MartianNight
No bio...
User ID: 1244
MartianNight
3mo ago
You don't find it strange that the IBA would stake its reputation on a claim that, if false, could be easily disproven with a simple cheek swab and PCR test? Don't you find it strange that neither the IOC nor either of the accused athletes have chosen to disclose any details on their medical condition?
And even if you believe that the IBA wanted to throw shade regardless of the truth (which is plausible), don't you agree that they'd be more likely to do that if they had actual proof? (Which is definitely not impossible; intersex athletes have been outed by sex tests many times, that's why the IOC stopped sex testing in the first place.) If so, you should agree that by Bayes theorem, that the fact that they have raised the issue increases the probability that the athletes are male.
MartianNight
3mo ago
The IOC claims she isn’t intersex.
No, that's the infuriating part. The IOC never clearly stated that they believe Khelif isn't intersex. (When an official accidentally said “this isn't a case of a DSD” the IOC published a rectification on Twitter stating that the official had meant “transgender” instead, tacitly admitting it might very well be a case of a DSD.)
The IOC intentionally abolished sex tests, because they worked too well: they identified some AFAB XY athletes, and the IOC didn't want to be the bad guy that has to tell male “women” with 5-ARD that their bodies are not female enough to be eligible for women's sports.
If the IOC had any integrity, they would say clearly: “We decided to include intersex males in the women's sports competition, so whether the IBA's assessment that Khelif is an intersex male is correct, is irrelevant.”
But they don't do that. They vaguely imply that the IBA is wrong, refuse to do any testing on their own, and let people take their sides in the culture war. It's infuriating cowardice. The IOC needs to decide whether or not XY-males with 5-ARD are allowed to compete. If so, they should say clearly that they don't care if Khelif is biologically male. If not, they should propose meaningful measures to keep males like Khelif out.
MartianNight
3mo ago
The simple cheating case which sex testing exists to catch (a non-intersex cis man entering a female event) has never happened in the Olympics
The question is: how much of that is because sex testing was mandatory? It could be that sex testing never had any useful effect (“my rock keeps tigers away”) or that it was quite effective at dissuading would-be cheaters. The argument “we didn't catch any cheaters, so therefore sex testing was always useless” is not logical.
MartianNight
3mo ago
A woman, born female
How did you arrive at these facts? The IOC never tested her sex, they only checked her passport, but you don't fight with your passport. Similarly, she might have ambiguous/female-looking genitalia, but that is not enough, because boxers don't fight with their genitalia.
Given the circumstances, I think it's quite likely that Khelif is biologically male with a DSD like 5-ARD, just like Caster Semenya before her. In fact, I'd be willing to bet on it. Are you?
Carini may have been outmatched, but she easily could have fought the round out defensively, run away, survived to the bell, and thrown in the towel between rounds.
That would not have called attention to the inherent unfairness of being paired up against a male opponent.
It makes a mockery of boxing.
You know what makes an even greater mockery of female boxing? Allowing males to compete. If you want to avoid a situation like this, you should be calling for Khelif to be sex tested and (if male) banned, not for Carini to take a beating from a (likely) male.
The fact that you think the woman should just suck it up and let the man demolish her shows that you don't care about the integrity of the sport at all. You just want to watch men beat up women, and have a grudge against women who won't put up with that.
MartianNight
3mo ago
According to Gallup: U.S. Women Have Become More Liberal; Men Mostly Stable.
MartianNight
3mo ago
It's not a perfect analogy, but it's useful because it separates the innate sexual attraction from acting on that attraction.
A pedophile is someone who wants to have sex with children.
I think the word “want” is being used in a very vague way here. A pedophile is sexually attracted to children, but might not consciously want to fuck them.
Compare with a heterosexual man who has a crush on his neighbor, but he knows she is married, and since he considers having sex with married women beyond the pale, he won't pursue her. Does he want to fuck her? On some theoretical level yes, but on a more practical level no. What if instead of being married she is underage, and he ignores her for that reason? Same thing, as far as I'm concerned.
In the real world, there is a lot of difference between cravings and conscious desires. A recovering alcoholic might crave a drink, but simultaneously want to avoid drinking. It's not helpful to simplify that to “alcoholics want to drink” — it's much more complicated than that.
They seem more similar to sociopaths and narcissists, in that you really can't counsel them or medicate them into being something else.
I don't think pedophilia can be cured, but it can be managed, just like alcoholism can be managed.
But even if it were true that alcoholics, pedophiles, philanderers, sociopaths and narcissists are utterly untreatable. What bearing does that have on whether they should be allowed to participate in the Olympics?
