aqouta
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User ID: 75
The attitude of conservatives towards women's sports in my lifetime has been blase at best and condemnatory at worst.
This frequently made point is over stated, at least unless by 'conservatives' you mean the online presence rather than the actual constituents . Conservatives with daughters want their daughters to be able to compete and while I've met plenty of liberal parents with kids in sports nearly every conservatives parents I've met has had their kids do sports. Sports in general are conservative leaning(this again is not to say that most normie left leaning people aren't also involved)
I doubt many conservatives would care too much either way; they might not exactly rail against the idea of a school being forced to spend ungodly sums on unprofitable women's sports because they spend millions on the football team
I always find this comparison facile, the men's sports are profitable, they subsidize other parts of the school not the other way around.
But the relevant governing bodies imposed testosterone limits, and while we can argue that those limits are too high or too low, we can't argue that no man is meeting the most lenient ones without taking supplemental estrogen.
And without the conservative railing this might not have happened, and it still doesn't seem fair. Fairness really matters in sports, violating it is a big deal. Did you actually ever play sports growing up? It takes a substantial amount of time to be competitive, undermining that with unfair practices is crushing. You can see how upset unfairness makes whenever a referee makes a call that people think is incorrect.
One thing you never hear about is what the actual women athletes have to say about this.
Of course you don't, they'd be canceled.
And if those most at stake don't care, then why should we? After all, when it comes to the priority of things, sports are pretty far down the list.
Like all appeals to "Why do you even care about this? It's so unimportant". The response is obvious. If it's not important and we care more than you do then let us have our way. If you think it is actually important enough to fight over then drop this shaming act.
I find the autonomy listed a bit misleading for a couple reasons. First, they know exactly what kind of teacher is going to sign up for teaching this course. But more importantly they control the fundamental curriculum with the test design. AP teachers teach to the test, they'd be failing their students their valuable college credit if they didn't. We can pretend like the teachers get to pick the curriculum all we want but if critical theory is on the test critical theory will be taught, simple as that.
Reliance on the "phenotypical null hypothesis" is uninteresting, and really I find the name to be ridiculous as it is just simply asserting an unearned null hypothesis status. It's the same kind of critique that the possibility that we're actual brains in a vat means I can't be certain about measurements during woodworking. Sure, granted. But you understand that this doesn't actually impact policy discussion right? I don't need proof against solipsism to accurately measure a cut of wood and I don't need a unified theory of genetic determinism to find out that the policy proposals of blank slatists fail in every conceivable way and we should stop listening to their batshit theories. Maybe there is some allergen with a simple intervention that will equalize all populations on average on IQ tests and achieve racial achievement equity and I'll celebrate that discovery more than you can image, but you don't get to call it a null hypothesis when literally no evidence has ever pointed to it being true.
aqouta
11mo ago
This all falls apart rapidly on works that require actual spending to make. Good luck funding the millions of dollars it takes to produce a AAA video game without the possibility of ROI. Not everything can be a one man operation that can afford to live lean.
aqouta
1mo ago
The scales falling from my eyes moment was when the Wonderlic "Race Norming" scandal came to light in 2019, and a significant portion of users here defended it. To be clear, The NFL had been collecting Wonderlic score on players since the late 70s, and what they got caught doing was artificially adjusting the scores of high-performing black players downward to change the racial distribution of disability payouts. On a dime I saw users who had claimed to support standardized testing flip from "the data obviously supports our conclusion" to "we must correct manipulate the data to better reflect the truth
Can you link to this? I might have missed a subthread but this does not comport to my memory of this particular scandal.
aqouta
11mo ago
The pro-trans camp will say that trans representation in women's sports is important because [grand matters of fairness and justice in our society];
Allow me to rephrase this as fairly as you have represented my position. The pro-trans camp tries very hard not to actually think of the ground truth of what transgenderism means. If they do the farce of trying to hold in their head that gender is both a social construct and also an innate characteristic will cause painful cognitive dissonance. So when a topic, like sports, comes up that noticing the physical reality of trans people comes up they just obfuscate and point to the applause lights of "We're doing something important to blah blah blah past injustice, blah blah blah equality blah blah blah representation". It doesn't matter even a little bit to them that the ground truth of what they're arguing for is impossible to justify. That including trans women in women's sports defeats the entire purpose of the division. It is not about women's sports at all to you, it is about dissolving the category and you do not care about the costs.
