LBJ’s legacy on the Civil Rights movement when three of the Little Rock Nine came together for a picture right on the steps of the LBJ library, only three years ago. They didn’t get together there because they had some had in Viet Nam. That’s not the legacy that was actually left by LBJ. The legacy LBJ left was ones that all Americans enjoy today. He left us a secure future. He removed discrimination from the voting polls, allowing every citizen to make an impact on our nation’s future without fear of racism. Lyndon B. Johnson may not have been the perfect president, but there is no doubt that he was a leader, in every aspect of the word.

#blog #lbj

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luckyfibers-blog · 8 years ago

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Linen Love

When I was preparing to become an English teacher, I knew I would need to enter my classroom with more than steadfast dedication to education and learning, more than a passion for literature and writing, more than a wellspring of compassion and patience.

I knew that I needed to cultivate a teacher persona that was at once authentic enough to endear myself to my students and the school community and contrived enough to create and maintain boundaries between my personal and professional lives.

I thought about my two most prominent teacher heroes:

Mrs. Scherl, my fourth and fifth grade teacher who introduced me to both Edgar Allen Poe and tangrams

Ms. Guarino, the high school English teacher who taught me how to write an essay

and listed what they had in common:

steadfast dedication to education and learning

passion for literature and writing

wellspring of compassion and patience

wardrobe replete with billowing, layered, natural fabrics and sometimes large, sometimes colorful, but always eye-catching jewelry.

I was raised by my bauble-loving mother and spent part of my time in college as a metals major, so my teacher-jewelry game was already pretty tight. I just needed to start calling my handmade necklaces and chunky pendants statement pieces.

Having been a teenager in the 1990s, my wardrobe was already fully stocked with baggy clothes of all kinds, so in order to fully calibrate and actualize my teacher persona, all I had to do was swap out my patchy corduroys and wide-leg jeans for subdued, tent-like dresses, tops, skirts, and pants that look like skirts.

Thus, my classroom look—and my love of linen—was born.

Knitting with Linen

Once I became obsessed with knitting, it was only a matter of time until I sought out linen yarn to make some flowy, flaxy frocks of my own. I fiddled and futzed. I knitted, frogged, and cussed.

As a newbie knitter, I didn't know the difference between knitting with fiber A and fiber B, so I would match projects and yarn willy-nilly and rue the results. But after spending the past many years knitting through dozens of drapey DROPS, Cocoknits, Purl SoHo, and my own patterns with linens of all kinds, I have fallen in crazy love with linen knitting.

As winter wanes, you might find yourself winding down on woolies and searching for some spring and summer stitching, so here's some wisdom for you to ignore consider when wishing for a cooler kind of knit this season.

Linen is a plant fiber, so it does not behave the same way as wool and other animal fibers. Much like cotton or hemp, linen has no elasticity, but what we sacrifice in squish, we earn back in durability and drape.

Choose patterns and plan projects with linen in mind. Gauge swatching is a must with linen. Stitches like stockinette and ribbing behave differently when worked in linen, and needle sizes can produce variable tensions even among yarns of the same weight when one of them is linen. Wash and dry your swatch before measuring, and read more technical stuff about linen here.

Linen abides by the, “It wears in, but it doesn't wear out” standard. Even though it sometimes has little bits of dried, scratchy plant matter spun into the yarn, there are ways to soften and break in your linen prior to starting and after the item is completed. For starters, wind, rewind, and re-rewind your skein to soften the yarn before working it up, and wash your garment before wearing it. Unlike wools that felt, acrylics that pill, rayons that grow, and other fibers that age like cheese in sunshine, linen improves with wear and washing.

People have strong opinions about linen. Some informal polling of knitters online shows that just as many people love to work with and wear linen as those who abhor it. Some say it's light and airy and perfect for summer months, and others find it itchy, stiff, and “crunchy.”

What say you? Share your linen opinions and project pics here, on the Lucky Fiber Designs Page (and click Like while you’re there!), on Twitter (and don’t forget to follow!), Instagram (follow, follow, follow!), Pinterest, Ravelry, or by email…or the old-fashioned way: Lucky Fiber Designs P.O. Box 4 Candler, NC 28715.

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click2watch · 6 years ago

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Tezos Is About to Enact Its First-Ever On-Chain Blockchain Update

After nearly three months of voting by token holders, the Tezos blockchain will undertake a series of backwards-incompatible changes to the network on Wednesday.

Called Athens A, the upgrade proposal was the first to undergo the network’s “self-amendment” process in which bakers on Tezos – equivalent to miners on bitcoin or ethereum – stake tokens bundled into “rolls” to show their support for or against competing upgrade proposals. Tezos is a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain with an estimated valuation of over $1 billion.

Teeing up this week’s event, a developer group known as Nomadic Labs kick-started Tezos’ first on-chain governance process back in February. At the time, the news was a notable given the turbulence that took place during the project’s early days.

As reported in March, Nomadic Labs put forward two proposals: Athens A and Athens B. Athens A and Athens B both suggested a reduction to the minimum amount of tokens – called a roll size – that’s required for a user to become a baker. This would reduce the barrier to entry for baking and encourage a higher number of bakers on the Tezos blockchain.

Athens A, on the other hand, also suggested an increase to the computation or gas limit of Tezos blocks in effort to make smart contract deployment easier for application developers building atop the platform.

After three months of voting and testing, bakers have now officially passed the final voting threshold to activate Athens A on Tezos’ main network.

As noted by Jacob Arluck from the Tocqueville Group – a for-profit business development entity funded by the Tezos Foundation – bakers actually passed this last round of voting last Tuesday with over 46,000 rolls cast.

Now, Athens A is expected to be activated on the main network sometime tomorrow on block number 458,752.

Styles of on-chain governance

Tezos’ final voting phase – called the promotion period – required a minimum participation level of at least 83.02 percent of all Tezos rolls. In addition, a supermajority of these rolls needed to be staked in favor of activating Athens A on the mainnet.

Contending that the voter turnout for this first governance process on Tezos is “the highest for any system like this,” Arluck said:

“It’s not like MakerDAO or Aragon where a whale can just control everything easily…It’s not purely a bunch of whales voting in our system. It’s people voting on behalf of a very large number of people.”

So-called “whale voters” have been a contentious issue for other blockchain projects and their systems of on-chain governance. For the past few weeks, programmatic loan system MakerDAO have been seeing one to two large token holders dictating the outcome of their governance polls.

While governance polls don’t have any impact on changes to the MakerDAO system, they do initiate executive polling rounds in which the same token holders vote continuously to either activate or ignore a change into the system.

In addition, the most recent voting round for the ethereum-based governance platform Aragon presented token holders with nine different proposals.

At least two of them, according to blockchain analytics site Alethio, were ultimately passed and rejected as a result of the preferences of one voter with large token holdings. Four others went from a close decision to a landslide victory due to the backing of a single whale voter.

“One obvious danger of onchain governance is plutocracy. Unfortunately Aragon’s second vote was not even plutocracy. It was just governance by one whale,” wrote Evan Van Ness, the author of Week in Ethereum News newsletters, on May 2 regarding the Aragon governance outcomes.

‘Still too much friction’

Like MakerDAO and Aragon, changes to the Tezos network are also ultimately determined by token holders.

However, according to Arluck, the defining difference of Tezos’ on-chain governance process is that token holders are required to either vote as a baker or delegate their assets to a baker in the system.

“In all these systems it’s whoever is paying attention votes. In our system we just have groups of people who are always paying attention because they’re baking,” Arluck told CoinDesk. “It solves the attention problem. It makes governance more scalable in terms of the number of people who can be represented in the system.”

