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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34129 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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The culture war seemed subdued in my bubble for a few months, but picked up majorly recently. Oddly enough, the cause (mostly) doesn't seem to be the attempted presidential assassination, the quick Democratic party shifts, the ramping up of tensions in the middle east, or the black female presidential candidate, but the Olympics. Color me surprised.

I see non-stop posting currently about "The Science doesn't support the bigots who think XY chromosomes makes someone a man", "why do they care more about a woman competing in woman's boxing than they do about a literal child rapist competing?", "the people complaining about a woman getting punched in the face by another woman are the same people who don't bat an eye at men beating up women outside of the Olympics". There seems to have been some really high-profile culture war controversies in this Olympics. I really doubt there's more fodder for controversy in the Olympics in general than in everyday life, so why is everyone picking up their keyboards to go vanquish the enemy all of a sudden?

The Olympics are built for TikTok, and then whatever the Facebook version is. You get a huge sporting event where I'm not watching most of it live, and you just pour out highlights and lowlights and controversies. Toss in that the sporting public is even worse informed than usual, and you have a recipe for arguments. ((I am once again begging people to watch the events we're arguing about))

TikTok came out in 2016 after the Olympics were over, and Tokyo was a weird one with COVID and no crowds and a lot of athletes having been thrown off in their training. This is the first real Olympics with TikTok.

I see no problem with this.

If the meta is transgender females, and people care about winning, let's metagame it to hell together. If the competition for best female boxer is a stacked bracket full of women who were at one point men, let's fucking go. Every country gets the same playing field, let's pump 'em with as much testosterone as possible before the 2028 summer olympics.

If they don't want this meta, then they might as well say so, patch the ruleset and save us all the trouble. If they don't, the smarter countries get to canvass their entire population for DSD athletes and stack every female event they can, we get more competitive sports out of it and more records broken. Everyone wins!

East German swimming coaches weren't wrong, they were just early.

I realize this makes me a dirty accelerationist, but hey, I want to see the cool future of cyborg transhuman roided out boxing. I don't care if they have breasts or not in the ring unless they act as armor, shock absorbers, or offensive weapons.

I don't really think that's worth the hormonal problems and other side effects. I'm fine with the enhanced games because at least you know what you're getting into at that point. But creating the incentives for girls to destroy their bodies if they want to be competitive doesn't sit well with me.

I thought the whole point of banning doping was to prevent just this.

Seems to me like an attempt to paper over a major hole in their ideological worldview.

I've spoken on the topic before, martial arts, combat sports, and such similar endeavors based on physical prowess in an actual fight for 'survival' against another human remain mostly untouched by the forces of 'woke' and are still a place where masculinity is allowed to exist without suborning itself to female-centric norms of behavior or lefty egalitarianism.

Its a cultural arena where any and all illusions about socially constructed gender norms smack into a wall of sheer pragmatism. Quoth myself: "end of the day, there is simply no amount of social maneuvering that will make up for the strength differential between men and women, and you can't 'fake' martial arts skills without willing participants, which makes entryism nigh-impossible."

A biological male who goes through male puberty has an insurmountable advantage over any person whatsoever who hasn't gone through male puberty. Unironically, If I were forced to bet on a no-holds barred brawl between a barely-trained 70 year old male and a heavily trained mid-twenties female in the same weight class, I am picking gramps for the win. Cardio will 100% be a factor here, but also, old man strength is REAL. (Oh I'm prepared to lose my money, but absent actual medical problems a 70 year old is not as fragile as you think.) I wonder why such a matchup hasn't been done before. Hmmmm.

But biology also has a tendency to be messy and perhaps defies categorization on the margins, so we can have women who produce a lot of testosterone and maybe some weird genetic quirks that trigger the same disgust reaction as a male whalloping on a female even though, technically, if we squint, its still women fighting women. But closer to the center of the respective bell curves for men and women there are no surprises to be found.

The lefties who want to claim the only reason anyone objects to Imane Khelif being in the women's division is wanton transphobia are depending on some very, very rare and unique circumstances to justify the situation that has come about. If we apply the left's logic, literally any person who was "assigned male at birth" who transitions at any age should be eligible to compete in the women's division. That's how they treat every other sport. So if we see some jacked, bearded wrestler sweep a women's karate tournament what exactly are we supposed say that ISN'T transphobic?

But the reason I reject the idea that it is 'fine' to let a trans woman compete in a fighting sport against cis women is mostly what I alluded to up above. Biology is messy but also merciless. Just as one might be repulsed by the image of a muscular male cracking a young lady's skull, the image of a strapping young buck trading blows with a senior citizen thrice his age also tends to also generate pity for the older guy and disdain for the younger who is showing blatant disrespect for his elder and risks hurting, maybe killing someone who is much less able to recover from the damage.

