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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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What if the word "fair" is actually normative? It seems everyone in the groupchat attempted to defend it under (b) but if someone said it belonged to the separate magisterium of (a), wouldn't you need another example?

While obviously the word "fair" is a normative word, my intuitive understanding is that the answer to the question "is it fair to allow male athletes to compete in female sporting events?" is pretty much entirely determined by the size of the delta in athletic performance between males and females. No one argued that it was a category error to include "it is fair to allow male athletes to compete in female sporting events" under the heading of "factual delusion", they simply disputed that it was in fact a factual delusion. One person said that, rather than segregrating sports by sex, we should segregate sports according to the things for which sex is a proxy e.g. bone density, T-levels etc., which just sounds like a sex-segregated league with extra steps.

As I expected, your groupchat was treating it as a factual matter, which is a real shame. Even worse, the one person suggesting to autistically use proxies is either deluded about transwomen, or is just too cowardly to point out the obvious.

If your goal was to prove a point to them then maybe the use of a political example was unwise.

Well the entire point I was making was that Western educated people are systematically politically biased in ways which give them a predictably inaccurate model of the world, and that this model of the world is systematically inaccurate in ways quite different from the model used by the modal uneducated person. Pretty hard to make my point without using specific political examples - it's a fundamentally political assertion.