As such, Arluck contends that even bakers with sizable token holdings – anywhere from between 3 to four percent of the token supply – are actually representative of many different users.

“It’s people voting on behalf of a very large number of people,” said Arluck. “[Bakers] only own 10 percent or maybe 20 percent of what they’re showing…For the people delegating to them, if they don’t like how they vote, they can delegate to other [bakers.]”

Still, Tezos by no means has on-chain governance entirely figured out.

Arluck highlights that many lessons were learnt during the Athens voting process that will likely inform how the voting process should change in future.

Speaking about the mechanism of on-chain governance on other blockchains like the recently launched Cosmos blockchain, Arluck told CoinDesk:

“There’s still too much friction to voting and to people signaling their preferences. In the future, I want us to be implementing…something like what Cosmos does with overriding [votes.]”

Athens image via Shutterstock

This news post is collected from CoinDesk

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dorothydelgadillo · 6 years ago

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The 3 Conversion Amigos: Heat Maps, Analytics, & Recordings

Wherever there are low conversion rates, you will find them.

Wherever visitors are suffering through broken links and ineffective call-to-actions, they will be there.

Wherever visitor and customer satisfaction is threatened, you will find… The three (conversion) amigos!

(My apologies to the true three amigos - Dusty Bottoms, Ned Nederlander, and Lucky Day of the 1986 classic, “¡Three Amigos!”)

Right now, there’s a marketer starting at the company website with frustration building.

By all standards and best practices, the website looks amazing. It’s aesthetically pleasing with SEO-centered copy and mobile-friendly design.

Despite being set for a digital win, however, the website analytics tell a different story. The conversions just aren’t there.

What went wrong? Why aren’t visitors turning into customers?

Was it the call-to-action color? What stopped the visitors?

Of course, our marketer isn’t alone in this scenario.

You could even replace “marketer” with a myriad of other positions, but the result would be the same. Just because a website looks good doesn’t mean it works well.

It takes deeper insight to understand visitors and their interactions to unlock the secret to explain why they aren’t converting.

Of course, we’re not talking about just any insight. We’re talking insight gleaned from these helpful amigos:

Dynamic Heatmaps

Google Analytics

Visitor Recordings

These three conversion amigos come together for the ultimate trifecta of insight to give your website (or a client’s) the help it needs to fight against low conversion rates and save the day for visitors everywhere.

via GIPHY

How Do You Know You Have a Conversion Issue? (a.k.a. Finding Your Website’s “El Guapo”)

No western, whether it’s a comedy or not, is complete without a ruthless bandit to ruin everyone’s day, and El Guapo was the perfect infamous villain in “¡Three Amigos!”

Your website even has its own digital “El Guapo” -- a pain point or flaw standing in the way of its success.

It could be a cluttered landing page, confusing navigation, poorly written copy, or a broken call-to-action that prevents anyone from converting. Maybe it’s a website that isn’t mobile-friendly or bloated with too much information and large, slow-loading images.

These issues may be staring you straight in the face or hidden by vanity metrics such as page views or email subscribers.

While these metrics are often used, they can’t explain how users are engaging and interacting with your website and are often easily manipulated.

Ignoring the issues can have serious consequences. If these issues are enough to turn away potential customers, it’s losing you (or your clients) money.

“But how do I know if my website has an ‘El Guapo?’”

Here are a few red flags:

>> Your conversions and conversion rate are lower than you expect.

To be clear, there is a difference between conversions and conversion rate. Your conversation rate is a great gauge of what your traffic is doing on your website while conversions are your ultimate measure of success.

Tracking both conversions and conversion rates can be the so-called canary in your digital mine.

If the conversion rate seems lower than average or a sudden drop in conversions, you know there is something either scaring away visitors or stopping them from completing the conversion, and that something can have serious implications on your bottom line.

>> You don’t really know what visitors do on your website.

If you don’t know what they do on your website, how do you know what it needs to be done? Where are visitors clicking, and how are they navigating through your website?

Let’s say your boss or client asked you tomorrow what visitors are doing on the website.

You could show the more popular web pages and how much time was spent on each page, but you could not – without any question – explain how they were clicking or scrolling on each page using traditional analytics alone.

>> Your customers express frustration.

Customers love to make their opinions known. Whether it comes through an online review, email, or a social media message, if a customer has expressed frustration with your website, consider it a waving red flag that something is wrong.

Be mindful not to brush off complaints or assume it’s limited to one region or browser. Keep in mind that negative word-of-mouth can reverberate beyond the disgruntled customer to an entire network of friends and acquaintances.

Helpful tip between friends: I would highly suggest using Chat and Surveys to help collect visitor opinions about your website, products, or services. For example, asking “Is there anything preventing you from checking out today?” can be particularly helpful. I have a list of 25 survey or poll questions you may want to consider for yourself.

>> You don’t analyze and test on a regular basis.

There are two billion websites online, and a large number of them are created once and never touched again other than updating the copyright date every so often.

Maybe someone did check and analyze how the website was doing at one point, but now it’s a lost habit.

The same goes for testing. A/B testing is an incredible tool, but it’s not a common enough that everyone knows what it is, let alone, do it.

Always put aside time to experiment with things on your website, but don’t just run the test.

If you don’t analyze your results on a regular basis, you don’t know how deep your problems may be in the near future.

Whatever it is, you need to address your “El Guapo” now.

Enter The 3 Conversion Amigos: 3 Tools to Help You Combat Your Conversion Woes

Before we dive in, I have to be clear on several things.

First, if you are looking for a magic checklist to fix a website’s conversion woes, you are going to be disappointed. Checklists are meant for packing, not optimizing a website.

Every website’s issues are unique. Even if you check the box for a specific task, doesn’t mean that it solves for your specific pain point. In the same thread, just because something worked for another website doesn’t mean it will work for you. You need to test analyze your website’s performance in order to diagnose and treat it effectively.

Finally, I am a firm believer that conversion optimization isn’t about changing your call-to-action or font type. While these issues may be turning away some visitors (unless all of your copy is in yellow Comic Sans), it’s highly likely that there are other bigger problems just below the surface.

In the words of Larry Kim, stop “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We need to move past this mentality to big tactics and optimizations that will dramatically change your performance and fortune.”

Now the “ugly” is out of the way, let’s get to the good news – our amigos:

1. Dynamic Heatmaps

As the newest “kid” on the block, dynamic heatmaps are more than traditional static heatmaps that simply capture a screenshot of the website with limited data available.

Dynamic heatmaps make data come alive by visualizing visitor click, move, and scroll data for elements such as a drop-down, hamburger menu, or pop-up, automatically as you navigate through a website.

For a moment, picture your own website.

If I asked you, could you tell me the top three elements on your most popular page?

What about your mobile version? Could you tell me your most popular hamburger menu option for tablet devices? Or if there’s a difference between how traffic from Facebook interacts and engages differently than Google PPC ads?

Lucky Orange asked those same questions, and in 2016, we realized that, as websites become more dynamic, heatmaps needed to as well.

Our dynamic heatmaps function as an overlay on your website updating data as you navigate through your website.

You can see data for everything visitors see, including hover-over and drop-down menus. It also enables you to see how visitors on mobile devices and tablets see and utilize the website, too.

Basically, your website’s “El Guapo” has no place to hide. Since every click, scroll, and move can be visualized, issues can be quickly spotted.

For example, this dynamic heatmaps is showing the precise clicks of visitors to the Lucky Orange pricing page.

It can also be combined with visitor recordings and A/B testing services like Optimizely.

2. Visitor Recordings

If you want to understand visitor engagement, nothing beats Visitor Recordings.

These recordings are a special kind of amigo best known for being the fastest playback this side of the Mississippi River.

