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princessanneftw · 4 years ago

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Livestream the summer solstice: my big survival plan for English Heritage

The charity is set to lose as much as £70 million this year, but its chairman, Princess Anne’s husband, Tim Laurence, won’t be beaten, he tells Richard Morrison of The Times.

Watching the sun rise at Stonehenge on the summer solstice, seeing those ancient stones perfectly aligned to the first rays of dawn; that has to be one of the world’s most magical heritage experiences. In any normal year more than 20,000 people, not all of them card-carrying druids, would gather to see it.

There’s nothing normal, though, about this year. On June 21 the 4,500-year-old monument will be deserted — by government decree. Instead, English Heritage (EH) will live-stream sunrise at Stonehenge. In the words of Tim Laurence, EH’s chairman, it will be a “self-isolating solstice”. And he’s doing his best to put a brave face on it. “For once the stones will be totally peaceful,” he says. “And nobody has to get up at 3am and get very cold.”

True, but if any one event symbolised how much coronavirus has wrecked Britain’s cultural calendar, this “self-isolating solstice” is surely it. That must be particularly painful for Laurence. Just turned 65, he had a highly successful career in the Royal Navy, where he ended up as a vice-admiral. And by the royal family’s eventful standards he enjoys a remarkably untroubled private life as Princess Anne’s husband. He took on EH in 2015 with instructions from government to wean it off public subsidy (which is being tapered down from £15.6 million a year in 2016 to nothing by 2023) and turn it into a self-supporting charity. And until two months ago he seemed to be steering his sprawling new ship very well.

“We’d had five terrific years,” he says. “We now have over a million members. Last year we had 6.4 million visits to our 420-odd sites. And from starting off in a negative financial position when we took the charity on, we had built up a financial reserve. So we were able to invest in some brilliant projects. We spent £3.6 million restoring Iron Bridge in Shropshire, which now looks fantastic and is secure for another century — despite all the terrible flooding on the Severn — and £5 million to build the new bridge to Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, which provides a much better visitor experience.”

Then the pandemic struck. Along with every other heritage organisation, EH closed all its staffed properties on March 19 (though 200 free-to-roam landscapes remained open). “We have to put this into perspective,” Laurence says. “Our problems are very significant, but as nothing compared to the challenge facing the health and care sectors.” Nevertheless, the result of what Laurence calls “putting everything into mothballs” has been, he admits, “a very serious loss of income”. He won’t put a figure on it, claiming with reason that the situation is too fluid, but even if all of EH’s recovery plans go well the charity seems set to lose between £50 million and £70 million this year. And if coronavirus refuses to be subdued, the outcome could be far worse.

In the context of the £200 million loss apparently run up by the National Trust in the past two months, EH’s problems might seem minor. Unlike the National Trust, however, EH doesn’t have £1.3 billion of reserves stashed away for a rainy day.

It didn’t help that lockdown started just before Easter, the precise moment when many heritage attractions traditionally open for the summer. EH has lost not only millions of paying visitors, but also the revenue they generate in its shops and tearooms. Laurence also decided to offer a three-month extension of subscriptions to the million-plus supporters, who are paying £63 a year for individual membership, or £109 a year for a family. “We wanted to thank them for staying with us,” he explains, “and to recognise that they aren’t getting as much value as normal out of their membership.” Probably a necessary public-relations move, especially in view of the reported mass exodus of members from the National Trust, but it put another big dent in EH’s revenues.

Those members haven’t been entirely deprived of EH’s services. Like many cultural organisations, EH has had a big surge in online visitors during lockdown. “Things like Victorian cookery lessons from Audley End [near Saffron Walden in Essex] or dance lessons for VE Day are getting massive attention this year,” Laurence says. So, he hopes, will an 80th-anniversary online commemoration of Dunkirk, designed to retell the story of the evacuation via a daily Twitter feed. That will provide a virtual experience for the thousands who would otherwise have visited Dover Castle, one of EH’s most popular sites, from where D-Day was masterminded.

Yet even the most vivid online experience can’t compensate for the visceral excitement of a physical visit to a dramatic historic site such as ghostly Witley Court in Worcestershire or the gaunt remains of Whitby Abbey. What if EH couldn’t reopen this year? Will there be another extension of membership? “I’d like to think that won’t happen,” Laurence replies. “We have a tentative date for reopening from government, and all our focus now is on getting things going again, rather than fearing the worst.”

That tentative date is July 4, but EH will take things slowly. “Our plan is to open a relatively small number of our staffed sites then, focusing on those that have lots of outdoor space,” Laurence says. “Stonehenge, for instance. The key is making sure that people feel safe, and we are putting in a huge amount of work — in close conjunction with other heritage bodies — to devise procedures to keep staff and visitors totally protected.”

One-way systems for visitors and PPE for staff? “Yes, and limiting visitor numbers, probably by having pre-booked time slots,” Laurence says. “I know it’s a bit of a bore for people, but I think visitors will appreciate the certainty of knowing they can get in. Then it’s about enabling social distancing to be maintained, and very high standards of hygiene wherever people have to touch things.”

Laurence won’t put a date on when a second wave of reopenings might happen. “The thing about the government’s guidance that I am most in tune with is the step-by-step approach,” he says. “We have to see what works and change it if it doesn’t.”

Is he convinced, though, that the public is ready to come back? Recent research suggests a high degree of fear about returning to any cultural activity. “Not everyone thinks the same way,” Laurence says. “What’s clear is that visiting places where there’s a degree of freedom and open air will be much more attractive than enclosed spaces at first. Of course we have a lot of enclosed spaces as well, so we have to find ways of overturning people’s reluctance to enter them.”

Even if people do flock back, however, EH is still left with an enormous black hole in its finances. The government is advancing funds that EH would be due to receive later this year, and there are discussions about bringing forward next year’s grant as well. These, however, are small sums (£8.8 million next year) compared with a possible £70 million loss. Will Laurence be asking for an additional bailout?

“It seems likely that we will be operating under [social distancing] limitations through the whole of this year and possibly next,” he says. “In that case, inevitably, our visitor income will be reduced. If we can’t get the income, we won’t be able to do all the conservation work and projects we’ve put on hold for the moment. Therefore we will have to ask government for more support.”

And an extra two or three years to be added on to EH’s planned transition from quango to independent trust? “That is also a discussion we need to have,” he says.

Could philanthropy help EH through its troubles? In the past five years Laurence has had some success at attracting private money, notably bagging a £2.5 million donation from Julia and Hans Rausing to help to build the Tintagel bridge. The trouble is that, as Laurence points out, “almost everyone who has got money to spare at the moment is thinking first about supporting health charities and care homes”. The Rausings’ recent decision to give nearly £20 million to charities tackling the pandemic is an obvious case in point. Nevertheless, if EH is to get back on track as an independent charity, it needs those big donors on board as well as the subscriptions of its million members.

Laurence spent his final navy years in charge of the Defence Estate, responsible for nearly 2,000 historically important buildings and monuments, so he was well aware of the challenges of conserving old buildings before joining EH. Even so, he admits he was a “slightly strange choice” to be its chairman. “I’m not an academic, not a historian, not an archaeologist,” he says. “Yet in some ways I represent a lot of our members. I’m a fascinated amateur. I absolutely love the history of this country. I love the sites we look after, and the story each tells.”

Tells to whom, though? The biggest challenge facing the whole heritage sector is arguably an urgent need to widen its demographic appeal. Can Laurence, in many ways the ultimate establishment insider, relate to that? Can he recognise that EH, like the National Trust, has an image problem? The perception that it’s a club for white middle-class people?

“There’s an element of truth in that,” he admits. “We are putting a great deal of effort into appealing more to — I hate using these categories — BAME [black and minority ethnic] people, who represent something like 14 per cent of the UK’s population. We have made a very strong statement by recruiting two outstanding representatives of those communities to our trustee board: David Olusoga [the historian] and Kunle Olulode [director of Voice4Change England]. They are helping our gradual transition towards being more appealing to non-white people. The important point is that we reflect not just the bricks-and-mortar history of England, but waves of immigration into this country over thousands of years. We have a story to tell to everybody.”

EH’s online output can be accessed through english-heritage.org.uk

#tim laurence #timothy laurence #dunkirk #english heritage #british royal family #brf

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Friday, November 6, 2020

Biden sees path to 270; Trump attacks election integrity (AP) With his pathway to re-election appearing to shrink, President Trump on Thursday advanced unsupported accusations of voter fraud to falsely argue that his rival was trying to seize power. “This is a case when they are trying to steal an election, they are trying to rig an election,” Trump said from the podium of the White House briefing room. The president’s remarks deepened a sense of anxiety in the U.S. as Americans enter their third full day after the election without knowing who would serve as president for the next four years. Neither candidate has reached the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House. But Biden eclipsed Trump in Wisconsin and Michigan, two crucial Midwestern battleground states, and was inching closer to overtaking the president in Pennsylvania and Georgia, where votes were still be counted. It was unclear when a national winner would be determined after a long, bitter campaign dominated by the coronavirus and its effects on Americans and the national economy.

Win or Lose, Trump Will Remain a Powerful and Disruptive Force (NYT) If President Trump loses his bid for re-election, as looked increasingly likely on Wednesday, it would be the first defeat of an incumbent president in 28 years. But one thing seemed certain: Win or lose, he will not go quietly away. At the very least, he has 76 days left in office to use his power as he sees fit and to seek revenge on some of his perceived adversaries. Angry at a defeat, he may fire or sideline a variety of senior officials who failed to carry out his wishes as he saw it. And if he is forced to vacate the White House on Jan. 20, Mr. Trump is likely to prove more resilient than expected and almost surely will remain a powerful and disruptive force in American life. He received at least 68 million votes, or five million more than he did in 2016, and commanded about 48 percent of the popular vote, meaning he retained the support of nearly half of the public despite four years of scandal, setbacks, impeachment and the brutal coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 233,000 Americans. That gives him a power base to play a role that other defeated one-term presidents like Jimmy Carter and George Bush have not played. Even if his own days as a candidate are over, his 88-million-strong Twitter following gives him a bullhorn to be an influential voice on the right.

‘The whole world waits’ with unease as drawn-out, contested election batters America’s global image (Washington Post) As the world reckoned with another day of uncertainty over the result of the U.S. presidential election, Trump’s premature victory claim, unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud and the threat of legal challenges continued to overshadow the drawn-out vote count, from which no clear winner has emerged. The indecision was met with deep unease around the globe over what lies ahead for the U.S. political process—and more than a little glee from America’s traditional adversaries. In Canada, lawmakers have been relatively silent on the aftermath of the vote, but election coverage continued to dominate the country’s largest newspapers, to the point that they nearly resembled U.S. dailies. The Toronto Star described a “nagging, palpable sense of dread” that no matter who prevails, Canada has never felt “so far apart” from its southern neighbor. “America has represented optimism, looking forward and ideas,” said Tatsuhiko Yoshizaki, chief economist at the Sojitz Research Institute in Tokyo. “And yet, over the past four years, we have come to see the dark side in the United States.” The same sentiment was echoed in Europe on Thursday, where Germany’s left-leaning Der Spiegel newsweekly compared Trump to a “late Roman emperor” who has “set a historic standard for voter contempt.” In Britain, some commentators responded with disgust—with the left-leaning Daily Mirror calling Trump “a liar and a cheat until the bitter end”—while other papers turned to humor, especially over the slow pace of the vote count. The front page of the Metro newspaper read: “Make America Wait Again.” In China, a number of publications used the election to highlight shortcomings of the American system. Still, China’s vice foreign minister, Le Yucheng, voiced hopes on Thursday about repairing bilateral relations after the election. “I hope the new U.S. administration will meet China halfway,” he said, according to CNBC.

US sets record for cases amid election battle (AP) New confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the U.S. have climbed to an all-time high of more than 86,000 per day on average, in a glimpse of the worsening crisis that lies ahead for the winner of the presidential election. Cases and hospitalizations are setting records all around the country just as the holidays and winter approach, demonstrating the challenge that either President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden will face in the coming months. The total U.S. death toll is already more than 232,000, and total confirmed U.S. cases have surpassed 9 million. Those are the highest totals in the world, and new infections are increasing in nearly every state.

Riot declared in Portland as protesters smash windows (AP) A riot was declared in Portland, Oregon, and protesters took to the streets in Seattle on Wednesday as people demanded that every vote in Tuesday’s election be counted. Hundreds were protesting in both cities against President Donald Trump’s court challenges to stop the vote count in battleground states. The Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office at about 7 p.m. declared a riot after protesters were seen smashing windows at businesses. In the interest of public safety, Gov. Kate Brown activated the use of the state National Guard to help local law enforcement manage the unrest, according to the sheriff’s office. Portland has been roiled by five months of near-nightly racial injustice protests since the police killing of George Floyd.

Tired of blue state life, rural Oregon voters eye new border (AFP) As a hotly contested election highlights the United States’s deep divisions, rural voters in liberal blue-state Oregon have approved a radical solution—splitting off to join neighboring deep-red conservative Idaho. Two conservative counties voted in favor of a non-binding measure to “Move Oregon’s Borders” during Tuesday’s polls, which also saw their northwestern US state predictably vote for Joe Biden in the race for president. “In the United States, the differences between liberal and conservative... there’s hatred there,” said chief petitioner Mike McCarter, of the votes in Union and Jefferson counties. “Populated urban areas are controlling the mass of everybody,” the 73-year-old retired gun club manager told AFP. Oregon—whose politics are dominated by the liberal city of Portland—has not voted Republican in a presidential contest since 1984, while landlocked Idaho to the east last chose a Democrat in 1964. But the high desert and mountainous swathes of eastern Oregon—where resource-intensive industries such as timber, ranching and mining prevail—are far more conservative than the environment-minded coastal stretches of the state. McCarthy said his movement’s goals rings true for outnumbered rural conservatives across a nation in which most states apportion their electoral college votes—to choose the president—on an all-or-nothing basis. “It’s a definite clash between blue and red,” he said. “Indiana and Illinois have got the same issue because Chicago controls all Illinois. In New York (state), New York City controls all New York. There’s a constant rub going back-and forth on life values between urban and rural.”

Eta brings heavy rains, deadly mudslides to Honduras (AP) Eta moved into Honduras on Wednesday as a weakened tropical depression but still bringing the heavy rains that have drenched and caused deadly landslides in the country’s east and in northern Nicaragua. The storm no longer carried the winds of the Category 4 hurricane that battered Nicaragua’s coast Tuesday, but it was moving so slowly and dumping so much rain that much of Central America was on high alert. Eta had sustained winds of 35 mph (55 kph) and was moving west-northwest at 7 mph (11 kph) Wednesday night. It was 115 miles (185 kilometers) south-southeast of La Ceiba. The long-term forecast shows Eta taking a turn over Central America and then reforming as a tropical storm in the Caribbean—possibly reaching Cuba on Sunday and southern Florida on Monday.

Arce’s opponents go on strike in Bolivia (Foreign Policy) Conservative opponents of Bolivian President-elect Luis Arce will begin a two-day strike today in the department of Santa Cruz, home to Bolivia’s largest city, in order to voice their opposition to the results of October’s presidential election. Governor Ruben Costas has asked Bolivia’s electoral tribunal to audit the result, but the tribunal rejected the request, citing the election’s certification by outside groups such as the Organization of American States (OAS). Arce is set to be inaugurated as president on Sunday.

Pix (Rest of World) Brazil’s Central Bank will launch a national instant payment system called Pix, which will be free to use by its citizens and mandatory for major banks to implement. It’s required for the 34 banks with 500,000 clients or more to roll out, and that group serves 90 percent of the 175.4 million Brazilians with bank accounts. As a result, this change could revolutionize digital payments in the country. Right now, fast money transfers cost 10 Brazilian reais in fees, or about $2. Pix will be effectively free for consumers: the Central Bank charges banks 1 Brazilian centavo, or $0.0018, for every 10 transactions. The five largest banks in Brazil make $440 million a year from same-day money transfer fees. The free price point of Pix will likely undercut their offerings.

In Spain, coronavirus puts the poor at the back of the line MADRID (AP)—Erika Oliva spends at least three hours a week standing in line at a soup kitchen. She spends a couple more at the social worker’s office with her 8-year-old son, who has autism. She waits on the phone to the health center or when she wants to check if her application for a basic income program will get her the promised 1,015 euros ($1,188). So far, it hasn’t. “They are always asking for more papers but we still haven’t seen a euro. Everything seems to be closed because of the pandemic. Or you are told to go online,” said Oliva. She managed to apply online, but others in her situation don’t know how to use a computer or simply don’t have one. “Poor people queue. It’s what we know how to do best,” Oliva said. Lower income families around the world have often suffered most from the pandemic for several reasons: their jobs might expose them more to the virus and their savings are typically lower. In Spain, their situation has been worse than in much of Europe due to the big role of hard-hit industries like tourism and weaker social welfare benefits. “The pandemic is extending and intensifying poverty in a country that already had serious inequality problems,” said Carlos Susías, president of the European Anti-Poverty Network, which encompasses dozens of non-profits. He says insufficient welfare spending, too much red tape, lack of access to technology and a resurgence of the pandemic are likely to widen what is already one of the developed world’s biggest gaps between rich and poor.

