FWIW, my partner is Ukrainian and I asked what’s the general mood in the Ukrainian circles. Apparently the unpredictability of Trump is seen as a potential positive. There was quite a lot of disillusionment about the fact that Harris would have continued with the Biden’s approach focused on soft politics and weapons given drop by drop.

In fact, the general public was quite unhappy with the cautious american support. If some of the weapons were given much earlier and all at once, the war could now be going very differently.

I don’t know if this is now building a narrative that doesn’t make you lose hope or if it’s the reality. For sure the vibe was for Harris before the elections, but it was definitely as clear cut (due to the above).

Every point can be supported with an analogy bad enough

Nobody talked about victims. I was just contesting your BS exaggeration. But I see you can only discuss in absolutes and you decided to simply ignore every single point I made and flip the table with all the cards.

You must be really unsure about your ideas if you can’t defend them at all.

YOU made it sound like reality is either you going around in complete peace and bliss without any danger whatsoever (man) or in complete terror with a deathly danger behind every corner (woman). Challenging this barbie view of the world is not aiming to flatten the differences (which I acknowledged since the beginning) between men and women.

So yeah, nice try but no. Maybe reflect on your position and admit you used an hyperbolic statement next time, I dunno, it might work better than strawmen and moving the goalpost.

Women fear for their safety around men in public, and rightfully so. Period. It’s so fucking bizarre that anyone would ever try to argue against this.

I am not. I am arguing against the fact that men don’t (need to) worry about their safety in public. It’s such a cartoonish way to think. You don’t worry, good for you!

The statistics you’re quoting (and likely making up, but I don’t care enough about this to look) aren’t really relevant, I’m talking about real women’s real life experience.

So one comment ago you were telling me to look at statistics, now it’s real life experience that matters.

BTW, just search and you will find data, for example https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/crime-and-justice/recorded-crime-victims/latest-release, https://www.statista.com/statistics/423245/us-violent-crime-victims-by-gender/ (which shows 2022 is essentially identical, but quite a gap in 2021), etc. Note that I am searching generic violent crimes. In terms of murders men are quite universally in higher number.

Again, talk to women. Or if you can’t do that, read what actual women have to say about this subject. Do you not value the opinions of women? Do you not believe them when they speak about their personal experiences?

This has nothing to do with my argument. I am not contesting women (need to) fear for their personal safety in public. If I were a woman there would be a host of additional things I would worry about. What I am contesting is the way you present this fact, as if the difference between men and women was a 0-100 difference, when it’s not.

I don’t really see the reason to make up bullshit exaggerations to drive a point that stands on its own without them. Women have to worry and do worry differently, both in terms of quality and quantity than men when they go in public. There are certain risks that in public are fairly irrelevant for men, which doesn’t mean “men have nothing to worry about”. There are also certain risks that are much smaller for women (e.g., getting into a fight in a bar because some dude’s ego was hurt and needs to assert being the alpha).

Why is it necessary for you to make a completely unrealistic assertion (which BTW disregards my opinion as man while talking about men, so “Do you not value the opinions of women? Do you not believe them when they speak about their personal experiences?” cit.) to support a very reasonable thesis? Do you think people can appreciate the safety issue for women only if they contrast it with a completely opposite (i.e., no issue at all) situation for what concerns men?

All the crimes I have mentioned are statistically way more likely than sexual assaults, a crime that notoriously happens mostly within one’s home. So what you just said seems to me completely in antithesis with the original message.

Also, I completely disagree with your assessment. I live in a perfectly safe city and country, but when I travel I sometimes also go in worse areas, and most importantly I don’t even know whether I am in a “bad neighborhood” or not, because I don’t know the place. Hence I worry for my personal safety, which is exactly what prompts for those basic measures that you listed (and more), such as not flashing wealth unnecessarily. You do this exactly because you are aware that man or not you can be victim of such crimes just as much. In fact, statistics show that men are more likely to be victims of violent crimes in general, so I am not really sure where your core thesis come from.

Also worrying is not being terrified, is understanding a risk exists and taking precautions. Either way, this idea that as a man you have nothing to worry about is completely idiotic.

Because robberies and mugging do not exist, because I should not worry about them or because they don’t happen to me as a man?

When men leave the house, the worst thing we walk around in fear of is ridicule and rejection.

Do you live in a cartoon? Seriously, this is complete nonsense. I worry about my personal safety very often, when an environment presents certain risks (e.g., getting robbed, mugged etc.). It’s true that I don’t generally fear to be sexually assaulted by a woman, but to say that men don’t (need to) worry about their personal safety is completely absurd.

It depends on location. Getting a disc shipped from the other side of the world, paying 20 bucks + shipping for each movie in not sustainable.

I wish there were. I have a huge DVD collection (2000+), and yet now it’s borderline impossible for me to find a DVD/Blueray for the stuff I want. Shops have shelves with maybe 100 blockbusters at most. It’s also impossible to buy the single product online, you can “rent” it, but you can’t buy it in a way that you can watch it with whatever device I want, with whatever tool I choose and without an internet connection.

