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.
aqouta
11mo ago
Why don't left types just admit that a wall on the southern border would reduce illegal immigration and....
It's because they don't want the policy and the objection to it isn't based on the efficacy of it. Why give up ground for no reason?
aqouta
10mo ago
Honestly this all seems super unnecessary. No one is actually confused at all about this stuff. Human beings naturally break into two groups if not fucked with by some unfortunate mutation/condition or fucked with by the various means of mimicking the other category. As cliche as it is, human beings naturally have two legs we don't need to blow up this useful assumption because of amputees or people with disorders that caused them to grow some other number of legs. The only reason these unusual conditions are brought up at all is because trans advocates want to conflate these unusual conditions with the intentional efforts used to mimic the opposite sex that trans people undergo. If we drop the abnormal conditions it just collapses to "sex is what you are identified as if you don't intentional put substantial effort into changing that perception", which is what everyone, even trans people and their advocates actually use as a category. If it wasn't the case then trans people wouldn't need to put in the effort and the concept of 'passing' would be incoherent. The major disagreement is on to what degree this mimicking should be humored.
aqouta
11mo ago
I think you have this precisely backwards, not that it makes life much better for the worshipped. White men are given maximum agency and the progressive stack can be run backwards from there to determine agency. A homeless black man is nearly minimally agentic, they would be less so only if they were also trans or some other identity minority, and thus can attempt to, with full intention, push others in front of trains and have this written off as simple non-agentic manifestations of latent society and be back out on the streets within a day of the incident. While a white man can, against their actual intention, kill a black homeless person while trying to restrain them and be held to the standard that this was intentional homicide. This interpretation seems to accurately reflect how society reacts to these two types of people and has something for everyone to like and hate.
aqouta
11mo ago
I'm kind of surprised you are surprised. I was permanently ip and device banned from reddit for using the /r/place thing the way it was intended to be used because an admin had a personal bone to pick with the community associated with the logo, a community that really is less objectionable than other allowed logos like 4chan. The whole phenomenon is why it was important for us to get off of reddit, they want an echo chamber and will have one. Only controlled opposition, complete with admin politically aligned moderators in control, is allowed and it's been that way for years.
aqouta
11mo ago
They're perverting the very reason the lock in is required. The whole point is so that the people on the annual pass have to give up the bikes to people who are paying the higher per ride cost. You're not even supposed to be able to use the ebikes on the annual pass.
aqouta
18d ago
I think they spend the same or similar amounts of time, it's just the learning seems secondary to the selection and socialization. All colleges have been suffering through becoming more and more instrumentalized as they become a necessary Goodhart's check box for middle class life. I think this process is downstream of the internet bringing all the contours of the various credentialing systems and their bounties to the attention of everyone. You can see this in the sharp plummeting in the ivy league acceptance rate starting in around the 90s.. If you offered someone either the education they can get at Harvard or the connections and credentials which one would it be more rational to choose?
There is undoubtedly learning at Harvard, but is the point of Harvard the learning? And if it's not, if its primary purpose is as an exclusive club for hand selected elites to rub shoulders then the willingness to throw out merit to service political goals makes perfect sense. And also I'd quite like to burn it to the ground.
If I were making a science fiction game set in a future where bodies can be changed with ease and I was convinced by modern day gender theory I think I'd want to be confident enough in my beliefs that I would not need to have a transgendered character, or at least that any major body change being not considered a big deal would explain all an intelligent player needs to have explained. Including trans people in a world they'd be easily cured strikes me as like including lepers as well on the grounds that they were once marginalized, the action of someone who has thoroughly forgotten the reason they wanted to include them in the first place. I guess the question is would the inclusion be because you want to explore questions of gender theory or just as a flag to modern day culture. I generally find flags to modern day culture tacky.
aqouta
11mo ago
On the other hand sending out named promotional cans to influencers (or whatever it was) on their special occasions and having one of them be a progressive transwoman who used it to advertise Bud Light to her own audience (which I would guess includes zero conservatives) because Anheuser-Busch wants young progressives to drink bud light seems like a relatively weak reason to start a boycott
Did you not see the video(sorry for fox link, it's getting harder lately to find controversial videos on YouTube that aren't reactions to reactions) of the executive saying they wanted to move away from their current customer base? If you don't respond to a company literally insulting you then I think you're ready to just lay down and die.
aqouta
11mo ago
they made an example of him.
this practice is so clearly injust that I really have trouble with how so many people accept it as required praxis. Is "being made an example out of" really just something people accept in our anarcho tyranny society that it can be said as a matter of course? We're seriously playing duck duck goose with decades of people's lives in the balance?
aqouta
5mo ago
Why do trans issues keep getting posted, over and over, when it’s a largely irrelevant issue to the vast majority of people?
I tire of this style of dismissal. It's posted continuously because intelligent people disagree and the most uncomfortable feeling in the world is knowing that people you otherwise respect disagree on something that seems so obvious with no explanation you can imagine an intelligent person believing readily available. No intelligent people really disagree about the problem of obesity, there are some disagreements on what should be done about it and those are talked about consistently but they often terminate in an agreement that more information is needed or a few reasonable theories to be investigated.
aqouta
1mo ago
they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?" without getting evasive and yet protecting that category is a moral imperative.