[giving fewer nice things to mtf trans] (a goal that is easily painted as vindictive or outright Voldemortian).
It is my opinion that there is literally no such thing as an MTF trans person. It is a made up category that will not exist in two decades. It is incoherent to reason about giving or taking things away from people who share a common memetic delusion. You and your allies have created this suffering you are attempting remedy.
aqouta
11mo ago
I find it hard to view a world with less and lower quality art/media but all of it is free as better than a world with higher quality art/media but only most of it is free and what isn't is easily affordable to someone with a very achievable income.
aqouta
1yr ago
The game design perspective is an interesting lens to take to this. People are 100% in control of whether or not they threaten to kill themselves. If this yields any advantage the meta will develop to always threaten to kill yourself.
I believe she made the wrong choice but I strongly object to removing that choice. We should have exit rights to life. If you can't choose to end it all I don't think you can truly be free. My fiance is a psychiatrist that works at a public hospital where she sees some of the most chronically afflicted, she has stories and I'm aware that there are many common ways of being that I would choose death over. I trust no one but myself to decide what those states are. This is not because I trust the medical establishment but because I do not trust it.
aqouta
1yr ago
Is cultural intervention honestly any more palatable than genetic pessimism to the opponents of hbd? Stop doing damage to society and you can examine the issue at your leisure. But if you're going to impose large costs on me and mine you need to have real receipts.
But also, that groups vary in average just trivially follows from the idea that different individuals can vary on the same measures. Any randomly selected group will vary to some degree just due to internal variance and it takes very little selective pressure to make that variance larger. It would require some kind of miracle for groups that were isolated for thousands of years to not vary somewhat and then we're just haggling on price.
aqouta
1mo ago
If you ask me "We didn't actually get away with it, so you can't blame us for trying" isn't much of defense.
The NFL is not meaningfully "we" and I don't understand why you insist that it is. You have this habit of assuming people who violently disagree with each other are on the same time and then arguing against the people we disagree with instead of us. It's like you making a some point about culture and then I spend reams of text explaining how young earth creationists are wrong and thus your real motivations are some version of backwards theocracy.
aqouta
1mo ago
While this is true their borders don't seem to reflect reality at all. The dominant strain on the left is absolutely not HBD believers who oppose a color blind meritocracy on the grounds of believing in HBD.
I've tried coming at this topic from a few different angles over the years and I frequently find that one of the biggest hinderences to debates around gender is that there are many different and at times contradictory ways to be on both sides of the various questions regarding gender in modern society. I've decided to lay out what I think are the fundamental questions that people disagree with. In isolation I think I can reason any option for any of the below questions but certain combinations of answers seem like they can't coexist
Questions in dispute in the debates around gender:
\1. To what degree if any is gender related to sex?
A) gender and sex are the same thing
B) gender and sex are tightly mapped but some people have a gender misaligned with their sex
C) gender and sex are related but not tightly mapped
D) gender is totally unrelated to sex
\2. How many Genders are there?
A) two
B) several
C) Many
D) A near infinite number
\3. Who or what determines what a person's gender is:
A) society
B) biology
C) self
\4. Sexual orientation(gay/straight/bisexual) is primarily related to the [Blank] of the object of attraction:
A) gender
B) Sex
C) Some combination of gender and sex
D) none of the above
\5. Are the differences between how men and women behave more socially or biologically derived:
A) Much more due to Social Pressures
B) a near even mix
C) Much more due to Biological differences
\6. How much can an individual's gender change over time?