BUT WAIT, age is just a social construct. A 'spectrum,' one might even say! There is no exact set of physical traits that makes someone "sixty years old" other than the date on which they exited their mothers womb! How can you assert that a 25-year-old is going to have inherent advantages in a fight over a 65-year-old? Why should these arbitrary categories justify rules that seek to protect the latter from the former? Somebody can identify as a different age than the one presented by their body, that much is true!

Well, because our current scientific understanding of how aging works... and common sense from what we can observe with our own eyes, tells us that even if we can't precisely predict how 10, 20, 30 years of time passing will impact a human body, we can be certain that the general trend will be that person will become slower, weaker, more prone to injury, and thus overall at much greater risk than the equivalent person who is 20 years younger.

So uh, when our current scientific understanding of how sexual development works... and common sense from what we can observe with our own eyes, tell us that even if we can't precisely predict how 300 ng/dL of added testosterone will impact a human body, we are still going to be certain that the person without that testosterone will be slower, weaker, more prone to injury, and overall at much greater risk than the 'equivalent' person who has 200 times their testosterone levels.

Yes, there's a plethora of other factors and the causal arrow can point in multiple directions, remember I'm granting that biology is messy.

Leaving aside whether women should be competing in combat sports at all, if they're going to have their own league or division, the rules should be focused on mitigating the risks to the competitors (and maximizing 'fairness,' I guess) and thus shouldn't be thwarted by the aforementioned weird edge cases, and definitely not thwarted by someone who can convince the organizers that they REALLY REALLY believe they're a female.

And I would say precisely the same about age divisions. A 30-year-old could in theory have the mind of a 60-year-old, but lets not force the actual 60-year-old into the ring with them because we want to accommodate the younger guy's beliefs... Again leaving aside whether 60-year-olds should be competing at all.

Lefties don't (currently) see the age spectrum as an issue worth fighting over, but dohoho they certainly will take any and every opportunity presented to fight over the gender identity spectrum. Especially when they're desperate to make inroads into the combat sports world which, as I stated elsewhere, is extremely resistant to entryism. This helps them slap a facade over the "males and females are fundamentally physically different in non-trivial ways" hole by arguing "transphobes can't even tell the difference between a trans woman and a woman who is merely huge physical outlier."

Anyhow. Maybe we revisit this topic after the Jake Paul/Mike Tyson fight

This has panned out to be an interesting subportion of the thread. I'm trying to imagine showing this to my wife, and I think an interesting question just occurred to me: where would a feminist land on this question of women's vs men's strength?

On the one hand, they want to believe that women and men can go toe-to-toe in boxing and a woman would have an equal chance. On the other hand, they want us to believe that women are in constant terror at all times that a man might hurt her. And I remember conversations on this very forum where people have been indicating that in certain situations women have no choice but to willingly go along with whatever a man wants her to do in a 1 on 1 setting, because there's a small chance he could get violent if she objected at all.

I have met women who've sincerely asserted that men and women are exactly equal in strength, speed and stamina, and women are underrepresented (not represented, I should say) among top athletes for the same reason they are underrepresented in STEM: the patriarchy favours male athletes and systematically discourages women from pursuing sporting careers which would allow them to reach their full athletic potential. These women are the minority: virtually every woman I've met is abundantly aware that men are stronger than women for reasons that have nothing to do with socialisation. One could persuasively argue that this simple objective reality is the entire impetus behind feminism as a movement - without it, a reasonable response to women complaining about male oppression might be simply "git gud" or "do you even lift?"

There are doublethinking feminists of the kind you're describing: feminists who seem to simultaneously believe that men and women are exactly alike in strength, speed and stamina, and also that all women are living in constant fear of male violence which they are powerless to defend themselves against. But I do genuinely believe that such people are the minority.

There is a way to thread a needle wherein they argue that men just train more because they don't get harassed out of the gym and thus are more likely to get good at fighting, so you end up with men tending to be strong and 'dangerous' and women who are less so, unless they power through all the harassment and naysayers to trains as much as a comparable man. Thus they could willfully believe that a trained woman is able to take on a trained man but that most women are still 'at risk.'

However, I really wonder if anyone believes that female powerlifters could match male powerlifters if they were just given the chance to start training as early and train as hard as men.

There does seem to be a large-ish contingent who want to deny that going through puberty awash in testosterone and having an elevated level of same later on equates to VASTLY improved muscle development and bone density... even though they tacitly acknowledge that it DOES make one more aggressive overall and thus makes men more likely to assault others.

Also, I laugh a bit at the argument that women are harassed or threatened and THAT is why they won't train in certain sports as much as men... which just implies that women are unable to handle being insulted or verbally abused as well as men can, so they're still 'weaker' in a certain sense.

Also, I laugh a bit at the argument that women are harassed or threatened and THAT is why they won't train in certain sports as much as men... which just implies that women are unable to handle being insulted or verbally abused as well as men can, so they're still 'weaker' in a certain sense.