MartianNight
3mo ago
just think it's a bit rich that commenters here are waving the flag for this dude without even the barest pretence of having any motivation other than owning the libs
For the record, I'm not “waving the flag [..] to own the libs”. I just want the discussion about eligibility of Olympic athletes to be more principled than the current “this guy's past behavior was appalling so obviously he shouldn't be allowed to compete now!”.
You can make an argument around how serious criminals should be barred from the Olympics, but then you should flesh it out in an objective way. Part of justice is applying rules equally and fairly, and not in an ad-hoc manner as seems to happen here. Insisting on that is not the same as blanket support for pedophiles to participate in the Olympics.
By the way, I really don't think it's only liberals who are upset about Van de Velde's participation. It's just that the liberals are more vocal now that the perpetrator is a straight white male, rather than if it had been a black or trans person or a drag queen or something.
if they were to interact with this guy in person, if it was their kid at risk of being interfered with [..], their revealed preferences for how they think he should be treated would be functionally indistinguishable from those of the Guardian journalist who wrote this article.
Again, you are conflating two very different things. I wouldn't hire Van de Velde as my baby sitter, and I'm not saying anyone else should, but I might well hire him as my tax accountant, and I wouldn't mind playing volleyball with him. I don't think there is any hypocrisy there.
MartianNight
3mo ago
Isn't Humbert on trial for murdering Quilty? Unless you take the unreliable narrator so far that the trial isn't real either.
In any case, Lolita in the end marries some other guy closer to her age (I forgot his name, if it's even mentioned).
To be fair to woke people, this attitude is at least consonant with one of their other typical opinions: that gay people are "born this way", that sexuality and gender identity are congenital and hardwired. If this is true of gay people, why wouldn't it also be true of paedophiles?
This is conflating sexual preference with criminality. It's not a crime to have a sexual preference for children. It's a crime to molest children.
Pedophile is to child molester as heterosexual male is to rapist of women. While it might not be possible to change the sexual preference, that doesn't mean we cannot rehabilitate criminals. If rapists of adult victims can be rehabilitated, then why not rapists of children?
(This conflation is very common in discussions surrounding pedophilia, by the way. My theory for why that happens is that people have such an irrational, visceral hatred of pedophiles that they just do not want to consider the possibility of a non-offending pedophile. But the distinction is important nonetheless, if you want to maintain a justice system where people are convicted based on their actions, and not just their thoughts or inclinations.
Something similar happens with other hated groups like “incels”, where being involuntarily celibate is almost a crime in and of itself, regardless of whether you've actually harassed any women.)
For all of you people wishing him well and crowing about woke hypocrisy, I have to ask - how comfortable would you feel about leaving him alone with your twelve-year-old daughter or niece?
This is an irrelevant hypothetical. You can argue that because of his past crime and the possibility of recidivism, Van de Velde should not be alone with twelve-year-olds in the future, but what does that have to do with him playing volleyball in a team full of adults?
The people who oppose Van de Velde participating in the Olympics seem to do so on the basis of some poorly-articulated principle that someone who has committed a horrible crime should never be allowed a place in the spotlight, regardless of whether they are likely to reoffend or not.
MartianNight
3mo ago
It's a bit style over substance in my opinion, but it's probably the most decapitated heads and fake blood during any Olympics opening ceremony to date.
MartianNight
3mo ago
I'm sure that's where the confusion comes from, but it's easy to remember the correct meaning when you know the origin of the word. Quoting Wikipedia:
In the military of ancient Rome, decimation (from Latin decimatio 'removal of a tenth') was a form of military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort. The discipline was used by senior commanders in the Roman army to punish units or large groups guilty of capital offences, such as cowardice, mutiny, desertion, and insubordination, and for pacification of rebellious legions. The procedure was an attempt to balance the need to punish serious offences with the realities of managing a large group of offenders.
A cohort (roughly 480 soldiers) selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten. Each group drew lots (sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot of the shortest straw fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning, clubbing, or stabbing.
It wouldn't make a lot of sense to kill 90% of your soldiers as a form of punishment, if the goal is to improve the discipline among the remainder. You would be left with so few that you might as well have killed all of them, and that's before considering the practical matter that if you condemn 90% of the group to death, those who are designated to die and have nothing left to lose would likely fight and overpower the lucky 10%.
In short, this punishment can only work with a minority being killed. That's why decimation means “reduced by 10%”, not “reduced to 10%”.
MartianNight
3mo ago
Also “decimated” in the meaning of “largely destroyed” rather than “reduced in size somewhat” (by 10%, literally).
MartianNight
4mo ago
framing Harris as a brave survivor of vicious and predatory grooming.
After all, Harris was a poor defenseless 30-year-old minor who couldn't be expected to stand up for herself.