A) Gender can never change
B) Gender is constant but someone's understanding of their gender can change
C) Gender can change in response to dramatic life events
D) Gender can be fluid and change frequently
\7. Is the relationship between men and women or the relationship between males and females the primary focus of feminism?
A) men and women
B) males and females
C) both
D) there is no difference
\8. How is gender felt from a first person perspective?
A) an innate feeling separate from behavior and dress
B) an inclination for certain behaviors and dress
C) just the consequence of sex
Questions I'm excluding because while definitely relevant to policy discussions I don't believe are really fundamental to disagreements:
-
Are puberty blockers safe?
-
Do males and females differ in physical capability?
-
How well can any given transgendered person pass?
-
How much should we expect people to game gender affirming policies and what if anything should be done to prevent this
Examples playing with edge cases:
-
I - A Female dresses and behaves in a manner perfectly median in every metric for a woman in the society they live in. Is it legitimate for this person to identify as a man without changing any behavior?
-
II - A Female dresses and behaves in a manner perfectly median in every metric for a man in the society they live in. Is it legitimate for this person to identify as a woman without changing any behavior?
-
III - A Female, who dresses and behaves in a manner perfectly median in every metric for a woman in the society they live in, Meets A Female who dresses and behaves in a manner perfectly median in every metric for a man in the society they live in. They have sex. Was this a heterosexual coupling or a homosexual coupling? Does this answer change depending on what each partner identifies as? Does it matter if they never exchanged gender identity?
-
IV - A Male teenager is unsure about their gender identity, they are not classically masculine and are bullied for this. No one ever affirms their masculinity. They attempt a social transition and find those around them very supportive and constantly affirm their femininity which the teenager enjoys although doesn't particularly enjoy many of the feminine trappings. What criteria should the teenager use to gauge whether they are a girl, boy or other gender?
-
V - A Male who identifies as a man raised in a very standard American cultural context is abruptly transported to a different culture with exactly opposite norms for men and women but an otherwise similar culture. would you expect the person to identify as a man or woman?
-
VI - In A world where there are no visible secondary sex characteristics including strength differentials and a society where there is no social distinction between the sexes would this society invent gender? If so would gender primarily fall along sex lines?
Please feel free to compare and contrast how different sets of answers to these questions have different implications for these examples or new scenarios you find interesting or propose new relevant questions. I'm most interested in kind of mapping out how different 'factions' in the general debate might answer these questions.
edit: the formatting was right in the preview >_>
aqouta
1yr ago
I keep not seeing my perspective brought up in these threads so I guess I'll say what I can't believe isn't obvious. Why should I care at all about any of the people or things connected to this dude who I had not heard of until the collapse? If they had a knowing hand in the scam then sure, but what's next? Are we going to hear about his favorite ice cream shop and their complicity in selling such a monster ice cream? We don't even have two cases of EA adjacent scammers with which to draw a pattern, the only conceivable way I see this being bad for EA is that they're now down a lot of money that they expected.
aqouta
11mo ago
But to point out that basically, you're not complaining that it's bad for the strong to dominate the weak. You're just complaining that the current social order doesn't put you among the strong.
I think this leans in the right direction from the previous poster but perhaps too far. They think that they already are "the strong" it's just for some peculiar political eddy the weak are given limited local situations where they can exercise a limited kind of crude power. It's difficult to model homeless schitzos as actually powerful rather than circumstantially able to exercise power because the State doesn't equally enforce the rules on everyone.
She was an adult, 23 years old. She was not some nonsentient dog that society grew tired of and discarded with no thought to her desires. I find her decision uncomprehensible, but it was her decision.
aqouta
4mo ago
We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?
We all agree that actually women and minorities are genetically more stupid and incapable than white men, and stop giving them jobs that earn more than a subsistence wage?
