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Notes -
Some thoughts about online political ads:
For the last couple months pretty much all of the ads I get on YouTube have been political. I figure this time of year must be a ripe harvest for Google in terms of ad revenue. Maybe it can buoy them through the recent drop in tech stocks.
Interestingly enough, every single ad I've gotten that mention abortion has been strongly pro-choice. I've strongly pro-life myself, and for most of these ads the effect is that I now know who to vote for (namely, the person they're warning me against). This is a very useful service because all the Republican candidates are keeping their stance on abortion on the down low. It often isn't even listed as an issue on their official campaign website, I have to google around until I can find some interview where they were asked about it in order to learn their stance. The Democrats are definitely making this an abortion centered campaign, and the Republicans are trying to keep their heads down. For someone like myself, who will not vote for a pro-choice candidate, it means I have to do a lot more legwork.
Also interesting is that I saw the same ad more than a dozen times (which is normal) when I suddenly realized that the names in the ad were different every time. Turns out they are cycling through every Republican running for the state legislature, slotting each name in for "If X gets elected, women will have to travel out of state to access reproductive healthcare." It occurred to me that online it can be difficult to tell what district a viewer is in, so I guess you have to have a shotgun approach.
Though for all the abortion focused ads, I did notice none of them actually say the word "abortion": it's always "reproductive rights" or "women's health." The most notable euphemism I heard also happened to be the only time I think I've seen genuine "dog whistle" in the wild: a candidate declared (along a list of other issues) that they would preserve our "constitutional privacy rights". Excellently manufactured so that anyone who cares about the abortion debate will hear "I am pro-choice" while the average voter who doesn't care about abortion doesn't hear it at all. So, ads are big on abortion but mostly wants to talk to the base.
Which is the other odd thing: ads like this are meant for pro-choice voters. It does nothing good for them for a staunch pro-lifer like me to see them. Yet I did see one openly pro-life online ad this election season, and it was on my wife's computer! My wife, who is much more moderate on the issue than I am. Even curiouser, this ad was on a probably-not-quite-legal manga scan-lation site. How and why are pro-life ads ending up on a manga website? Don't manga readers skew female? Doesn't YouTube's audience skew male? I had assumed I was only getting pro-choice ads because most people online lean left, but now I'm not so sure.
Is this true? I would have thought it was more male-skewed.
Over at ACX item 38 in "Links for June" was a breakdown of reviews on Goodreads by genre and sex. The original link is broken, but here is the chart.
"Sequential art>Manga" is pretty far on the female side of the chart. It matches my experience: the only kind of comics my wife reads are manga, and she reads them daily. Unlike western comics there are a lot of manga that are aimed at a female audience: heck, based on what my wife keeps reading there seems to be an endless amount of manga that are just isekais where the protagonist is reincarnated as the villain of a visual novel! There's a lot of content for ladies in the world of manga.
/images/16670089049219537.webp
Is hamefura still the best? It's the only one I've watched an anime of, read some scanned translations of the light novels.
I couldn't possibly comment on "best" as there are far too many and it's not really my genre. My wife did ask me to watch Hamefura with her, and it was fun. Some of the manga she's shown me are better, but it's hard to compare a manga and anime since they have different constraints.
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