I have as much of a bone to pick with the trans activists as the next skeptical guy here but you're failing the intellectual Turing test spectacularly if you don't know what their answer is. In most of their their worldviews(there are several different factions with different answers) there is an intrinsic 'trans' quality that some people are born with. Every trans adult was once a trans child. The 'trans' quality frequently causes kids great distress around puberty because a central element of the condition is feeling as though they should have the body of the opposite sex and puberty greatly exaggerates these differences. If all of this was true and we could without error identify trans people in their youth it naturally follows that we should intervene and try to alleviate this condition through puberty blockers and cross sex hormones or at the very least allowing them to adopt the social social habits of the opposite sex. They further think that trans people are frequent targets of bullies and harassment.
I happen to be skeptical about the whole concept of trans as a quality and even granting it doubtful at our ability to diagnose it reliably in youth but their position and reasons for taking the stances they do are not mysterious.
aqouta
8mo 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
This is an interesting perspective and I thank you for it. That said, to follow your academia comparison, there are academic physicists and there are engineers. A lot of what us plebs want are the kind of things we get from the engineers of art. And very few people want engineers to design inefficient and difficult to use appliances because they might have internals that are fascinating to other engineers. It would make a lot of people really resentful if they had to buy vacuum cleaners and dish washers from the 90s because modern engineers were obsessed with putting pointless voids in the new ones and held in contempt anyone who demanded functionality, which I think is actually what is analogous to beauty here. Novelty is also important and I think the beauty/functionality crowd underrates it but there is also something underserved.
aqouta
25d ago
Claiming otherwise requires some sophisticated reasoning, like one that claims happiness or sexual satisfaction are of little value themselves, and only matter when done for in line with a greater purpose - in this case, marriage and having children. And since trans individuals imitate the appearance of sexuality without the fertility backing it, it's bad. I agree with something like that.
I think the cleaner reasoning is that the disease appears to be memeborne and validating the meme is part of its transmission. If the finger amputation thing catches on and 5% or more people start getting their fingers cut off then there is a real cost. The hidden cost in the treatment, especially the social aspects of the treatment, is that you're spreading the infectious meme. If people only develop the illness internally then sure, a case can be made for treating it it individually. But it's rather like approaching the flu as if it were a nontransmissible issue caused by an unfortunate accident at birth and encouraging people to hug and kiss people with the flu to show that we're all sorry for them.
BTW, thrilled to see whether you and the other people who reply to this will actually watch that video I linked earlier in this comment, or will offer some excuse not to.
We're here to have actual discussions, a multi-hour long video that can't continence objections is not at all what this place is about. If there is a smoking gun it can be shown with a single link and doesn't need three costume changes to express.
Linking a contrapoints video is not evidence, it's pointing to a whole different interlocutor.
aqouta
3mo ago
The consensus building is both tiresome and against the rules but at least the readership very obviously leans liberal as distinct from progressive. The commentariat is a mixed bag of disagreeable people who will take basically any position besides main stream progressivism when the opportunity arises. The readership like more than anything novel arguments and novel arguments are what are reward by replies and upvotes, irregardless of the perspective. People appreciate Christian arguments that they've never seen before over arguments that more align with their beliefs but appear to be a dime a dozen. That doesn't change that there are what, six to ten regular Christian posters?
aqouta
11mo ago
A fair point, but I also think there are some other factors playing into the dynamic. Perhaps it's the belief that these different types of art have their places and more and more on the plebian to art snob spectrum the art snobs have been pushing their preferences onto the plebians. Like when governments pay huge fees for things like the $10 million MLK sculture. New art meant to be transgressive and sense shocking has it's place, but it often feels like we're the both the butt of the joke and footing the bill for it. Where is all the recent big stuff with mass appeal? The best I can think of is graffiti art type stuff which I enjoy around Chicago.
aqouta
11mo ago
his information was limited to what he could tell from the approximately 30 seconds or whatever it was that Penny observed him in public. He didn't have a copy of the guy's criminal record to know that he was a general homeless scofflaw who had been arrested 42 times previously, mostly for turnstile jumping and public drunkenness but at least four times for assault. All he knew was that the guy was ranting and raving about being hungry and not caring if he went to jail and that this behavior made some (most?) people around him uncomfortable so he decided to do something about it, or, more accurately, assist in a group effort to do something about it.
Have you ever actually lived downtown in a large city with a substantial homeless population? You can identify this class of homeless person by smell from an entire subway car away. And the ranting really isn't the kind of thing you see with normal wasted people. None of this is really to say that I endorse the more extreme points of the previous poster but lets not play dumb, your average city dweller is not mistaking normal drunk people who happen to be black for the belligerent homeless.
aqouta
11mo ago
The boycotters are not concerned with Budlight finding itself with no way back and diving back into woke, they are sending a message to others that they actually do have teeth, an idea mocked as ridiculous just before this whole thing blew up, and not to even consider the math on whether it's worth provoking the backlash.
aqouta
11mo ago
All it takes is a hard to see knife or gun and someone could be dead in seconds.
aqouta
4mo ago
Patriarchy doesn't mean "imposed by men on women" It means men take the role of leaders. Like most culture it's primarily transmitted from one generation to the next through women teaching their children. I think it's wrong to model it as maximizing what men want although that is basically how unsophisticated feminists use the term.
aqouta
11mo ago
This is a take with only anecdotal evidence but from the stories from my Doctor SO at a public hospital, a substantial amount of the money is just covering the majority of patients who will never pay a dime. Homeless frequent fliers, those who will go to collections and have the debt sold for nothing, ect. ect. Every hospital visit by someone who will see the price and begrudgingly pay it is subsidizing some number of visits by people who will not.
Where are the scholarships? Where are the outreach programs? Why was none of the gender uplift social architecture ever designed to work in the general case and not just the specific cases where women were disadvantaged?
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