Okay, so fun Western descriptions aside, visitor recordings explain what happened before and after a click was made.

You can actually watch visitors and customers interact on your website, seeing where they spend the most time, where they go to when, and a host of other behaviors.

You can watch it live or stored and tag it to certain behaviors, like checked out or signed up, to better understand the middle and bottom of the conversion or sale funnels.

In other words, you can watch visitors on your website kind of like a DVR of their experience.

3. Google Analytics

Let’s just cut to the chase - Google Analytics is a powerhouse of analytics. In the wild west of conversion, it is like the John Wayne of data.

Sure, it may be a little older, heavier, and slower than newer “data slingers,” but it has a reputation that reaches a wide range of professionals and websites.

Consider this: An estimated 56% of all websites use Google Analytics.

Whether it’s a new website designer fresh from college or a seasoned marketing professional, Google Analytics is the “it” analytic tool in their arsenal.

With its incredible amount of raw data, it can be intimidating. When used correctly, however, this data can be dissected down to micro- and macro-level reporting for phenomenal details and insight.

How to Use Google Analytics, Recordings, & Heatmaps Together

When dynamic heatmaps, visitor recordings, and Google Analytics combine, these amigos become the trifecta of unstoppable conversion rate optimization prowess.

Together they make it easy to dissect useful patterns or visitor behaviors.

No marketer, agency, or client will have to guess if what they’re doing is effective; they’ll have the data to show them!

1. Make Sure Lucky Orange and Google Analytics are Installed on Your Website.

The sooner both are installed, the more insight you will have at your disposal. Google Analytics will help you identify the pages that need your attention then Lucky Orange will provide the dynamic heatmaps and visitor recordings to take insight up a few notches.

Without Lucky Orange, Google Analytics misses on telling what happened in the middle of the visitor journey. Without Google Analytics, you may not always know where to start looking for problems areas.

2. Identify Problem Areas in Google Analytics.

I’ve found that since Google Analytics is such a standard for so many people, it’s better to stick with the habit.

Look for red flags such as low Time On Site or a high Bounce Rate (tip: RocketFuel suggests a bounce rate over 90% should set off your alarm bells). Also watch your traffic, popular posts, and sources.

These metrics are common indicators of problems on your website. Because you’re focused on spotting potential problem spots, using this data helps lay the foundation for a better overall insight and direction from dynamic heatmaps and visitor recordings.

Think of it as a compass. You may not know what errors or issues you’ll find, but at least you’ll be headed in the right direction.

3. View Dynamic Heatmap of Problem Area.

Google Analytics ear-marked pages to question, and now it’s time to go one step further. Dynamic heatmaps open the door to better analyze potential issues or take a 30,000-foot view of the bigger picture.

Example: if Google Analytics showed a low conversion rate, you can follow dynamic heatmaps in Lucky Orange to isolate which webpage(s) may be causing the issue. You can then segment data to further isolate and identify the problems.

4. Segment Dynamic Heatmap Data as Needed.

Segmenting works by filter data through specific data ranges, browsers, devices, locations, and behaviors. To continue our example, I may find that conversion dropped off on Product A’s webpage.

If I narrow it down by device to mobile users, I could see that the webpage’s mobile version is cutting off a call-to-action.

Segmenting can also help narrow down to behavior from specific sources, such as those from Facebook or Google PPC, to drive better landing pages and changes to creative that are directed for specific traffic.

5. Follow-up with Visitor Recordings of Problem Areas.

Sometimes looking at dynamic heatmaps will be enough, but at others, it will be prudent to learn more about which elements were more or less popular than another, such as one call-to-action compared to another.

For each element, visitor recordings will be available to show recordings of visitors actually clicking on it, as well as the rest of the visitor’s journey.

Visitor recordings can also be accessed via the “Recordings” or “Live View” tab in Lucky Orange for a wider view of the website.

As you watch these recordings, you can see where visitors are clicking, how they scroll, how they move from page to page, and what they are doing on your website in general.

There will be little doubt left after watching select recordings to see what is turning off a visitor, such as a broken link or overpriced shipping.

6. Combine the Findings to Suggest Changes.

Folks, this is where the real magic happens. Google Analytics led you to the pages in question, dynamic heatmaps led you to uncover trouble spots, and visitor recordings let you watch as real visitors actually click, move, and scroll.

There’s no guesswork or assumptions. It’s clear what’s working or what’s not and opens the door for the team to discuss short-term (new copy, working links, better CTAs) or long-term solutions (website redesign, landing pages, new marketing strategies).

For example, one Lucky Orange user had a banner at the top of his homepage promoting a discount. By using Google Analytics, dynamic heatmaps, and visitor recordings, he could see that visitors weren’t clicking on the call-to-action or other links.

Visitors were clicking on the banner that wasn’t linked. Adding a link to the banner increased conversions from 3% to 8%.

(Note: If you’re on a budget and worried about cost, don’t. Google Analytics is “free” and Lucky Orange starts at $10 per month and according to WordStream, conversion optimization tools like Lucky Orange have an average ROI of 223%.)

Win the Battle, Continue the War

As you grab the tequila to celebrate conversion victories, keep one eye on the horizon.

The digital world is constantly changing, and your visitor expectations are only going to continue to increase. As you validate and prioritize the next redesign or updates to your website using Google Analytics, visitor recordings, and heatmaps, remember to never forget to keep your visitor’s experience as a priority.

Shayla Price, a B2B content marketer, and SaaS expert said it best: “It’s imperative that more companies take a customer-driven approach to conversion optimization.

Following someone else’s best practices may guide your team; however, it’s all about your customers’ interests and behaviors...[F]ocus your attention on gathering customer data through one-on-one interviews, on-site surveys, and analytical tools.”

Don’t let your website’s “El Guapo” win. Your website will not “die like dogs.” It will “fight like lions” to win the conversion battle!

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/conversion-tools-heat-maps-analytics-recordings

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citizentruth-blog · 6 years ago

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I Didn't Vote or Campaign for Hillary. Please Don't Use the Separation of Immigrant Families to Try to Shame Me for It. - PEER NEWS

New Post has been published on https://citizentruth.org/i-didnt-vote-or-campaign-for-hillary-please-dont-use-the-separation-of-immigrant-families-to-try-to-shame-me-for-it/

I Didn't Vote or Campaign for Hillary. Please Don't Use the Separation of Immigrant Families to Try to Shame Me for It.

If you want to talk about my white privilege, fine. If you want to talk about what I could have done for vulnerable immigrant groups and can do going forward, I’m genuinely sorry, and with you. If you want to shame me for my vote for a third-party candidate, however, I reject your ignorance of electoral realities and your political bigotry. (Image Source: CBS News via YouTube)

I don’t often share personal experiences in my political writing, mostly because I feel like I’d be sharing stories that no one wants to hear. That still may very well be the case, but seeing as this situation was made relevant to the ongoing crisis facing the separation of immigrant families, I figured I would highlight my experience as a way of talking about the related issues.

A now-former friend on Facebook, who is a leader/organizer on behalf of a nonprofit organization, recently took to social media to ask whether any Jill Stein voters would like to apologize for their choice in the wake of said crisis. I, as someone who voted for Stein, took umbrage to this comment, if for no other reason than it seemed particularly haughty of him to begin the conversation on these terms. Granted, I could’ve (and probably should’ve) not engaged at all, but I did, and so here we are.

First, a note about my vote for Jill Stein: I am neither an ardent supporter of Stein nor am I am a Green Party fanatic. I also don’t fully know what the heck the point was of the recount she spearheaded or ultimately what exactly became of the money raised to fund recount efforts. For some of you, I suppose that just makes it worse: that I would just up and support a third-party nominee of whom I am not a follower despite being a registered Democrat. In this sense, my vote can be seen as somewhat of a betrayal.

