#(by biased i don't mean the users are biased. i mean the sample is biased...it's highly likely to include people who feel strongly | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

doyouknowthischaracter · 5 months

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Do you think the polls are inherently biased, because the well-known characters will be shared more wheras the unknown characters might never even reach their bubble where they are actually known by a lot of people?

Short answer is no.

Long answer is: well, if we want to be pedantic, an argument could be made that no method of collecting data via surveys, even self-administered surveys, is completely free of bias because that's just human nature and all you can do is minimize it by wording questions neutrally, trimming outliers, etc etc. With that out of the way, one very important thing to note here is that this isn't an opinion survey. The question being asked is very straightforward and the answer is not something that can be swayed or influenced by peer pressure, propaganda, unwillingness to disclose private information, or any other factors, be they internal or external. You either know a character or you don't. I mean, people could certainly lie, in either direction, but 1) why would you do that?? it's not even like we have winners or losers here, and 2) there's nothing I can do about it anyway.

Now, when it comes to sampling bias (which, from what I understand, is what you're actually asking about) my answer is still no, I don't think that's accurate. Popular characters will reach more people and get more votes overall precisely because they're more popular. If this were a tournament style blog or if I were asking your opinion on the character in question, then yes, I could definitely see how more well-known characters would be at an unfair advantage (or how tagging the polls with the character's name is encouraging that bias, as it's been suggested before), but this is not that! Well-known characters reaching their bubbles faster/more efficiently than obscure characters is an inherent part of being more popular. Everything is working as intended.

All that being said, there are a few factors which I think could influence results somewhat unfairly, but I wouldn't necessarily call them bias. They're more like limitations of the medium.

Firstly, the time and day of the week when a poll is published. I don't have access to this kind of data right now, but off the top of my head, I'd say Sundays around 10pm is when Tumblr users are most active. That, coupled with the fact that most users are from the United States, means that polls that come out of the queue on US Sundays during that time window have a chance to reach more people than all the others. However, this potential problem is organically circumvented by people going back to see previously posted polls, finding polls through reblogs or from tag searches, etc. So it's not really a significant difference. I haven't noticed the numbers reflecting this yet either, but in theory that's how social media works, so I thought it was worth pointing out.

Secondly, polls that were posted early on when the blog had fewer followers reached less people, on average, than polls being posted at the moment or that will be posted in the future. No argument there, that's just a fact. But, again, this is a limitation of the medium. Potentially, I could repost older polls at some point in the future and reassess characters' popularity, but how do I choose which ones? All of them? Wouldn't we just get stuck in a loop of reposting the same characters over and over then? That'd be no fun. So I don't really think there's anything to be done here, unfortunately.

Thirdly, meme-able characters will be see better engagement and consequently higher numbers of votes. Point in case, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Once again, not something that can be helped, not really. I do my best to maintain uniformity in how I format the polls and which pictures I choose (as high quality as I can find, cropped adequately, consistent size, etc.). But some characters will just have better chances of being shared around by virtue of featuring in memes or having some recognizable line or something like that.

To sum it up, overall I don't think there's an inherent bias in how the polls work at the moment. I do think there are certain factors that could marginally influence voting numbers, but not the votes themselves. (Which is why I've decided to compile two separate lists, by number of votes and by percentage-- they measure slightly different things, but that's a post for another day.) As long as every follower of this blog is delivered every poll to their dash and everyone pinky promises not to lie and screw up my numbers on purpose, then I'd say we're golden.

This is probably more than you asked for lol, but hopefully it all makes sense. And as always, feel free to share your opinion. I'm always happy to hear it!

#dyktc chatter #anonymous #asks #not a poll

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reloaderror · 3 years

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should i read nno :O? whats it abt?

anon, your interest makes me genuinely happy, and, while i might be biased, it is my humble opinion that, yes, yes you should read nabari no ou.

what is it about? (if you don't want to read all this, check out the resources at the end)

Nabari no ou is a shounen manga set in modern-day (sometime after 2004) japan and follows the protagonist, the 14-year-old Miharu Rokujou, as the hidden world, the world of nabari, is revealed to him upon the activation of the hitherto dormant forbidden technique that resides within him, the shinrabanshou. The shinrabanshou is sought after within the nabari world and Miharu quickly becomes a target of the many clans active within the nabari world, particularly the black wolf clan, kairoushu who seek to claim the power for themselves. Miharu is thus faced with two options: succumb to the power struggles of the hidden world, or conquer it and become the ruler of nabari.