Well, no. It implies that women are harassed more. "If men were harassed more than women, then men would be the ones intimidated" is well within the realm of that kind of argument.

Men are harassed more. Women suffer from gendered harassment more, the definition of which is designed specifically to make women suffer from it more in order to be able to dismiss the harassment men face.

If thats the argument then WHY are they harassed more?

Are men trained to harass females from a young age or do they have some psychological tendency for it?

Kinda just pushes the argument back a level.

The answer's generally "because society has been set up so that it works to empower men more than women; that's what 'patriarchy' means". As for why did it happen to be set up like that originally, please ask actual radical feminists, I don't know.

A biological male who goes through male puberty has an insurmountable advantage over any person whatsoever who hasn't gone through male puberty. Unironically, If I were forced to bet on a no-holds barred brawl between a barely-trained 70 year old male and a heavily trained mid-twenties female in the same weight class, I am picking gramps for the win. Cardio will 100% be a factor here, but also, old man strength is REAL. (Oh I'm prepared to lose my money, but absent actual medical problems a 70 year old is not as fragile as you think.) I wonder why such a matchup hasn't been done before. Hmmmm.

I honestly don't agree with this. I went to BJJ for a couple of months just prior to starting dialysis. I was strong, not super strong but pulling 1 rep-max of 50kg over my 75kg body weight on a pullup kind of strong. I had no technique just strength and the technique was developing, but only enough to resist tapping to white belts for the 5 minute hard sparing periods. And for some of the novice white belts I was pretty comfortably in top position against (just had no idea how to submit anyone). I went up against a judo girl about the same size and weight as me. Absolute utter domination. She had been doing this since she was very young. I think I got tapped out like 3 times in the span of 3 minutes. This was in the first week of my short bjj bout, but still.

I have utter respect for BJJ as a discipline, and its one of the few areas where a female with technique can win under the rules of the sport against a male, since many submissions use leverage rather than strength. And you can get choked out at any size.

Under the rules of BJJ.

I'm not certain a female fighter can get a male to go to the ground, where the techniques work best, if he doesn't want to go down there. She certainly risks catching a devastating strike or getting body slammed in the process.

We always started standing. I mean she was a judoka so, it wasn't that hard for her to get me to the ground. If you are so heavily out skilled and you have the same weight, the strength makes very little difference. She isn't going to let you body slam her and might do the same herself. Most women are very much NOT the same weight as me, indeed majority in the sparing sessions were about 20kg lighter. Which means it would probably go down as you are proposing, weight + large strength difference. But this was the only big Dutch woman there hence the result.

Would it have been different if you could have used strikes? Remember, no-holds-barred was the premise.

If you know how to fight standing then I think it goes without saying strength matters a lot. But I also did a few weeks of MMA (Friday was like sparring from standing with strikes allowed) I remember going against a person who was vastly superior striker (with my 2x MMA striking, you can imagine my state). But I shot quiet fast and took him down and there it was quiet easy. I imagine, given that she was so good at judo (coming from that background), etc, unless I got lucky or for some reason she just couldn't deal with striking being a part of the game, she would similarly take me down and go to town. As I replied to faceh, similar weight + huge skill imbalance is where you would get a woman absolutely dominate. If she was 20kg lighter (as is usual) I think it would be a very different story.

A 30-year-old might have the mind of a 60-year-old, but lets not force the 60-year-old into the ring with them because we want to accommodate the younger guy's beliefs

I drew a similar analogy here. Why couldn't one have a "weight identity" distinct from one's biological mass?

Props to you for making that point against someone who seemingly was hellbent on ignoring it.

We could enumerate all the reasons why weight classes are necessary and good but I like to just post this video of Connor McGregor fighting the Mountain. Even under playful conditions I think its clear why this is not a 'fair' fight, and its not because Connor is/was a top 1% MMA fighter.

I wish I could believe that they'd never try to remove weight classes but yeah, if they don't care about the advantages gender confers, that might very well be on the agenda.

A strange aspect of this phenomenon I've noticed is people somehow misremembering facts into existence that are the exact opposite of reality. I encountered this Tumblr post, where OP and several people in the notes seem to believe that Serena Williams "famously" beat a bunch of men at tennis, when the only professional match she ever played against a man she lost, and he was ranked 203rd.

It's hard to have a discussion when half of the people are wishcasting their opinions into existence. (I say this as one of the people on this forum more generally sympathetic to trans inclusion across a variety of social domains.)

My brother pointed out that whenever this debate comes up, feminists always go back to the well of the Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs tennis match (that is, a 29-year-old woman beating a man almost twice her age, in which there were credible allegations that Riggs had deliberately thrown the match to get out of some gambling debts). What's striking about the match is what an outlier it is: in essentially every battle of the sexes before and since, the man has come out victorious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_(tennis)

Just yesterday I was reading twitter conversations spurred on by the Olympic shooting event memes and getting people confidently stating that the reason these sports (and similar competitions) were segregated was men were scared of losing to women and women were sick of being harassed by men. Community notes swoops in to point out that the decision to segregate happened in 1991 and the female winning was 1992, so something else was probably afoot.