I also should note that I supported Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, and voted for him in my state’s Democratic primary. By this point, I had no illusions that Bernie would capture the nomination; my home state, New Jersey, was one of the last handfuls of primaries to be held in the 2016 election season, and several media outlets were already calling the nomination in Hillary’s favor before the polls could open. Accordingly, you might see my refusal to cast my ballot for Clinton, too, as a manifestation of the “Bernie or Bust” mantra. Although technically I did vote, just not for a representative of either major political party. Nor did I write in Sanders’s name as a protest vote. Or Harambe’s, even though I’m told he would’ve loved to see the election results.

When it came down to it, though, I didn’t feel like Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party did enough to try to win my vote—simply put. To me, Clinton’s campaign was emblematic of a larger strategic flaw that characterizes the Dems: too much capitulation to centrists, too dismissive of concerns about reliance on corporate and wealthy donors, too little regard for the concerns of working-class Americans and grass-roots organizers until it comes time to donate or vote. To me, Hillary’s pitch seemed largely tone-deaf if not disingenuous, plagued by secrecy about E-mail servers and Goldman Sachs speeches as well as ill-advised comments about “deplorables,” among other things. And for those of you already raising a finger to wag about the deleterious aspects of the Republican Party and its nominee, I never even remotely considered Donald Trump or another GOP candidate for my vote. At present, that’s a line I won’t cross, in jest or otherwise.

Thus, despite her evident misunderstanding of quantitative easing, I voted for Jill Stein—not because I thought she could win or because I feared Trump could—but because I felt the values she and her campaign expressed most closely matched mine. That’s it. I imagine many Trump voters felt the same way re values—that is, they supported his economic or social platform more than him or his antics, though if that’s the case, I don’t know how much that says about their values. I’m just trying to get the idea across that people’s “support” for particular candidates can be more nuanced than today’s political discourse might otherwise suggest.

My voting mindset, therefore, was not “strategic” in the sense that I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton specifically to block Donald Trump. In light of my state’s final tally, it would seem my vote was unnecessary in this regard, though I could not know that for sure at the time I cast my ballot. Clinton came out ahead in New Jersey by more than 13 percentage points and close to 500,000 more votes, and thanks to the Electoral College and our winner-takes-all style of deciding these matters, all 14 of the Garden State’s electoral votes went to her. Stein did not even manage a third-place showing, being bested by the likes of Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s candidate.

This was the crux of my initial rebuttal about the need to apologize for my vote. While on a state-by-state basis, the notion of Johnson and Stein being “spoilers” may or may not have more validity (more on that in a bit), in my state, it did not. Regardless, to point fingers at lowly third parties deflects a lot of blame, and to borrow a term from Ralph Nader, who faced similar finger-pointing following the 2000 election, is to succumb to a high degree of “political bigotry.” In other words, it’s scapegoating perpetrated by members of major parties to distract from their need for substantive reform.

In addition to the culpable parties oft-cited by Clinton’s supporters and defenders—namely Russia, James Comey, and sexism (this last one may or may not be so true depending on the context or individual voter’s mindset, but that’s a whole different kit and caboodle)—there’s ample room to consider what role other groups played or, in theory, could have played. After all, what about the people who could vote and didn’t? What about the people who couldn’t vote but perhaps should be afforded the privilege, such as convicted felons? And what about the folks who actually voted for Donald Trump? Are they to be absolved of responsibility because they didn’t know better? If so, where is this written?

Additionally, what does it say that someone like Clinton, vastly more qualified than her opponent and, from the look and sound of things, quantifiably more capable, lost to someone in Trump to whom she had no business losing? For all the justifications for Hillary Clinton failing to capture an electoral majority—let’s not forget the fact she won the popular vote, an issue in it of itself when considering it’s not the deciding factor in presidential victories—we shouldn’t overlook some questionable decisions made by the Clinton campaign, including, perhaps most notably, how she and her campaign paid relatively low attention to important battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Of course, even in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania where Clinton campaigned heavily, she still lost, so maybe any establishment Democrat the party trotted out might’ve met with the same resistance fed by blue-collar whites flocking to Trump. Still, one can’t shake the sense Hillary approached the final throes of the campaign with a certain sense of arrogance.

To my ex-FB-friend, however, my reasoning was insufficient, and at this point, one of his colleagues, who happens to be a person of color, interceded to agree with his sentiments. As far as they were concerned, my support for Jill Stein may have influenced people in states more susceptible to a Trump win to vote for someone other than Hillary Clinton. I guess, for the sake of an analogy, my thoughts could’ve “infected” those of otherwise discerning voters to make them vote the “wrong” way. My assignment of blame to Hillary despite the forces working against her was panned as well, as was my diminishment of Stein as a spoiler. All in all, they contended, my position was one that exhibited my white privilege and made me sound—quote unquote—morally reprehensible.

As far as I am concerned, if I’m morally reprehensible—fine. You can call me a serpent demon, for all I care. The legitimacy of the arguments within is what interests me. On the subject of my potential game-changing pro-Stein influence, though it’s possible, it’s highly unlikely. In my immediate circle, I told few people unless specifically asked who I planned to vote for. I also wrote a post back in 2016 about why I planned to vote for Jill Stein and posted to Facebook, but—let’s be clear—hardly anyone reads my writing. My own mother doesn’t even read it most of the time. From her standpoint, my entries are of the TL;DR ilk, and what’s more, they tend to be devoid of pictures of cute animals or how-to makeup videos. Fair enough, Mom.

On the subject of Jill Stein as the spoiler, while it’s true that Stein’s numbers may have been larger than Trump’s margin of victory in key states, to say that all those votes would have gone to Hillary instead makes an assumption which may be accurate, or it may not. Again, however, it doesn’t change the contention that the race shouldn’t have been this close in the first place. Weeks after the 2016 election, as vote counts were yet being finalized in too-close-to-call contests, Jim Newell wrote as much in a piece for Slate. He argued:

The lesson of the Comey letter should not be that everything was just going fine until this singular event happened. Obviously Democratic candidates can pick up some tips for the future, such as a) always be sure to follow email protocol and b) keep your electronic devices as far as possible from Anthony Weiner. But they can never rule out some other Comey-equivalent October surprise. The question to ask is: Why was the Clinton campaign so susceptible to a slight shock in the first place? A campaign is resting on a very weak foundation if one vague letter from the FBI causes it to lose a huckster who sells crappy steaks at the Sharper Image.

The “Jill Stein or James Comey cost Hillary the election” narrative is akin to the narrative that Bernie Sanders did irreparable harm to the Democratic Party. You’re telling me that one man not even officially affiliated with the Democrats as a U.S. senator permanently damaged the entire party apparatus? To me, charging Sanders with potentially bringing ruin to the Dems says more about party’s infrastructural integrity (or lack thereof) than it does the intensity of his so-called “attacks” on Hillary Clinton as her primary challenger.

On the subject of my white privilege, meanwhile, well, they’re right. Let me say I don’t dispute this. I enjoy a certain amount of privilege on a daily basis and have almost certainly benefited from it over the course of my educational career and my professional life. Going back to the state-by-state basis of variation in election results, though, the biggest issue would appear to be my geographic privilege. If I lived in a state projected to be much closer based on polling data, might I have chosen differently?