Pope Francis: A Day Without Prayer Is ‘Bothersome,’ ‘Tedious’ (Breitbart) Pope Francis insisted Wednesday on the centrality of prayer in a Christian’s life, declaring that prayer has a way of turning all things to good. Prayer “possesses primacy: it is the first desire of the day, something that is practised at dawn, before the world awakens,” the pope proposed in his weekly general audience in the Vatican. “It restores a soul to that which otherwise would be without breath.” “A day lived without prayer risks being transformed into a bothersome or tedious experience” where “all that happens to us could turn into a badly endured and blind fate.” Through prayer, the many occurrences of every day—both good and bad—take on new meaning, the pontiff suggested. “Prayer is primarily listening and encountering God,” he said. “The problems of everyday life, then, do not become obstacles, but appeals from God Himself to listen to and encounter those who are in front of us.” “Consistent prayer produces progressive transformation, makes us strong in times of tribulation, gives us the grace to be supported by Him who loves us and always protects us,” he said.

Greece orders nationwide lockdown to curb COVID surge (Reuters) Greece ordered a nationwide lockdown on Thursday for three weeks to help contain a resurgence of COVID-19 cases. Under the new countrywide restrictions to take effect from Saturday, retail businesses will be shut with the exception of supermarkets and pharmacies. Civilians will need a time-slot permit to venture outdoors. Primary schools will stay open, but high schools will shut.

Debt trap? (Nikkei Asian Review) China has lent large amounts of money to many developing countries, and critics contend—though China disputes—that this is in pursuit of “debt-trap diplomacy,” where a powerful country offers money to a less powerful one, and when the less powerful one defaults, the powerful country will take important resources like ports, natural resources, or infrastructure. China’s loans typically have interest rates of 3 percent or more, compared to International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans where the interest is about 1 percent. Critics point to the China-Sri Lanka relationship—where Sri Lanka signed a 99-year lease on the port of Hambantota in 2017—as a key example, and there are others. Regardless of the broader motivations, lots of African nations are in the hole to China, and the pandemic has exacerbated default risks. Zambia—home to voluminous copper reserves—is a particularly interesting case, as the country owes $12 billion in total, of which $3.4 billion, or 29 percent of its external debt, is to China, up 8 percentage points from four years ago.

China blocks travellers from virus-hit Britain, Belgium, Philippines (Reuters) Mainland China has barred entry to non-Chinese visitors from Britain, Belgium and the Philippines and demanded travellers from the United States, France and Germany present results of additional health tests, as coronavirus cases rise around the world. China has temporarily suspended entry of non-Chinese nationals travelling from the United Kingdom even if they hold valid visas and residence permits, the Chinese embassy in Britain said, in some of the most stringent border restrictions imposed by any country in response to the pandemic. Starting Nov. 6, all passengers from the United States, France, Germany and Thailand bound for mainland China must take both a nucleic acid test and a blood test for antibodies against the coronavirus. The tests must be done no more than 48 hours before boarding.

Japan’s expensive oranges (CNN) How many mandarin oranges can you buy with one million yen—or roughly $9,600? For one fruit-loving buyer at an auction this week in Japan, the answer is just 100. A single, 20-kilogram crate of 100 Japanese mandarins (also called mikan) hit the auction block on Thursday at Tokyo’s central wholesale Ota Market. It was the year’s first auction of satsuma mandarin oranges, a famous citrus species from Ehime prefecture, on the island of Shikoku in southern Japan. Nishiuwa is one of Ehime’s mikan-producing regions and its semi-seedless citrus species of oranges is known for its good balance of rich and sweet flavors, its easy-to-peel thin skin as well as its melt-in-the-mouth texture. It wasn’t the first time the sweet mandarins fetched such a staggering price in an auction—the highest bidding price last year was also in the million range.

West Bank village razed (Foreign Policy) Israeli forces have demolished a Palestinian village in the West Bank, leaving 73 people homeless, in what the United Nations reported as the largest demolition operation in years. The demolition brings to 689 the number of structures demolished across the West Bank, the highest number since 2016. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said the mass demolition was likely an opportunistic move by the Israeli government while the eyes of the world were focused on the U.S. election.

#headlines #news

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sharley20ahsgov-blog · 5 years ago

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BLOG POST #5 POLITICAL INTEREST GROUPS AND PAC ASSESSMENT

Blog Post #5 due Tuesday 11/05 by 8 a.m.

· Please go to: http://votesmart.org/interest-groups

· Under the state tab, choose national, then click on the issue tab and choose the category which represents your civic action issue.

1. Identify one national interest group that represents your issue. Include:

a. Interest group name

American Civil Liberties Union

b. A brief statement assessing the position/perspective of the interest group.

"The ACLU is our nation's guardian of liberty, working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country. The ACLU's mission is to conserve America's original civic values: the Constitution and the Bill of Rights."

c. Visit the interest group’s website. Spend a few minutes exploring and reading about what this group believes, what it wants to happen in Washington, and how it seeks to influence politicians. List five important pieces of information which gives a picture of what this interest group believes.

The ACLU’s main goal is to protect peoples basic rights that are stated in the Constitution under the Bill of Rights. They started the Criminal Law Reform Project that focuses its work on the criminal justice system. It is seeking to end excessively harsh criminal justice policies that result in mass incarceration, over-criminalization, and racial injustice, and stand in the way of a fair and equal society. CLRP is working to reverse the tide of overincarceration, protect constitutional rights, eliminate racial disparities, and increase government accountability and transparency. Long-term isolation costs too much, does nothing to rehabilitate prisoners, and exacerbates mental illness - or even causes it in prisoners who were healthy when they entered solitary.

d. From your research, describe one (preferably current) piece of legislation, specific policy action, or candidate this group desires or endorses.

The ACLU, together with our state-based affiliates, scholars, activists, mental health experts, and faith-based organizations around the country, is engaged in a campaign to challenge the use of long-term solitary confinement – in the courts, in the legislatures, in reforms of correctional practice, and in the battle for public opinion. The goal of the Stop Solitary campaign is to limit and abolish the use of long-term solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, jails and juvenile detention centers. This policy action is called “Stop Solitary”

e. Where is this interest group located? Are there any local meetings you could attend? When?

Located in lower Manhattan, New York. There is an ACLU of Northern California located in San Francisco that is open most days from 9 a.m to 5 p.m

f. Are there volunteer opportunities? If so, what are they?

There are opportunities to help with short term projects or you can also serve as a counselor for the civil liberties hotline.

g. Identify additional developments you find interesting from the website/group.

I find it interesting how large the group is and how many topics they are able to cover.

· Return to http://votesmart.org/interest-groups . Under the state tab, choose California.

2. Identify one state interest group that represents your issue. Include:

a. Interest group name

ACLU of California

b. A brief statement assessing the position/perspective of the interest group.

There are tens of thousands of people, including children and the mentally ill, held in solitary confinement across the nation. Long-term solitary confinement does not rehabilitate, reduce crime or make our communities safer. Yet across the country people are held in in isolation – sometimes for years on end. Solitary confinement is inhumane, costly, and ineffective.

d. From your research, describe one (preferably current) piece of legislation, specific policy action, or candidate this group desires or endorses.

Supports a program called “Stop Solitary” that has the goal to put an end to solitary confinement.

e. Where is this interest group located? Are there any local meetings you could attend? When?

There is an ACLU of Northern California located in San Francisco that is open most days from 9 a.m to 5 p.m

f. Are there volunteer opportunities? If so, what are they?

There are opportunities to help with short term projects or you can also serve as a counselor for the civil liberties hotline.

g. Identify additional developments you find interesting from the website/group.

I find it interesting how many headquarters they are able to have all over the nation.

3. Finally, compare the two interest groups. Which one seems more organized? More successful? Who is their target audience? Supporters? Additional thoughts, concerns, observations welcome. Be sure to follow them on twitter.

Since I could not find many interest groups that had information on my topic, these are both the same interest group one is just a specific branch of the bigger organization.

· Please go to: http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/alphalist.php

4. Choose one PAC or Super PAC that pertains to your civic action issue. Include:

(I was not able to find anything on the website about my topic so I looked up other PACs and found a website of one of those)

a. PAC name

Sylvia Rivera Law Project

b. A brief statement assessing the position/perspective of the PAC.

The PAC is very opposed to the use of solitary confinement and believe that it is a form of cruel punishment that takes a physical and emotional tole on those that are forced to endure it. They feel this punishment is misused.

c. How much money have they raised/total receipt? How much have they spent? How much cash do they have on hand?

I can only find access to their form report from 2018, but in that year their total revenue was $1,118,237. It is unclear how much they spent or how much cash they have on hand.

d. How much of their budget is spent on: Republicans? Democrats?

I am unable to find this information on their website or form report.

e. Click Donor. Who are some of their donors? How does this reflect the interests of the PAC?

I am unable to find a list of donors to this organization.

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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Poll of the week

We at FiveThirtyEight hope you had a very patriotic Fourth of July — whatever that means to you. A YouGov poll, released this week, checked in on Americans’ feelings on patriotism and revealed some stark differences along — what else? — partisan lines.

Overall, the survey found that 76 percent of Americans consider themselves “very” or “somewhat” patriotic. But between Republicans and Democrats, there were pretty big differences: A whopping 97 percent of Republicans placed themselves in the “very” or “somewhat” categories, compared with 71 percent of Democrats. That’s a gap of 26 percentage points. Even more starkly, 72 percent of Republicans consider themselves to be “very” patriotic (the highest level of patriotism), compared with 29 percent of Democrats — a 43-point gap.

The poll also suggests that Democrats may define patriotism differently than their conservative counterparts. Specifically, YouGov found that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe that patriotism can include dissent:

52 percent of Democrats told YouGov that someone can criticize U.S. leaders to foreigners and still be considered patriotic, compared with 35 percent of Republicans.

51 percent of Democrats say disobeying a law they think is immoral doesn’t detract from their patriotism, compared with 33 percent of Republicans.

34 percent of Democrats think a person can still be a patriot even if he or she burns the American flag in protest, compared with 10 percent of Republicans.

And 55 percent of Democrats think an American can refuse to serve in a war he or she opposes and still maintain his or her patriotism, compared with 25 percent of Republicans.1

The “patriotism gap” is nothing new. Gallup has asked its respondents how proud they are to be Americans periodically since 2001. According to those polls, one year after the Sept. 11 attacks, 93 percent of Democrats and 99 percent of Republicans said they were either “extremely” or “very” proud to be Americans. The GOP number stayed comfortably in the 90s for the duration of George W. Bush’s presidency, but by January 2007, amid an unpopular war in Iraq that sparked no small amount of liberal dissent, the share of Democrats who were “extremely” or “very” proud to be Americans had shrunk to 74 percent — 21 points lower than the Republican share (and, to that point, the widest gap since Gallup started asking the question). The Democratic share increased during Barack Obama’s presidency (reaching a high of 85 percent in 2013) but was still consistently lower than the GOP’s: The share of Republicans who said they were “extremely” or “very” proudly American never dipped below 89 percent despite the extremely low opinion GOP voters had of Obama.

After the election of Donald Trump, the share of “extremely” or “very” proudly American Republicans ticked upward,2 but the share of Democrats saying the same thing plunged to 67 percent in 2017 and 60 percent just last month (the chart above has not been updated with the 2018 data). The current 33-point gap now holds the record for the widest gap between the two parties since 2001. (YouGov’s data also seems to suggest that Trump is contributing to the patriotism gap: The difference between the shares of Democrats and Republicans who said they were “very” patriotic rose from 29 points in 2013 to the current 43-point difference.)

So do Democrats’ feelings of patriotism rise and fall depending simply on who is in the White House? Data that Pew Research Center collected from 1987 to 2003 suggests that might not be the case. Throughout that time period, more Republicans than Democrats told pollsters that they “completely” agreed with the statement, “I am very patriotic.” In 1987, 51 percent of Republicans completely agreed, compared with 40 percent of Democrats. The two ticked up in tandem to Gulf War-era highs in 1991, but then, during the Bill Clinton administration, the gap widened: Democrats fell back into the 40s, while Republican agreement with that statement remained around 60 percent.

So what accounts for the persistent difference? It could just be that Republicans are more comfortable with the most obvious manifestations of patriotism these days. Public displays of patriotism often assume a pro-military dimension (sometimes purposefully and tactically so), which may be more likely to appeal to Republicans (other polls show they are generally more hawkish than Democrats). Singing “God Bless America” and military flyovers at sporting events also first came into fashion in the years immediately following 9/11, when rallying around the flag coincided with rallying around a Republican president. By contrast, funding AmeriCorps or paying taxes probably aren’t the first things many people think of when they think of patriotism, but lots of Democrats would argue they should be. Even apple pie and baseball aren’t the unifiers they once were: Pumpkin pie beat out apple as Americans’ Thanksgiving dessert of choice in 2015, and football blasphemously beats out baseball as Americans’ favorite sport to watch, 37 percent to 9 percent. In sum, we’re a big country, and there are just as many ways to enjoy America as there are Americans.

Other polling nuggets

A Quinnipiac University poll found that 63 percent of registered voters (84 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republicans) agree with the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which established a woman’s right to an abortion, while 31 percent disagree.

Quinnipiac also found that 91 percent of registered voters, including large majorities of Democrats and Republicans, think “the lack of civility in politics” is a serious problem. When asked who they blame more, “President Trump or the Democrats,” 85 percent of Democrats said Trump, and 76 percent of Republicans said the Democrats.

According to a SurveyMonkey poll, 62 percent of Americans believe the Senate should vote on President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court before the November elections. Sixty percent say the process of confirming nominees has become too partisan.

A YouGov poll found that 46 percent of Democrats support abolishing the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and replacing it with a different organization — a position that has been advocated by some Democratic lawmakers. Twenty-seven percent of Democrats said they opposed the move, and an additional 27 percent said they weren’t sure.

According to a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 76 percent of Americans said they’re in favor of requiring TV ads for prescription drugs to include a statement about how much they cost, a proposal that is part of the Trump administration’s plan for reducing drug prices.

43 percent of women say they do more than their fair share of house work in their households, according to a YouGov poll. That’s compared with 26 percent of men.

A Pew Research Center poll found that 24 percent of Americans say legal immigration should be decreased. That’s a significant decline since 2001, when 53 percent said so.

A Florida International University poll of 1,000 Puerto Ricans in Florida found that the majority have either a “good” or “very good” opinion of Republican Gov. Rick Scott despite very high levels of disapproval of the president, whom Scott was an early supporter of. People who moved to Florida between 2017 and 2018 were more likely to have a “very good” opinion of Scott than those who arrived earlier. Scott has repeatedly visited Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria hit the island in September 2017 and campaigned to welcome evacuees from the island.

A Gallup poll found that only 3 percent of India’s population was “thriving”[f00tnote]Gallup groups people into three categories: “thriving,” “struggling” and “suffering” based on their responses to two questions. The first asks people to rate their present life situation on a scale of 1 to 10, and the second asks them to use the same scale to assess their views on the next five years. Those who are categorized as “thriving” rate their present life situation as greater than or equal to 7 and their future as greater than or equal to 8. In 2017, Gallup found that 56 percent of Americans were “thriving.”[/footnote] in 2017. That’s an 11-point decrease from 2014, when 14 percent of the population was “thriving,” despite a 24 percent increase in GDP during that time.

Are you obsessed with polls? Check out FiveThirtyEight’s new polls dashboard, where we’re displaying all in one place the polls we’re collecting for the 2018 U.S. Senate, U.S. House and gubernatorial elections!

Trump approval

Trump’s approval rating is currently 41.9 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s tracker. His disapproval rating is 10.8 percentage points higher, at 52.7 percent. Trump’s job-approval numbers have generally held steady over the past month. One month ago today, his approval rating was 41.3 percent, and his disapproval rating was 52.6 percent (a net approval rating of -11.3 points). One week ago, his approval rating was 41.8 percent, and his disapproval rating was 52.3 percent (a net approval rating of -10.5 points).

Generic ballot

This week, Democrats are ahead in polls of the generic congressional ballot by an average of 47.3 percent to 39.6 percent — a 7.7-percentage-point lead, according to FiveThirtyEight’s model. One week ago, Democrats led 47.0 percent to 39.8 percent (a 7.2-point edge). One month ago, it was Democrats 46.3 percent and Republicans 39.9 percent (a 6.4-point edge).