THIS one had 24k likes. And sure maybe there's some element of that but you can directly point out that in most cases women are very much allowed to compete against men if they want. But they choose not to and usually they don't place well when they do.

Like sure, on some culture war issues a difference of opinion can be sustained because the facts on the ground are ambiguous. But thousands of people sustaining a false outlook on the world that could be refuted by simply looking at the reliable records is some serious epistemic collapse.

I wonder if there are 'strength truthers' out there who believe that female powerlifters could absolutely catch men's records if they started training as intensely as possible as early as possible and weren't being harassed out of the gym by the 'bro culture' or whatever. Actually, now that I've said it, I'm now certain there's people out there who believe that.

I would caution against taking community notes at face value without checking their underlying reference. The relevant underlying quote is :

Mr Gilbert Felli, Sports Director, had a number of proposals to present to the Board which were agreed to and thus will now be put to the IOC members for approval at the next Session... On the other hand, the mixed trap and skeet shooting events are to be deleted in favour of separate events for men and women. The addition of two events requested by the UIT, double trap for men and women, was accepted, as was the quota reduction from 440 to 430.

That is, the proposal was accepted for later IOC approval in December 1991. Since the IOC's 84th session had been in September of 1991, this means that final approval must have been in the 85th or 86th session, the earliest of which was in May, three months after the 1992 Winter Olympics.

It's not clear where the note is getting "women requesting the IOC to do so" from. UIT was the (French) name for the shooting organization that eventually became the ISSF, but pretty much every group of every Olympic sport launders their calls to action through the international sporting org, so that's not proof against. But the UIT wasn't (and the ISSF isn't) exactly a knitting club when it comes to demographics, and their contemporaneous claim was that they couldn't support the matter as "only a handful of women shooters are able to qualify against men for major competitions."

((There's also a longer history; as the underlying link points out, separation of men and women's shooting sports had begun in 1984, well before 1991, with trap and skeet being the last to swap. More broadly, women were arguing in favor of discrete Women's events for new sports, an argument they had mostly won in 1990, but existing sports were as often recast as 'mixed', some of that persists to this day. There was also a contemporaneous movement, mostly from eastern europe, in favor of gender segregated sports over mixed ones, not because but because of social/religious norms.))

And sure maybe there's some element of that but you can directly point out that in most cases women are very much allowed to compete against men if they want. But they choose not to and usually they don't place well when they do.

I'm very skeptical of the harassment explanation, especially for the shooting sports, but women do compete, albeit rarely, in non-Olympic shooting sports. Some have gender-segregated roles, some have mixed-gender competitions, some do both. Handgun work generally favors men slightly,

Bigger issue is that there's just not as many women interested. USPSA tends to have had the best luck getting interest from the fairer sex, both due to match style and for historic reasons, despite the best efforts of IDPA to try and poach. But while you have women like Justine Williams and Jessie Harrison that are absolute terrors, you don't have anywhere near the number of 'almosts'.

Yeah I just fundamentally don't believe that wanton sexism is the explanation for segregating out womens divisions.

It seems unlikely that one lady winning one medal in one year is enough of an impetus to create new divisions by itself.

Blatant corruption is always on the table.

If I were forced to bet on a no-holds barred brawl between a barely-trained 70 year old male and a heavily trained mid-twenties female in the same weight class, I am picking gramps for the win.

This doesn't pass the sniff test to me. Digging up one robust 70 year old example doesn't change anything. 70 year olds have a 3% chance of not even making it through the year on average. They are, in fact, rather fragile.

Granted I have some bias on this issue because I train with guys approaching 70, so the availability heuristic has me thinking of the most robust members of that age cohort.

But it is hard to understate just how advantaged, pound for pound, a male is over any given female. I stipulate same weight class and the average male weight for an over-60 is about 190 pounds. I want you to try and imagine what a 190 pound woman looks like. Especially if we assume she's NOT freakishly tall (another factor impacted by testosterone).

In my mind, the theoretical fight really comes down to whether the woman can avoid the guy long enough until he's mostly gassed, and then execute a successful submission. Similarly, if the guy manages to grab hold of her and keep her from getting away, dropping her with a strike to the head or slamming her hard to the ground are likely finishes. I'll stipulate that a lightly trained male is almost certainly not choking out a heavily trained female.

I want you to try and imagine what a 190 pound woman looks like.

I assure you that the average 190 pound male looks like a sack of dog shit.

And if a 190 pound male manages to lie on top of a 190 female, she's going to have a hard, nearly impossible time getting unpinned regardless of how he looks.

We're talking about a heavily trained woman and almost untrained man. That scenario seems unlikely.