Perhaps. It’s a decision I’m weighing on a smaller scale as we speak with Sen. Bob Menendez seeking re-election in New Jersey after a poor showing in the Democratic Party primary. Sure, Menendez is still the likely winner come November, but with doubts raised about the ethics of his behavior still fresh in voters’ minds, can I take his win for granted? On the other hand, if I do vote for him, what does this say about my values as a voter? Is choosing the “lesser of two evils” sufficient, considering we’ve been doing it for some time now and the state of democracy in this country doesn’t seem to be all that much better for it? These are the kinds of questions I don’t take likely.

Another issue invoked at around the same point in this discussion was whether I had done as much as I could to prevent Trump from winning. For what it’s worth, I wrote a piece separate from my pro-Jill Stein confessional right before the election about why you shouldn’t, under any circumstances, vote for Trump, but as I already acknowledged, my readership is very limited. At any rate, and as my online detractors insisted, I didn’t vote for Hillary, and what’s more, I didn’t campaign on her behalf. I could’ve “easily” made calls or knocked on doors or what-have-you for her sake at “no cost” to me, but I didn’t. As a result, according to them, I was complicit in her electoral defeat.

Could I have told people to vote for Hillary Clinton? Sure. I don’t consider myself any great person-to-person salesman, but I could’ve made an effort. Although this would present a weird sort of dissonance between my advocacy and my personal choice. Why am I instructing people not to vote for Trump and choose Clinton instead when I myself am choosing neither? Then again, I could’ve chosen to vote for Hillary, or simply lied about my choice, assuming anyone ever asked. I also could’ve tried to lobotomize myself with a fork to forget anything that happened leading up to the election. That’s the thing with hypotheticals—you can go any number of ways with them, no matter how unlikely or painful.

Eventually, it became evident that these two gentlemen were demanding that I apologize, but in a way that could make them feel better about accepting me as one of them—a liberal, a progressive, a member of the “Resistance, etc.—rather than simply apologizing to immigrant populations and people of color for “putting my white privilege above” their more immediate worries. My original critic was unequivocal in his demands: “You need to apologize.” His colleague and my second critic, reacting to my expressed feeling that relitigating the 2016 election only to quarrel among various factions on the left was of limited use and that we need to be more forward-thinking in our approach to 2018, 2020, and beyond, was likewise stern in his disapproval. As he stressed, you can’t just do something shitty, say “let’s move on,” and be done with it. I would have to admit my wrongdoing, or he and others would reserve the right to judge me negatively. Such was my “choice.”

Ultimately, my parting remarks were to reiterate my positions as stated above and to insist that people not be shamed for their vote as part of some scapegoating exercise against third-party/independent voters. I also closed by telling my second critic in particular—someone very critical of me on a personal level despite barely knowing me—that I hope his recruitment efforts as an organizer are handled with more aplomb. End of discussion, at least on my end, and click on that Unfriend button. Now you guys don’t have to fret about having to work with me—because I won’t work with you unless I have to.

The unfortunate thing about this conversation—other than that I let it happen—was that it grew so contentious despite the idea we seemed to agree on a lot of points. For one, I conceded my privilege in voting the way I did, something I have characterized as not merely being about race, but of geographical privilege as well. I would submit that admitting privilege is only a small part of the solution, however.

A more constructive recognition of inequality between people of different ethnicities, I would argue, involves advocacy for those who can’t vote, those who should be able to vote, or those who can vote, but otherwise ,find obstacles in access to the polls. On the latter note, there are numerous reforms that can be enacted or more widely used to expand the voter pool in a legitimate way. These include automatic voter registration, increased availability of the absentee ballot and early voting options, making Election Day a national holiday, and opening and staffing additional polling places in areas where election officials are unable to meet the demand of voting constituents.

Moreover, these issues can be addressed concomitantly with issues that affect all voters, including the electoral vote vs. the popular vote, ensuring the integrity of machine-based voting with paper records, gerrymandering designed purely for one party’s political advantage, the influence of Citizens United on campaign finance laws, and ranked-choice voting as an alternative to a winner-takes-all format. American elections have a lot of avenues for potential improvement, and particularly salient are those that disproportionately affect people of color.

I also conceded that I could have done more and can still do more on behalf of undocumented immigrant families, especially as it regards the separation of children from their parents, and this recognition more than anything merits an apology on my part, so to those negatively impacted by the policies of this administration, I am sorry. By this token, many of us could probably do more. Hearing of so many horror stories of young children being traumatized and parents being deliberately deceived by Border Patrol agents is disheartening, to say the least, and as powerless as many of us may feel in times like these, there are ways to contribute, even if it seems like something fairly small.

There seems to be no shortage of marches and protests designed to elevate awareness of the severity of the crisis facing immigrants and asylum seekers, notably from Mexico and Central America, as well as groups devoted to advocating for and defending the most vulnerable among us that can use your contributions. RAICES (the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services) and the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) jump to mind, but there are numerous possible recipients of much-needed donations. As always, be sure to do your homework regarding the reputation of any charity you seek out.

Though it may go without saying, you can also contact the office of your senators and the representative of your district to express your desire that they support any legislation which puts an end (hint: not the House GOP bill) to the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance policy” on illegal immigration, and to thank them for signing on in the event they do. If they don’t accede to or even acknowledge your request, keep trying. As it must be remembered, these lawmakers serve us—not the other way around.

The point I refuse to concede, however, is that I should apologize for my vote for Jill Stein in a state won by Hillary Clinton when I neither voted for nor supported Donald Trump, when both major parties have contributed to destructive immigration policies over the years, when Democrats lost an election they most likely shouldn’t have lost, and when this same losing party refuses to own its shortcomings and open the door to real reform, instead only becoming more calcified. That is, I certainly won’t apologize merely to assuage the concerns of fellow Democrats and liberals. Now is the time for a dialog, not a lecture, and certainly not the time for endless dissection of the 2016 presidential election and guilting conscientious objectors. At a point when we should be working together, I reject this means of tearing one another apart.

With Allies Like Trump, Who Needs Enemies?

#2016 Election #Bernie Sanders #donald trump #Hillary Clinton #immigrant children #immigrant families separation #Jill Stein #Ralph Nader

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samanthasroberts · 7 years ago

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Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans

Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong

Last March, my 71-year-old grandmother, Betty, waited in line for three hours to caucus for Bernie Sanders. The wait to be able to cast her first-ever vote in a primary election was punishing, but nothing could have deterred her. Betty a white woman who left school after ninth grade, had her first child at age 16 and spent much of her life in severe poverty wanted to vote.

So she waited with busted knees that once stood on factory lines. She waited with smoking-induced emphysema and the false teeth shes had since her late 20s both markers of our class. She waited with a womb that in the 1960s, before Roe v Wade, she paid a stranger to thrust a wire hanger inside after she discovered she was pregnant by a man shed fled after he broke her jaw.

Betty worked for many years as a probation officer for the state judicial system in Wichita, Kansas, keeping tabs on men who had murdered and raped. As a result, its hard to faze her, but she has pronounced Republican candidate Donald Trump a sociopath whose mouth overloads his ass.

No one loathes Trump who suggested women should be punished for having abortions, who said hateful things about groups of people she has loved and worked alongside since childhood, whose pomp and indecency offends her modest, midwestern sensibility more than she.

Yet, it is white working-class people like Betty who have become a particular fixation among the chattering class during this election: what is this angry beast, and why does it support Trump?

Not so poor: Trump voters are middle class

Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.

According to the study, his supporters didnt have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall werent clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. Surprisingly, a Gallup researcher wrote, there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.

Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism not income, education, gender, age or race predicted Trump support.

These facts havent stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working classs giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.

In seeking to explain Trumps appeal, proportionate media coverage would require more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump supporters in tony suburbs. Or, if were examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements.

But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face.