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nathaniel Rakich and Dhrumil Mehta

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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Netflix and Amazon gave daring Indian filmmakers hope. Now that's turning to fear Even with two major, critically acclaimed films under her belt — “Kal: Yesterday and Tomorrow,” a thriller she wrote and directed, and “Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi,” a political drama that won Bollywood’s equivalent of an Academy Award — the work just wouldn’t come. Since then, the Mumbai-based filmmaker says she has “been inundated with work.” Her film “Guilty” — a social issues drama about a rape investigation — was released by the streaming giant in 2020. In the same year, Disney+ Hotstar released her 8-part comedy series “Hundred.” Now, increasing government scrutiny of these more provocative projects and other groundbreaking stories is worrying Narain and many other creators in Mumbai, the home of India’s film industry. Original shows on Amazon Prime and Netflix have lately drawn ire from Indian politicians and regular citizens who consider these films and TV shows insensitive to cultural and religious beliefs. Police complaints have also piled up against creators and company executives, and some of the offenses they have been accused of — including committing “deliberate or malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings” — carry prison terms of up to three years, a fine, or both. And, in recent months, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has announced new rules and guidelines for streaming services, though no explicit bans on particular themes. India’s creative community now fears that streaming services may buckle under the pressure, and refrain from touching stories that are even remotely controversial. It’s a troubling sign for an industry that had just begun experimenting with new forms of storytelling and producing shows capable of worldwide appeal. Just last year, Delhi Crime, a Netflix drama series based on the real rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in India’s capital, won an international Emmy. Start of a new era The arrival of Amazon (AMZN) and Netflix in India has been a boon to directors and writers like Narain, who had long languished on the fringes of Bollywood — an industry often accused of nepotism. Several filmmakers told CNN Business they thought the international streaming services introduced a degree of professionalism. “I co-directed a film called ‘House Arrest,’ which was released on Netflix in 2019, and everyone on set was thrilled just because they were getting paid on time,” said Samit Basu, novelist and filmmaker. He added that the culture changed to one where rigorous research and development were commonplace. “A lot of book rights were auctioned and writers’ rooms started happening,” Basu added. “Earlier, people in the film industry hardly ever read books.” More importantly, these companies made it possible for storytellers to explore subjects that had previously been untouched. Bollywood films are hamstrung by the Central Board of Film Certification, which forces filmmakers to remove everything from kisses and swear words to shots of drug abuse — once even from a film about drug abuse. Indian TV, which is also regulated by the government, is dominated by often regressive stories about housewives and mothers-in-law. Streaming content broke that mold because it was, until recently, unregulated by the government. “Sacred Games,” Netflix’s first original series in the country, shocked Indian viewers by casting well-known actors in a show that liberally made use of abusive language, violence and nudity. The program was compared to “Narcos,” Netflix’s hit American drama about Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. Amazon’s first series in the country, meanwhile, was “Inside Edge” — a show about the dark underbelly of cricket, a sport that is worshipped in India. Both “Inside Edge and “Sacred Games” were nominated for International Emmy awards. Several other shows on the platforms have also taken an unflinching look at subjects ranging from politics to female sexuality, which Bollywood and Indian TV have typically shied away from. “I am glad I did my film for Netflix because they did not dilute anything,” said Narain, referring to her project “Guilty.” When a kiss offends Politically-fueled uproar over shows on these international video platforms isn’t new. “Sacred Games,” which was released in 2018, managed to offend lawmakers from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition Congress Party. In 2019, a politician from the BJP filed a police complaint against the creator of the show for a “scene which disrespects Sikh religious symbol Kada.” But lately, the political and public outrage has reached a crescendo. Netflix faced boycott calls in November over “A Suitable Boy,” an adaptation of the award-winning novel of the same name by author Vikram Seth. Some viewers and BJP politicians were angered by a scene that depicts a Hindu man and a Muslim woman kissing in a temple, which led to complaints against Netflix executives. The company did not respond to CNN Business’s request for an update on these complaints. In January, Amazon’s political drama “Tandav” — which has been likened to the Netflix series “House of Cards” — faced a backlash from politicians who said they complained to the police about the company and the show’s creators for depicting Hindu Gods in a derogatory way. Aparna Purohit, the Head of India Originals at Amazon Prime Video, was questioned by police for several hours. Both Amazon and the show’s creators issued an apology. “We respect our viewers’ diverse beliefs and apologize unconditionally,” Amazon said in a statement. That same month, an Indian journalist filed a police complaint against Amazon’s crime series “Mirzapur” for “showing the city of Mirzapur in a bad light,” according to media reports. And this month, the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights asked Netflix to stop streaming “Bombay Begums,” a drama about five ambitious women, because of its “inappropriate portrayal” of children, who were shown sniffing cocaine. The government has also taken official action to rein in streaming services and the content they provide. Last November, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry brought the previously unregulated services within its scope. Three months later, the government announced new rules for online content, including a requirement for video platforms to classify their content into age-based categories. They also have to appoint a “grievance redressal officer” in India who has to address every complaint made against the company within 15 days. While activists have criticized these rules, the government said the video streaming services must be “responsible and accountable” for their content. “India is tolerant and will remain tolerant,” India’s technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Thursday. “But the limits of tolerance and standards of tolerance should not be judged on the creating freedom or abuse of a particular producer of an OTT platform.” The new rules do not explicitly ban any type of content — but the vague scope of the regulations is also exactly why filmmakers who spoke to CNN Business were troubled. A wide range of topics have already been targeted with complaints and outrage, leaving creators second-guessing and self-censoring. “In India, anyone can have a problem with anything. In India, people confuse what a character is saying with what the writer believes,” said Sumit Purohit, who wrote for “Inside Edge” and “Scam 1992,” a web series on Sony’s streaming service SonyLiv. “How can you make a series like the ‘Mindhunter’ here?” he asked, referring to a Netflix show about serial killers. Purohit also described the impact of self-censorship on a writer, saying that it “makes you angry, frustrated,” because “that is not how any art is created.” The backlash from all sides — politicians, journalists, national agencies and even regular citizens — is hard for American services to fight in India, a key overseas market, as they are wary of getting on the wrong side of the government. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in 2018 his “next 100 million” users would come from India. In Dec 2019, he said his company would spend 30 billion rupees ($413 million) on original content over the next two years in India. And, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has said that “it [Prime Video] is doing well everywhere but there’s nowhere it is doing better than in India.” A chilling effect There are already some signs that the industry might be regressing. Earlier this month, Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources, that “companies like Amazon’s Prime Video and Netflix are inspecting planned shows and scripts, with some even deleting scenes that could be controversial.” A few days later, the Indian financial newspaper Mint reported, citing anonymous sources, that Amazon had canceled the second season of the crime series “Paatal Lok,” which was praised for its portrayal of corruption and caste discrimination. Amazon and Netflix declined to comment on the reports. “Nothing that has politics in it is being touched [commissioned] right now,” said Josy Joseph, an investigative journalist whose media platform is collaborating with the creator of “Sacred Games” to make a series about Tihar Jail, India’s largest prison. “There is a massive depression that has set into the creative minds of Mumbai,” he said. “They are scared and writers are winding down to mediocrity. They are going back to telling saas-bahu stories or conservative romance.” (Saas-bahu means “mother-in-law and daughter-in-law” in Hindi.) While production isn’t slowing down — Netflix has announced 40 new shows and movies from India — Basu worries that production houses in the future may go for content that is “unambiguously safe” and “assumes that the audience’s intelligence is zero.” Just weeks after Prime Video executive Purohit was questioned by police, the platform announced it would produce its first film in Bollywood, the stronghold of traditional Indian movie making. “Ram Setu” will “highlight our Indian heritage,” said Vijay Subramanium, the head of content at Amazon Prime Video India, in a statement. Some filmmakers are less pessimistic about their creative freedom. Karan Anshuman, one of the creators of “Mirzapur” and “Inside Edge,” said he felt it was “too early to react” to the heightened scrutiny, adding that he would rather “wait and watch.” But film writer Arpita Chatterjee, said it is too late to rein in the Indian filmmaking community now. “We can’t just go back 20 years,” Chatterjee said. “The world is at a different place and storytellers are at a different place. You can’t just put the genie back in the bottle.” Source link Orbem News #Amazon #daring #Fear #filmmakers #gave #Hope #Indian #Netflix #turning

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dipulb3 · 4 years ago

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Netflix and Amazon gave daring Indian filmmakers hope. Now that's turning to fear

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/netflix-and-amazon-gave-daring-indian-filmmakers-hope-now-thats-turning-to-fear/

Netflix and Amazon gave daring Indian filmmakers hope. Now that's turning to fear

Even with two major, critically acclaimed films under her belt — “Kal: Yesterday and Tomorrow,” a thriller she wrote and directed, and “Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi,” a political drama that won Bollywood’s equivalent of an Academy Award — the work just wouldn��t come.

Since then, the Mumbai-based filmmaker says she has “been inundated with work.” Her film “Guilty” — a social issues drama about a rape investigation — was released by the streaming giant in 2020. In the same year, Disney+ Hotstar released her 8-part comedy series “Hundred.”

Now, increasing government scrutiny of these more provocative projects and other groundbreaking stories is worrying Narain and many other creators in Mumbai, the home of India’s film industry.

Original shows on Amazon Prime and Netflix have lately drawn ire from Indian politicians and regular citizens who consider these films and TV shows insensitive to cultural and religious beliefs.

Police complaints have also piled up against creators and company executives, and some of the offenses they have been accused of — including committing “deliberate or malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings” — carry prison terms of up to three years, a fine, or both. And, in recent months, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has announced new rules and guidelines for streaming services, though no explicit bans on particular themes.

India’s creative community now fears that streaming services may buckle under the pressure, and refrain from touching stories that are even remotely controversial. It’s a troubling sign for an industry that had just begun experimenting with new forms of storytelling and producing shows capable of worldwide appeal. Just last year, Delhi Crime, a Netflix drama series based on the real rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in India’s capital, won an international Emmy.

Start of a new era

The arrival of Amazon (AMZN) and Netflix in India has been a boon to directors and writers like Narain, who had long languished on the fringes of Bollywood — an industry often accused of nepotism. Several filmmakers told Appradab Business they thought the international streaming services introduced a degree of professionalism.

“I co-directed a film called ‘House Arrest,’ which was released on Netflix in 2019, and everyone on set was thrilled just because they were getting paid on time,” said Samit Basu, novelist and filmmaker. He added that the culture changed to one where rigorous research and development were commonplace.

“A lot of book rights were auctioned and writers’ rooms started happening,” Basu added. “Earlier, people in the film industry hardly ever read books.”

More importantly, these companies made it possible for storytellers to explore subjects that had previously been untouched.

Bollywood films are hamstrung by the Central Board of Film Certification, which forces filmmakers to remove everything from kisses and swear words to shots of drug abuse — once even from a film about drug abuse. Indian TV, which is also regulated by the government, is dominated by often regressive stories about housewives and mothers-in-law.

Streaming content broke that mold because it was, until recently, unregulated by the government. “Sacred Games,” Netflix’s first original series in the country, shocked Indian viewers by casting well-known actors in a show that liberally made use of abusive language, violence and nudity. The program was compared to “Narcos,” Netflix’s hit American drama about Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar.

Amazon’s first series in the country, meanwhile, was “Inside Edge” — a show about the dark underbelly of cricket, a sport that is worshipped in India. Both “Inside Edge and “Sacred Games” were nominated for International Emmy awards.

Several other shows on the platforms have also taken an unflinching look at subjects ranging from politics to female sexuality, which Bollywood and Indian TV have typically shied away from. “I am glad I did my film for Netflix because they did not dilute anything,” said Narain, referring to her project “Guilty.”

When a kiss offends

Politically-fueled uproar over shows on these international video platforms isn’t new. “Sacred Games,” which was released in 2018, managed to offend lawmakers from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition Congress Party. In 2019, a politician from the BJP filed a police complaint against the creator of the show for a “scene which disrespects Sikh religious symbol Kada.”

But lately, the political and public outrage has reached a crescendo.

Netflix faced boycott calls in November over “A Suitable Boy,” an adaptation of the award-winning novel of the same name by author Vikram Seth. Some viewers and BJP politicians were angered by a scene that depicts a Hindu man and a Muslim woman kissing in a temple, which led to complaints against Netflix executives. The company did not respond to Appradab Business’s request for an update on these complaints.

In January, Amazon’s political drama “Tandav” — which has been likened to the Netflix series “House of Cards” — faced a backlash from politicians who said they complained to the police about the company and the show’s creators for depicting Hindu Gods in a derogatory way. Aparna Purohit, the Head of India Originals at Amazon Prime Video, was questioned by police for several hours.

Both Amazon and the show’s creators issued an apology. “We respect our viewers’ diverse beliefs and apologize unconditionally,” Amazon said in a statement.

That same month, an Indian journalist filed a police complaint against Amazon’s crime series “Mirzapur” for “showing the city of Mirzapur in a bad light,” according to media reports. And this month, the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights asked Netflix to stop streaming “Bombay Begums,” a drama about five ambitious women, because of its “inappropriate portrayal” of children, who were shown sniffing cocaine.

The government has also taken official action to rein in streaming services and the content they provide. Last November, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry brought the previously unregulated services within its scope.

Three months later, the government announced new rules for online content, including a requirement for video platforms to classify their content into age-based categories. They also have to appoint a “grievance redressal officer” in India who has to address every complaint made against the company within 15 days.

While activists have criticized these rules, the government said the video streaming services must be “responsible and accountable” for their content.

“India is tolerant and will remain tolerant,” India’s technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Thursday. “But the limits of tolerance and standards of tolerance should not be judged on the creating freedom or abuse of a particular producer of an OTT platform.”

The new rules do not explicitly ban any type of content — but the vague scope of the regulations is also exactly why filmmakers who spoke to Appradab Business were troubled. A wide range of topics have already been targeted with complaints and outrage, leaving creators second-guessing and self-censoring.

“In India, anyone can have a problem with anything. In India, people confuse what a character is saying with what the writer believes,” said Sumit Purohit, who wrote for “Inside Edge” and “Scam 1992,” a web series on Sony’s streaming service SonyLiv. “How can you make a series like the ‘Mindhunter’ here?” he asked, referring to a Netflix show about serial killers.

Purohit also described the impact of self-censorship on a writer, saying that it “makes you angry, frustrated,” because “that is not how any art is created.”

The backlash from all sides — politicians, journalists, national agencies and even regular citizens — is hard for American services to fight in India, a key overseas market, as they are wary of getting on the wrong side of the government.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in 2018 his “next 100 million” users would come from India. In Dec 2019, he said his company would spend 30 billion rupees ($413 million) on original content over the next two years in India. And, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has said that “it [Prime Video] is doing well everywhere but there’s nowhere it is doing better than in India.”

A chilling effect

There are already some signs that the industry might be regressing. Earlier this month, Reuters reported, citing unnamed sources, that “companies like Amazon’s Prime Video and Netflix are inspecting planned shows and scripts, with some even deleting scenes that could be controversial.”

A few days later, the Indian financial newspaper Mint reported, citing anonymous sources, that Amazon had canceled the second season of the crime series “Paatal Lok,” which was praised for its portrayal of corruption and caste discrimination.

Amazon and Netflix declined to comment on the reports.

“Nothing that has politics in it is being touched [commissioned] right now,” said Josy Joseph, an investigative journalist whose media platform is collaborating with the creator of “Sacred Games” to make a series about Tihar Jail, India’s largest prison.

“There is a massive depression that has set into the creative minds of Mumbai,” he said. “They are scared and writers are winding down to mediocrity. They are going back to telling saas-bahu stories or conservative romance.” (Saas-bahu means “mother-in-law and daughter-in-law” in Hindi.)

While production isn’t slowing down — Netflix has announced 40 new shows and movies from India — Basu worries that production houses in the future may go for content that is “unambiguously safe” and “assumes that the audience’s intelligence is zero.”

Just weeks after Prime Video executive Purohit was questioned by police, the platform announced it would produce its first film in Bollywood, the stronghold of traditional Indian movie making. “Ram Setu” will “highlight our Indian heritage,” said Vijay Subramanium, the head of content at Amazon Prime Video India, in a statement.

Some filmmakers are less pessimistic about their creative freedom.

Karan Anshuman, one of the creators of “Mirzapur” and “Inside Edge,” said he felt it was “too early to react” to the heightened scrutiny, adding that he would rather “wait and watch.”

But film writer Arpita Chatterjee, said it is too late to rein in the Indian filmmaking community now.

“We can’t just go back 20 years,” Chatterjee said. “The world is at a different place and storytellers are at a different place. You can’t just put the genie back in the bottle.”

0 notes

khalilhumam · 4 years ago

Text

Hold Your Fire, Dueling Democrats

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/hold-your-fire-dueling-democrats/

Hold Your Fire, Dueling Democrats

By William A. Galston

Less than 36 hours after the polls closed, Democrats had formed up into their traditional circular firing squad—and this time, after they won the presidency! But Joe Biden’s margin over Donald Trump was a fraction of what they had expected. The Senate seemed likely to remain in Republican hands. House Democratic leaders had to explain why the gains they expected had turned into significant losses. And despite well-organized efforts, Democrats had failed to flip a single state legislature, allowing Republicans to dominate the redistricting process as they did a decade ago.