Yes, that's why its fun to consider, since we really have almost no real-world examples to prove up one side or the other definitively.

On the other hand, I watch a lot of videos of street fights, and virtually none of them depict a female KO-ing a man in any context.

Here's a Mixed MMA fight from about two months ago between TWO females and one large dude:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lQllTuPzOXU?si=H90MBAshtGUD2IL4

The women were allowed headgear and he wasn't. Notice him turning all his attention to one and not even reacting as the other woman hits him from behind at about the 2:00 mark. Skill is not really the determinant factor here.

I cannot overstate how huge the physical advantage is for the male, even if that guy gets gassed its still not safe for a female to approach lest he grab her and just SIT on her.

I watch a lot of videos of street fights, and virtually none of them depict a female KO-ing a man in any context.

How many street fights involve seventy year old men, let alone a seventy year old man and a young woman?

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Hell, even if that was a barely-trained mid-twenties male and a heavily trained mid-twenties female in the same weight class, I would probably bet on the woman.

Since she's heavily trained, she will keep her distance, avoid the telegraphed punches and grabs and attack the joints and the groin until she can go for a throw and an armbar.

Male and female weight classes are different, a male and female in the same weight class is one where the male has a mass advantage.

Hard disagree, the male will compensate for poor technique with brute strength and mog her.

Really? I am a mid 20s decently fit male who knows nothing about boxing and has never been in a ring. I don't think I'd manage to hold a candle against the women competing in my weight class at the olympics.

The gap is much larger than what popular culture lets people believe.

Lucia Rijker one of the best female boxers and kickboxers got knocked out by an amateur Muay Thai fighter. Polish arm wresler Ula Siekacz got in an MMA fight with Piotrek Muaboy and he brutally mauled her.

Technique helps but it doesn't substitute for all the biological advantages even an average man gets: they just hit a lot stronger and can take a lot more punishment.

Realistically the average fight between a man and a women is over as soon as he grabs her and/or she gets knocked out. You can compensate a lot with technique so top women can probably take on men that don't exercise, but introduce any sort of strength training and it's just over.

An amateur Muay Thai fighter is a huge step up from a barely trained rando like me or BC.

I am quite sure that I could pound a woman into submission if I got on top of her, but getting on top of her is the problem. You need several months of training as an adult to be able to avoid cheap shots if you didn't grow up fighting in the playground.

I'll admit I don't know how much that matters in that particular configuration. Could an expert woman neutralize the average dude in at most a couple of blows? I guess you just go for the nuts and the eyes. But you can't really go hard for that in any sort of sanctioned fight so unless you can go for a knockout that's going to involve some level of wrestling, and it's very hard to compensate the strength advantage then.

Seems like you have to thread a needle to make it work.

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I sincerely think you would perform better than you think. Even a man's skull is harder than a woman's, the woman's punches won't hit as hard.

I used to row in a past life and happen to sort of know one of the Olympic GB female rowers. Despite the fact that she almost the same height as me (height is very important for rowing) and basically the same weight class as me (if not lighter) she had a 15-20 second faster 2K erg than me (this was before she went professional), although the caveat is that I was only training 3x a week while she'd have been doing 7+ sessions a week.

Perhaps boxing isn't like rowing but equally in the other sports where I can do a direct comparison easily (like weightlifting), the Olympic women in my weight class are miles and bounds ahead of me. The lowest score for the snatch was 90kg in the 76-kg category in Tokyo 2021 while I topped out at like a 50kg snatch back when I used to train for rowing.

I mean, if we're being 100% literal, yes, BurdensomeCount would almost certainly lose a boxing match. If he knows nothing about boxing, he doesn't know which moves are illegal, so he'd get DQed.

@faceh's thought experiment specified a "no-holds barred brawl" rather than a boxing match with rules and a referee.

In the latter case, my money's on the trained woman (if for no other reason than the man fighting cautiously out of fear of accidentally breaking the rules) - and it might well come out with the trained woman getting knocked out, but winning by default by referee's decision, because the man broke a rule.

In the former case, my money's on the untrained man: assuming he's reasonably fit for his age and body mass, he will absolutely dominate the woman through brute force alone, no matter how much training she's received.

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For my part, it seems like the primary epistemic sin of the left is Biodenialism. It underpins so much confused and counterproductive discourse about inequality, race, and gender. Among the most prominent defenders of this ideology in the West have been highly educated white women. The more examples we get of cases where Biology Matters, Actually, the greater the likelihood of an emergent class consciousness among the segment of society that most ardently defends Biodenialism. In this regard, the olympics are very elucidatory, as are cases where trans women misbehave in women’s prisons etc.. The correct responses from the Bio-pilled segment of the political sector should probably still be accelerationism.

The correct responses from the Bio-pilled segment of the political sector should probably still be accelerationism.

I understand where you're coming from, and I hope you're right. But the black pilled part of me makes me think that accelerationism will just accelerate the denial. That's what I tend to see.

