adderaline

If the IDF was bombing indiscriminately, then why are they using only expensive guided ammunition in dense urban areas? Wouldn’t it be far cheaper to just lob unguided bombs randomly instead of announcing where they strike through telephone calls, messages, flyers, hacked TV stations and, most recently, an online service? How does your claim of indiscriminate bombing mesh with this extensive warning system they developed?

if they aren’t bombing indiscriminately, the death toll is even more condemnable. if they are precise in their bombing, they have used that precision to butcher thousands of innocent people. in any case, saying “watch out people who have no place to go, we’re about to bomb the hospital you’re in!” is not the humanitarian victory you seem to think it is.

they didn’t die “because of the October 7 attack”. they died because the IDF has been indiscriminately bombing civilians after the attack. nothing about the actions of Israel are an inevitable consequence of October 7. they are the deliberate actions of a far-right government. i am not ill informed, i know the facts of the situation, i have family in israel, i am a jew. your failure to recognize forced migration and mass killing of palestinian civilians as fundamentally the same as what the jewish people were subjected to is appalling. never again for anyone.

or maybe not all jewish people think ethnic cleansing is acceptable? thousands of children have died.

appealing to existing harms being done in the world to justify more harms is not really a compelling argument. we have done a lot to mitigate the risk of car travel, and there are plenty of people who see the damage cars do to people and our environment and advocate for better transit solutions that are less likely to harm people. the reality is they could have done more, saved lives, by limiting the spread of the disease more than they did. they didn’t, and their failure to act responsibly can and should be criticized.

ugh. you’ve pressed enough of my buttons to warrant a response.

We’ve come a long way from cave drawings and hieroglyphics

the idea that hieroglyphs are in some way inferior to modern writing systems in an objective way is flawed. hieroglyphs were a diverse writing system comprised of phonograms, logograms, and ideograms, and they could be used contextually to record a rich and complex language as fully featured as our own. the ancient Egyptians wrote their dreams, legends, and histories in this text for over 4000 years. the idea that our modern languages are somehow “better” than ancient languages is to misunderstand what language is.

And yet there is a whole new wave of people unable to use those languages correctly or even rudimentarily who drag civilization backwards by returning to hieroglyphics

the idea that there is a “”“correct”“” way to use language is flawed. the field of linguistics recognizes a vast diversity of languages, dialects, sociolects, and even idiolects that vary from each other in many interesting ways. collapsing that diversity into a single “correct” way to use language is nonsense, and has historically served to exclude those whose dialect is not supported by powerful institutions. just because people aren’t speaking like you are doesn’t mean they’re speaking wrong, or “rudimentarily”.

instead of catastrophizing about how new ways of communicating might end the world, as people have done literally since we started to write down things, linguists have studied how and why emojis exist, and, unsurprisingly, its not because people are getting stupider or something like that. its because they’re useful for conveying non-linguistic social information in informal written communication. without the non-verbal queues, vocal tone, and other contextual information that exists in spoken language, emojis are one of many ways to add context that can’t be represented through text alone. tone indicators and emoticons serve similar roles.

And things like emojis are leading the charge.

this is cringe. small changes in the structure of our informal written communication are never going to be the big, important thing you seem to think they are. if you’re this passionate about language that you think it can be ruined by funny little pictures, learn some linguistics. nobody who knows anything substantive about language shares your concerns, because they’re too busy studying the interesting new cultural phenomenon and what it might mean for our understanding of human communication.

i mean, at the state level blue states are both not trying to get queer people killed, and are expanding access to resources. blue senators aren’t voting with the anti-queer positions on the federal level. they aren’t safe, but complacency and support are not the same thing, and the outcomes for actual people are materially worse in places where republicans have control.

that isn’t what the linked article says lol.