Why? Who was to blame? Moderates charged that socialism and “defund the police” had weighed down Democratic candidates in swing districts. Progressives returned fire, arguing that moderates were trying to suppress the new voices in the party that had energized its base of minorities and young people. In a post-election interview, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez critiqued centrists’ campaign strategies and pointed to “the share of white support for Trump” as her biggest surprise and suggested that racism accounted for much of Democrats’ disappointing results. Throughout 2020, Democrats have demanded—rightly—that the fight against the pandemic be evidence-based. They should apply the same standard to their inevitable election post-mortem. When they do, they will realize that their disappointment reflects the structural features of contemporary politics more than poor choices by strategists and candidates. Let’s begin with two facts. Donald Trump enjoyed—and used—the substantial powers of incumbency to boost his reelection chances—nowhere more aggressively than in Florida. There is nothing unusual about this—it’s one of many reasons why challengers rarely defeat sitting presidents. Whatever the final margin turns out to be, Joe Biden deserves credit for getting the job done. Second, an uncomfortable truth: Donald Trump’s presidency was no fluke. He crystalized and intensified the passions that propelled him to the presidency in 2016; he did not create them, and they have not gone away. He will probably end up with a higher share of the popular vote in defeat than he received in victory four years ago. Trumpism will loom as a massive outcropping in our political landscape for quite some time, and healing the divisions that fuel it will require a less ideological analysis (and self-examination) than Democrats have mustered during the past four years. Biden deserves credit for unifying nearly all the Americans who did not want Donald Trump to be President, a feat Hillary Clinton was unable to accomplish in 2016. Despite repeated warnings that the votes reported on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning would be Trump-heavy and that the “blue shift” would take place days later, Democrats reacted myopically to the early returns. The U.S. Elections Project has estimated that votes will reach a total of 158.8 million, compared to 136.7 million four years ago. If so, it was apparent that after Election Night, 8 million votes remained to be counted, the bulk of them from deep blue states. After these votes are all finally tallied, Joe Biden will likely enjoy a popular vote advantage of at least 6 million—and a winning margin of 4 percentage points or more. He moved five states—Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona—from the Republican to the Democratic column. By the standards of the close races that have characterized our politics since Ronald Reagan left the scene, this is a substantial victory, not a cause for disappointment, and it came with the highest turnout as a share of the population eligible to vote in more than a century. As partisan polarization has deepened in recent decades, ticket splitting has waned. (A pre-election survey by the Pew Research Center estimated that only 4 percent of the electorate was likely to do so this year.) If so, the outcome of Senate races would be predicted to conform increasingly to each state’s presidential vote. This is exactly what has happened. In 2016, for the first time since the 17th Amendment inaugurated the selection of senators by popular vote, not a single Senate race deviated from the presidential race. In 2020, only Susan Collins—a sui generis candidate in a sui generis state—was able to buck the tide. In Colorado, Biden won big, and so did John Hickenlooper. Biden won Arizona and Michigan by modest margins; so did Mark Kelly and Gary Peters. In Texas, Montana, and Iowa, all of which Biden lost by substantial margins, Democrat Senate candidates could muster no more than 45 percent of the vote. Biden lost North Carolina by 1.3 percent; the Democrats’ senate candidate, Cal Cunningham, by 1.7 percent. And in Georgia, where Biden and Trump are separated by only 14,000 votes out of nearly 5 million cast, both Senate races are headed to runoffs. The bottom line: In contemporary circumstances, Democrats will have a hard time winning Senate races in Republican states during presidential election years. This has little to do with money, message, strategy, or even candidates—and nearly everything to do with the intense partisan polarization that has made widespread ticket-splitting a thing of the past. Yes, Steve Bullock—the popular Democratic governor of Montana—ran 5 points ahead of Joe Biden. But in a state Biden lost by 18 points, it wasn’t nearly enough. Now to the House of Representatives. In 2018, Democrats won 53.4 percent of the votes cast in House races and gained 41 seats, with the highest turnout in a midterm election for more than a century. Although turnout rose across party lines, voter mobilization was massively asymmetrical. Compared to the previous midterm in 2014, Democrats raised their vote from 35.6 million to 60.6 million, a stunning gain of 25 million. By contrast, Republicans were able to increase their total by only 10 million votes. During presidential election years, total votes cast in House races also tend to mirror the presidential vote. So it proved in 2016, and although the total vote for House races this year has yet to be tallied, there can be no doubt that the Democratic advantage over Republicans narrowed substantially from its 2018 peak, in line with a Biden victory margin of at least 3 points lower than the edge House Democrats enjoyed two years ago. Against this backdrop, a narrowed House majority was inevitable. So long as partisanship remains pervasive and intense, House results are likely to vary in line with the presidential outcome in years divisible by four, with massive “wave” elections mostly confined to the midterms. And finally, the presidential contest, where a clear-eyed assessment of the results contradicts many confident predictions. This was supposed to be the “year of the woman,” whose revolt against Donald Trump’s aggressive and disrespectful brand of masculinity was predicted to trigger a massive surge in favor of the Democrats. This did not happen. Compared to 2016, Biden gained only marginally (if at all) among women. Among men, however, he improved on Hillary Clinton’s performance by 5 to 7 points. The predicted outpouring of minority votes did not happen either. Although African Americans voted in greater numbers than four years ago, their share of the electorate was unchanged, and Biden received a slightly lower share of their vote than Hillary Clinton did. Early figures suggest that Trump improved on his 2016 showing among Black men and younger Black voters for whom the civil rights movement and the Great Society are history lessons rather than lived experience. Latinos have equaled or surpassed Blacks as the largest minority group in the electorate, an advantage that is bound to widen in subsequent elections as more Latinos come of voting age. Despite justified concern about Biden’s performance among Latinos in Florida and Texas, he appears to have won roughly the same share of their vote as Hillary Clinton did. Still, the warning light is flashing yellow. “Latino” is a census category, not a group unified by a shared experience. Some have been here for generations; others have just arrived. Their country of origin influences their response to the political options they face in their adopted country. For a Spanish-speaker from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Colombia, socialism is toxic—a sentiment that Trump successfully exploited in Florida, where he received 47 percent of the Latino vote. He also bettered his national showing with this group in Georgia (41 percent), Texas (40 percent), Nevada (37 percent), and Arizona (36 percent). Contrast these results with his showing in California (21 percent) and New York (27 percent), where more Latinos come from Mexico and Puerto Rico. Democrats who view the Latino vote through a bicoastal Blue prism are likely to be led astray, as are those who draw facile analogies between Latinos and African Americans. Latinos may prove to be the Italians of the twenty-first century—a family-oriented, culturally conservative, and entrepreneurial group that gradually assimilates into the general population as the generations pass and discrimination fades. Despite Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s lament about white Americans, Biden scored substantial gains in this group, which still represents at least two-thirds of the electorate, according to the exit polls as well as other sources that many experts believe are more reliable. In fact, his showing among whites explains all his gains over Hillary Clinton in the national vote share; his showing among Black and Latino voters was at best the same as hers, if not a bit worse. He even scored important gains in the heart of the Trump coalition—whites without college degrees. Young adults and first-time voters gave Biden a slightly higher share of their vote than Hillary Clinton received four years ago, but to the dismay of progressives, their share of the electorate did not increase. (Senator Bernie Sanders encountered similar disappointments during his quest for the presidential nomination.) By contrast, Biden was able to slash Trump’s margin among seniors, a bloc with a high propensity to vote, by more than half, and he substantially bettered Hillary Clinton’s showing among moderate and independent voters As for geography, in-depth studies of the election returns by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal show that Biden did much better than Hillary Clinton among suburban voters, who make up about half the electorate. The Times found that in the 373 suburban counties across the country, Biden improved on Clinton’s performance by about 4.6 percentage points. In Georgia, the pro-Biden shift was a massive 8 points, compared to 3 points for Michigan and Wisconsin. As the Journal study underscored, there are different kinds suburbs with distinctive voting patterns. The inner suburbs, which tend to be wealthier and more diverse, lean Democratic, and Biden improved Democrats’ winning margin by about 3 points over Hillary Clinton. In the outer suburbs (“exurbs”), which tend to vote Republican, Biden cut Trump’s edge from 18 percent in 2016 to 12 percent this year. And in the Midwest, Trump’s margin in working-class suburbs declined slightly from four years ago. In other kinds of jurisdictions, Trump improved further on his strong 2016 showing in rural areas and small towns, while Biden’s performance in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee was not significantly better than Clinton’s. Biden’s improved performance in the suburbs surrounding these urban areas was the key to his victory in the Blue Wall states that put him over the top in the Electoral College. In Georgia and Arizona, on the other hand, both big cities and their adjacent suburbs contributed to Biden’s narrow wins. In short, Biden’s strengths were exactly what his backers for the Democratic nomination predicted: He was able to hold Democrats’ gains among the so-called “Rising American Electorate” (women, young adults, urban voters, and minority groups) while substantially improving Democrats’ showing in those groups—men, whites , seniors, and suburbanites—that gave Trump his wafer-thin upset victory four years ago. Gains in these groups almost certainly turned 2016 Democratic losses in the Blue Wall states into vital victories this year and helped move Georgia and Arizona into the Democratic column for the first time in decades. There is good reason to wonder whether any other Democratic nominee could have achieved these results. Democrats are rightly disappointed that President-elect Biden probably will not enjoy the unified support of the legislative branch. Barring Democratic victories in both Georgia Senate runoff elections, much of the progressive agenda will be on hold. If Biden is unable to achieve a working relationship with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, prospects are dim for major legislative accomplishments in the next two years. If McConnell gives priority to the nakedly political objectives that guided him in the first two years of the Obama, Biden’s plea for national healing will go unheeded. For now, anyway, Americans of goodwill in both parties are reduced to hoping that the urgency of the problems Biden will face as he takes the oath of office will move McConnell in the direction of the compromises that are the only alternatives to continuing gridlock, which would inflict further damage on the nation’s health, economy, and social fabric. Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump with a coalition that stretched from the center-right to the progressive left—that ran, as someone remarked, from William Kristol to AOC. To say the least, it will not be easy to unite this diverse assemblage behind a common program. For cultural as well as economic reasons, the issues that unite progressives leave moderate voters uneasy. Even if McConnell chooses the path of cooperation with the incoming President, the progressive agenda has no chance of getting enacted into law during the first two years of the new Administration. Progressives face a strategic choice. They can put their agenda on hold, accept as necessary the bargains that Biden will be compelled to strike, and turn their energies toward putting Democrats firmly in control of the Senate after the 2020 mid-term elections. Alternatively, they can decide that fighting for their agenda will shift public opinion in their favor, even if they lose, and they will pressure the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership to offer bills that the Senate is bound to reject. The latter course would guarantee a continuation of the gridlock that has frustrated the American people by thwarting progress on so many vital issues, while the former would require committed advocates to display an unusual degree of foresight and restraint. To manage this swirl of pressures from his left and his right, Joe Biden will need all the experience he has acquired and all the skills he has honed during nearly half a century in national public life. It won’t be easy, but this is the hand he has been dealt, and his only option is to play it as well as he can.

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uk-news-talking-politics · 4 years ago

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Polling deep dive shows Labour taking first steps towards power

By Chaminda Jayanetti

April must seem a long time ago in Conservative Central Office. Where once much of the country rallied round the flag, falling in line behind the government and its stricken prime minister, the Tories' yawning poll leads have since disappeared, with Labour occasionally even nudging ahead - an unthinkable notion back in the spring.

Through its slipshod handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the fiasco around Dominic Cummings, the Tories have squandered unity, goodwill and vote share in the polls. Labour's strategy of critical support for the government has paid solid dividends so far with voters. Keir Starmer has stronger personal ratings than any Labour leader since Gordon Brown's honeymoon.

But Starmer's critics on Labour's Corbynite left ask how he isn't further ahead of a government that has a poor record on covid and seems to stumble from one shambles to the next. There's a degree of bitterness to the criticism, but it does point to a more fundamental challenge for Labour: the risk of a Tory revival if the pandemic dissipates and the economy recovers by the next election - and especially if the Conservatives change their leader.

With both YouGov and Opinium, the Tories' vote share among its own voters from last December has plunged from more than 85% in January - sometimes topping 90% in late March and April - to just 70% now with Opinium, and the high 60s with YouGov. But during that time Labour's vote share among 2019 Conservative voters has only risen slightly, from pretty much nothing back in January to around five percent now. The biggest rise has come from 2019 Tory voters responding 'don't know' to the question of who they'd vote for in a general election now. This has more or less doubled from below one in ten in January to almost one in five now.

It's normal for voters to be unsure how they'd vote between elections, but interestingly the pattern is not repeated among Labour voters from last year. The 'don't knows' among Labour voters with Opinium has fallen from the mid-teens during winter and spring, to around ten percent now. With YouGov it's generally in the low teens. In both poll series, Labour now has more support among its existing voters than the Tories have among theirs - a direct reversal from early this year.

These shifts were most marked around the Dominic Cummings row, but they have continued since then. Tory support in particular has continued to ebb away over the summer and into autumn.

The Tories' vanishing poll lead is therefore mostly down to Labour voters - and Lib Dems, around a third of whom are now backing Labour - affirming their support for Starmer's party, while Tory voters express increasing doubts over who would get their vote. This is solid stuff which will be reassuring to Labour HQ, but it's a long way from sending the Conservatives into panic mode.

There's a niggling concern though. Does this mean that Labour is piling on support where, in purely electoral terms, it doesn't really need it?

The party has made limited headway among Leave voters in YouGov's polling - again, the shift is primarily from Conservative to Don't Know. With Opinium, Labour has made slightly more progress. But in both cases, Labour's advance is split pretty evenly between Leave and Remain voters. That's not necessarily a bad thing - after all, some Remain voters in red wall seats defected to the Tories last year, having accepted the referendum result and wanting to 'get Brexit done'.

Since May, Opinium has been breaking its results down by type of seat - Tory holds in 2019, Labour holds in 2019, Tory gains in 2019, and seats Labour has lost since 2005.

Labour's support in the seats it held onto last December hasn't really shifted that much since May - all that is happening is some Tory support is shifting to Don't Know.

But in the seats it has lost since 2005, Labour's support has risen from the low to the high 30s, while the Tories' has fallen from around 40% into the 30s, and indeed to just 30% in the two Opinium polls this month. In May and June the Tories were comfortably outpolling Labour in these seats - now the picture is increasingly fuzzy, with Labour ahead in the last two polls and the Tories only ahead in two of the six polls conducted since the start of August.

These categories are subject to relatively high margins of error and can fluctuate significantly from one poll to the next, but the pattern over time smooths out. Labour is making ground where it needs to. Or, alternatively, the Tories are losing ground where they can't afford to.

There are other smoke signals in the data. The Tories' lead among town-based voters has disappeared since May, while their lead in rural seats has halved, according to Opinium. The Tory lead in the Midlands has essentially vanished with both pollsters, while in the North, Labour has retaken the lead and is now comfortably ahead.

YouGov's series of separate Wales-only polls shows the party is now eight points clear of the Tories, compared to five points in the general election - and a 12-point Tory lead back in April.

Does this mean that Labour is reclaiming its working class base? This is harder to measure. The rather unsatisfactory ABC1C2DE measure, which is based on old employment categories, shows Labour reversing a healthy Tory lead among the white collar ABC1s, while the Tories maintain a shrinking lead among blue collar C2DEs.

The latter includes state pensioners. It's the over-65s who continue to provide the Tories with commanding leads - albeit less commanding than in Spring. Labour has made little headway among pensioners - although, once again, Don't Knows have increased. Its performance among those approaching retirement varies between the two pollsters, with Labour doing far better with Opinium.

The same pollster has Labour taking the lead among 35-to-44-year-olds and 45-to-54-year-olds, reversing Tory leads from Spring. This matters. The 'crossover' age at which people became more likely to vote Tory was 39 at the last election, down from 47 in 2017. For all the talk about the grey vote, it is these more middle-aged bands that are the critical battleground. Labour is a long way from being comfortable here, but it's a marker of significant progress.

For all that, it's worth remembering Labour's healthy poll leads under Ed Miliband, and prior to the 1987 election under Neil Kinnock. On both occasions, the following election was a disaster for the party. Analysts often regard leadership ratings as a better guide to future elections than voting intention polls.

We know that Starmer has taken the lead in 'best prime minister' polling since becoming Labour leader in April - something that largely eluded Miliband.

There's an interesting contrast between the leadership polling of people currently intending to vote Tory and those who voted Tory at the last election. Among current Tory supporters in YouGov's most recent poll, 80% said Johnson would make the best prime minister, compared to 65% of people who voted Tory last year. Just four percent of current Tory supporters prefer Starmer, compared to eight percent of 2019 Tory voters. Fifteen percent of current Tory supporters don't know who'd make the best prime minister, but a whopping 27% of 2019 Tory voters say likewise.

Given that around a third of 2019 Tory voters aren't currently backing the party in YouGov's polling, this suggests that Starmer's ratings are higher among those 2019 Tory voters who aren't currently backing the party, Johnson's ratings are lower, and 'Don't Know' is a much more common response. Correlation is not causation, but it's evidence that Johnson's unconvincing leadership may be turning Tory voters away.

Other than that, Starmer's own ratings largely mirror the patterns seen with Labour's ratings in the voting intention polls - he's popular with Labour and Lib Dem voters from last year, popular with Remainers, younger voters, ABC1s and Londoners. Perhaps unlike Labour, his own ratings shot up early on and have since plateaued, whereas the party has made slower but steadier progress throughout the year.

So where does this all leave us? We're very far from a general election, a lot might change, and there are substantial margins for error in the data. But certain trends are positive, if not exactly triumphant, for Labour. They are not just piling up support in their remaining heartlands. They are winning over middle aged voters and those in their former seats. They are making up ground in towns and rural seats.

And meanwhile, a significant minority of Tory voters have grown unsure about the government without being won over by the opposition. That means Labour has room to grow - but it also means the Tories do too. A lot will hinge on which of them succeeds in doing so.

#keir starmer #labour

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tactical-substitution · 4 years ago

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The Konundrum of Kai Havertz

One of the principle things that differentiates a footballer from a writer, artist, or philosopher, relates to the significance of questioning and answering. Whereas in the latter examples, the very best ones tend to be characterized by the capacity to create puzzles and contradictions that invite further thought and insight, truly elite footballers are different; their presence on the pitch feels like a certain “this is just the way it is”. It can be surprisingly difficult to tactically analyze the Messis, Xavis, Ronaldos, and Lahms because the best footballers in a given generation excel so completely at their assigned tasks on the pitch that there are few questions left to ask. It is the great-but-problematic footballers who ellicit further reflection. It often ends up being the Sneijders and Goetzes and Balotellis who prompt fans to think and debate about exactly what they were good at, and why this was never enough to be “world class” footballers on a prolonged basis. If the former category could currently be said to consist of players like Kylian Mbappe, Virgil Van Dijk, and Kevin de Bruyne, it is unlikely that most football fans won’t already be thinking of someone who meets the latter criteria – a Romelu Lukaku, say, or a Sergej Milinkovic-Savic. It is obvious when watching some players play that there are things that they are capable of that few others would try, and yet actually fitting these players into the squads of clubs among the five or ten best in the world proves difficult. It is this space between manifest skillfulness and tangible skillset that would allow them to play at the absolute highest level that tends to illustrate what is required of the players for whom no such deficit exists, and creates a basis for scouting and player analysis at the level of potential Champions League winners.