The faces journalists do train the cameras on hateful ones screaming sexist vitriol next to Confederate flags must receive coverage but do not speak for the communities I know well. That the media industry ignored my home for so long left a vacuum of understanding in which the first glimpse of an economically downtrodden white is presumed to represent the whole.

Part of the current glimpse is JD Vance, author of the bestselling new memoir Hillbilly Elegy. A successful attorney who had a precariously middle-class upbringing in an Ohio steel town, Vance wrote of the chaos that can haunt a family with generational memory of deep poverty. A conservative who says he wont vote for Trump, Vance speculates about why working-class whites will: cultural anxiety that arises when opioid overdose kills your friends and the political establishment has proven it will throw you under the bus. While his theories may hold up in some corners, in interviews coastal media members have repeatedly asked Vance to speak for the entire white working class.

His interviewers and reviewers often seem relieved to find someone with ownership on the topic whose ideas in large part confirm their own. The New York Times election podcast The Run-Up said Vances memoir doubles as a cultural anthropology of the white underclass that has flocked to the Republican presidential nominees candidacy. (The Times teased its review of the book with the tweet: Want to know more about the people who fueled the rise of Donald Trump?)

While Vance happens to have roots in Kentucky mining country, most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia. That sometimes seems the only concept of them that the American consciousness can contain: tucked away in a remote mountain shanty like a coal-dust-covered ghost, as though white poverty isnt always right in front of us, swiping our credit cards at a Target in Denver or asking for cash on a Los Angeles sidewalk.

One-dimensional stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread. The last time I saw my native class receive substantial focus, before now, was over 20 years ago not in the news but on the television show Roseanne, the fictional storylines of which remain more accurate than the musings of comfortable commentators in New York studios.

Countless images of working-class progressives, including women such as Betty, are thus rendered invisible by a ratings-fixated media that covers elections as horse races and seeks sensational b-roll.

This media paradigm created the tale of a divided America red v blue in which the 42% of Kansans who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 are meaningless.

This year, more Kansans caucused for Bernie Sanders than for Donald Trump a newsworthy point I never saw noted in national press, who perhaps couldnt fathom that flyover country might contain millions of Americans more progressive than their Clinton strongholds.

In lieu of such coverage, media makers cast the white working class as a monolith and imply an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that the poor are dangerous idiots.

Poor whiteness and poor character

The two-fold myth about the white working class that they are to blame for Trumps rise, and that those among them who support him for the worst reasons exemplify the rest takes flight on the wings of moral superiority affluent Americans often pin upon themselves.

I have never seen them flap so insistently as in todays election commentary, where notions of poor whiteness and poor character are routinely conflated.

In an election piece last March in the National Review, writer Kevin Williamsons assessment of poor white voters among whom mortality rates have sharply risen in recent decades expressed what many conservatives and liberals alike may well believe when he observed that communities ravaged by oxycodone use deserve to die.

The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles, Williamson wrote. Donald Trumps speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.

For confirmation that this point is lost on most reporters, not just conservative provocateurs, look no further than a recent Washington Post series that explored spiking death rates among rural white women by fixating on their smoking habits and graphically detailing the haggard face and embalming processes of their corpses. Imagine wealthy white woman examined thusly after their deaths. The outrage among family and friends with the education, time, and agency to write letters to the editor would have been deafening.

A sentiment that I care for even less than contempt or degradation is their tender cousin: pity.

In a recent op-ed headlined Dignity and Sadness in the Working Class, David Brooks told of a laid-off Kentucky metal worker he met. On his last day, the man left to rows of cheering coworkers a moment I read as triumphant, but that Brooks declared pitiable. How hard the man worked for so little, how great his skills and how dwindling their value, Brooks pointed out, for people he said radiate the residual sadness of the lonely heart.

Im hard-pressed to think of a worse slight than the media figures who have disregarded the embattled white working class for decades now beseeching the country to have sympathy for them. We dont need their analysis, and we sure dont need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told, preferably by someone who can walk into a factory without his own guilt fogging his glasses.

One such journalist, Alexander Zaitchik, spent several months on the road in six states getting to know white working-class people who do support Trump. His goal for the resulting new book, The Gilded Rage, was to convey the human complexity that daily news misses. Zaitchik wrote that his mission arose from frustration with hot takes written by people living several time zones and income brackets away from their subjects.

Zaitchik wisely described those he met as a blue-collar middle class mostly white people who have worked hard and lost a lot, whether in the market crash of 2008 or the manufacturing layoffs of recent decades. He found that their motivations overwhelmingly started with economics and ended with economics. The anger he observed was pointed up, not down at those who forgot them when global trade deals were negotiated, not at minority groups.

Meanwhile, the racism and nationalism that surely exist among them also exist among Democrats and higher socioeconomic strata. A poll conducted last spring by Reuters found that a third of questioned Democrats supported a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. In another, by YouGov, 45% of polled Democrats reported holding an unfavorable view of Islam, with almost no fluctuation based on household income. Those who wont vote for Trump are not necessarily paragons of virtue, while the rest are easily scapegoated as the countrys moral scourge.

When Hillary Clinton recently declared half of Trump supporters a basket of deplorables, Zaitchik told another reporter, the language could be read as another way of saying white-trash bin. Clinton quickly apologized for the comment, the context of which contained compassion for many Trump voters. But making such generalizations at a $6m fundraiser in downtown New York City, at which some attendees paid $50,000 for a seat, recalled for me scenes from the television political satire Veep in which powerful Washington figures discuss normals with distaste behind closed doors.

The DeBruce Grain elevator. Federal safety inspectors had not visited it for 16 years when an explosion ripped through the half-mile long structure, killing seven workers. Photograph: Cliff Schiappa/AP

When we talked, Zaitchik mentioned HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, who he pointed out basically makes eugenics-level arguments about anyone who votes for Donald Trump having congenital defects. You would never get away with talking that way about any other group of people and still have a TV show.

Maher is, perhaps, the pinnacle of classist smugness. In the summer of 1998, when I was 17 and just out of high school, I worked at a grain elevator during the wheat harvest. An elevator 50 miles east in Haysville, Kansas, exploded (grain dust is highly combustible), killing seven workers. The accident rattled my community and reminded us about the physical dangers my family and I often faced as farmers.

I kept going to work like everyone else and, after a long day weighing wheat trucks and hauling heavy sacks of feed in and out of the mill, liked to watch Politically Incorrect, the ABC show Maher hosted then. With the search for one of the killed workers bodies still under way, Maher joked, as I recall, that the people should check their loaves of Wonder Bread.

That moment was perhaps my first reckoning with the hard truth that, throughout my life, I would politically identify with the same people who often insult the place I am from.

Such derision is so pervasive that its often imperceptible to the economically privileged. Those who write, discuss, and publish newspapers, books, and magazines with best intentions sometimes offend with obliviousness.

Many people recommended to me the bestselling new history book White Trash, for instance, without registering that its title is a slur that refers to me and the people I love as garbage. My happy relief that someone set out to tell this ignored thread of our shared past was squashed by my wincing every time I saw it on my shelf, so much so that I finally took the book jacket off. Incredibly, promotional copy for the book commits precisely the elitist shaming Isenberg is out to expose: (the book) takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing if occasionally entertaining poor white trash.

The book itself is more sensitively wrought and imparts facts that one hopes would dismantle popular use of its titular term. But even Isenberg cant escape our classist frameworks.

When On the Media host Brooke Gladstone asked Isenberg, earlier this year, to address long-held perceptions of poor whites as bigots, the author described a conundrum:They do subscribe to certain views that are undoubtedly racist, and you cant mask it and pretend that its not there. It is very much a part of their thinking.