you know, i’ve felt a similar way before. i thought that i had discovered some terrible truth, that everything is meaningless and its not worth it to try pursuing something that’s ultimately without purpose. then i got treatment for depression, and i can scarcely imagine living that way now. i still fundamentally believe that its basically all meaningless, but it turned out that my lack of drive and passion for life was far more related to the concentration of neurotransmitters in my brain and harmful patterns of thinking that it was to any coherent belief about the nature of the world, and that there is quite a lot to enjoy about being fated to die and become nothing. i’m not saying you necessarily have depression or something like that, i just remember feeling the way you describe, feeling absolutely convinced that it was the only rational way to feel about living in a world like this, and being proven wrong. with the right treatment, i found that i was unable stop myself from feeling motivated to do the things i wanted to, unable to stop myself from finding joy and fascination in the small moments of my days.

some healthy self-deprecation is definitely nice, but the eldritch implications of somebody representing their intelligence as convertible to a temperature value transgressing thermodynamic law intrigue me more.

somebody talking about their IQ would be a major red flag for me lol

Only because a women’s division exists where she can shine. In the open division she would not be good enough to gain any fame, and be just as forgotten as Karsten Braasch.

hypothetically, because we don’t live in a world where women’s sports don’t exist.

Because people like you keep arguing that women can compete in the open leagues, and we only have women’s leagues to segregate them from the men. This is not true, women are perfectly free to join the NBA and compete against them men, but at that level of competition they would just lose.

i’m not arguing that women can compete in open leagues, im disputing the assertion that women’s leagues only exist to segregate them from men. no. there are quite a few reasons women’s sports exist in the form they do today, and a pretty big reason was sexism. ignoring the long history of female exclusion from sports leaves you blind to the modern realities of sexism and misogyny in sports.

I value women’s sports far more than you do, because I understand their need to exist. Without them female athletes would not win in the majority of sports.

hypothetically, because we don’t live in a world where women’s sports don’t exist.

you can confidently assert that women wouldn’t have a place in sports if we did things differently all you want, but… uh, we don’t do things differently, have never done things differently, and if it were up to you will never do things differently. women’s sports and men’s sports are segregated, and have been since women started to do sports. there was never a time when women and men did sports together, and it was later decided that women just couldn’t compete. the assumption was that they couldn’t, even before women started to have professional sports, and honestly before we even had a solid scientific understanding of human sexual dimorphism. the idea that women’s sports came out some rational notion of fairness is wrong. its simply not what the historical arguments against having women in sports ever were.

The issue isn’t the mostly regular people just sporting around for fun, the issue is that sports plays a big role in how a person’s life might turn out.

explicitly my argument is speaking about the way we construct sports as an activity, not sports as industry. the people for whom sports defines one’s life path are firmly the minority of people who do sports. and like, the laws we’re talking about aren’t affecting trans people’s ability to do professional sports in most cases, because those professional organizations aren’t under the jurisdiction of anti-trans state laws, they’re almost exclusively impacting children playing sports in school or for regional competitions. if you aren’t interested in engaging with the argument as it exists, and with the people who are primarily affected by laws that prevent trans children from doing sports with their peers, i’m not interested in talking further on the matter.

So why, if the trans population is exploding, don’t we have divisions specifically for all trans people? Have a trans division, have them play each other, which would allow women, men and trans people the competitive ability to place in their respective categories.

because the trans population is not “exploding”. that’s the current moral panic going around, but the visibility of trans people in media, especially right wing media, vastly overestimates how many trans people there are. there are more trans people who are out, but its still like less than 2% of the population. of that population that are athletes, even less, and there are close to no trans athletes competing at the high level you insist this conversation must primarily address. segregating trans people into their own divisions would mean trans people don’t get to play, because there aren’t enough people who are trans and doing sports to make that happen. your solution is to marginalize trans people out of the sports everybody else plays, and that sucks.