Miharu has no desire for either, and initially seeks to retain the life of indifference he's lived so far in the surface world, however quickly finds himself struggling to remain impassive. Before long Miharu finds himself swept up in the conflict happening at the very core of the hidden world much due to meeting Yoite, a kira user and member of the black wolves around his own age who wants Miharu to use the shinrabanshou to erase his existence. In return, Yoite promises to help Miharu learn how to control the shinrabanshou and make him the king of nabari. While Miharu initially agrees to get involved because Yoite threatened the lives of Miharu's friends the two gradually become closer, and Miharu finds he genuinely wants to help Yoite and grant his wish. Miharu's desire to help Yoite does however mean he will have to go against both those who wish to help him and claim to have his as well as the world's best interest in mind, who seek to seal the power, as well as those who wish to separate the power from Miharu and claim it for themselves.

As Miharu and Yoite work towards fulfilling the promise made between them they find help in both those who align themselves with and against them, gaining them unexpected friends, and enemies, blurring already murky delineations within the hidden world.

As others have pointed out, the story isn't necessarily as much about the plot as it is about the development of the characters and their relationships, although, of course, the two are undeniably intertwined. There is a lot more to nno than i am able to put into words. there's definitely a reason why it seems to stay so long with those who read it and why a lot of us keep coming back to it though this opinion might be a result of a slight sampling bias.

now, that's the basic premise of the story, however, there are many other reasons to read nabari no ou (the art)! I've already taken up quite a bit of your time and dashboard space with this answer so here is a compilation of more entertaining resources outlining why nno is worth giving a shot:

why you should read nno (infographic) genuine pieces of lgbt fiction content warnings why you should read nno (short version) probably one of the best literary works I’ve read(summary up until read-more)

#i want you to know that your interest in nno literally brought me to tears i am not joking in the slightest.#nabari no ou #nno #anon #ask #this took so long cause i had two particular posts in mind that I wanted to add to the resource list and one of them I literally had to #wade thru mj's archives to find #long post #could i have added a read-more?#yes #did i do that? no

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larktb-archive · 4 years

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Whenever I go to block a racist I've been seeing a post that claims that revolutions dont work and peaceful protests do.

These are the examples said post uses:

These are all fucking terrible examples to use and I'm gonna go in order of worse to best which isn't saying much.

Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace

Yes this did in fact end the civil war. But no one denied that peaceful protests can make momentary symbolic changes such as ending a war or gaining a country its independence. This does often happen and you can list off dozens of countries wherein there has been a peaceful response to violence which has seemingly brought about an end to that violence I should know this because after all I come from the best known example of that happening aside from India (and I'll come back to my home country eventually). The problem with saying this is that it ignores the aftermath of the "peace" and whether or not it made enough of a difference in peoples lives for it to matter; even though external visible violence has been quelled, other covert forms of violence stay in place.

Liberia is a good example of this because of one major issue in Liberia: Corruption. Millions of USD are lost every year due to members of the government pocketing the money for themselves to the extent where, according to Transparency International, Liberia is 137 out of 180 and 53% of public service users had paid a bribe within the year of 2019. Interestingly enough the OP of that post calls China and Cuba corrupt despite the fact that Cuba is 60th and China is 80th. But I guess what happens after the revolutions is successful only matters when you're talking about places you dislike.

This corruption has lead to protests in 2019 and 2020, wherein police used tear gas to disperse peaceful protesters. Something to note is the minister of informations accusation of the protests being caused by outside elite forces. Rings a bell but I'm not sure from where.

Now one of the reasons Liberia is so corrupt is because of the lack of punishment against the main actors of the civil war, in spite of the trc listing out 100+ perpetrators and recommending that they be dealt with.

Then president, Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, was on this list and has admitted that she backed the civil war. She went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

Jasmine Revolution

Around 79% of people in post revolution Tunisia think the country is "going in the wrong direction", 29% of people would not vote with 48% not knowing who they would vote for, 81% said they don't feel close to a political party, 57% said they aren't interested at all in elections, only 20% believed elections would be free and fair, 45% said they disapprove of the current president, 71% said the government isn't addressing the needs of the youth, 50% of people said the government struggles with preventing political violence and I could go on and on.