Among younger players, little doubt exists as to the sufficiency of Kylian Mbappe or Jadon Sancho should a European giant wish to sign them – in virtually any tactical circumstances their technical and athletic gifts are enough to wreak havoc on any defense. These are the kinds of players who will set clubs back and arm and a leg, and be worth it. In this transfer window, there is perhaps no better example of a “great-but problematic” player attracting serious transfer interest than 20-year-old German international Kai Havertz, currently at Bayer Leverkusen. The young attacker has been seriously linked with the likes of Liverpool and Bayern Munich for months, though Chelsea have ostensibly lept to the front of the queue, having apparently only started on their spending spree with the acquisitions of Hakim Ziyech and Timo Werner. Barcelona, Real Madrid, PSG, Juventus, Man City, and Man United have all been linked at least somewhat credibly with attempts to woo the young German. Whether he moves in this transfer window, and if so where, could come down to any number of factors: Will Bayern prioritize his signature because of his nationality, and will the player feel the same way? Will the desire the work with a celebrity manager like Pep Guardiola or Jurgen Klopp be an incentive to push for a move to a particular club at a crucial point in the young player’s development? Maybe most germanely, who will actually be willing to spend the money should Leverkusen hold out for his buyout clause? In the cases of Sancho or Mbappe, nearly any fee or wage would be rewarded by a signing that is as close to a “sure thing” as exists; with Havertz, the risk seems to be far greater. Knowing why this is the case will be crucial for any signing club if they wish to mitigate that risk, and to not ensure that they have a player widely derided as a “misfit” or “flop” on their hands collecting high wages and attracting negligible transfer interest in two or three years’ time.

What makes Havertz a risky proposition relative to other putatively world-class youngsters is not a matter of talent or lack thereof – go watch a YouTube highlights video if you doubt he’s a marvel – but rather one of style and skillset. Analysts have observed that Havertz’s position could be thought of as a fairly orthodox and old-school number ten, which is a problem given that the clubs interested in him don’t necessarily play with tens. It is not simply that any one club incidentally does not currently play with a playmaker “in the hole”, but rather that the tactical dynamics of modern football have crowded such players out. Just look at the (mis)treatment of Mesut Ozil or Philippe Coutinho by fans compared to the universal adulation given to the likes of Thiago or Marco Verratti for their more “complete” midfield performances. Champions League holders and runaway Premier League leaders Liverpool are generally noted to play with a trio of “workhorse” midfielders supporting their adventurous fullbacks and explosive attackers, and have improved their fortunes dramatically since jettisoning Coutinho to Barcelona, while the player looks like a black sheep wherever he goes in spite of being a much more skilled and “watchable” player than current Liverpool midfielders like Jordan Henderson or Georginio Wijnaldum. Barca themselves were the best club side in living memory on the basis of the genius of midfielders like Xavi and Andres Iniesta on both sides of the ball, and were frankly foolish to regard Coutinho as a “replacement” for all of the things that Iniesta did on the pitch. Top teams attack, defend, and press as an organized unit, and it is hard to see a role for a “free” playmaker who cannot also cover spaces and defend individually in midfield, participate in the buildup of possession, and generally act as a multi-functional cog in a tactical system, or else play as out-and-out forwards stretching play, battling with defenders, and creating and scoring goals. Therein lies the rub for Havertz, who for all of his flashy ability does not really profile as the kind of player who can fill any of the roles in a truly modern football side that looks to dominate with and without the ball, at least without some development on his part, or some shoehorning and accommodating on the part of the team.

What it means to play as a number ten can be variable to different contexts, ranging from deeper-lying playmakers of the ilk of Carlos Valderrama, to creative attackers who would tend to play off of strikers or even as “false nines”, a la Francesco Totti. Havertz is much more in the latter mold, and in fact Totti is a decent comparison to his style of play. What Havertz is truly great at is using his balance, ball control, precise shooting, and passing range to conjure up “moments of magic” – high risk, high reward actions in and around the penalty box that if they work are very likely to lead to a good goal-scoring opportunity. In addition, his height and heading technique make Havertz an aerial threat if the ball is crossed to him. So far, so good – many analysts and pundits regard the scoring of goals as a tactical end worth pursuing. The problem, then, is that Havertz isn’t terribly good at doing much else. His one-on-one defending is nothing to write home about, he lacks the explosive pace to beat all but the slowest and most injured fullbacks if he ends up in a wide position, and he rarely involves himself in buildup play closer to his own goal. It is highly unlikely that he will get much faster, though he may well gain some physical strength and tactical intelligence – nevertheless, simply expecting the player to become a more solid defender or exert a more metronomic influence as he ages is frankly a gamble. If a big club decides to go in for Havertz they should be able to fit him into their plans commensurate to the amount of money they invest in him, and they should be able to do so now rather than in some ill-defined future where his game has become more balanced and less deficient. Accordingly, the thorny task around Havertz is determining whether his game, more or less as it currently exists, could fit into those of any of the superclubs he is linked with.

The most conventional possibilities for Havertz’s future are worth considering, and roughly align with the roles he has played at Leverkusen. He could play as a pseudo-right-winger, though this would necessitate an overlapping fullback or wingback to give width in attack. He is also possibly capable of playing as a withdrawn forward in the mold of Roberto Firmino, chipping in with a non-embarrassing goal tally but also pulling the strings creatively while the goalscoring burden is carried by wingers, a strike partner, or advanced midfielders. Neither of these are totally inconceivable, but unless Havertz irons out kinks in his game and broadens his skillset, they would necessarily pull teammates out of position to fill the gaps he leaves, potentially creating problems elsewhere on the pitch. Top managers quickly notice these kinds of things and are unlikely to be so impressed by his neat touches and controls that they don’t yank him from the starting XI in their quest for tactical impenetrability and balance. Another possibility is that Havertz will play as a “second striker” off of a more traditional number nine for the rest of his career. One system that could facilitate this would be some species of 4-2-4, with midfield areas occupied by a strong double pivot; another would be to position the wingers more conservatively so that the team lines up in more of 4-4-1-1. The former would be pretty absurdly attack-minded, perhaps resembling Pep Guardiola’s 2015-16 Bayern side when Kingsley Coman and Douglas Costa played high and wide, the fullbacks tended to assist the midfielders, and Thomas Muller (a German number ten a decade Havertz’s senior) played off of Robert Lewandowski. When fully functional, that side was mind-melting to watch, and Havertz might strive to emulate Muller’s successful interpretation of the attacking midfield role, with defenders never sure if he had dropping deep to create or darting to meet an aerial cross on his agenda. If Havertz were to play in the latter system, his role might be comparable to that of Antoine Griezmann at Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid, or perhaps a frame of reference would be the function of Juan Mata, Eden Hazard, and Oscar for Chelsea under managers like Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte. The allure of this kind of role would of course be that Havertz is less likely to come across as a defensive liability in a system where virtually everyone is responsible for a great deal of defensive grunt work in one way or another and he is the primary creative outlet, constantly looking to locate himself in a point of weakness in the opposition’s structure, receive the ball, and then make the “magic” happen. Where problems come up is when one remembers how much running around the likes of Griezmann or Oscar always did. Even in a counter-attacking side, even if a player does much more than their fair share of creative passing and danger-creation, they will still inevitably be expected to harass opposition defenders and midfielders out of possession, and Havertz has not yet clearly demonstrated the stamina or the tactical intelligence to be apt to such a role.

One last possibility for Havertz would be to play as a kind of “false midfielder”. He could stand in midfield areas to make up the numbers and aid in a tactical plan to create numerical overloads in central areas, and then when able to get closer to goal, really start to add value. The problem here is that Havertz has not yet shown that he can become a safer, higher-volume passer at even the level of, say, David Silva or Isco. Those midfielders are nowhere near the central midfielders that they are attacking ones, and cannot resolve situations in congested areas through passing combinations at the level of their compatriots Iniesta or Xavi, but they can at least participate in such exchanges without constantly playing catastrophic sideways passes which result in counter-attacking opportunities for the opponent, and thereby justify their presence on the pitch for when they are able to be more useful in the final third. Is Havertz trustworthy enough to do so? If so, he has not yet shown it. With all of these hypotheticals, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the player will simply develop his game through practice, coaching, and the last embers of puberty, and be able to play them satisfactorily, but this seems like too speculative an expectation to ground such a large financial outlay in. Havertz is who he is right now, and should be scouted for his demonstrated skillset rather than based on wishful thinking. If a club is to justify the purchase of Havertz, then they may have to fundamentally rethink the kind of player he is, and re-rationalize how they will fit him into their plans.

What clubs should expect to get should they bid for Havertz, is a kind of very expensive water-carrier. When most football fans hear that phrase they likely do not think of a player of Havertz’s qualities. French attacker Eric Cantona infamously used the epithet to describe his international teammate Didier Deschamps, as a kind of tongue-in-cheek way of belittling his compatriot’s contribution to the collective effort. Other players who tend to come to mind as “water carriers” might be Marcel Desailly or Claude Makelele. What all of these players have in common, besides their nationality, is a particular skillset, which was as narrow as it was well-executed. These midfielders had the match-intelligence to step up and engage opponents at the right times without getting caught out of positions, assisted defenders at risk of being over-burdened, covered for teammates who may have been out of position, were precise in challenges, could effectively mark dangerous opposition players as effectively as a center-back, and were mobile enough to cover ground and arrive at the right time and place to slow down or stop opposition attacks or win the ball back. In possession they were all fairly conservative, prioritizing consolidating possession and passing to teammates in space over attempting any risky passes or skills on the ball. They are greats of the game because they “carried the water” for more flashy teammates who were given more license to improvise and take risks closer to the opposition goal, by performing these kinds of simple actions with great competence and consistency. Clearly this does not sound like the kind of player that Havertz is, and in fact quite the opposite, but what if there is more than one way to carry the water?

If the main impression that most fans have of Cantona’s famous phrase is that it describes the duties of a defensive or holding midfielder, there is perhaps another interpretation of it that should be considered, which has more fidelity to his intentions with the quip: a “water carrier” is a player who performs a narrow range of mechanized actions to support the team, in contrast with teammates whose roles entailed doing more different things, in a greater variety of situations, in order to really unlock games and break down an opposition. In Cantona’s time this was arguably a fairly accurate rendering of the dynamics of how a footballing side functioned – midfielders and defenders tended to keep a compact shape closer to their own goal, and tens, wingers, and center-forwards were given the task of breaking down those compact structures with “moments of magic”. In such a (simplified, admittedly) context Havertz would be an absolute star with his skillset, as he would constantly have the game in front of him, virtually daring him to find a distressed point in an opposition’s defensive structure in which he could dribble, run into, or find a teammate with a through-ball. There is no doubt that defenders and midfielders would find it difficult to deal with Havertz’s clever runs, deft controls, and overall skillfulness for approximately half of a ninety-minute football match, and the onus would be on his “water carrier” teammates rather than him to do much of the serious running and remain positionally alert. Perhaps in such a situation Kai Havertz would truly be living high on the hog. Unfortunately for the young German, he was not even born at the time that that footballing milieu existed, and so must contend with the landscape of 2020.

When one watches the football sides of Guardiola, Klopp, Tuchel, Pochettino, or Sarri, it is pretty abundantly clear that the players are not divided into conservatively-positioned grunts and attacking artists running around at the will of their self-governing genius improvising ways to foil the defensive goons. It is a cliché to describe top-level sides in the modern game as “fluid” or praise their “discipline” and “organization”, but there is a good reason for that. Modern approaches are based on using all ten outfield players, and increasingly the goalkeeper, to circulate and advance the ball into positions of overloaded strength in possession, and stymy and harass opponents out of doing any of that out of possession. The number nine is the first defender, and the goalkeeper the first attacker, and all of that. It is somewhat difficult to see a place for a solitary magician like Kai Havertz in all of that, as modern footballing sides tend to rely on the industry and intelligence of their forwards to keep opposition defenders from building up attacks, and don’t tend to rely quite as heavily on one or two especially flashy players to break down defenses as sides of the past. For a modern superclub, an attack might look something like a left-sided midfielder and left-winger forcing an opposition defender to play an errant long pass by swarming them and giving them little option, a left-back retrieving the ball and playing it to the holding midfielder, who consolidates possession with a quick interchange with the right-back, allowing the right-back to engineer a free path close to the opposition penalty area where they can cross to whichever attackers or midfielders are able to plausibly compete for an aerial ball with the opposition defenders. In scenarios of this kind, Kai Havertz is unlikely to play much of a part, and if he does is unlikely to be doing anything that a less costly player with a different skillset would be unable to. This is before one considers his (relative lack of a) defensive contribution. In these kinds of tactically sophisticated, high-tempo “gegenpressing” encounters, Havertz begins to look like something of a flat-track bully and an anachronism rather than a superstar.

How, then, is Havertz to fit in to a modern footballing side, if at all? In the above scenarios, and indeed in the squads of big clubs like PSG, Juventus, and Bayern, midfielders (and increasingly fullbacks) are expected to have broad skillsets, and to be able to move and progress the ball in a variety of ways and to defend actively and passively, and indeed academies across the world are producing players who can “do it all” without any “master of none” caveats. Take potential Havertz destination Bayern for example: Austrian defender David Alaba, who has spent the bulk of his club career at left-back but was groomed for a kind of hybrid center-back/midfield role by Guardiola, and plays as an attacking midfielder for his country, plays as a center-back playing incisive long and short passes to start attacks, and uses his anticipation and speed to expertly mark opponents. Former right-back Joshua Kimmich has played in central midfield this season, and has arguably been the best player in his position in the entire world. Young Canadian winger Alphonso Davies has deputized at left-back, and, like Alaba and Kimmich, has been a strong candidate for the most effective and complete player in the world or at least the league in his position, despite it not actually being his position, using his lightning pace to monitor an entire side of the pitch, overlapping intelligently in attack and showing excellent reading of the game to make vital defensive clearances and tackles, all while looking frigidly cool in building up possession in conjunction with his more experienced comrades. These are as much the stars of Bayern’s juggernaut team as their vaunted forward players, along with the defensive likes of Niklas Sule, Benjamin Pavard, and Jerome Boateng. Whichever system Bayern choose to play, it is unlikely that Havertz would be their most important player or even particularly close despite playing in a role that would render him the traditional “star player”. What would the young German mark himself out as, then, were the Bavarian club to take a punt on him?

In the tactical schemes employed by top clubs of the 1990s, elite attacking midfielders of the ilk of Roberto Baggio, Zinedine Zidane, and Michael Laudrup were not only the “stars” of their club and national sides in terms of press attention and shirt sales, but were also typically the players who would quantitatively have a “starring role” in the sense of touching the ball with greater frequency and significance than teammates. Over the last two decades and under the influence of the “positional” approaches of Marcello Bielsa, Louis Van Gaal, and Guardiola, and the “counter-pressing” philosophies employed by Klopp, Roger Schmidt, and Ralf Rangnick, deeper-lying, less directly creative midfielders have emerged as the “protagonists” in matches where the majority of clubs prioritize ball retention in safe areas, and use structured possessional routines to both keep a compact defensive shape and manipulate the ball into dangerous areas. On and off the ball it has been midfielders such as Sergio Busquets and Mousa Dembele and, increasingly, defenders like Trent Alexander-Arnold and David Alaba who have not only spent the most time directly controlling the play of games, but also had to use the widest array of dribbles, passes, tricks, and controls to keep and manoeuvre the ball, and this has been by design. Even many smaller clubs have come to adopt this style of play, but, most relevant to the immediate future of Havertz, every title-chasing club across Europe with whom he has been linked play this way. Gone are the one-dimensional “water carrier” defenders and holding midfielders, and in their place a generation of deeper-positioned players with the skillsets of traditional number tens (many of whom in fact played in that role at youth level or earlier in their playing careers) have emerged. At the tip of the spear pace has been the attribute that most preoccupies top managers, whose obsession has been with using the coordinated movement of attackers to provide passing options and open up spaces for one another and for advancing midfielders and wingbacks or fullbacks. These attackers have found themselves in the role of “water carriers” for their more cultured teammates further back on the pitch, performing simple actions in a relatively mechanized way, but doing so at such a high level that the new breed of holding playmakers are able to use their broader skillsets to move the ball into areas which have been given situational tactical significance and danger by their water-carrying forward comrades.