When I wrote The Science doesn't support the bigots who think XY chromosomes makes someone a man, it was paraphrased from several people I saw writing about this. I can't actually ask these people what actual biology and science support the notion that being a woman is distinct from the presence of XY chromosomes, and how that was determined by these biologists and scientists for fear of outing myself as a heretic and being yelled at by people who probably don't really want to explain it anyhow. I really am curious, because it seems if I'm being charitable, "being a woman" is a social state that they're arguing for definitionally. And definitions like that are neither provable by biological science nor disputable. As Scott says:

I can’t argue with this. No, literally, I can’t argue with this. There’s no disputing the definitions of words. If you say that “racism” is a rare species of nocturnal bird native to New Guinea which feeds upon morning dew and the dreams of young children, then all I can do is point out that the dictionary and common usage both disagree with you. And the sources I cited above have already admitted that “the dictionary is wrong” and “no one uses the word racism correctly”.

What good is a definition that doesn't define a boundary? If they're not provable and they're not disputable they're not actually useful for anything to anyone.

The people who campaign for this stuff ignore that they're forging ther own rhetorical weapons out of marshmallows and candyfloss.

Because a man punching a woman shouldn't be an Olympic sport. Its much more visceral than the three XY males that took the medals in one event during the 2016 olympics.

Images like this are powerful.

https://twitter.com/HazelAppleyard_/status/1820091385199865963

The fact that he groped his first opponent after the match was terrible too.

Too many people didn't care about "just" the women losing out on scholarships, victories, and fame. Too many people don't seem to care about the injuries suffered by teenaged girls playing soccer, rugby or volleyball with much stronger males. But here we have a dude punching a woman in the face so finally more people are saying "you know what, maybe thats not fair".

Serious question - what’s the use in calling a phenotypically female intersex person a “man” due to XY chromosomes? They have a vagina, grew up perceived and socialised as a woman, and some even have ovaries and the ability to get pregnant (if it’s Swyer Syndrome). Prior to the invention of genetic sequencing, there’d be no way of telling they’re not say, female with some hormonal abnormality. Look up CAIS - people with it look 100% like women to the point where historically they weren’t told they were anything but infertile normal women.

Barring intersex athletes from competing with women is perfectly reasonable if it’s a condition that gives them an unfair advantage. However, having pronouns and gender be tied to chromosomes seems to me like it would cause the same issues as what some trans activists request. If you’re intersex, you have to “include chromosomes in bio” so people can call you a dude/a lady despite you not looking like one at all. You’re, ironically enough, saying that men can have vaginas, some men can get pregnant, and that women can have penises.

what’s the use in calling a phenotypically female intersex person a “man” due to XY chromosomes?

It's a soldier in the pro vs anti transgender argument war. The person you described, as you noted, is intersex. They're not male, and they're not female. They were born with a very unusual mixture and biological expression of what are typically considered biological male and female characteristics. They're not transgender. Strictly speaking they have no relevance to the transgender debate other than serving as a prompt to explore the issues (read: muddy the waters) of the transgender debate. Transgender debate aside they're also, strictly speaking, not a woman and shouldn't be participating in women's sport. That doesn't mean they're a man either in the same way a mule not being a horse doesn't mean it's a donkey. It's its own thing.

That doesn't mean that men can have vaginas. It means that some vanishingly small number of people were born with phenotypically female sex organs despite having other biological markers of being a male. Society doesn't have a social class that can accommodate those people so they get swept into one of the two bins that they'll never completely fit inside of, and any closer inspection of why they don't fit requires unpacking a biology textbook of initialisms and polysyllables and revealing that there's not even a single class of intersex in the same way I've just found out that there's a second horse-donkey hybrid that doesn't belong with the mules.

If you flip a coin enough times eventually it will land on its edge but we don't ask people to call heads, tails or edges, we say "Holy shit I've never seen that before, is this a magic coin? Also we'll have to flip again to settle the call". That doesn't make a trick coin that has heads on both sides into an edge call, and it doesn't make it worthwhile specifying the precise 0-360 degree Z axis orientation of the edge call when you're arguing about whether a heads is a tails.

You're right about the men-with-vaginas irony but in turn what you're saying could imply that there's no such thing as a woman. IIRC you're a transwoman. I hope you appreciate what showing there's no such thing as a woman would imply for people who claim to identify as such. This is why the intersex issue has no relevance, because it doesn't serve either side of the debate. It's a blind soldier (not even a soldier, more like a conscientous objector) being pressganged into battle and ordered to open fire.

It's extremely and unequivocally pro-trans rhetoric to say that some women, who are born with female genitalia, have an invisible issue they are born with that adjudicates that they are actually male and should live as men.

No, the unequivocally pro-trans rhetoric is "...and if he believes that he's a man". No pro-trans rhetoric currently known to me, whether tucute or truscum, states that someone "should" live as a particular gender because of any kind of traits they have, visible or not - indeed that's what the "assigned male/female at birth" language is striking at.