Could you put even a little effort into not straw manning the opposing viewpoint?
aqouta
4mo ago
Trans people make an impossible empirical claim as well. The claim that undergirds their requests are that they are actually able to tell that they are the opposite sex. That is to say they are claiming to be able to distinguish between the experience of "being a male who correctly thinks they have the internal experience of a female" and "being a male who mistakenly thinks they have the internal experience of being female". This is epistemically impossible as we each only have one experience and cannot triangulate reality.
aqouta
7mo ago
Am I the only one who grew up in a place that just had good public schools? Maybe it required living in a mildly conservative and middle class to upper middle class suburb but I really don't have any grievances with my schooling growing up and would happily send my kids to the same schools. It's not something fundamental about public schools, it's the students.
aqouta
11mo ago
Saying MtF trans people don’t exist is a bizarre viewpoint - what do you call the obviously real number of people who are born male, have gender dysphoria, and are transitioning to have the characteristics of females by taking hormones and going through surgery? Those people clearly exist, and MtF is an apt descriptor, as they are going from male to female - in some cases successfully enough to pass, in some cases not. The “MtF” term is useful to distinguish between MtFs and FtMs - I don’t see any commonly used alternative words that avoid confusion (many times I’ve had to explain to people the direction of transitioning of people I know - e.g. X used to be a girl and now is a boy).
There is no epistemicly coherent method to differentiate between the experience of being a man who actually has the internal experience of a woman and being a man who mistakenly believes they have the internal experience of a woman but in fact has typical male internal experiences. The difference between the two interpretations of experience is purely memetic, as one of these interpretations leads to pathology it is a harmful meme. Taking hormones and mimicking the opposite sex is a behavior and esthetic decision and has no bearing on the person's sex. Just their presentation.
Also trans people have existed since recorded history, there’s ancient Sumerians trans priestesses called Gala, the Roman Emperor Elagabalus, and kathoeys (aka Thai ladyboys) are not a recent western phenomenon.
These are other memes and are nothing like actually transitioning from one sex to the other. In every one of these cultures this is a third state, usually of weaker men who could not provide being used by the other men rather than being simply killed.
aqouta
1yr ago
The more I digest the shower thing the stranger it is to me. Does she never exercise to a sweat? The people quiting shampoo at least makes sense as it's a relatively new invention but humans have been bathing forever.
aqouta
1yr ago
How someone can look at the abuses possible with a central authority and immediately dump on the decentralized alternatives is incredible. No argumentation, just blind ignorant assertions.
The dominant strain of the left and the white-identity right believe fervently in the inescapable importance of racial identity
If you and @HlynkaCG want to talk about the white-identity right I beg you, just call them that. There is nothing inherently tied to HBD belief that implies the importance of racial identity. That you think I'm a white identarian is exhibit A that your understanding of the whole topic is deranged.
HBD and white identarian are not synonyms. One is a belief about the cause of statistical outcomes and the other is ideological movement. If you assumed that HBD was true are you actually saying that you'd be committed to white identarianism? Surely not right? The only thing holding you back from pushing for ethno states isn't the really quite difficult to defend belief that there is no variance in average aptitudes between races? Can you actually say that? Say "If I were convinced that there was a statistical difference in outcomes between racial groups I think ethno states would be a good idea".
If you're not willing to say that please stop putting those words in my mouth.
If you think white identitarians and progressives are distinct, what differences in policy, action or outcome do you see as relevant? Is it something beyond which specific racial groupings should be favored and which oppressed?
I have long argued for race blindness. HBD is simply true and its truth is useful in counter arguing against the belief that different outcomes are caused by racial discrimination. I know this cannot be the first time you're seeing this position, why do you keep ignoring it?
I'm not sure why you expect your experience as an older gentleman to have much to do with the experience of twenty somethings which is more central to the original point, family formation. Things change greatly as you age.
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