If the modern “water carriers” are the quick and tricky attackers whose speedy movements create the chaotic conditions which their teammates exploit, then how is a player with little natural pace or explosive acceleration to distinguish themselves? This is the scouting question that lingers over Kai Havertz – his actual skillset looks quite narrow against a frame of reference where playmakers are expected to do their work in more congested and treacherous midfield areas, but if a club side were able to exploit the young German’s demonstrated capacity to pass creatively in and around the penalty area to its fullest extent, it might well be enough in and of itself to justify his presence on the pitch. The problem is that it is not immediately obvious how his skillset and limitations could be accommodated by the tactical schemes employed by the likes of Guardiola, Klopp, and so forth. In the case of a true two-way midfielder or an explosive winger, it requires little imagination to see how they would be “plugged in” to the kinds of tactical systems used by Man City or Liverpool – the dynamics of these systems are calibrated to balance the extensive skillsets of the star players against the intensive skillsets of the water carriers, albeit in a markedly different ways from the suberclubs of the 90s. In the case of Havertz, it is clear that he would end up being a “water carrier” in a limited role were he to wind up at either club, but decidedly murkier whose water he would be carrying, and what kind of intricate tactical scheme of delegating tasks would mediate this balance. Managers, scouts, and pundits understand the scouting question for an old-school defensive midfielder – will this player’s ability to mark opponents and plug gaps carry the water left at that club by its existing, defensively cavalier squad without creating an awkward stylistic disjunction? The same kind of scouting question will have to inform clubs as they contemplate allocating a large chunk of their budget towards Havertz – in what way can the existing or prospective squad play on and off the ball such that Havertz’s superior skillset around the penalty area will free up teammates to do all of the other important work which they are more suited to without having to worry about scoring and assisting goals as much as they might otherwise have to?

Such a question is radically different from the orthodox perspective from which clubs (as well as football journalists, fans, etc.) tend to approach scouting a “star” player like Havertz, but its pertinence is a consequence of the style of modern football. As Casemiro is a guaranteed starter at Real Madrid because his prodigious volume of tackles and interceptions mitigates his pedestrian on-ball skillset and “frees up” his more expansively-passing teammates, big clubs eyeing up Havertz must consider whether the routineness with which his movement, vision, and skillfulness make the difference in the final third can be utilized as a similar kind of mechanized action to Casemiro’s defensive interventions; such a question is not simply a matter of whether or not the scales can be balanced by such and such a teammate who performs an equal number of opposite actions, but a rather more dynamic one of what types of things a team’s midfielders, defenders, and strikers might suddenly be able to do on the pitch if they are safe in the knowledge that Havertz is reliably carrying the water around the penalty area. This is the kind of complex tactical question that elite managers and sporting directors get paid eye-watering wages to attempt to solve, though it may well be intractable to the point where Havertz is virtually fated to wind up at a club like Valencia or Leicester City in five years’ time. It is also a question with a crass quantitative dimension – if Havertz is only creating and scoring a few goals per league season then the truly big clubs needn’t ponder his unbalanced skillset at all, whereas if he’s directly responsible for two goals every game then all other more nuanced questions become moot in a much different way. In reality, Havertz is in double figures for combined expected goals scored and assisted in both of the last two Bundesliga seasons, and has gone one something of a finishing tear that has made him look like a seriously prolific goalscorer, but he is nowhere near the “get him at any price, figure out what to do with him later” levels of Messi or Neymar, or even Eden Hazard in an average season. Havertz is a seriously tidy-looking attacking midfielder whose flashy skills have led to tangible goal contributions which are nothing to shake a stick at, but he has not as of yet demonstrated that he can shoulder an attacking burden commensurate to the defensive one carried by a Casemiro or an N’Golo Kante.

Scouts, managers, and analysts will have to squint hard at the data and footage, and figure out a way in which Havertz’s skillset can be made to carry a little more water than it currently is - his height and precise heading technique, for example, could probably be exploited more than they are currently being. But this kind of conundrum casts a fog of doubt on the notion of splashing a hundred million Euros on the player – sure, he’s nice, but shouldn’t that kind of a cash outlay mean we don’t have to think so hard to figure out what to do with him? You scour a wine store for half an hour looking for an obscure Greek red on a clearance sale and pair it with precisely the right meal to get the most value out of your wine-buying dollar, but if you go and squander your money on a seventy-dollar Barolo you kind of expect that you’ll open it up and it will just be good – otherwise what’s the point? None of this is to say that Kai Havertz clearly isn’t worth whatever fee and wages a club ends up parting with to secure his services – he can do all kinds of exquisite things with the ball at his feet (and head) that look like the kinds of things that players do in the highlights footage from Champions League and World Cup knockout games. He can do, and has routinely done, the kinds of things that decide those kinds of games, sometimes against the kinds of defenders who try and stop a player from doing them. But rather than looking at him as the next Baggio, Totti, or even Muller, big clubs across Europe should consider the sense in which Cantona belittled Deschamps for doing such a narrow range of mundane things, and stick to the mantra that if they end up buying a water carrier, it is the rest of the squad and the manager who will end up carrying him. If Havertz can end up doing as few things as well as Deschamps did, he will turn into a footballing legend like the current France manager, but if he doesn’t turn out to live up to the “as well as” part then he will only ever be the kind of player who fans and pundits describe as “fun to watch, but limited.”

If the phrase “it is the water carrier who is really the one being carried” doesn’t evoke the image of a white-haired Shaolin monk in a Shaw Brothers film or the sound of a bong gurgling in the bedroom of some philosophy undergrad, then maybe a more traditional brain-teasing dialectic will do the trick – “the more that things change, the more that they stay the same.” When one frames Havertz’s skillset as being that of a traditional number ten, he is cast as an anachronism. When football fans of a certain age hear the phrase “number ten” they are likely to think of big 90s Serie A clubs, and the likes of Baggio, Totti, Veron, Zidane, or Riquelme. Footballing reactionaries sick of the ultra-disciplined grimness through which a club like Liverpool can optimize small advantages and secure a string of one-goal victories on a march to domestic and continental glory might well fantasize about a career path wherein Havertz loafs around at the big Milan and Rome clubs and Fiorentina, playing in a way that gets described as “languid”. In this scenario none of these clubs ever hire a “modern” coach or sporting director, or at least nobody more progressive than Sacchi, and the footballing landscape in Italy is fixed to a particularly simplified representation of the league two or three decades ago. He might even be able to show up drunk, as many football writers seem to insinuate that Andrea Pirlo did when they make gratuitous references to his wine connoisseurship as some kind of synecdoche of his “elegant” and “old-world” style of play. All joking aside, there is a credible case to be made that Havertz’s skillset make him something like a genuine anachronism – he’s likely fitter and certainly has more video analysis sessions under his belt than the old school number tens, but this hasn’t ironed a marked stylistic resemblance out of him. Where this begins to look like some kind of big conundrum is when one looks at where he plays, and who he plays for: Havertz has a starring role at an exemplary progressive, data-driven, modern pressing football club, stewarded by a well-regarded “gegenpressing” manager with stylistic roots in the Holland/Ajax “total football” philosophy.

If Havertz were to play as a “traditional” number ten, more or less singlehandedly acting as a creative outlet in an otherwise defensively rigid unit then he would likely end up under a manager like Mourinho or Simeone, playing the central playmaking role in a 4-4-1-1 or 4-2-3-1 system. It is possible that he would wind up in a system with a three-man defensive line and wingbacks behind him were he to play under the likes of Nuno or Antonio Conte, just as the number ten playmakers in football’s bygone era may well have played in both back-three and back-four systems, but like those players he would expect to play a creative role in front of a well-drilled unit that no one would describe as “fluid”. At Bayer Leverkusen, Havertz has played a non-negligible number of minutes as the team’s sole attacking midfield, in a “free eight” role (similar to the “false midfielder” roles of Kevin de Bruyne and the Silvas at Man City) alongside Julian Brandt, as a central striker or false nine, and in a pseudo-right wing role, and has generally looked very good wherever he has played while never having a hugely different role or set of jobs on the pitch or displaying a different skillset more suitable to the position which he is ostensibly playing. He looks like a classy player wherever he plays, but he always looks like Havertz. This positional carousel is operated by manager Peter Bosz, who has set the team up with back-three, back-four, and back-five defensive systems and rotated his midfielders and attackers significantly, giving minutes to all members of Leverkusen’s impressively deep squad. Bosz seems determined to extract serious contributions from his entire diverse cast of players, and has demonstrated a great talent for devising tactical plans that allow basically any combination of them within reason to be on the pitch at the same time and function according to his broader tactical principles. Havertz will be moved around to accommodate this or that attacking partner, but rather than shining by playing the position in an orthodox manner, much credit should go to the manager for setting up the team in such a way that they are collectively able to engineer the kinds of situations in which Havertz is able to do Havertz stuff.

On paper, the fluid and modern tactical schemes employed by Bosz at Leverkusen could hardly resemble the rigid systems that brought success to managers like Lippi, Trapattoni, or Hitzfeld less, but in a very real sense he has simply found much different means to the same end of accommodating his star playmaker. For the number tens at the superclubs of the 90s, positional freedom and the license to move to where they could do the most damage with the ball was a key condition that allowed them the autonomy to control attacks. At Leverkusen, Havertz similarly tends to “go where the action is”, insinuating himself at the center of counter-attacks and picking up pockets of space in which to pick apart deep-lying defensive blocks when his team have established stable possession in the hopes that a teammate will find him so that he can execute the kinds of high-risk manoeuvres which he is so good at. The boy is not going to drag a full-back very far with an off-the-ball run or physically intimidate an opponent into coughing up the ball in a dangerous area, but let him roam around looking for ways to solve attacking problems with the ball at his feet and he’ll eventually figure something out. In previous footballing contexts, players of Havertz’s ilk would accomplish this with the help of a tight-knit lineup behind them playing in, let’s say, two banks of four, with one or two forwards making attacking runs for them to pick out. At Leverkusen, as in hyper-modern Bundesliga-standard football generally, Havertz does not have as fixed a formation supporting him, but his teammates are essentially trying to accomplish the same kind of support structure as were those of Zidane or Veron, but simply doing so in a more sophisticated and convoluted way.

It makes a certain kind of intuitive sense that in a footballing milieu where the significance of pressing and collective actions on and off the ball have been elevated, and successful sides are more thoroughly drilled than ever with the assistance of video analysis and even the literal use of drone footage, the high-level task of having a bunch of unit of outfield players supporting one “star” player would require a more positionally fluid set-up than the traditional formations. In fact, going back to the earlier discussion, it is not difficult to see how the “stars” would become marginalized and the players tasked with the increasingly byzantine task of freeing them up would increasingly take up the mantle of being their teams’ most significant contributors in this context. At any rate, when one watches Leverkusen play, it becomes clear that apart from Havertz’s colleagues in the attacking line playing in such a way as to maximize his options, the contributions of the players behind him on the pitch are absolutely crucial to his capacity to play the way that he does. Leverkusen have traditional defenders and hard-tackling, orthodox midfielders, but no mere “water carriers”. Bosz often plays with three players in the center-back position, but is disinclined to play three out-and-out center-backs, often preferring instead of play full-back Wendell or one of the identical-twin midfielders Lars and Sven Bender in the defensive band – like Bayern manager Hansi Flick, he clearly considers recovery pace and passing ability to be as important as the ability to win headers and make goal-line clearances in his defenders and is willing to play squad members “out of position” to accomplish this. Full-backs or wingers are often played in wide positions as is customary, but Bosz has shown a habit of playing four true central midfielders in his midfield line, giving a clear window into his tactical outlook and into his strategy for getting the best out of Havertz. Julian Baumgartlinger and Charles Aranguiz are the two most defensively-minded of Leverkusen’s midfielders, with Nadiem Amiri and Kariem Demirbay more obviously skillful technicians when they are tasked with making a creative pass or keeping the ball under pressure. All of the club’s primary midfield options, however, are well-rounded in their skillsets, in the same way that the defensive line are expected to be. All of Leverkusen’s midfielders are instructed to press in unison, play passing combinations, drop into the defensive line, and join the attack when the situation calls for it. When seven or eight players can collectively work at a high athletic and technical level to provide structure, make defensive interventions, create adequate spaces in wide and central areas, and so on, it becomes easy to see how a player like Kai Havertz is able to thrive.

Arguably the most analogous current side to Bayer Leverkusen playing at a high level are Atalanta Bergamo, managed by Italian veteran Gian Piero Gasperini. As with Leverkusen, Atalanta focus on attacking far more than they do on defending, and their roaming playmaker-attackers Josip Illicic and Papu Gomez provide reasonable points of stylistic comparison for Havertz. Within Atalanta’s tactical setup, the importance of midfielders Marten de Roen and Remo Freuler being able to undertake a wide variety of unglamorous tasks related to pressing, defending, ball retention and progression, and keeping a collective structural balance through correct positioning cannot be overstated; neither can the significance of the wide-positioned wingbacks, acting as defensive and especially offensive outlets capable of doing the tireless running that the team’s more technically proficient attacking midfielders are unwilling or unable to do. The team must constantly be able to make up the numbers in various areas of the pitch in order to function in passing, defending, attacking the opposition penalty area, and so forth. Illicic and Gomez are reasonably intelligent players, but Illicic in particular is not exactly renowned for his leopard-fast bursts of pace or tremendous workrate. Like Leverkusen, Atalanta play with anachronistic number ten players by screwing with the formula further back on the pitch, and may provide a window into what ought to be done with Havertz in the future. The problem lies in the fact that Atalanta are a “fun” side, but they are far from a “complete” side. The immense ability of Illicic and Gomez has made Atalanta into something of an offensive juggernaut to the point that they are reliable top-four finishers in Serie A despite having far from the fourth-largest budget in the league, but their presence creates a kind of chain of deferred problem that ultimately results in the club’s center-backs frequently chasing back in comical fashion or playing calamitous forward passes because they are isolated from their teammates. Will a team like Man City or Chelsea, whose problems this season have been much more with their defending than going forward, look at Leverkusen and Atalanta and their status as “entertainers” whose matches produce goals at both ends, and decide that Havertz is a prudent signing? It does not seem entirely likely.

Perhaps if a big club is to roll the dice on Kai Havertz, they should look to play with a support structure similar to that employed at Leverkusen, but simply have better midfielders and defenders than Leverkusen. This is probably not the kind of suggestion for which a sporting analyst in a big club’s employ can hope to receive a big promotion, but it may well work. Leverkusen have pretty talented players all over the pitch, but they do not have any one player as truly excellent as PSG’s Marco Verratti, Real Madrid’s Dani Carvajal, or Chelsea’s Jorginho. It is well within the realm of possibility that a club that can afford Havertz can also afford the kinds of players who are so good that they can sufficiently control the aspects of the game that Havertz doesn’t, and allow him to do what he is exceptional at. The issue, given everything previously discussed, is with the proposition of outlaying such a large sum on the player. Why not simply cut out the middleman, sign some midfielders and fullbacks who can collectively do a reasonable amount of goal-creation and goal-scoring without Havertz’s presence on the pitch and be done with it – is there really a high-level system that is truly balanced in which there is really no substitute for a player of his skillset? After all, an industrious and athletic midfielder can create the possibility of a goal with a well-timed run, and a full-back can cross the ball with a meaningful chance of creating a good goal-scoring opportunity.

The scouting question returns to the one of whether Havertz’s gratuitously skillful on-ball ability makes him viable as a “water carrier” for world-class teammates who can do more than just create and score a decent volume of chances. If not, then surely it is the players whose skillsets are more well-rounded than Havertz’s who should be attracting the ridiculous fees rather than the young German. A more tantalizing question might be whether it is feasible for Havertz to do everything he has shown himself capable of doing around the penalty area at Leverkusen, do nothing more, and still have the rest of the team do plenty of solid attacking work in addition to that done by him rather than burdening him almost entirely with making the attack hum. All of this is of course contingent on the rest of the squad being capable of, firstly, feeding the ball to Havertz in the areas where he needs it, and secondly, doing the defensive and ball-progression work that are not really his forte. Any team with serious structural issues in their defensive and midfield areas should be looking nowhere near the youngster as his expensive purchase is highly unlikely to indirectly solve any issues in defense or build-up, and could quite possibly exacerbate them.

All of these questions could reasonably be rendered moot if Havertz simply broadens his skillset somewhat. It shouldn’t be presumed to be inevitable, but it’s far from unheard of for young attacking midfielders to pick up the aspects of the game which are more subtle than getting a shot away or looking for the killer pass. Genuinely top-tier central midfielders like Luka Modric and Andrea Pirlo initially profiled as classical number tens, and it is not too much of a leap of imagination to imagine the German’s balance and passing range being transposed to deeper areas on the pitch. A version of Kai Havertz who shows enough composure to regularly drop back and assist midfielders positioned deeper than him while also demonstrating the same skillset that he already has is basically Kevin de Bruyne. Then again, a version of Michel Platini whose body hasn’t gone downhill athletically over the past three and a half decades and whose reputation isn’t tarnished by a series of corruption scandals is basically peak Michel Platini. A disgusting, greasy broken Hollandaise that was instead emulsified properly by someone who knows how to cook is a delicious sauce. If clubs get too tempted by the prospect of the kind of player that Havertz could be if such and such conditions are met and base their decision to buy him on that, then they are buying the conditions along with the player, and the potential for an expensive mistake is very much baked into the structure of such a valuation.

Have the scouts for Europe’s super-elite considered all of this and analyzed it in greater depth and with more technical resources than has been done in this piece? Without question. Will this ensure that their decision to bid or not bid for Kai Havertz is the right one? Not necessarily. But regardless of what happens with the young player, consideration of who he is as a player right now, who he reasonably could be, and what kinds of conditions must be met for him to end up a success has facilitated a level of reflection on the nature of modern football that would not be the case with other higher-end players. What kinds of scouting questions need a club ask about Raphael Varane, say, if he’s unsettled in Madrid? He’s ridiculously quick, his positioning and decision-making are as good as it gets, he wins his aerial duels. There is no question, go all in for him. What about another 20-year-old Bundesliga sensation, Jadon Sancho? His quick feet, strength, and quick change of direction make him one of the most effective dribblers on the planet, and he’s demonstrated plenty of end product over the past two seasons in Dortmund. If you could use an attacking player and have the money, you go for him, little analysis is necessary. But human agency tends to orient itself towards problems, contradictions, and puzzles, and when a player is as manifestly brilliant as Kai Havertz is without necessarily fitting into any of the truly elite European superclubs, the urge to philosophize his situation takes over. It is this urge which will guide how clubs scout Havertz, and every other player under the sun, if they are to grab themselves a future superstar or at least a useful contributor and not another expensive disappointment.

