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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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I'm claiming that men's sports and women's sports are not "equal". Not that the latter "doesn't matter in the slightest".

I tell my daughter to to as many sports as she likes, to any level she can achieve, and the more she does the better. I don't tell her that regardless of her actual abilities, her performance and/or the interest of spectators will be in any sense "equal" to that of any given others.

When your constitution says "all people shall be equal before the law", do you feel compelled to say "but they're not, why must we pretend otherwise"?

"All people are equal before the law" is a declaration of intent, not a statement of biological fact. And equality before the law has nothing whatsoever to do with individual judgments on what sorts of athletes should receive what level of social acclaim. No one is trying to arrest the women's olympic team for the crime of sporting while female.

No one is trying to arrest the women's olympic team for the crime of sporting while female.

Sure, but they will get arrested for excluding men who claim to be women, or at least punched really hard by an example of the same.

Honestly, yes. I think we're well past some nebulous "equality" being a useful social fiction, and well into it having become the object of a socially debilitating cult.

When "equality before the law" meant "there are no longer hereditary aristocrats for whom a separete code of laws applies", it was useful. When it is taken to mean "the legislature is not to distinguish between races, genders or religions", then at least that's actionable. But when "the law" is a ten-million-pages nightmare of exceptions, intentional and accidental loopholes, carveouts, special interests, favored and disfavored groups, discretionary budgets and authorities wielded in suspiciously un-equal ways, and a wide array of impossible impositions on an uncooperative reality, then good riddance. The fiction is entirely at odds with the facts.

I know it's a very important word to many people, but yes, absolutely, when someone tells me that different people are equal, then I feel very strongly compelled to ask "IN WHAT SENSE?".

I kinda do.

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