But this is only 1 study with a very small sample size so by itself it's not a lot.

But when you compound that with a corruption index of 74, an unemployment rate of 15% (compared to Vietnam and Cubas horrible 3% rate and Chinas 6% rate), ~100,000 skilled workers leaving the country and a slowly increasing number of asylum applicants leads me to think that the data is not unfounded.

Suicide and murder rates also increased after the revolution, with cases of self immolation increasing threefold, such as with the case of Abderrazak Zorgui, who's death sparked protests which turned violent after the police were sent in to quell them.

At least 800 Tunisians went to fight for Isil and that's only counting those who came back from Syria. For comparison 900 returned to Turkey and 760 returned to Saudi Arabia.

Much like Liberia there has not been any justice, with the government instead introducing a law granting amnesty to former members of the dictatorship in Tunisia. A constitutional court was supposed to be set up in 2014 to speed up this process. 6 years on it still hasnt been set up.

Rose Revolution

Now this one is interesting. Georgia has a corruption ranking of 44, its unemployment rate of 11%, although higher than the corrupt, evil nations of Cuba and Vietnam isn't terrible and its Gini Coefficient is 36.4 which is pretty average.

So what's wrong with this one?

Well for starters four years after the Rose Revolution, Georgian protestors once again took to the capital to protest against the increasing amount of power, President Saakashvili, who led the Rose Revolution, was gaining.

To be more specific in 2004, legislation was passed to give him the right to dissolve parliament and in 2006 local elections were manipulated so that the government would dominate local legislatures.

And what's that? The president of Georgia blamed outside Russian influence on the protests and sent in police with tear gas and water cannons? That seems weirdly familiar familiar. Where have I heard that one before.

Here is a quote from a leader of a peaceful revolution after peaceful protests against him took place: "Everyone has the right to express disagreement in a democratic country. But the authorities will never allow destabilisation and chaos".

Interesting how after he was put in power, suddenly peaceful protest is the work of Moscow and needs to be controlled by police. Funny that. But this is totally a successful revolution guys!

And how many protests happened after this one? 3, not including the anti-homophobia protest. I think if you need to protest against the government every few years to the point where people keep calling each new protest, the Rose Revolution 2.0, your 1st revolution wasn't that successful.

Womans Suffrage

But before I talk about the relatively well off post-Soviet nations let's just do a assessment of the absolutely dumb as fuck idea that the Suffragists were more effective than the Suffragetes despite the Suffragists making no progress in the 40 years they existed prior to the branching off of the Suffragettes.

Now some historians do agree that the Suffragettes more violent methods did begin to turn men away from granting womens suffrage during their later years. Less concrete is the idea that this outweighs the net positive they had on the movement for womens suffrage.

In fact heres a contemporary source from 1906 praising the suffragette movement:

"I hope the more old-fashioned suffragists will stand by them. In my opinion, far from having injured the movement, [the Suffragettes] have done more during the last 12 months to bring it within the region of practical politics than we have been able to accomplish in the same number of years"

Who said that? Millicent Fawcett? Oh clearly she's just biased towards suffragettes?

But even if I gave evidence that the Suffragettes were indeed more effective than the Suffragists, you could easily find an opposing argument and vice versa. Ww1 happened and in the end that swift change of culture is what gave women their rights to vote (or at least the wealthy).

What can be argued is the historical reasons of why the Suffragettes became even more violent in 2nd decade of the 20th century leading to more guerrilla warfare like tactics being deployed such as arson.

Black Friday happened. Was a protests against the government caused by then Prime Minister Asquith, reneging his promise to put a bill granting womens suffrage through parliament. This protest started off as peaceful and ended up with women being physically and sexually assaulted by the police and counterprotesters with there being accusations of plain clothes police officers inciting this violence. Do I even have to say it?

In order to avoid further molestation, the Suffragettes stopped doing large gatherings with each other and went "underground" so to speak getting more and more violent.

What we should recall is the fact that prior to this Emmeline Pankhurst told the Suffragettes to stop all operations and renewed them after this traumatic event.

Prior to the suffragettes emergence the fight for women's rights had been by in large ignored by the public and it was only after their emergence that this became an issue in the forefront of the public's mind.