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polixy · 5 years ago

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Most Americans don’t see Trump as religious; fewer than half say they think he’s Christian

Most Americans don’t see Trump as religious; fewer than half say they think he’s Christian;

U.S. President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and faith leaders pray at a 2017 proclamation signing in the Oval Office. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump has often used religious language while in office, and he has surrounded himself with evangelical leaders and supported conservative Christian causes. But Trump’s personal religious beliefs and practices have not been as public.

Indeed, half of U.S. adults either say they’re not sure what Trump’s religion is (34%) or that he has no religion (16%), while just 33% say he’s Protestant.

And Americans overall don’t think Trump is particularly religious: A majority say Trump is “not too” (23%) or “not at all” (40%) religious, while 28% say he’s “somewhat” religious and only 7% say he’s “very religious,” according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

How we did this

The findings in this post are drawn from a new survey exploring the intersection of religion and politics in the U.S. The survey of 6,395 U.S. adults was conducted Feb. 4 to 15. All respondents to the survey are part of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology.

Here are the questions used for the report, along with responses, and its methodology.

A similar share of Americans see Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders as religious. (Sanders identifies as Jewish but has said he’s “not actively involved with organized religion.”) Americans are more likely to say that Joe Biden, who is Catholic, is at least somewhat religious (55%).

But none of these presidential contenders are perceived to be as religious as Vice President Mike Pence, according to the survey. Seven-in-ten Americans say Pence is at least somewhat religious, including 43% who say he’s very religious.

Pence, who was raised Catholic and also has described himself as evangelical, openly follows conservative Christian teachings, often cites the Bible in speeches and has said “my faith sustains me in all that I do.”

How Americans see these politicians varies by religion and by race: White evangelical Protestants are the only religious group with a majority who say that Trump is at least somewhat religious (64%), although even among white evangelicals, just 12% say Trump is very religious. The share who describe Trump as at least somewhat religious also is relatively large among white Protestants who are not evangelical (45%) and white Catholics (44%).

By contrast, three-in-ten or fewer among Hispanic Catholics (28%), Jews (26%) and the religiously unaffiliated (23%) say that Trump is “very” or “somewhat” religious. Black Protestants are among the least likely to say that Trump is at least somewhat religious (14%), while the vast majority (84%) say he’s not too or not at all religious.

Opinions on Trump’s religiousness also vary sharply by party affiliation: Republicans and those who lean toward the GOP are about five times as likely as Democrats and Democratic leaners to say that Trump is “very” or “somewhat” religious (62% vs 12%).

Pence, meanwhile, is viewed as at least somewhat religious by majorities in virtually all groups, including by nine-in-ten Jews and seven-in-ten Catholics, Protestants and religiously unaffiliated Americans. (The unaffiliated – a group that’s also known as religious “nones” – includes atheists, agnostics and people who describe their religion as “nothing in particular.”) Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say Pence is religious, but majorities of both groups share this view.

What is Trump’s religion?

Americans also are divided – and a third (34%) are unclear – on the specifics of Trump’s religious affiliation.

President Trump identifies as Presbyterian, making him the nation’s ninth chief executive to be affiliated with that Protestant tradition. But Trump does not regularly attend a Presbyterian church, and he has associated with a range of religious groups. His spiritual adviser, Paula White, used to lead a Pentecostal-leaning church. He has prayed in public with Southern Baptist leaders such as Robert Jeffress. And last Christmas, Trump attended services at a conservative Baptist-affiliated church.

Still, when asked to name his religion, fewer than half of Americans associate him with Christianity or, more specifically, Protestantism. Just over four-in-ten U.S. adults (44%) say Trump is a Christian, including 33% who say that he’s Protestant, 8% who say he’s Catholic and 2% who describe him as “just Christian.”

In addition, 16% say that Trump has “no religion,” including 2% who say they believe he’s an atheist and 13% who describe his religion as “nothing in particular.”

One-in-twenty Americans (5%) say Trump’s religion is “something else”; when asked to specify what they mean, many people provide caustic responses, saying they think Trump worships himself, that he worships money or power, that he is a fake Christian or someone who only pretends to be religious, or that he is evil.

Again, there are clear differences of opinion on this question tied to respondents’ religion and party affiliation. Jews and white Christians (including white evangelicals, white Protestants who are not evangelical and white Catholics) are more likely than other groups to identify Trump as a Protestant. And Republicans and those who lean toward the GOP are about twice as likely as Democrats and their leaners to say that Trump is Christian (60% vs. 31%) and, more specifically, that he’s Protestant (47% vs. 23%).

Democrats are more likely to think Trump does not have a religion, with one-quarter saying Trump has no religion (including 4% who say he is an atheist and one-in-five who say his religion is “nothing in particular”), compared with 7% of Republicans who say this.

; Blog – Pew Research Center; https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/25/most-americans-dont-see-trump-as-religious/; ; March 25, 2020 at 11:17AM

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airoasis · 5 years ago

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SEC Fights over Bitcoin ETF! CLAP BACK

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SEC Fights over Bitcoin ETF! CLAP BACK

SEC Commissioner claps back at the SEC hiya all people, it’s Ken and welcome back to G4B television. The exhibit committed to bringing readability to cryptocurrency. Now’s it simply me or is there a variety of salt within the air on Wall avenue? First now we have bought significant Papa John himself, founder John Schnatter, suing Papa John’s after being served a "poison tablet" in his pizza by using the manufacturer’s board of directors. And now we now have the SEC Commissioner formally blasting the SEC via a formal dissent on the SEC internet site. Commissioner Hester M Pierce sounded OFF in opposition to the SEC’s modern day excessive-profile refusal of the Winklevoss twins 2nd try at a Bitcoin ETF. Among her many facets she honestly makes a horny compelling argument that leaves the most important critics with 2nd thoughts. She explains that the SEC has passed its restricted scope of its role in regulating securities markets. And criticized the company for accomplishing "benefit law." oh, Oh…Shots fired! She’s quoted in her dissent as pronouncing that, "Bitcoin is a new phenomenon and its lengthy-term viability is uncertain. It may be successful. It will fail. The fee however, is not good-positioned to assess the likelihood of both effect. For Bitcoin or some other asset. This is a excellent point that the agency should not allow individual biases on what they deem just right or unhealthy investments into their policymaking selections. Peirce further alleged that the SEC’s concerns about Bitcoin, on the whole that the underlying markets are discipline to manipulation, applies to many other trade-traded merchandise which were authorized through the company previously. Saying that officers didn’t practice their rules continuously to Bitcoin. Correctly, cost manipulation is a heavy debate with countless commodities of which have SEC accredited ETFs tracking the rate of.The most important example in my mind, being oil. Whose rate has been historically, generally influenced by means of the sector’s greatest cartel, OPEC. Now of direction, the SEC’s issues are by no means ungrounded. It’s as an alternative hard to ignore the uncomfortable side effects that the Mt. Gox trustee has had on the market this previous year. Onto another factor, she uniquely counterclaims that the SEC’s choice will probably be harmful to investors alternatively than protecting them on the grounds that it’ll deprive them of an opportunity to acquire exposure to this nascent asset category. Chiefly in a regulated marketplace. And will also stunt cryptocurrencies development as an institutionalized asset. Which may be real in the very short-term, however within the lengthy-run technological and even fiscal innovation invariably beats out or rather outsmarts executive. And with reference to her statements on the dismissal of ETFs doing harm to investors, which may be just a little over dramatic. Due to the fact how convenient it’s to achieve exposure to cryptocurrencies, notably in the spot market, where you have got or manage your possess exclusive keys. Simply feel of all these tender information experiences last year of grandma’s purchasing Bitcoin on Coinbase.Nonetheless, her argument does keep weight when applied to the U.S. ICO market. Of which is limited to accredited investors handiest. Which brings me back to the beef of her argument, which is highlighted via her saying that, "If we were to approve the ETP, alternate alternate product, at drawback right here. Investors would pick whether or not to buy it or avert it. The commission’s motion today deprives traders of this option.I reject the role pf gatekeeper of innovation. A role very one of a kind from, and certainly inconsistent with our mission." And later summed as much as say that, "i might rather we err on the side of approving merchandise, so that buyers, who are more often than not higher judges about these things than we’re, can kind their own view a few distinct innovation and act on those views in the market. If you wish to learn the authentic dissent that she released, i will have an instantaneous hyperlink to it within the description beneath. I used to be pleasantly amazed that it was truely, relatively a stimulating read, she additional talks about how the decision discourages home entrepreneurship by means of growing an aversion to innovation. One who directs just right ol’ American ingenuity to different less impactful sectors of the economic climate. And that excessively prohibitive regulation redirects the release of innovative merchandise to international markets. Where entrepreneurs talents are welcomed with broad fingers and first-rate enthusiasm. And that allowing firms to construct cryptocurrency ETFs would support serve as a method to the SEC’s main drawback, that being, that bitcoin requires additional institutionalization of the Bitcoin market.And that encouraging better regulated participation would serve to ameliorate these considerations. In terms of market influence, of path, the touchy crypto market has been consistently rattled this week over the ETF hassle as the SEC is delayed deliberations on 5 different ETFs. Reminiscent of ones filed by way of colossal-title avid gamers equivalent to the brand new York stock alternate’s Arca Inc. Nonetheless with the proverbial "jackpot" hanging over them, asset managers will continue to hound the watchdog agency until they get their approval. Final week Bitwise grew to become the state-of-the-art entrant amongst the group of hopefuls after filing for an ETF that may track a basket of cryptocurrencies, no longer simply Bitcoin. In a similar way, funding manager VanEck and Solidx, who serves as an insurer of any skills misplaced Bitcoin, filed a joint utility for a Bitcoin ETF.They seem to be taking a more targeted approach of implicitly limiting it to institutional investors by surroundings the percentage cost at a whopping 2 hundred thousand greenbacks a pop. Which is still miraculously more cost-effective than type A shares of Warren Buffet’s, Berkshire Hathaway. The firm’s process could ease the SEC’s issues over more mom-and-pop investors through conveniently pricing them out of the product that used to be purported to be retail pleasant within the first position! Of direction, the significant canine that investors are ready for is a determination on the CBOE’s ETF utility. The CBOE’s application is for a commodity- backed ETF.Meaning, direct Bitcoin must be bought and hence would have a a lot higher constructive have an impact on on the spot cost of Bitcoin. As hostile, to say the proposed futures backed ETFs, similar to direct Direxion’s or ProShares’ models. For those who recall, the CBOE, Chicago Board options exchange, was the the primary to gain approval and ultimately launch futures trading over Bitcoin last December. Of which was once, and has been, attributed toward the significant speculative run-up in Bitcoin costs and ultimate demise soon after. The closing date for CBOE’s ETF is about for mid-August. These ETF application cut-off dates are determined by means of the Dodd-Frank rules, which mandate that the SEC take motion within forty five days of submission of a inspiration comparable to for rule exchange. Of path, as observed they can perpetually formally prefer to prolong these choices up to three consecutive instances. Which would account to a maximum of 200 and forty days to arrive a conclusion. Anyhow, getting back to Hester’s factor of view on the selection. It’s clear she takes a more laissez-faire, conservative view of minimal government intervention in the securities market. Upholding innate tenants that absolutely ended in her appointment from the Trump Administration.Of path, to be fair, the SEC chair Jay Clayton and 2 out of three of the SEC’s commissioners are additionally Trump appointees. So you’ll count on a extra deregulatory stance from the commission. The only professional serving who wasn’t appointed via the Trump Administration is Kara Stein, who’s serving earlier her expired time period and might get replaced by way of anybody more in prefer of Bitcoin-associated merchandise someday. The ultra-modern choice ruling against the Winklevoss ETF used to be three-1. I wonder who that one was..? And if for nothing else, in her first 12 months as a commissioner she’s at the least making a reputation for herself as a forward thinker and even fairly of a maverick on the SEC. On that note, i might wish to introduce you to a brand new bit I wish to call "The No Shill Zone," discussing SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce. Now whether or not you trust her or no longer, you need to particularly respect the fearlessness that she’s placed on display here. She’s without problems publicly opposing the resolution certainly spearheaded by her advanced, SEC chair Jay Clayton.Taking a defiant stance against the historic institution in favor of good, Bitcoin. Naturally the rest SEC officials are taking an extraordinarily timid, riskless approach to law. Which is understandable, given the hype and controversy surrounding this early stage and mostly misunderstood technological know-how. Intertwined with representing a future disruptive variety of finance. But literally all people and their grandma can see that cryptocurrency prices gyrate greater than as an adult inn’s vibrating Beds. "European trip" film clip plays. Custody considerations aside, the SEC is simply being overly protective of their possess butt! If in the case that cryptocurrency prices expertise an excellent bigger crash in the future. The ongoing policy of delayed dismissals fairly boils all the way down to their possess individual hazard aversion of not looking to be dragged in entrance of Congress to testify as to why they at the SEC allowed naive buyers to unwittingly lose money on their own individual speculative investments.Hence, no longer best is Hester exposing herself to unpopular prefer on the SEC, she’s additionally opened herself as much as become a expertise martyr in front of Congress. As good as now being seen by the cryptocurrency community as a Bitcoin evangelist. It is this bold action that makes me see Hester as a Trump appointee that i can sooner or later, really get in the back of! Now not like that fam. Regrettably, she appears to be signaling a future of extended prohibitive stance on the SEC in regards to the cryptocurrency ETFs. This is evident in her concluding her dissent denouncing the preclusion of approval of cryptocurrency headquartered trade-traded merchandise for the foreseeable future. I will shut with leaving you guys with the legitimate mission announcement of the U.S. Securities and alternate fee so that you may form your possess conclusions on the talk. That mission assertion being, "…To defend traders, preserve reasonable, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation. That’s keen on now, let me comprehend where you rein in on the giant Bitcoin ETF debate within the remark part beneath.And if you haven’t already subscribed to the G4B television channel, remember to smash that subscribe button and with that, i’m going to see you next time. Hester interview clip performs: we have an principal role to play in telling the USA and the arena that the our capital markets are open to innovation. And that is what style of drove my dissent. .

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batterymonster2021 · 5 years ago

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SEC Fights over Bitcoin ETF! CLAP BACK

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/sec-fights-over-bitcoin-etf-clap-back/

SEC Fights over Bitcoin ETF! CLAP BACK

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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j0sgomez-blog · 5 years ago

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Jeff Wilhelm trekking the Dusky Trail in the Pleasant Range, Fiordland National Park, New Zealand.

By Michael Lanza

We step out of the Lake Roe Hut into a persistent drizzle, deep in what may be the most dishonestly named mountains in the world—the Pleasant Range in New Zealand’s chronically soggy Fiordland National Park. Belligerent gusts hurl cups of water into our faces. By the time my friend, Jeff, and I have taken our first 50 steps on the Dusky Track, we have both sunk knee-deep a dozen or more times into some of the heaviest, gloppiest, boot-suckingest mud that I have ever mired a leg in.

Garbed head to toe in rain shells, gaiters, gloves, and waterproof, leather boots, we hike across an almost treeless landscape, the “trail,” such as it is, intermittently fading into a sea of knee-high grass. Boggy tussock masquerades as earth, but the ground seems more liquid than solid: Excavate and wring out a cubic meter of it, and I’d bet my wide-brim, Gore-Tex hat you could fill a bathtub. Our mode of travel falls somewhere between walking on water and wading through land.

We claw up a crazily steep hillside of rain-slicked grass and stop in our ankle-deep-in-mud tracks. The view makes me briefly forget the brackish mix of raindrops and sweat dripping from my nose.

Jeff Wilhelm hiking the Dusky Track in the Pleasant Range in Fiordland National Park.

Before us sprawls a mystical, heaving plateau dappled with scores of tiny tarns and a few bigger lakes. Emerald fingers of land snake between the watery pearls. The plateau’s sawed-off edges fall away abruptly into abyssal, glacier-carved valleys and fjords that stretch for miles to the South Pacific. In all directions, dark mountains loom in and out of the fog, their flanks at once so vertiginous and lush with rainforest that they appear to have gotten a waiver from gravity. It’s absolutely quiet, except for the haunting moans of the wind and the explosive farting sound our boots make each time we pry them from another calf-deep quagmire.

A shaft of sunlight pierces the bruised heavens, throwing a golden beam onto the valley below us. Then the cloud cover slams the celestial window shut so abruptly I’m left wondering whether I hallucinated it. In Fiordland, sunshine is like a mirage: Believing in it can drive a person mad.

Before we descend the other side of the hill, I turn around for a last look back toward the Lake Roe Hut—and see that in the strenuous and sloppy first 45 minutes of our trek, we have covered about a quarter-mile.

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Jeff hiking the Dusky Track in the Pleasant Range in Fiordland.

I’ve come with my friend Jeff Wilhelm to backpack a four-day, 23-mile (37k) section of Fiordland’s 52.2-mile (84k) Dusky Track, from Lake Roe Hut to the track’s northern terminus at the West Arm of Lake Manapouri. I chose the Dusky, and Jeff eagerly signed on, for a reason that can seem, at first blush, masochistic (or just plain dumb): We’re intrigued by its reputation as the hardest hut trek in New Zealand.

