BahRamYou
14hr ago
So yeah, props to you for noticing that I don't really care about sports per se. It's more about the larger social impact of sports.
Right now, sports are in this weird in-between zone: sometimes they're a pure meritocracy, other times they're used to force social outcomes, like boosting up girls.
Meanwhile, almost every other part of high school elevates girls at the expense of boys. The teachers are almost all women, there's very little exercise, and almost all the assigned reading tends towards female writers. It's a matriarchy.
I'm not totally opposed to that. I think that men might just be a bad fit for modern society, what with our impulses towards violence. But current high school and society goes too far. We need something, and sports seems like basically the only thing we have left.
BahRamYou
14hr ago
Anyone who has played co-ed sports knows that almost all the men are better than almost all the women, and when that's not true it's mostly due to differences in practice time or age.
But on the surface this isn't obvious. When we look at measures of raw athleticism, the difference isn't always huge. For example, at all distances, the difference between elite male and female running speed is only about 10%, perhaps 2 standard deviations.
Indeed. But in our current era where people mostly sit at home watching screens, I feel like people are losing that knowledge. Perhaps we need a reminder?
BahRamYou
14hr ago
how rare is "extremely rare?" Being in california, I feel like meet trans people all the time.
BahRamYou
14hr ago
Yeah, I think this is a good point. The counterforce to the progressive army in this area depends on a fairly specific niche: people who have daughters, and want to push their daughters into competitive sports, but aren't completely progressive yet. It's actually kind of amazing that the ballot measure passed.
BahRamYou
14hr ago
Great, can I join the field hockey or volleyball team then?
"No, that's for women only."
Uh, why?
"Because Title 9 says that we need an equal number of girls's sports to balance the boys sports. And since so many boys play football, that means we need a ton of girls sports to balance it."
So what counts as a woman or a girl?
"That's complicated, and we can't agree on a real definition. But still we need this split."
Why do we need it to be perfectly equal?
"Because sports are the bedrock of our society. They're by far the most important thing that anyone does in high school."
BahRamYou
15hr ago
I think that "boy's tennis" (or whatever) should be called "open tennis."
Sure, I agree with you there. Although I would just call it "standard tennis" or "varsity tennis," to make it clear that it's the main, normal, highest level division. Right now it's kind of confusing that "boy's tennis" is technically open to all, and considered equivalent to girls' tennis despite the much lower level of skill. and colleges give many more scholarships to girls' tennis than to boys.
A better analogy would be if the country club had objective, bona fide standards for admission, e.g. everyone has to pay $10,000 a year membership fees and that money is truly necessary to maintain the grounds, and it just so happened that very few blacks could afford (or were willing to pay) the annual fee.
If you ran a business like that today, you'd be sued out of oblivion and widely decried as racist. Ivy league colleges provide special discounts on their applications fees to black students specifically to avoid that sort of thing.
I'm not sure how this relates to my point, but it does raise a question for me. Can we agree that by this standard, the NBA discriminates against white people and Asian people?
I'm really not much of an expert on basketball, but my impression from reading Steve Sailer for years is: yes. The NBA blatantly discriminates against whites and Asians. Or rather, it discriminates so much in favor of blacks that it discriminates against everyone else.
Well can we agree that it's dishonest to pretend that men and women are equal in athletic ability? Do you think it's reasonable for women in women only sports to demand equal status, respect and money compared to the open (or men's) version of those sports?
Sure, I agree completely with you on this. But the current mainstream society opinion seems to be to force men and women to appear equal, so that they can give equal status, respect, and money to the female athletes, even though objectively they're far below male athletes.
BahRamYou
15hr ago
If you let the boys compete, that takes places from the girls. This means places reserved for girls get taken away yet again by boys.
That's actually the crux of my argument. Why do we feel like we need to reserve special places for girls?
In college admissions, girls/women are dominating. They're up to like 60% now, and it just continues rising, year after year. They do better at grades, extracurriculars, and recommendations. The boys used to do better at standardized tests, but now those have been largely watered down or eliminated.