For a more nuanced view:

"Viewing the militant movement from the second half of the twentieth century, it is difficult to argue that violence does not ‘pay off’. [The history of independence of the colonies, and Civil Rights campaigns in the USA shows that violence can succeed.] It may be that suffragette violence after 1912 fell between two stools, being inadequate to force the government but sufficiently destructive to antagonise public opinion. This writer [i.e. Constance Rover] is of the opinion that, as the events turned out, militant tactics helped the women's suffrage movement until 1912, but after that date were harmful. This does not mean that militancy was necessarily a foolish policy. With hindsight, one can conclude that militancy failed in the last two years before the war, but with the experience of rebellion we have had since, one cannot conclude that militant tactics are an unsuccessful means of obtaining an objective such as enfranchisement..."

- Constance Rover 1967.

I use the quote in specific because it calls the civil rights movement violent. And was written a year prior to the end of the movement. It's almost as if the movement has been whitewashed by liberals to be a completely non-violent effort or something.

Singing Revolution and Velvet Revolution

I'm putting both of these together as these states are all former Soviet nations who have became arguably more successful than others like Moldova, Bulgaria and the aforementioned Georgia.

Now in the post-Soviet Baltic states, there are a large list of things i could talk about. The high suicide rates, the mass exodus leading to a quarter of the population in each nation leaving them, the large amount of people at risk of poverty, high incarceration rates, the gutting of labour laws, the rise of anti-semitism and the glorification of Nazis within their societies all come to mind. Some of these also apply to Czechia and Slovakia.

I could talk about specific events such as the Gorilla scandal, the murder Jan of Kuciak literally everything concerning Czech prime minister Babiš and the large proportion of Soviet Nostalgia in both Czechia and Slovakia (1/3 in the former and 1/2 in the latter).

I could mention protests that have taken place after these revolutions leading to the usage of rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse protesters who were acting non-violently. But I'd be repeating myself so I'm leaving it at that.

"But Lilly" you might say, "that doesn't necessarily disprove OPs point that these protests were successful, they did after all achieve their goals of 'political revolution/ending war/gaining womens suffrage".

And that's true. But...

TL;DR

OP used these as examples to contrast against so called failed violent revolutions with OP using violent revolutions like Vietnam, Haiti, Cuba, China, the USSR and the French Revolution as examples of failed revolutions. Anyone with a brain knows these revolutions absolutely succeeded in their short term goals of political change. There is no Tsar anymore, Cuba and Vietnam are still socialist, the aristocracy of france were decapitated, Haitians arent slaves and China has no emperor.

So where does the problem with these revolutions lie? Well according to OP:

... of course as we've just seen the so called successful peaceful revolutions are also poverty-ridden, corrupt and unstable with problems years later so what's the actual difference? There is none (aside from the historical revisionism of socialist states but that's beside the point), it's just hypocrisy and an incredibly silly gotcha to those currently arguing for violent protest.

I could continue and talk about how Haiti collapsed because of sanctions from racist countries who wanted to punish Haiti for fighting against their white masters, how Vietnam was practically always in war throughout the 20th century and how its stabilized since the end of the Viet-Khmer war, how Cuba infinitely improved the lives of all Cubans and was far more humanitarian than any western nation at the time, how the USSR and communist China turned Russia and China from poor feudal states to economic powerhouses which were far more equal in nature than the US.

But this post is way too long and I don't want to have to read through another dozen sources written by anti-communists liberals again.

Edit: the conclusion didnt save properly (thanks tumblr)

To end I'll say that the major problem with non-violent protests that is shared by every single one of these examples (apart from womens rights) is the lack of punishment towards those who caused the problems the people were protesting against. This means that said people can become president or a member of the government without any impediment and those people continue to be corrupt. From Ellen Sirleaf Johnson to Mikheil Saakashvili to the Tunisian government to Andrej Babiš. On the other hand violent revolution makes sure that those who war complicit in the crimes of the past are not able to usher in the crimes of the future, even if others eventually do.

The thing about that is progress has still been made, and even if they begin to reverse some of the gains that had been made they cant reverse all of them. With non-violent revolutions there is no change except for the ways that those in power step on the working class being more covert than overt.

You can decide which you prefer.

#lillypad.txt #long post #like really long post

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