What is happening to the fundamentals of our legal system, college faculty are pushing back on wokeness, and the new autocrats are just like the old autocrats.
"If the analogy to Jackie Robinson was accurate, the logical conclusion would be getting rid of separate male-female sporting events the way we rightly got rid of separate black-white sporting events. Skin color is irrelevant to athletics, sex is not. "
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I'm not so sure that's entirely correct. Back in 2002 when we went into Afghanistan, we had no real allies in Europe. The quip then was that the times were about as strange as they could get: the best golfer was black, the best rap singer was white, the best basketball player was Chinese, the French thought America was arrogant, and Germany didn't want to go to war.
It's not an accident that most pro basketball players are black--on average, they play better b-ball than whites do. Blacks are clearly overrepresented in sports. Pro sports are big business, so managers do practical things: they hire the people who are best at the job--at least once the managers figure out what that is. (See Moneyball.) They developed ragtime music, which I see as a modern embodiment of Bach's music. Only a few whites have written as good Dixieland jazz, which I dearly love.
Different groups have different native talents. It's how the world is put together. Men generally have larger, more muscular bodies than women do. Changing hormones around a little bit, with or without surgery, makes a little difference but clearly nowhere nearly enough to level the playing field against the likes of "Lia Thomas." Want to level the playing field? Don't let him compete against women until he gets his total weight down the that of the heaviest XX woman on the team. Since he probably has little body fat, muscle mass will be the first to go. That ought to take care of the problem handily.
If Thomas thinks that going from a ranking of over 400 competing against men to being first among women is a big deal, Thomas needs psychiatric help. What Thomas doesn't need is being reinforced in delusions of greatness. The fact that I can do much more sophisticated math than 99.9999% (or just a few more) of kids in kindergarten does not make me Einstein. I'm far from that.*
By the way, wrestling categories are determined by weight. Why not swimming?
Part of Thomas' problem makes me sad, part makes me angry, and part really frightens me. That last part is the general acceptance of wildly delusional ideas and magical thinking as somehow OK. There's no universe in which they are. Men aren't women because they say they are and take a few pills and women aren't men because they say they are and take a few pills. Terrorists who go out and murder women, children, and the elderly aren't freedom fighters and they aren't brave: like Thomas, they're just cowards and murderers. Speech isn't violence and silence isn't violence; they're just speech and absence of speech. I could go on (and on) but everyone reading this already knows the litany.
Of course, I could be wrong about all of this....
* There's a Jeff Foxworthy-esque thing: you probably went to MIT if you're very smart, but you know a bunch of people who are a whole lot smarter than you are. And none of your friends believe you.
"If the analogy to Jackie Robinson was accurate, the logical conclusion would be getting rid of separate male-female sporting events the way we rightly got rid of separate black-white sporting events. Skin color is irrelevant to athletics, sex is not. "
____________________________
I'm not so sure that's entirely correct. Back in 2002 when we went into Afghanistan, we had no real allies in Europe. The quip then was that the times were about as strange as they could get: the best golfer was black, the best rap singer was white, the best basketball player was Chinese, the French thought America was arrogant, and Germany didn't want to go to war.
It's not an accident that most pro basketball players are black--on average, they play better b-ball than whites do. Blacks are clearly overrepresented in sports. Pro sports are big business, so managers do practical things: they hire the people who are best at the job--at least once the managers figure out what that is. (See Moneyball.) They developed ragtime music, which I see as a modern embodiment of Bach's music. Only a few whites have written as good Dixieland jazz, which I dearly love.
Different groups have different native talents. It's how the world is put together. Men generally have larger, more muscular bodies than women do. Changing hormones around a little bit, with or without surgery, makes a little difference but clearly nowhere nearly enough to level the playing field against the likes of "Lia Thomas." Want to level the playing field? Don't let him compete against women until he gets his total weight down the that of the heaviest XX woman on the team. Since he probably has little body fat, muscle mass will be the first to go. That ought to take care of the problem handily.
If Thomas thinks that going from a ranking of over 400 competing against men to being first among women is a big deal, Thomas needs psychiatric help. What Thomas doesn't need is being reinforced in delusions of greatness. The fact that I can do much more sophisticated math than 99.9999% (or just a few more) of kids in kindergarten does not make me Einstein. I'm far from that.*
By the way, wrestling categories are determined by weight. Why not swimming?
Part of Thomas' problem makes me sad, part makes me angry, and part really frightens me. That last part is the general acceptance of wildly delusional ideas and magical thinking as somehow OK. There's no universe in which they are. Men aren't women because they say they are and take a few pills and women aren't men because they say they are and take a few pills. Terrorists who go out and murder women, children, and the elderly aren't freedom fighters and they aren't brave: like Thomas, they're just cowards and murderers. Speech isn't violence and silence isn't violence; they're just speech and absence of speech. I could go on (and on) but everyone reading this already knows the litany.
Of course, I could be wrong about all of this....
* There's a Jeff Foxworthy-esque thing: you probably went to MIT if you're very smart, but you know a bunch of people who are a whole lot smarter than you are. And none of your friends believe you.