I honestly feel like teen boys need sports if they're going to compete against girls. Otherwise, what do they have? They can't make money (they're teenagers). They're much worse at sitting still and following directions. The teachers are all women, and most of the books they're assigned to read are about women. Nobody cares about math anymore now that AI can solve it. Boys are just getting their butts kicked at school, by the Hermiones and Twilight Sparkles of the world.
Sports is the one clear area where boys shine. But we can't have that! Oh no oh no. That would be tragic. So we make up these weird, artificial leagues, for girls only, but then pretend as if they're just as good. It's crazy.
BahRamYou
15hr ago
You forgot about college and pro sports.
No, I think I was pretty clear: at all levels, humans should play together as equals. Let the best win. We don't need special carve outs and exceptions to make favored political categories win. But apparently that's what you want: you want cis women to win trophies, but you don't want trans women to win trophies.
BahRamYou
15hr ago
The males' team. Being as they are male.
So basically you think all trans people and all their supporters are huge liars? Because that's where you end up with this. And while there are maybe some on the right who would support that, I don't think the left would go for that at all, and they're the ones making policy on this issue.
BahRamYou
15hr ago
I think it works the opposite. HEMA is massively male, so they are desparate for female attention and thus became the most vulnerable to woke entryists. The ones most resistant are chuds like professional wrestling, who have enough women who want to join that they can stay sexist.
BahRamYou
15hr ago
So yeah, in the same way, there shouldn't be scholarships or similar benefits offered to those who succeed in women's sports. If women want to compete for scholarships, they can compete in open sports.
I guess that's basically the same as what I'm proposing. But in our current world, there's a massive array of prizes and benefits earmarked for the women who compete in women-only leagues, especially at the highschool and college level. So this naturally creates a massive arm's race over who "exactly" is allowed in that "women's only" league.
BahRamYou
15hr ago
I feel like you're basically agreeing with me, right? The current situation is a weird mix of brutal competition ("oh you're not in the top 1% of athletic genes? too bad, cry me a river") but also special welfare for some groups (the girls get their own league, scholarshops, and recognition). The WBNA might be taller than the average man, but they'd still be rocked by the average highschool boys' team, even the boys shorter than them. The NBA subsidizes the WNBA because of politics, not because they're the best.
BahRamYou
15hr ago
So now to take stock of the sports issue - women's sports is a thing because of the other tribe, and they care about it way more than me.
Well, the other tribe is the one dominating the culture war. It's ok if you just want to surrender to them, but you should realize what you're doing. In this case, you're giving up a massive amount of cultural power to women, while also throwing a bunch of trans and intersex people under the bus.
BahRamYou
16hr ago
So, I see that others like @omw_68 and @MollieTheMare and @Blueberry and maybe some others that I've missed have made this argument. And I'm a little surprised, because I thought it was so obviously wrong that I didn't even need to address it? But sure, let me go ahead and address it here.
#1: In practice, the "open league" is all boys, with girls being so rare as to merit a newspaper article whenever they make an appearance. In common sense, everyone knows that there's a boy's league and a girl's league. In fact, I'm pretty sure most girls would be surprised to find out that they're even allowed to try out for the boys' league.
#2: This sounds like the sort of argument that a 1950's southern pro-segregationist lawyer would make. "Oh ho ho, my dear boy, as you well know, the colored folks are perfectly free to apply for membership at our country club. They just choose not to do so, and the few that do, do not meet our requirements." Such arguments were (rightfully, imo) struck down by the 1960 courts, and do not hold up at all today.
#3: It's actually even more generalizable than that. There's a meme among lawyers: the "Airbud rule" where the movie says "ain't no rule a dog can't play basketball!" That makes for a great movie plot, but it doesn't work at all in real life. Just because there's no specific rule against it, doesn't mean that it's allowed. You have to work it out, case by case, with some allowance for common sense.