Entertain a parallel broad statement about any other disenfranchised group, and you might begin to see how rudimentary class discussion is for this relatively young country that long believed itself to be free of castes. Isenberg has sniffed out the hypocrisy in play, though.

The other problem is when people want to blame poor whites for being the only racist in the room, she told Gladstone. as if theyre more racist than everyone else.

That problem is rooted in the notion that higher class means higher integrity. As journalist Lorraine Berry wrote last month, The story remains that only the ignorant would be racist. Racism disappears with education were told. As the first from my family to hold degrees, I assure you that none of us had to go to college to learn basic human decency.

Berry points out that Ivy-League-minted Republicans shepherded the rise of the alt-right. Indeed, it was not poor whites not even white Republicans who passed legislation bent on preserving segregation, or who watched the Confederate flag raised outside state capitols for decades to come.

It wasnt poor whites who criminalized blackness by way of marijuana laws and the war on drugs.

Nor was it poor whites who conjured the specter of the black welfare queen.

These points should not minimize the horrors of racism at the lowest economic rungs of society, but remind us that those horrors reside at the top in different forms and with more terrible power.

Among reporters and commentators this election cycle, then, a steady finger ought be pointed at whites with economic leverage: social conservatives who donate to Trumps campaign while being too civilized to attend a political rally and yell what they really believe.

Mainstream media is set up to fail the ordinary American

Based on Trumps campaign rhetoric and available data, it appears that most of his voters this November will be people who are getting by well enough but who think of themselves as victims.

One thing the media misses is that a great portion of the white working class would align with any sense before victimhood. Right now they are clocking in and out of work, sorting their grocery coupons, raising their children to respect others, and avoiding political news coverage.

Barack Obama, a black man formed by the black experience, often cites his maternal lineage in the white working class. A lot of whats shaped me came from my grandparents who grew up on the prairie in Kansas, he wrote this month to mark a White House forum on rural issues.

Last year, talking with author Marilynne Robinson for the New York Review of Books, Obama lamented common misconceptions of small-town middle America, for which he has a sort of reverence. Theres this huge gap between how folks go about their daily lives and how we talk about our common life and our political life, he said, naming one cause as the filters that stand between ordinary people who are busy getting by and complicated policy debates.

Im very encouraged when I meet people in their environments, Obama told Robinson. Somehow it gets distilled at the national political level in ways that arent always as encouraging.

To be sure, one discouraging distillation the caricature of the hate-spewing white male Trump voter with grease on his jeans is a real person of sorts. There were one or two in my town: the good ol boy who menaces those with less power than himself running people of color out of town with the threat of violence, denigrating women, shooting BB guns at stray cats for fun. They are who Trump would be if hed been born where I was.

Media fascination with the hateful white Trump voter fuels the theory, now in fashion, that bigotry is the only explanation for supporting him. Certainly, financial struggle does not predict a soft spot for Trump, as cash-strapped people of color who face the threat of his racism and xenophobia, and who resoundingly reject him, by all available measures can attest. However, one imagines that elite white liberals who maintain an air of ethical grandness this election season would have a harder time thinking globally about trade and immigration if it were their factory job that was lost and their community that was decimated.

Affluent analysts who oppose Trump, though, have a way of taking a systemic view when examining social woes but viewing their place on the political continuum as a triumph of individual character. Most of them presumably inherited their political bent, just like most of those in red America did. If you were handed liberalism, give yourself no pats on the back for your vote against Trump.

Spare, too, the condescending argument that disaffected Democrats who joined Republican ranks in recent decades are voting against their own best interests, undemocratic in its implication that a large swath of America isnt mentally fit to cast a ballot.

Whoever remains on Trumps side as stories concerning his treatment of women, racism and other dangers continue to unfurl gets no pass from me for any reason. They are capable of voting, and they own their decisions. Lets be aware of our class biases, though, as we discern who they are.

Journalist? Then the chances are youre not blue collar

A recent print-edition New York Times cutline described a Kentucky man:

Mitch Hedges, who farms cattle and welds coal-mining equipment. He expects to lose his job in six months, but does not support Mr Trump, who he says is an idiot.

This made me cheer for the rare spotlight on a member of the white working class who doesnt support Trump. It also made me laugh one cant farm cattle. One farms crops, and one raises livestock. Its sometimes hard for a journalist who has done both to take the New York Times seriously.

The main reason that national media outlets have a blind spot in matters of class is the lack of socioeconomic diversity within their ranks. Few people born to deprivation end up working in newsrooms or publishing books. So few, in fact, that this former laborer has found cause to shift her entire writing career to talk specifically about class in a wealth-privileged industry, much as journalists of color find themselves talking about race in a whiteness-privileged one.

This isnt to say that one must reside among a given group or place to do it justice, of course, as good muckrakers and commentators have shown for the past century and beyond. See On the Medias fine new series on poverty, the second episode of which includes Gladstones reflection that the poor are no more monolithic than the rest of us.

I know journalists to be hard-working people who want to get the story right, and Im resistant to rote condemnations of the media. The classism of cable-news hosts merely reflects the classism of privileged America in general. Its everywhere, from tweets describing Trump voters as inbred hillbillies to a Democratic campaign platform that didnt bother with a specific anti-poverty platform until a month out from the general election.

The economic trench between reporter and reported on has never been more hazardous than at this moment of historic wealth disparity, though, when stories focus more often on the stock market than on people who own no stocks. American journalism has been willfully obtuse about the grievances on Main Streets for decades surely a factor in digging the hole of resentment that Trumps venom now fills. That the term populism has become a pejorative among prominent liberal commentators should give us great pause. A journalism that embodies the plutocracy its supposed to critique has failed its watchdog duty and lost the respect of people who call bullshit when they see it.

One such person was my late grandfather, Arnie. Men like Trump sometimes drove expensive vehicles up the gravel driveway of our Kansas farmhouse looking to do some sort of business. Grandpa would recognize them as liars and thieves, treat them kindly, and send them packing. If you shook their hands, after they left Grandpa would laugh and say, Better count your fingers.

In a world in which the Bettys and Arnies of the world have little voice, those who enjoy a platform from which to speak might examine their hearts and minds before stepping onto the soap box.

If you would stereotype a group of people by presuming to guess their politics or deeming them inferior to yourself say, the ones who worked third shift on a Boeing floor while others flew to Mexico during spring break; the ones who mopped a McDonalds bathroom while others argued about the minimum wage on Twitter; the ones who cleaned out their lockers at a defunct Pabst factory while others drank craft beer at trendy bars; the ones who came back from the Middle East in caskets while others wrote op-eds about foreign policy then consider that you might have more in common with Trump than you would like to admit.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/dangerous-idiots-how-the-liberal-media-elite-failed-working-class-americans/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/dangerous-idiots-how-the-liberal-media-elite-failed-working-class-americans/

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getseriouser · 7 years ago

Text

20 THOUGHTS: Josh Kelly to become majority investor in Channel Ten

MID-June, Round 13 is upon us, we are well and truly into the meat of the season.

Teams are out of the race, some teams are now preparing themselves for a full, validated tilt at the flag, others are now positioning themselves to scrap it out for a finals spot.

Player managers are getting busy, football media continue to squabble with one another and with the quick turnaround with the Thursday fixtures, it’s pretty full on.

Let’s get into it.

1. Alistair Clarkson gets away with a $5k donation to Freeze MND with a further $15k suspended until the end of their season, ie. August. A bit soft really. Does he get a lighter whack because he was indirect in his language, even though the message was a strong as any? Or because the league found contrition in his appearance Sunday, half-time of the Blues-Giants game, an appearance he solicited? Either way, soft.

