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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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How can someone with so little competitive drive that they immediately give up and start crying after a single punch (and it's not like it was so hard she fell straight to the mat or anything) even make it to the olympics in the first place? Like, you're a boxer, for chrissakes, you're still standing and your jaw's not broken, get the fuck back out there.

A woman who thinks a man is beating on her, that's who. If she has ever sparred against one during training (and why wouldn't she), Carini knows that against a legitimate male boxer (good, but not necessarily a contender) who is trying to win (even in her weight class), her options are a quick tapout and getting smashed up in potentially life-altering ways. On hearing that Khelif was XY, Carini could have concluded that she was facing a legitimate male boxer. That would probably panic her* in a way which explains her failure to fight properly before taking the big punch and rapid surrender after it.

Broadhurst, on the other hand, assumed that Khelif competing in womens' boxing implied that she was not, in fact, a legitimate male boxer (she may also not have known that there was a question about Khelif's biological sex at all), fought like someone who wanted to win and belived she could, and demonstrated that Khelif boxed like a girl.

* Real-estate guru, youth football coach and Libertarian speaker John T Reed wrote a number of articles about why you need to minimize the ability gap (which in size-based youth sports is approximately equivalent to the age gap) in youth contact sports because athletes will panic and freeze if they expect to be hit by someone a lot more dangerous than them. Unfortunately they don't seem to have made the transition to his current blog.