To us, though, this isn’t about something as shallow as bragging rights. Jeff and I are both past 50; our pride has gone the way of our ability to sleep through the night without getting up to pee. I have enough tales of ridiculously hard and pointlessly stupid things I’ve done to fuel stories for several lifetimes. (And that’s just what I’ve done outdoors.) We have nothing to prove.

We know we can handle the suffering. What captivated us was the Dusky’s more subtle promise: the chance to see the New Zealand wilderness the way it must have looked a generation or more ago, before the hordes of international trail-trophy seekers invaded. Thanks to its reputation, the Dusky can feel all but deserted compared to other Fiordland trails, like the Milford and Kepler tracks.

Now, though, as my outer layers turn the shit-brown hue of Fiordland mud, a profound and introspective question enters my mind: Can we suffer through all that the Dusky Track dishes up and still enjoy it?

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Here Be Dragons: Dusky Track Warnings

On the spectrum of multi-day hikes, the Dusky Track achieves an unusual level of misery and hazard.

Traversing some of the planet’s most biped-unfriendly terrain, we will experience innumerable WTF moments. We will get to know mud more intimately than perhaps ever before. We will scale and descend hundreds of vertical feet of absurdly steep and slick “root ladders.” (Yes, they are pretty much exactly what the name implies.)

We will tiptoe across “walkwires,” sketchy wire bridges that would pucker the sphincters of the Flying Wallendas. There are 21 walkwires on the Dusky (six on the 23-mile section we’re hiking) that offer the only safe crossing of rivers and creeks at times of high water. Before our trip, I scrolled through jaw-clenching photos online of these three-wire spans dangling above brown rivers; calling them “bridges” is like describing a thong as all-weather outerwear. I thought they looked manageable, and in a twisted way, fun. But as Jeff and I will learn, nothing prepares you for your first steps onto a wobbly, inch-wide cable suspended high above a rock-strewn chasm.

Early morning at Loch Maree on the Dusky Track.

On top of all that, we face a very real prospect of flooding rivers stranding us for days in a hut—or as a Fiordland ranger actually warned me, “you could find yourself up a tree for a day or two waiting for the water (level) to come down.” And flooding is not rare: Fiordland receives up to 10 meters of precipitation a year—that’s nearly 400 inches, about 10 times as much rain as Seattle. It’s a climate that only amphibians, mushrooms, and a tiny minority of mildew-tolerant humans could love.

The Department of Conservation (or DOC, New Zealand’s equivalent of the National Park Service) recommends Dusky hikers carry a personal locator beacon, a mountain radio—both available for rent locally—and emergency bivy sacks. We’ve brought all three.

In fact, on the day we arrived in the small town of Te Anau, gateway to Fiordland, the forecast called for what locals refer to cheerfully, as if discussing an amiable, eccentric uncle, as a “weethah bum.” In New Zealand, a “weather bomb” (English translation) bears a strong resemblance to a category 2 hurricane, with tree-lashing wind and “heevy rine.”

Everyone we spoke with—from DOC rangers to the receptionist at our hotel, a cheery young woman who had run the entire, 37-mile (60k) Kepler Track in a day—advised us to postpone starting the Dusky until the forecast improved. Instead, they said, trek the nearby Kepler, which, unlike the Dusky, doesn’t flood. With the right clothing and a positive attitude about bone-rattling wind, cold rain, and wet snow—in late summer—we’d love the Kepler. Jeff and I decided to respect their local wisdom.

Click here for The Big Outside Trip Planner: Trekking New Zealand’s Dusky Track

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Jeff hiking the Dusky Track in the Seaforth River Valley in Fiordland.

Still, I came here tingling with anticipation at the prospect of seeing the unpolished side of one of the planet’s most pristine wildernesses, with its wildly tangled rainforest and boundless mountain views. Sprawling over 4,633 square miles—only six U.S. national parks are larger, all in Alaska—Fiordland is New Zealand’s biggest and baddest wilderness. There are plants in Fiordland that grow nowhere else in the world. There are animals that Dr. Seuss would have thought looked weird.

There are corners of this vast and largely impenetrable wild land that have never felt a human footfall—probably most of Fiordland—and other parts that few people see.

Like the Dusky Track.

Now, as we walk—and wade—through our first day on the Dusky, I remind myself that we actually waited four days for weather this good. In Fiordland, a wind-driven, steady drizzle qualifies as a break in the weather.

The Roots of All Evil

After close to four hours of muddy up and down crossing the Pleasant Range on our first afternoon, we’ve hiked a whopping two-and-a-half miles. But that was a tropical-beach honeymoon compared to what lies ahead. The persistent drizzle escalates to steady rain as Jeff and I start the descent to Loch Maree, a stretch of our route that plummets almost 3,000 vertical feet within less than a mile-and-a-half. And while it is marked, calling it a trail would be very generous. It will recalibrate our notions of steep and strenuous.

Following the muddy footpath down a grass slope that’s more cliff than hill, I hear a sound behind me like a charging pachyderm and spin around to see Jeff just as he comes to a stop, sitting upright, after cartwheeling downhill. His eyes bulge widely, like a man who has briefly beheld the face of God, but he’s okay. It occurs to me that the Dusky may be the only trail in the world where you could fall to your death on grass.

Descending a steep section of the Dusky Track toward Loch Maree.

Then we enter the bush—what Kiwis call forest—and the real work begins. For more than two hours, we downclimb endless, nearly vertical “ladders” of slick tree roots and rocks, grabbing fixed ropes and chains at times, and kicking steps into mud that has an angle of repose of about 60 degrees. If one applied the rock-climbing rating scale to rainforest, this would probably be 5.4, with the difficulty compounded by us frequently using one hand to wave off tenacious squadrons of mosquitoes and sandflies. (Locals had warned us before we set out that “the mossies and sandies are swarming.”)

I dub this section of the Dusky: “The Roots of All Evil.”

Staggering into the empty Loch Maree Hut late that first afternoon, I glance at my watch: It took six hours to hike 3.7 miles (6k) from Lake Roe Hut. I feel like I just put in a 20-mile day in the Tetons or the Grand Canyon. Moments after I set down my pack and peel off mud-encrusted boots and gaiters, the skies erupt in a torrential rainstorm drumming loudly on the hut’s metal roof.

Minutes later, Jeff steps through the door and bellows, “That was epic. Calling this a track is a bit of a stretch. I think we need a new category: ‘bush thrash.’”

Inside the Loch Maree Hut on the Dusky Track in Fiordland.

By early evening, three guys arrive together and join us in this basic, one-room cabin, which like other huts on the Dusky sleeps up to 12 people on upper and lower platforms, and has wooden tables and chairs and a wood-burning stove for heat. This will be our most “crowded” hut on the Dusky. Besides them, Jeff and I will encounter just two other people in four days. (We flew by helicopter to Lake Roe Hut, where we met two trekkers, a German and a Russian.) On other New Zealand hut treks, like the Kepler, I’ve typically seen dozens of hikers every day.

The hikers—a Belgian in his 30s named Max, and two Frenchmen in their 20s, John and Simon—are trekking the Dusky in the opposite direction. This is their first visit to New Zealand. When I ask why they chose such an unlikely first track, Simon grins and says, “Because it is the hardest!”

Jeff and I smile but offer no response. We’ve been their age; we know they have to learn on their own the pointlessness of suffering for its own sake.

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After a night of coma-like, powerfully restful sleep—the gift of rain drumming on a metal roof in an otherwise hypnotically silent rainforest—we step outside early to find the rain has stopped. Mist dangles like a translucent curtain over Loch Maree, a small lake embraced by mountainsides of thick forest, created when a landslide dammed the Seaforth River during an earthquake in 1826, eventually drowning the beech trees it inundated. Swords of sunlight slash through the mist, silhouetting hundreds of stumps that rise two or three feet above the lake’s glassy surface against a reflection of the green and golden mountainside and blue sky.

It’s an image I think I’ll remember forever. Along with yesterday’s mud-boarding.

Not Like a Bird on a Wire

Standing on a tree root ball not much bigger than my boots and inches above water, I peer into the mind-boggling tangle of the Fiordland rainforest. By all appearances, nothing lies ahead but a muddy stream sliding lazily into a brown pond with trees growing in it—an environment better suited to bottom-feeding fish than humans. But in fact, orange markers indicate that the stream and pond are the trail.

We left Kintail Hut minutes ago in the crepuscular light of another gray morning in the bush. It’s our third day, and we’ve long since given up all hope of the Dusky Track getting easier.

I can imagine plunging into this organic stew and my bones and flesh spending the next million years transforming into a quart of West Texas light sweet crude. So I stretch and lunge and make all manner of acrobatic contortions from one partly submerged root ball to the next. On the Dusky Track, “hiking” covers many forms of ambulation.

Click here for The Big Outside Trip Planner: Trekking New Zealand’s Dusky Track

Climbing to Centre Pass on the Dusky Track,.

Despite the unappealing prospect of accidentally tumbling into this mire, I feel a smile crease my face. Hopping from root ball to root ball is kind of… fun, in a kid-climbing-a-tree sort of way.

Somewhere behind me, Jeff erupts in a series of F-bombs. In a tone suggesting he may not be having quite as much fun as me—something closer to genuine panic—he yells: “I’m stuck!” Reluctant to risk spending eternity as a fossil fuel by trying to save him, I wait on a relatively secure root island, calculating that his chances of successful self-rescue are probably at least 50-50. When Jeff finally sloshes toward me, his pants plastered brown—it would be distasteful to describe the image this conjures—he tells me through labored panting, “I was stuck hip-deep in mud! I didn’t think I was gonna get out! I thought I was gonna die there!”

I nod sympathetically. This does not strike me as an implausible scenario.

I’m reminded of the DOC warning about the Dusky’s “knee-deep mud” and “some rough terrain.” That’s absolutely priceless understatement. In a pub somewhere, I’m sure DOC copywriters howl with laughter. If the native Maori people didn’t have at least two dozen names for mud, they must have had that many curse words for it.

An hour uphill from Kintail Hut, we reach a torn-off edge of earth where a wall of forest drops off into a boulder-strewn stream gorge some 50 feet across. A walkwire spans the gorge, suspended at least 20 feet in the air—high enough that if a fall wasn’t fatal, you might lie there wishing it had been.

Clutching the two, chest-high, handrail wires, I step gingerly onto the foot wire. Each time I slowly place one foot in front of the other, the wire vibrates like a plucked guitar string; before I’m halfway across, it’s visibly bouncing. I look down past my toes at the rocks two stories below and my reaction surprises me: This is thrilling.

Once across, I look back at Jeff. The rushing stream drowns out our shouts. He plants one foot on the walkwire, scowls, shakes his head, and backs off it. He scrambles down to the creek and walks downstream a short distance to a rock-hop crossing that’s easy enough at this water level. Then he’s crashing through the jungle more than a hundred feet downhill from me, bushwhacking up a steep, muddy slope so thickly vegetated that I can’t see him, I can only hear his panting and cursing and see ferns and other leafy plants shaking seizure-like as he yards on them. Twenty strenuous minutes after he backed off the walkwire, he reaches me looking like a puppy rescued from a cyclone.

Jeff has gleefully hiked through days of cold rain in Norway with me; we’ve been blown off our feet together by gusts of Patagonian wind. But watching him now, I get the sense that he may be questioning what the hell we’re doing here.

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Centre Pass

Beyond the walkwire, we commence another brutally, unbelievably dirty and arduous ascent of more than 2,000 vertical feet in just over a mile—climbing innumerable root ladders, slogging through swamps, shimmying and slithering over and under some of the most tortuous piles of blown-down trees I’ve ever seen. Only the reliably steady line of orange ribbons offer any evidence that we are on a trail.

After more than two hours of jungle thrashing, we emerge from the bush to green, rocky meadows that remind me of the Scottish Highlands, only—and it stuns me to think this—wetter. A meandering footpath leads us over 3,448-foot (1051m) Centre Pass, where a chilly wind blows through the cliff-flanked gap. But the clouds have broken up, granting us a temporary reprieve from the rain, and we get a view made more special by knowing how few people endure the suffering required to reach this spot.

Jeff ascending a “root ladder” in the Seaforth Valley.

Mountains roll off into the distance, wearing thick, green coats. Rainforest sprouts from sheer cliffs, many bearing the vertical, light-green scars of new vegetation growing in the wake of a “tree avalanche,” which is exactly what it sounds like and a phenomenon I had never heard of before visiting Fiordland.

Jeff and I stop for lunch and to gape like happy idiots. I’ve hiked and backpacked for three decades all over the U.S. and the world, from Iceland to remotest Patagonia, Nepal to Norway, in the Swiss Alps and Italy’s Dolomites, and twice before here in New Zealand. Few times have I labored so hard to reach such a magnificent view shared with so few other people.

After the long, sandfly-bedeviled descent from Centre Pass—and another exhausting day of averaging barely more than a half-mile an hour—Jeff and I reach the Upper Spey Hut for our final night. No one else shows up, even though this is the first hut for hikers walking in the other direction. I don’t consider this fact worrisome until the rain that falls softly at first builds into a drubbing like a thousand fists pounding the metal roof.

I awaken a couple times during the night to its relentless, monsoonal drumming—and only then begin to wonder whether the reason no hikers showed up here tonight is that the Spey River Valley, which awaits us tomorrow, now lies under an impassable flood.

The Dusky Track’s Elusive Pleasures

In the morning, rain still pours down but we decide to attempt to hike out to the Dusky’s northern terminus, where we’ll catch an hour-long ferry ride across Lake Manapouri. If the valley is impassable, we can backtrack to the hut and avoid spending tonight in a tree. Hopefully.

Rain falls steadily and fog rises from the dense understory of ferns and grasses as we follow the Dusky along the Spey River. We wade through dripping, chest-high vegetation overgrowing the trail, which has the same effect as running an endless gantlet of big, wet dogs shaking themselves off. We plunge, usually without warning, knee- to thigh-deep into mud bogs—but rather than life-threatening, they’ve somehow become amusing. We casually cross the last two walkwires—shorter spans that wobble and sway less, but still have enough spice to feel exciting. Jeff walks them stress-free; I think I even see him crack a smile of thrill.

I pause for a moment, alone—Jeff’s just ahead of me—and glance down at a rare sight in New Zealand: an elusive kiwi bird, with its dagger-like beak pointed at me as it gazes curiously upward, as if perplexed over why a creature like me would venture into this environment. A moment later, the kiwi turns and disappears into the impenetrable bush like an avian ghost. I’ve trekked many miles in this country, and that fleeting instant was my lone kiwi sighting.

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Jeff Wilhelm on the Dusky Track in the Warren Burn forest in Fiordland.

As we get farther down valley, the Dusky Track grows less muddy and more walkable. While it rained hard, the river didn’t flood. We actually move along at a normal pace, covering the 7.4 miles (12k) from Upper Spey Hut to Wilmot Pass Road in four-and-a-half hours—averaging a blistering 1.6 mph (2.7 kph).

The Dusky Track is not just harder than any other hike I’ve done; it’s a different experience altogether. I have known extremes of wet, cold, mud, and exhaustion, from the Alaskan tundra to Vermont’s Long Trail and the John Muir Trail. The Dusky eclipses them all. It’s not just a hard, wet hike—it’s a full-body immersion in land and weather. It’s like a hurricane and flash flood striking as you’re sinking in quicksand. It can feel like walking for days through a car wash—if the car wash was filled in with three feet of mud and the brushes were replaced with downed trees.

But the Dusky is more than a sufferfest of root ladders and shaky walkwires. It’s hiking in solitude across the breathtaking highlands of the Pleasant Range and Centre Pass. It’s dark, brooding, lushly dense, and fascinating rainforest of beech, pepper trees, tree ferns, and dozens of species of greenery crowded together like passengers on a rush-hour subway car. It’s your only sighting of a kiwi, or a rare blue duck, or whio, paddling leisurely through the mirrored reflection of mountains in Gair Loch.

Jeff wading deep mud in the Spey River Valley on the Dusky Track.

New Zealand’s popular tracks are well-graded paths often built with gravel hauled in—manufactured so that trekkers don’t have to worry about mud or overgrown vegetation. For most trampers, those tracks deliver satisfying payoffs of stunning scenery and a sense of challenge. And that’s fine.

Rare treks like the Dusky tap into the essence of adventure: It retains an undiluted and raw character that’s missing from manicured trails. It forces you to interact with the landscape in a deep, tactile way—to traverse the wilderness on its terms. It’s Fiordland without the makeup. As an experienced local said to me: “The Dusky is just a good, honest New Zealand tramper’s track.”

The pleasures and rewards of the Dusky Track are a little like that elusive kiwi bird: always surprising you when they pop up infrequently, and then disappearing just when you were hoping it would stick around for a while.

The Dusky did eventually answer the question that it raised in my mind on our first day—but it also reframed the question. Yes, we could suffer even more than ever before and enjoy it.

After catching an hour-long ferry ride across Lake Manapouri, Jeff and I board a bus for Te Anau. The driver looks us up and down; she has obviously seen our ilk before. She says, “So you tramped the Dusky Track? That’s pure insanity.”

I nod, grinning with deep and abiding satisfaction, and tell her, “There were times we thought exactly that.”

Click here for The Big Outside Trip Planner: Trekking New Zealand’s Dusky Track

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