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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves."

This right here tells me all I need to know about these two authors. I immediately knew they were women and what their political beliefs are. The fact that this Twitter clap back SJW style writing made it into a publication like this is infuriating.

Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.

There's no way they can actually believe this. Like this is so obviously not true. But if they did, this is literally Alex Jones tier thinking because if veers off into insane conspiracies. It doesn't map onto reality.

It was the arrival some 10,000 years ago of agriculture, with its intensive investment in land, population growth and resultant clumped resources, that led to rigid gendered roles and economic inequality.

You can really see Marx's influence in academia here. This is just basically saying the superstructure arises from and is shaped by the economic base. There is some truth to this, but they take it way too far. One of the worst examples of this is with the Atlantic Slave Trade. There is this meme that Europeans didn't see race until the economics of the New World and the Age of Discovery demanded it. This is obviously not true though because when Europeans first encountered sub-Saharan Africans, we have some of their writings and they already considered them inferior pagans before the discovery of the New World. It wasn't economics that drove this belief. Or when they try to tie the modern day conception of race to economics here. It's basically tautological. Europeans didn't have a conception of race because they didn't really interact with other races. Or if they did, it was Arabs and Berbers who look very similar to them anyway. Despite what you see in movies and video games today, Europeans had very little contact with black people so of course they didn't have an opinion on them