There are ways to include trans people in sports without pushing out biological women, so why must the changes we make push towards that inevitability? Why do biological women have to be trampled on to make room for others when it very clearly doesn’t have to be like that?

the only way you’ve proposed to “include” trans people in sports marginalizes them and prevents them participating with their peers, all in service of a a fear that changing the rules to be more inclusive would push out “biological women” in some hypothetical future you think is inevitable. but the reality is, there is no actual proof that allowing trans people to participate as they see fit would actually lead to the outcome you’re describing, because in many cases, they have been participating and have not been sweeping the competition.

in any case, nobody who advocates for restructuring sports away from the gender binary sees women being pushed out of sports as a desirable or even achievable outcome. the idea that we would change the rules towards a policy which does such a thing and not continue changing the rules until we arrive at a more equitable and inclusive outcome is a fantasy, almost entirely sustained by right wing reactionaries fear mongering about social change. nobody actually seriously considering the inequities of modern sports is blind to the physical differences between men and women’s bodies, and they, again, are not proposing a flattening of sporting events into a single category containing all people, just a diversity of categories representing the diversity of the human condition, and allowing people with similar bodies to compete against each other without strict delineations of gender. unless you genuinely believe that all male athletes can outperform all female athletes in all sports, which is a vast overestimation of human sexual dimorphism, there is room for co-ed competition that accommodates people according to their individual skill and strength, rather than according to whether or not they have the right genitals.

gender segregation in some sports is only an effort to filter out uninteresting matches

i’d be more willing to accept this rationale if the history of gender segregation in sports wasn’t deeply rooted in misogyny. are you sure that isn’t at least partly a post-hoc rationalization for a practice that has a lot of cultural inertia?

Maybe we should appreciate that some people not born with Usain Bolt’s long legs have value as well.

i’d recommend looking into the Paralympics if you want to see what sport, and even competition, without that kind of value judgement can look like.

the idea that the only solution to the gender based segregation of sports is to make a single sports category for every person is disingenuous. weight classes in wrestling exist. there are plenty of ways to organize sports that don’t collapse the diversity of the human condition into a single ranked competitive event, and there are plenty of people who currently engage in co-ed sports for recreational purposes that like it just fine. there is a small minority of athletes that compete for the highest possible performance, but the vast vast majority of people who do sports are just regular folks, and don’t need arbitrary gender barriers to have a good time.

the rules set out to make competition at the highest levels of sport possible are not by default the best way for regular human people to do sport for their own pleasure. things that could be exclusionary in a ranked competition are not so in the context of average human performance, or even below average human performance. the Paralympics is a fantastic event that showcases the physical talents of people with disabilities. the specific events are tailored to the limitations of the athletes, and it’s great! its great that even people who have more physical limitations than the average have a space to push their bodies to their personal limits, and it showcases how arbitrary those limitations actually are. the diversity of disability is vast. some of these athletes bodies look very different from their competitors, and that comes with specific physical limitations that are unique to that person. they still do sports.

i think we forget sometimes how utterly arbitrary sports are as an activity. its a game, for fun. anything, literally any set of arbitrary rules that involve physical movement can constitute a sport. and while we can insist that in our most special extra serious sports only certain kinds of people get to play, that doesn’t mean those restrictions are any less arbitrary, or that they have to be that way. and if you’re playing a fun game, and somebody who doesn’t have the same kind of body wants to play the fun game with you, saying that because the way their body works it won’t be fair is still not a proper justification for their exclusion, because we can change the rules whenever we want to.

if you can’t conceive of the difference between a practice game and a game for competition, especially in the context of an explicitly educational goal, you can have fun with that. the idea that the segregation of sports is the only reason we have professional women athletes is a hilarious misunderstanding of why people like sports, and why women’s sports have been growing in popularity for decades. the idea that single games in single sports indicate anything substantive about “women’s sports” as a concept is silly.

you can live in your bubble of ignorance all you like, and insist that centuries old appeals to the superiority of the male body mean much at all to a modern context. the reality is, these stories about women losing matches? they aren’t relevant. i could not give a single shit. ranking people on numbered lists is not the only appeal of sports for audiences or athletes. Serena Williams is still a popular and well liked athlete, and you didn’t even give that dude’s name, so whatever reputational damage seems to have both not affected her rise to prominence, and not boosted her opponents reputation, so like, who fucking cares?

why do you know so much about this? what relevance does being able to tell people all the times women lost matches in sporting events have to your daily life? to what end are you telling people these things? the reality is, you don’t value women’s sports, so you’ve scoured the internet for justifications for that belief. but people who do find value in these things don’t look at things the same way. weird ass comparisons trying to judge the objective winner by category mean fuckall to me, i like watching cool people do cool shit with their cool bodies, and the fact that you can’t conceive of people being interested in the physical skill of people that don’t look like you is firmly a you problem.