But here we have a dude punching a woman in the face

Do we? Perhaps if you have reason to trust IBA's judgment despite them being quite abrupt and tight-lipped about it, you believe it. I don't, and the other info appear to be coming out the other way. As found by other posters, Khelif's record is not the dominating streak one would expect from a male fighting women, neither do her other fights suggest she is a stronger if unskilled fighter.

Do we? Perhaps if you have reason to trust IBA's judgment despite them being quite abrupt and tight-lipped about it, you believe it. I don't,

Given that you were criticizing me for engaging in precisely the same type of skepticism, I think you shouldn't be allowed to use it here. The ICO is just as cagey, they never bothered denying that the IBOs tests took place, or their accuracy, nor have they made a statement about their own tests show something different. Instead,l they're focusing on accusations of corruption, or decrying the fairness of the tests having been done at all / not testing all the other athletes.

and the other info appear to be coming out the other way. As found by other posters, Khelif's record is not the dominating streak one would expect from a male fighting women, neither do her other fights suggest she is a stronger if unskilled fighter.

That's not info "coming out the other way". This does not prove the athletes sex one way or the other, and is nothing but a deflection from a very simple question.

If you want to stay completely agnostic on the athlete's sex, be my guest. Even if I accept a 50/50 prior (which is ridiculous, approximately no one, not even the die-hard gender-non-assumers do that), performing on par with other female-patterned boxers is info.

I'm not engaging in "precisely the same type of skepticism". You said you can't know her sex one way or the other without evidence. I'm saying I can, in fact, know "one way", even if it's not 100%. I trust my eyes more than I do Olympic (or formerly Olympic-certified) commissions, that's all.

I'm leaning towards them being dudes, but I'm not going to act like it's based on "info coming out the other way". My point us you're selectively playing a skeptic, all the while you were acting outraged that I asked for concrete evidence earlier.

The whole idea of using Bayesian analysis for these sorts of controversies was a disaster for rational discourse, so I don't particularly care what priors you pick.

Performance is irrelevant, this matter can be resolved with a simple test, and people claiming these athletes are women are bending themselves into pretzels to avoid having these tests done, which is highly suspicious behavior.

The fact that he groped his first opponent after the match was terrible too.

I didn't hear about that, source?

One could likely become King, Queen, or anything in between, of MMA Twitter for a day by swapping out the Viagra for DUDE Wipes.

The relationship between Woodley and DUDE Wipes is oddly wholesome and endearing; they go back to before the UFC Reebok days. Find someone as loyal to you as Woodley and DUDE Wipes are to each other.

Athletes would legitimately be a pretty good advertising pathway for Viagra. Viagra is useful to middle-aged and old men for expected reasons, but it can also be quite useful for young men to counteract coke or whiskey dick, or just for greater peace of mind that they'll be able to perform when it's show time.

Pfizer beat you to the punch (pun not intended) by about 22 years. It was in NASCAR, though.

Color me surprised that there are other people here who follow NASCAR.

Every day I wake up and lament that Mark Martin never won the Cup.

Well, not follow, but YouTube has taught me more than I ever thought I wanted to learn about it.

Trans is ground zero for the culture wars, the olympics are a major event, and Khelif is from Algeria, hardly a progressive powerhouse. Honestly even if people didn't inaccurately think she was trans I'd expect progressives to root for her because they inaccurately think she's black(after all, Algeria is in Africa, right?).

There's multiple governments and international organizations involved to turn it into a news story and there's footage which speaks a thousand words.

I see the same memes circulating at high speed through Facebook and Twitter. I have a couple of friends whom I can very reliably expect to let me know what the current talking points are with smarmy reposts from accounts with names like "CatLadiesWhoKnowThings" or "Social Justice Tiefling" or "Jedi Tea Witches." (Not actual accounts, but you get the idea.)

JK Rowling has jumped into the Imane Khalif controversy with both feet, outright stating she's a man, which is always good for turning up the heat on a constantly simmering issue.

The other thing I'm noticing is that "Weird" seems to be the Woke Word of the Week (and The New Republic has discovered Curtis Yarvin).

Wasn't the "weird" thing pretty clearly an organized campaign, with the first shot being that commercial with creepy actors strawmanning about reproductive politics? I figure they found an attack vector on Vance that played well with focus groups and are now committing all resources on it.

It started with Tim Walz doing an interview on MSNBC where he used the phrasing and Democrats loved it and piled on. The ad was part of the pile on.

Weird was pretty clearly a campaign, but it seems like it got overplayed and they're now backing down just a bit.

Specifically the 'weird' campaign somehow came off as making fun of the appearances of republican politicians instead of a description of oddball quotes. This backfired because the republican politicians who look weird tend to have sympathetic reasons for doing so(and JD Vance is almost aggressively normal-looking to the point of being nondescript), while most political figures who look weird because of, say, alternative lifestyle choices are progressive.