2. Now how’s about Robbo? He has played a bit of the victim here, which I have some empathy for as he has royally copped it, from the media and the social media heroes alike. However, he has brought this upon himself. Aside from the original tweet, and the sincerity of his apology, the audacity to then request an interview and as Nathan Buckley put it “feather his own nest” is a shocking display of self-interest, ignorance and totally undoes the good work of the initial apology. To then blame ��heat from his editor’ is too equally disappointing. Patrick Dangerfield said it best when he questioned the accountability for actions by those in the media, those who are now bonafide, rightly or wrongly, personalities of the game. Not good enough Mark. Nowhere near good enough.

3. Cracker game on Monday and you’d like to think the Dees deserved a close one after throwing a few too many wins away earlier in the season. Without their All-Australian ruckman and emerging star key forward, this team has a lovely mix of pace, grunt and skill. Fully fit, sneaking into that 5th-8th bracket, they are quintessentially the team who could scare from the bottom part of the eight ala the Dogs of last year, if they were to find some real form in the lead up to September.

4. As for Collingwood, this is going to be such a fine line you feel come year’s end. Finally you are starting to see the kind of side that could win finals break out of Buckley’s program, but has he had too much time? Their last five weeks has yielded three wins, a four-point loss and one-point loss, its good form. But whether a 9th, 10th or 11th with a bullet saves Buckley is very hard to judge. Going to be interesting to say the least.

5. Jaeger O’Meara is a story not being told enough right now. The Hawks have mortgaged the mortgage on he and Tom Mitchell, bereft of any draft pick for the best part of two years so they could get both lads into the club. The latter, Mitchell, is a lock for the All-Australian squad, so you tick that box. However, the former Rising Star winner is anything but a success yet, struggling to get on the park. Why? He has a knee with the structural integrity of David Strassman’s Chucky doll. His patella tendon was severely ruptured and he’ll never fully recover from it. Some clubs medical view, when appraising the worth of chasing the former-Sun last off-season, was he’d be lucky to ever get back to his best, perhaps ever put together a full season again. This is all predication and a prognosis is always just a prognosis, but given the last month or so’s lack of progress, it looks very gloomy for the Hawks without any real confidence for optimism.

6. How about Liam Jones on the weekend? One of the genuine good news stories of the year. Sure, Bulldogs fans have every right to shrug the performance off, they know all too well the tease he was and were happy to be rid of him, a subsequent drought-breaking flag definitely helped. But two and a half years into a three-year contract, one seen as a massive failure and a certainty not to be renewed, to take down Jono Patton comprehensively, effecting 12 spoils in a one-point win, enormous. Well done to him.

7. Essendon showed on the weekend what to expect in 2018. Don’t be too concerned about finals this year, in fact getting in and losing first week would be fantastic. But this team has such a September blue print about it, another 12 months and they are top four material, and from there of course the world is their oyster. Look out.

8. Sydney on the other hand, not so sure about them, and as a result the Bulldogs. I think we stick with the Swans being done, not rubbish and bottoming-out done but they aren’t making the finals and shouldn’t be unless the world caves in and this becomes the weirdest season ever. But we are trusting the Dogs because of last year – but we must remind ourselves, they somewhat scraped into 7th last year, they were definitely good enough for finals, but don’t remember their September campaign, as utterly brilliant as it was, was not reflective of their home and away year.

9. Some player movement stuff, because it comes in – firstly Nat Fyfe. Looks as though he will stay, but what is clear is he definitely exercised the look to a Melbourne move. St Kilda didn’t really stop their interest in Fyfe, that’s not right, what has occurred is they now believe Josh Kelly is in their grasp, which we will touch on next. So Fyfe staying at Freo is a fair bit to do with the Saints focusing their pockets of overflowing cash elsewhere. Carlton hasn’t ruled Fyfe out though, but that would be doubtful, they really like Lachie Whitfield.

10. So Kelly, he knows GWS’ offer and that’s two years at decent coin. St Kilda is offering better money and term, the Roos are offering better again. Tough call. Hard to ignore the Victorian money, and security, but I don’t think he has decided. He could stay. After thinking Josh Schache was a certainty, the idea of staying might be remerging – success over salary. The smart call might be to pick the Saints and hope you win a flag there, but this one is up in the air for sure.

11. On Schache, the Tigers are stiff. They thought they had him. They had made him a priority and were making decisions around his acquisition. His two-year deal to stay at Brisbane shocked them and now it’s about Plan B at Punt Rd.

12. Collingwood are trying to change Jackson Trengove’s mind. The Port defender come relief ruckman is out of contract, a free agent, and yet to re-sign at Alberton but the word is he is unlikely to leave. But the Pies see his value and are prepared to offer him a thought-provoking deal to bring him back home to Melbourne. This will test how persuasive the Pies can be, they’re making all the right noises to him, so watch this space.

13. Almost as a backup plan it seems, but Sydney’s Sam Reid is the Pies fall back if Trengove follows Schache’s decision to stay at their club. The Swans would prefer to move Kurt Tippett and keep Reid, but if there’s no taker for Tippett, and right now there isn’t, then they risk losing Reid who if he was to move on, a return to Melbourne and choosing his brother Ben’s club would be a fait acompli. But it appears the Pies are prioritising Trengove, mind you they may be well happy with Reid worst case anyway.

14. Jason Johannisen, I have that at 50-50. But I think he stays if I have to pick right now. There are persuasive reasons to leave Melbourne, good cash, closure from some issues here, but I credit Luke Beveridge for being a great man manager and alongside some related reasons to stay to those that see him leave, I think the Doggies hold onto the Norm Smith medallist.

15. Zak Jones is 80-20 to be a Demon next year. Melbourne has followed his progress, would like to add another piece in their build towards top four contention, and given his brother happens to be the co-captain, it’s a strong case they can put to the young Swan. I think the Dees get their man.

16. Tom Rockliff will be on the market again this off-season, in different circumstances mind you, but whilst he has performed more than admirably in recommitting to the Lions for 2017, his contract demands are turning Melbourne clubs away. Collingwood was one who was keen, who won’t be now/anymore, but others such as Hawthorn and St Kilda who are tempted by the free agent are now thinking against the idea. Rockliff would be a useful piece, and transaction for someone, but right now it’s looking long odds.

17. Quick one on Dustin Martin, if Kelly stays in Sydney then I wander if the chequebook rolls out from Moorabbin for the free agent. It would make a lot of sense; they can definitely pay him more than the Tigers.

18. Could Gaz win the Brownlow? Right now, in a Suns side that is looking a bit better than we’d first thought, he would have probably three best-on-grounds to this point, maybe accumulating 10-13 votes, which would be maybe three or four off the lead. Now, not suggesting he should be favourite, but if he is fit, even in a fledgling Gold Coast team, we know he polls and polls well. A watch.

19. The runner issues with Nick Maxwell – please, its like all the fare evaders who catch Melbourne trams every day. So many are doing it but one gets caught and we want to pigeon that person for being the one bad egg. All the runners do something similar, or at least if you scrutinise closely are conducting themselves in a way that wouldn’t please City Hall or the fans alike. We just never check or notice.

20. And finally this week, Jeremy Howe is a victim of his own prowess. His mark on Monday was that good yet failed to get the absolute kudos it might deserve because he does it every second week. Mind you, for the best marks of all time, two that still stick in my mind, one I saw live, one from the pages of history – check out Michael ‘Disco’ Roach’s screamer against Hawthorn, and then Chris Tarrant’s speccy on Queen’s Birthday many years ago, which was usurped for Mark of the Year just four days later, by Gary Moorcroft standing on Brad Johnson’s back. Biased or not, Tarrant’s mark was just massive.

(originally published June 15)

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