The US women’s soccer team, the best female soccer team in the world, has played exhibition games against high school boys and lost badly.

oop! maybe look up the context for that one. in short, it was a scrimmage, and as part of a structured practice routine that the US national women’s soccer team participates in as part of a youth soccer training program. not exactly representative of a competitive game, same for the women’s hockey team.

that being said, its basically a non sequitur. i’m not denying that physical differences exist, they absolutely do, but the idea that these physical differences are the primary reason our sports are structured the way they are isn’t historically accurate. there were potent social forces at work, including social forces which prevented women from participating in sports at all.

in any case, the fact that in some sports, some professional women athletes lost to some high school boy athletes in games that explicitly do not count for competition does not, to me, have some larger implications on the field of women’s sports more generally. the unquestioning acceptance of reports on these practice games for fun with children as some kind of proof that female athletes just can’t perform as well as men reveals, to me, a tendency towards confirmation bias. tell me, do you know if any prominent men’s soccer teams have ever lost to children during a practice match? i certainly don’t. exhibition matches aren’t newsworthy events. the fact that these ones were has much more to do with validating the ancient belief that men are just better than it does with genuine interest in a demonstration of friendly sport for high school kids.

as far as i can tell, the claim that most female athletes are cisgender is mostly a refutation of the political motivation, that trans women are dominating women’s sports, which is a common refrain in much of the legislation around this topic. the reality is that trans people aren’t winning any prominent competitive sports, in part because they are such a small minority of athletes.

i would honestly doubt this is something we could get a very conclusive study out of, if only because there isn’t a very huge sample size of competitive trans athletes that exist to be studied, and the ones that are there objectively haven’t been winning very many awards. nor do i think this needs to be adjusted by population. competitive sports are not a random sample, they are the self selected group of the most physically fit people for a specific task. the fact that trans women aren’t breaking records for competitive women sports, despite being in the self selected group of the women most fit for the task at hand, does say something on its own without the need for a more in depth statistical analysis.

There is no inconsistency in study results on the effects of testosterone levels

i mean, maybe read your sources a little more? two of them are about the effects of dosing testosterone in “normal male” subjects, which is not generalizable to women, or to endogenic testosterone, or to the effects of HRT for either transfeminine or transmasculine people, and the middle one is an overview of testosterone’s role in exercise in both men and women which says this in the abstract:

Findings on the testosterone response in women are equivocal with both increases and no changes observed in response to a bout of heavy resistance exercise

which directly refutes your stated claim. equivocal is a synonym for ambiguous. the effects of testosterone on resistance exercise in women is explicitly recorded as inconsistent according to the article you’re citing.

i mean, no, that’s ahistorical. historically, the reason they are “split” is because men didn’t let women do sports for a really long time, and when women began pushing for their own sports, men didn’t want them to be the same thing. it wasn’t some dispassionate analysis of sexual dimorphism, it was rooted in the culture of misogyny of the time, and backed by deeply held pseudo-scientific beliefs about the fragility of women. they thought that sport, like higher education, literally caused infertility, and used that as a justification to restrict women from those pursuits.

okay. lemme burst your bubble, then. trans people aren’t gonna unanimously decide of their own volition that they don’t deserve a place in sports for a variety of reasons, ranging from the ideological to the personal. sorry, that isn’t going to happen, and your personal understanding of what is or isn’t important to “realizing oneself as a particular gender” is irrelevant to the lived experience of the people who disagree with you about that. and so your next steps are fairly clear. you either allow trans people to do what they choose to and address problems as they become relevant, or you try to force them to comply with your vision of competitive sport at a time when trans people are virtually absent from competitive sport, and align yourself with the legislators pursuing that agenda.

oh, whoops! you just made common cause with the bigots trying to erase trans people from public life! weird look, for somebody who’s “all for trans rights”.

