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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I understand why Russia doesn't care much about Griner- she was, after all, a foreign petty criminal who is fantastically unlikely to ever go back to Russia- but not why we do. It must be pure culture war dynamics on the part of certain elites.

She's a black homosexual female athlete (but I repeat myself). It's a diversity triple whammy, and yes, it's pure culture war.

She didn't deserve to rot in Russian prison, but she definitely isn't worth releasing someone actually dangerous, and the fact that she was is an embarrassment.

She's a black homosexual female athlete (but I repeat myself). It's a diversity triple whammy, and yes, it's pure culture war.

As is your "but I repeat myself" crack. Don't do that.

It's an interesting and unexplained phenomenon. Why are female athletes so often homosexual, while male athletes almost never?

It's probably unexplained because it's incredibly obvious to anyone who's willing to notice- sports are stereotypically male and not female, so it's non-stereotypical women who go far in them. Whether that's because the stereotypes are true(something about testosterone being associated with both athletic inclination/ability and with attraction to women) or because lesbians being outsiders compared to other women so they pursue non-traditionally-female-gendered things like getting really into sports is potentially an interesting question, but it's not one that will ever get investigated. People who notice will go "duh, lesbians are mannish and gays aren't" and people who don't will come up with some boilerplate about the emancipatory power of queerness that might as well have been written by AI and then proceed to never think about it again, but only if it's specifically pointed out.

Kinda makes you wonder about the “equality” of Title IX, then.

My priors at this point are distinctly that ‘equality’ is just a euphemism for smearing around money to political allies, whether or not it actually helps the groups it’s supposed to. Title IX does reasonably well at that.