More seriously though, the problem with this strategy is that the “groomer” in this case is a Black man and a Democrat. I'm sure the Democrats would have no problem accusing a white Republican of grooming Harris, but are they willing to throw a Black Democrat under the bus like that? Is Barack Obama going to declare “It could have been me soliciting sexual favors from women half my age in exchange for political favors?”
MartianNight
4mo ago
It's always funny to see these blogs where some random nobody (or at least, nobody with any credentials relevant to the case) gives a detailed argument in support of a definite claim that turns out to be entirely and utterly wrong.
MartianNight
5mo ago
In the near future, the ethnic Dutch will be a minority in the capital.
They already are. Amsterdam put the overall population at 44% Dutch alone, 19% of Western descent, and 36% of non-Western descent (PDF source), and that was in 2020.
MartianNight
5mo ago
There is some source data here: https://ggdgezondheidinbeeld.nl/ (in Dutch)
For the survey mentioned in the linked article, they surveyed 5351 high school students in grades 2 and 4 (ages between 13 and 16). The survey is primarily about life style and (mental) health; the question about acceptance of homosexuality was phrased like this:
What's your opinion on two girls/women or boys/men being in love with each other?
❑ Normal
❑ A little weird
❑ Very weird
❑ Wrong
Apparently 46% answered normal (down from 71% in 2019) and 25% answered wrong (up from 13%).
MartianNight
6mo ago
For someone who uses words like “lies” and “literally” quite liberally I'd expect you to stick closer to the truth yourself. The research grant isn't about banning real meat at all. To quote:
The long-term goal of this research proposal is to explore and explicate the emerging social and bioethical implications of cellular agriculture (i.e. "lab grown meat")
So the purpose is literally “to explore and explicate”. Maybe you think there is some more sinister hidden purpose, but if so, it definitely does not literally say that the goal is to remove meat-based options, and if you think that's the actual purpose you will have to make an argument for it. (How annoying! That's much harder than simply calling people liars!)
The part that you are upset about is this:
a nascent industry that portends to disrupt traditional livestock production by bioengineering animal products through cell cultures
This is just standard fluff you put in research proposals to make the topic of your research sound super duper important: why should someone pay you USD 500,000 to study a phenomenon if that phenomenon isn't something earthshaking? It's no different from the hundreds of blockchain startups that claimed they were going to disrupt the financial system in order to secure VC funding (spoiler alert: they didn't).
But even taken at face value, “disrupting” traditional livestock production doesn't imply that real meat will be banned. It's easy to imagine a future with 50/50 fake/real meat; that would be pretty disruptive to the agricultural sector, but it still doesn't make real meat unavailable.
MartianNight
6mo ago
"nobody is trying" is kinda consensus-building, but probably fine.
I never wrote “nobody is trying” to ban real meat. I'm sure there are some PETA-style militant vegans who'd love to ban real meat, but they are a tiny minority that does not have enough power to enact such a ban, and I don't see a likely scenario where that changes in the near future.
What I did say was:
Having lab-grown meat available as an option does not force anyone to eat it, and it doesn't take away traditional options.
I've not heard a convincing argument against this, and can't imagine one that doesn't rely on a lot of assumptions and slippery slope type fallacies.
Meanwhile, there is real-world evidence in favor of my claim, in that restaurants already serve vegan and vegetarian options in addition to meat-based options, and this hasn't lead to meat becoming unavailable in general.
If lab-grown meat ever becomes commercially viable (which is a big if) I can see large chains like McDonald's introducing it as a separate option, just like they now offer a plant-based burger. The plant-based option isn't there to force you to eat it. It's there so that if your friend group consists of 9 meat eaters and 1 vegan, you can all go to McDonald's together.
MartianNight
6mo ago
Yes, I agree that failing to do something useful in the past shouldn't prevent you from doing something useful today, but by that very logic, the government can still ban any number of unhealthy foods if it wanted to.
That's why I don't buy the explanation that the ban on lab-grown meat was motivated by concern for public health, because if that were true, the government would also be banning alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks, etc. If you want to explain the meat ban in terms of public health concerns, you have to explain why none of the other, much more effective, bans are happening.
Of course, in reality it has nothing to do with public health, but simply waging the culture war. DeSantis is trying to own the libs by banning something that they advocate for. DeSantis himself said as much:
“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “Our administration will continue to focus on investing in our local farmers and ranchers, and we will save our beef.”
Nowhere does it say that public health concerns were the reason for the ban. Instead, it's all about “fighting the elites” and “saving our beef”. If lab-grown meat was provably more healthy than regular meat, DeSantis would still oppose it for the above reasons.