#4: Disparate impact. You don't just look at the letter of the law, you look at what the results are. In this case, the results are clear: the "open" league is 99.99% boys (or at least, as much "boy" as can be determined with our current vague definisions and lack of testing).
So there you have it. Practically, historically, legally, and in impact, the current situation is to segregate sports into two sexes, with anyone trans or intersex caught in an awkward middle. It's disengenious to talk about how the boys' league is "technically open to all" when we all know darn well that will never happen.
A modest proposal to solve the trans sports issue (and maybe also all other gender issues in human society)
(Warning: controversial and lizard brain pilled. I’m not sure how much I actually believe this, I just want to have some fun speculating)
Recently, despite the massive blue wave in the midterm election, there was one conservative victory: the state of Washington (a very blue state!) passed a ballot measure that banned trans girls from competing on girls’ sports teams. This has triggered a quick lawsuit, and I have to think it’ll get struck down, but we’ll see. At any rate, it shows what a controversial issue this still is.
My proposal: stop segregating girls and boys sports teams all together. “Separate but equal is inherently unequal.” We already make them take classes together, and in fact mix genders in almost every activity now, even the Boy Scouts! Separate male and female bathrooms are also quickly becoming a thing of the past. And women are now proudly welcomed into every branch of the military, even front-line infantry. Also, kids are fully expected to play together during elementary school sports, as well as most adult rec leagues. So why are middle and high school sports this one, weird exception where everyone wants segregation?
I think that if we’re being honest, there’s one clear reason: it’s because the boys are too much better than the girls. We make the separate girls league so that the girls can win and feel good about themselves. It’s to give them self-confidence.
But isn’t that anathema to sports? Or at least, to competitive sports where there’s tryouts and tournaments and stuff? It feels wrong that the same league which says “you must do everything to be the very best and win” also says “but we’ll make a special, easier division to give out more trophies to the weaker players.”
At a stroke, this instantly solves the transgender issue. Everyone plays on the same team. No need for “vagina inspection day” or however the hell Washington was planning to do it. (And if you ban trans girls from the girls team, then where are they supposed to play? I guess they just don’t get to play sports at all?)
You might ask, but wouldn’t this stop girls from playing sports? No, I don’t think so. They’ll still be on the team, they’ll still practice and compete. It just might stop them from being starters, because they’re probably not good enough for that. But that’s the same problem that most boys have, too. It’s not some fundamental human right to have a starting spot on the varsity basketball team.
But what about the girls’ self-confidence? Wasn’t that the whole point? Well… here’s where things get extra spicy. (Translation: deranged, half-baked, hot takes.)
I believe that a lot of problems in our current society are caused because women have too much self-confidence, and men have too little. The girl who was the star of her girls’ field hockey team gets a full-ride scholarship to Harvard, then gets recruited into a hedge fund, where she is quickly promoted to make diversity quotas. So she becomes an extremely confident, ego-tripping, “girl-boss,” with immense power to make bad decisions that damage the world, or at least her company. She makes life hell for her subordinates, and loses all attraction to any normal men. She advocates strongly for feminist programs that benefit women like herself: more money for girls sports, no trans girls allowed in girls’ sports, and more female executives.
Meanwhile, her male equivalent? Well, he diligently played sports throughout his teen years, and was objectively better than her, but not good enough to make the Varsity team. Certainly not good enough for any college to offer him a scholarship, or even really care. So he goes to his local state university where tuition was cheap. He struggles to date anyone there because he looks bad compared to the football players and celebrities. He graduates, gets a perfectly normal job, but struggles to get promoted because “they have too many men in management already.” He tries and fails on all the dating apps. He stops giving his opinion on politics, because he’s scared of getting cancelled or shouted at by angry feminists.
Mixing up the girls with the boys would change all of this dynamic. The boys would get a big shot of confidence as they realize just how big and strong they are. The girls would stop getting fake confidence at winning a separate league, and really appreciate the boys for what they are. The colleges would open up far more spots to boys, so the gender ratio there would balance out. The boys would get laid a lot more, boosting the birth rate. And then they’d go on to get better jobs and be more active in politics, thus restoring reason and logic in our society.