…Are a thing. They’re around. But the vast majority of people in the US (much less Europe and other developed countries, with developed public transportation) have easy access to fresh food. This…just isn’t a huge deal. It’s a public policy tweak away from being solved.

you can’t be serious about this, right? have you done any research on this at all? vast quantities of people live in food deserts in a ton of places. 23 million people. and its suspected that that figure is under-reporting.

you make a bunch of comments about being essentially fine with monopolies, which i’m going to just ignore, because if you can’t understand why entrusting so much of the things we consume to a couple megacorps is really dangerous i don’t know what to tell you. historically that doesn’t tend to lead to people having a great time, and all evidence suggests that the people working for those corporations are suffering pretty bad right now. we actually have quite a few protections in place to theoretically break up monopolies, specifically because they’re known to cause lots of suffering for people.

…In countries that are resolutely authoritarian or anarchic, and non-capitalist. I hope some day China escapes it’s authoritarian tendencies, and Africa manages to pull itself together. If they just establish functioning market economies, then the problem is solved.

i genuinely can’t believe this one lol. you are actually going to pretend that market forces aren’t the explicit driving factor of slavery in these regions. their work is directly linked into global supply chains, you bought the slave labor phone with dollars, how is that possibly something that can be solved with a market economy? the market economy is already there, and it has driven human beings into bondage. whatever. if a country is the target of rampant resource exploitation that directly enriches corporations existing under capitalism, its not non-capitalist. and even if it were true that countries that are “anarchic” or “authoritarian” weren’t capitalist by their participation in the global system of capital, the way the government got that way is not some accident of history. the exploitation started with colonial expansion, and it never stopped. rich countries pillaged these places, enriching themselves even further, and then you go and blame them for being unstable enough to continue pillaging.

Exploiting those noncapitalist countries. Shame on them. I have no problem punishing them accordingly.

is the US noncapitalist? nestle is doing this in impoverished regions of the states too. sometimes not legally, but mostly while protected by the US government.

And there just isn’t a form of government where everybody gets what they need, and nobody has proposed such a government, or a path to get to it, so it’s kinda fucking irrelevant, isn’t it?

now i know you really haven’t explored these ideas at all lol. that’s just marx. from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. he actually did propose such a government, and laid out a pretty detailed roadmap to get there. the failures of that system are well described, but nah man, there are a ton of proposed models of government based specifically about getting people what they need. that you seem not to have heard of them doesn’t really make your defense of capitalism seem well considered. wouldn’t it be nice if the government gave everybody what they needed? why shouldn’t that be our goal?

No, reality is causing massive human suffering, and capitalism is the single best tool we have to ameliorate it.

fuck that noise. the specific suffering caused by capitalism are not natural consequences of our lives as humans. there are identifiable harms caused by structures that extract resources from places without any to spare. the “developing world” is often in the state they’re in because capitalist governments took all their shit and kept all the profits.

Famines, again, were completely normal until relatively recently.

this one’s just ignorant. the frequency of crop failures in india increased drastically under British control, and there is fairly solid research to support the assertion that the extraction of wealth and food from the region by the East India Company directly led to the famines there. that is not to mention that the resource extraction capitalism has driven worldwide has made crop failures a lot more likely, and increasingly so, as we continue to ramp up our fossil fuel usage, despite knowing about the very real dangers of climate change for fucking decades.

Until you have an amazing vision and a bulletproof plan to achieve it, you’re just whining.

nah. i don’t need those things. i can criticize the many many flaws inherent to the current economic system without having a perfect alternative available for you. not that i don’t have any alternatives. again, there are so many fucking books on this stuff its insane. i know you seem to think that capitalism is not responsible for the many things capitalism is directly responsible for, but capitalists of yore fought tooth and nail to keep slaves, to work people impossible hours under unsafe conditions, to deprive people of food, water, and shelter, and they are continuing to do so to this day. the only way that’s gonna change is if we make it change. the only way we’ve improved things through the past is by directly opposing the ability for single dudes to own all the land and all the stuff and all the tools to make the stuff, and the same is true today. but you go ahead, have fun licking that boot.