And of course the whole reasoning is bogus. Having lab-grown meat available as an option does not force anyone to eat it, and it doesn't take away traditional options. The idea that allowing anyone to eat lab-grown meat would result in everyone being forced to eat it is a classic example of a slippery slope fallacy.
MartianNight
6mo ago
I'm just trying to pin down the argument here. If the argument is “the government should ban unhealthy foods in the interest of public health” that's a position that's easy to understand, whether you agree with it or not, but adopting it would imply banning a bunch of traditional foods too.
If the argument is “the government should ban unhealthy foods, but only if they are new” then the logic is less clear: why does it matter if an unhealthy food is new or not? You should be able to defend the “only if they are new” qualifier, unless your real motivation is something different (e.g. irrational hatred of lab-grown meats or the people who advocate for them).
(Note that all of this assumes that lab grown meat is unhealthy as a given, which I certainly don't believe in the strict sense, though I will concede there is some unknown risk associated with it.)
MartianNight
6mo ago
So are you arguing that without the extrajudicial home raids, the ban is useless? Because I'm fairly certain home raids aren't part of the current proposal.
MartianNight
6mo ago
Sure, let's say, when left to their own devices, people will choose to eat garbage. Is it the government's job to prevent this? If yes, then why single out lab-grown meat, when hot dogs, jellybeans and soda are just as bad? If not, then what is the basis for banning just 1 of 1000 unhealthy foods that people already consume?
MartianNight
6mo ago
by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients
So when is Florida banning jelly beans? And calorie-rich sodas sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup? And sugary breakfast cereals? And cancer-inducing smoked meats? Tobacco? Alcohol?
Why should all those foods that we know are unhealthy and that consumers actually do overindulge in to the detriment of their health be allowed, but a meat substitute that is likely to be much healthier and is not even widely available needs to be banned?
We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way. Maybe it has the wrong hormones, or the wrong mix of hormones or an absence of certain kinds of proteins.
I don't think “probably” is right; which nutrients and vitamins are essential is pretty well known, so the chance that lab-grown meat is unhealthy in some unpredictable way is pretty low. Especially since nobody suggests you switch to a meat-only diet; the idea is that you eat this in moderation, along with fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables, just like the recommendation is for real meat.
Still, if you personally don't want to take the risk, you would still be welcome to stuff your face with jellybeans, vodka and tobacco because you believe that's the healthier alternative. That's hardly an argument for a ban.
MartianNight
6mo ago
Nit pick: /r/the_donald was the banned subreddit.
1:
Quillette published an article about the verdict, too:
https://quillette.com/2024/08/27/tickle-vs-giggle/
2:
The verdict didn't surprise me because I'm already working from the sad assumption that in the woke West, biological sex is no longer recognized as real by anyone in a position of power. What was once a woman is now a “uterus-haver”, a “pregnant person” or a “chest feeder”, but such people have no collective rights. Those collective rights now belong to those who merely identify as women, even if they have penises and testicles, which means that there is no longer any legal basis for having female-only spaces, online or offline.
What confuses and angers me is that the judge will not even explain that state of affairs in clear terms, instead insisting that this was a case of discrimination based on gender identity. But that's literally impossible! Giggle is an app for women, and Tickle identifies as a woman, so whatever discrimination Tickle faced cannot have been based on gender identity (and it wasn't: it was based on biological sex).
That's also clear from the paragraph here:
Again, the decision was based on the fact that Tickle did not look biologically female, not that they looked insufficiently woman-identifying. In fact, Tickle looks exactly like a male who identifies as a woman. So the Giggle moderators, correctly, clocked her as a male and banned her for that reason. That is sex-based discrimination, which may or may not be illegal, but definitely not gender-identity discrimination.
So de facto the situation in Australia is as follows:
I don't agree that this should be the law, but this is what it is in practice. Then why can't the judge explicitly say so? Is he that stupid? Or is banning discrimination based on biological sex while claiming you are banning discrimination based on self-identification some elite power play that I'm too unsophisticated to understand?
3:
As for normie men increasingly identifying as female for the benefits:
I suspect that a lot of these benefits in practice are only afforded to biological females and to males who make enough effort to signal that they are serious about their gender identity.
The normie dad who changes his legal sex in hopes of getting custody of his children will be sussed out as faking it and will not get the benefits associated with women and real transwomen.
This all reminds me of an old but good article by The Last Psychiatrist, The Nature of the Grift, where (in section IV) he explains that to get asylum because you are persecuted as a homosexual, it's not sufficient to declare yourself homosexual, you have to play the part too. Officially there is no rule on how gay you must act to be considered homosexual, and in practice many people fake such a claim, but it's still a requirement that you fake it convincingly.
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