Am I right? Tell me how any of this could possibly be wrong.
edit: see my response to people saying that the male league is technically "open" here: https://www.themotte.org/post/4074/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/497696?context=8#context
BahRamYou
2d ago
It’s like, what is wrong with this guy?
There's a part from the Michael Chrichton novel "Disclosure" that's always stuck with me. In that novel, the main character is a man, who is suing his female boss for sexual harassment. And his lawyer (a veteran of many sexual harassment cases) tells him basically "there's always a pattern. The sort of people who do this, they don't start with you. They do it to a lot of other people, too."
Also it's sort of "Black Swan" type logic. If you've never seen something, maybe it never happens. But if you've seen it once, it's a lot more likely that you'll see it again.
BahRamYou
3d ago
Uh... hold up. So you're not young anymore, and you're not worried about getting caught, you just... enjoy watching porn with the sound off? That's the first time I've heard of this particular fetish... You might be unusual in your tastes. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, just saying...)
BahRamYou
3d ago
I agree! Or at least, I think it's plausable. I wish there was a way we could find more evidence. Maybe someday soon we can use AI to analyze every single porn video to find where the incest stuff was coming from?
BahRamYou
3d ago
For what it's worth, I'm a staunch defender of Oreimo because I think it's funny and artistically interesting. BUT I'm still disgusted by actual incest, or any sort of incest porn.
BahRamYou
3d ago
Think of it this way, imagine two universes where life exists every 100,000 planets and one where life exists every 100 sextillion planets. Life in both universes before contact makes the same observations, that "we exist therefore other life could exist". The beings that exist on all of them no matter the probability have the exact same logic they can use. And if all universes (both likely, unlikely, and everything else) have the same exact observation, then you can not actually tell the likelihood of other life based on that.
Well, maybe. But consider a few counterarguments.
- In general, if you personally see something happen, you shouldn't think that it's fantastically unlikely. Maybe it was, but it's more likely that you saw something relatively common.
- As far as we can tell, life is just a normal physical-chemical reaction. There's no magical "chemical X." We are mostly just bags of water with some amino acids, which are built from common elements.
- Life on Earth developed quickly, just a few hundred million years after the planet cooled down enough to have liquid water. If life is really so rare, that's one hell of a coincidence!
- The universe, overall, is still relatively young. So what a coincidence it is if we were literally the first life to ever develop! We must be truly blessed.
BahRamYou
3d ago
I feel like that's a bad joke, which is also kind of insulting to the many, very brilliant people working on things like SETI or Project Blue Book, who did a lot more than just "put out a sign in front of their house."
BahRamYou
3d ago
Sure, that's one way to look at it. But the other way is to just focus on the raw number. 13.8 billion years is a long time! And even if you ignore the early universe and just focus on type 1 stars like our sun, that still gives like 8-10 billion years. And since humans have only had modern tech for like, 100-200 years, it's not hard to imagine that something could have gotten there slightly sooner.
For what it's worth, I think both of these ways of thinking are equally valid. Hence the paradox.
BahRamYou
3d ago
It's not supposed to generate an answer. The point of it is more to list all the different factors that we need to research, and hopefully boost research in those areas. Which it did! In Drake's time, we had no idea how many other stars had planets. Now we've got a lot of research into explanets, and maybe someday soon the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitable_Worlds_Observatory designed specifically to look for them. We also have a lot more information on star formation and planetary atmospheres than we did in Drake's time.
BahRamYou
3d ago
I've heard that before, that they think it's an easy way to just add an extra tag. But doesn't it also detract? Like, a lot of people are going to be sketched out by that, even if it's just thrown in for a few lines. It seems like an extremely weird niche that for some reason they all went for.
Yes, yes that is the reason. Men's football and basketball make big money for their colleges. Women's sports do not.
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