If this is really what's happening (I'm not really plugged in to social media) then @IGI-111 should get a medal for predicting this as the likely result. "The left accusing the right of being the weird party seems like throwing stones in glass houses. Do they really want to play that game?"

I just can’t figure out how they expect this to play for anyone other than their own camp. It’s not a real accusation by any stretch of the imagination. There’s nothing behind this other than a sneer and especially for people who don’t follow politics until after the conventions, it’s actually not that good. They’re weird like weird how exactly and why should I, the drone of sector 7G care about this? What is the message here? What agenda do either groups have? How are you going to get groceries and gasoline and housing to the place where the median American family can afford to live with only one job per adult? How are you going to fix my kid’s school? Crime? Why is republicans being “weird”, whatever the heck that actually means, affect my life?

It’s a stupid tactic because it’s so nonspecific that the public can easily disregard it as just name calling. At least the fascist thing was an actual accusation, a charge that would mean something objective and negative to most people. But they can’t do that anymore because it’s seen as too mean to a guy who got shot in the ear. They can’t run on the record, because they didn’t make life better for most Americans. They can’t bring up either schools or the border because they lose on both. So they have the equivalent of being a Becky and sneering at people they consider beneath them even if it’s silly. This is a campaign that would come out of a junior high.

Honestly I think the motivation is that leftists have a bunch of internalised self-consciousness about weirdness. Part of that's driven by the fact that they are broadly the on the side of transgenderism, drag time story hour, polyamory, and other non-mainstream lifestyle choices. Republicans have spent ages hammering them for being insufficiently patriotic, for not caring about the heartland of America, etc etc. And Democrats reject those attacks, but they still hear them and get kind of defensive about it. It's like right wingers and accusations of racism.

And so in my interpretation "Republicans are weird" is the mirror of "Democrats are the real racists". It's not actually an argument that is going to convince any of the people you might plausibly be aiming it at, it's more a story your side is telling itself about why the people who don't like you are actually guilty of the thing they keep accusing you of.

I mean you’re not wrong, but in context of this being an apparent campaign message from the top of the democrat party ticket, I just don’t understand what they how to actually accomplish here. Most of the too-online liberals are already completely sold on “vote blue no matter who” so there’s no need to appeal to them. They’d vote for a moldy peach if it was a registered democrat. And as far as reaching anyone outside the circle, as a strategy, it makes no sense. We aren’t voting for homecoming court members, we’re electing a government. Just saying “they’re weird” doesn’t convince outsiders that they should vote for you. And right now, it’s the middle of the country she has to convince.

I think it's a case of typical-minding. Progressives like the message, so they spread the message thinking that other people will like it too. Republicans do the same thing - "I am your retribution" is not a selling point to anyone not already on the Trump train.

I think you over-estimate the amount of secret coordination that occurs. Coordination happens a lot, but it often happens pretty publicly. Politicians frequently use the media to talk to each other. I don't think this was a case of the Harris campaign circulating memos saying "hey we're going to call republicans weird". I think it was a case of one guy saying a thing, other progressives liking and repeating it, and still other progressives going "Oh I guess this is the line we're running with now? Sounds good, let's reinforce it." Now, possibly somewhere along the line we get an actual focus group message testing this pitch to see how it does with swing voters, and possibly the line gets dropped or modified in response to that research, but I don't think that's the first or even the fifth step in this process.

Honestly I think the motivation is that leftists have a bunch of internalised self-consciousness about weirdness.

Ding ding ding. Walz probably said it in a folksy calling-it-as-I-see-it manner, but the democrat embrace of it is telling. To use weird deflects that appellation, rubber glue style. Its not just the transgressive quality of progressive beliefs that is weird unto itself because it subverts or attacks existing norms, its that by making the right the weird ones it allows the left views to be laundered into normality.

Most nonsense like this is ultimately ingroup signalling, with the outrage from the right about the label weird being the fact that democrats are transparently trying to pass off THEIR craziness as normal. It just becomes more proof of institutional capture by an out of touch progressive elite that is not able to consider that proles can have their own opinions.

Most nonsense like this is ultimately ingroup signalling, with the outrage from the right about the label weird being the fact that democrats are transparently trying to pass off THEIR craziness as normal. It just becomes more proof of institutional capture by an out of touch progressive elite that is not able to consider that proles can have their own opinions.

They can't. COVID proved that. The proles will believe what CNN tells them to believe, and if that means Rachel Levine is normal while J.D. Vance is weird, then Rachel Levine is normal while J.D. Vance is weird.

JK Rowling has jumped into the Imane Khalif controversy with both feet, outright stating she's a man, which is always good for turning up the heat on a constantly simmering issue.

Ah, I didn't realize that. That might account for why more people are paying attention to this issue.

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