This is my main beef with streaming services, you are permanently renting and therefore depending on the whim of the distributor (which in 90% of the cases now is also the maker).

Do you understand what an advantage is, and that there are N attributes where people have advantages?

Anyway, how is this relevant to this particular comment chain?

Can you now show a glimpse of intellectual honestly and show that your source uses poor data and therefore makes a wrong claim? Can you recognize that your initial claim that “Ledecky beats Phelps in long distance” is based on this one source that uses poor data?

I feel like I need you to acknowledge that a comparison between 1-time trials for 15yo Phelps and Ledecky’s peak performance record was not a sane comparison at all, and that the little difference even in such a shitty comparison proves the opposite of what you were claiming.

Aren’t we discussing the arbitrary nature of the gender binary and the intersection of biology, genetic diversity, and ability?

No. You are, maybe. I am discussing the way certain characteristics relate to categories currently used in sport. You started from here to then contest categories themselves, which in have no problem with, recognizing they have obviously limits and they are simply ok-ish proxies.

Amd I’m pretty sure you are the one who started the confrontation

I started a discussion. You turned every single topic of conversation in a polarizing discussions between two opposite sides, despite me being fully open to a lot of your ideas (like for example that categories are arbitrary, that limits are mostly arbitrary especially considering genders are a spectrum, etc.). You constantly force a me vs you fight, which pushed you to actually misrepresent my opinion a couple of times (remember when you claimed I am gender deterministic and see it as fully binary, few comments down from when I said the exact opposite?).

Per the source, Ledecky beat Phelps.

Bad faith 100%. You just made a rant of few lines about how I refuse to make research to further my knowledge (brb, taking a biology degree in between comments), and yet you deny reality about something so simple that doesn’t even require research, it requires basic math and a pinch of common sense.

Yes, your source shows the the personal best for Phelps for a race he did once, when he was 15 is (few seconds!) slower than Katie Ledecky peak performance record. I told you, I run faster the 100m than Bolt when he was 5, so I am faster than Bolt. I actually also outrun my mom’s car when it was without fuel, so I am faster than cars and I ride faster than the winner of the Tour de France when he was learning to bike, so I am faster than him! You can prove anything if you use a shitty enough comparison!

I won’t even try to convince you, because it’s clear you are not here with the intellectual honestly to say “yep, my claim was bullshit”, I will just lay it out as it is to show how ridiculous your argument is. In fact, the source you showed could be used by anybody with a bit of honesty to prove the opposite: if Phelps at 15, without it being his specialty, could swim only a few seconds slower than Ledecky in her main specialty at peak performance, it is clear that men have advantages in swimming!

Yes, regressive like fascists and every other terrible person who can’t fathom a better world so they make us all miserable with the status quo.

Yes, exactly like that, it makes perfect sense. It’s obvious that anybody who didn’t welcome without questions your proposal (which is based on solid science and of course deep, deep understanding of all sports - see above for example swimming!) is a regressive fascist who hates a better world. That’s how the world works!

Yes, you could run it in LAN only. You could access it via VPN only.

Obviously this adds friction in addition to security, but if that’s fine with you, you can.

That is simply because you moved the topic of the conversation to something else. You changed topic twice, and now you are burdening me with providing a solution, when I was barely acknowledging the existence of a problem. Not sure why you are so unnecessarily confrontational, but I am arguing in good faith, laying down exactly what I mean and what I don’t. I am not going to search stuff on the fly I am not competent about to entertain a conversation you are forcing.

Let’s also remember the other shameful thread in which you were claiming something objectively false (Phelps swims slower than Ledecky on distance), and after 3 comments of bad faith arguments you simply disappeared without ever acknowlding the mistake in your argument. Who is arguing in bad faith? You are the one that after being shown that your argument was bases on comparibg times when Phelps was 15 yo answered “being a teenager is an advantage in some sports”.

So please, I don’t think you are in any position to moralize anybody. Including in this case, where I clearly said that even though I am not an expert, a quick search showed some objections to your proposal. Instead of addressing any of that, you just wrote this meta-comment about how I didn’t “debate the science”. So yeah, you want to call me regressive to support status quo vs the impromptu proposal of a random internet user who is not an expert in this either, with the proposal having no general support (I found one article having the same idea in addition to that reddit post)? Sure, I am regressive then.

I don’t have a solution. I started this whole conversation by simply answering “why being intersex is different from having scoliosis”, and we are at this point where you proposed a completely alternative way to slice competitions in sports. In my opinion your solution is impractical at least, let alone there might be tens of scientific issues that I am not aware of. A quick search shows that your idea has been suggested already in informal conversations, and even in a non-scientific forum received objections of missing advantages deriving from hemoglobin, reaction times, biomechanical advantages and sizes, all properties for which sex is a good proxy. This should be addressed somehow, and I am not in a position to do that, I am simply not an expert. That said, I am not against finding a better way to make sport both inclusive and fair/entertaining in principle. I simply believe, based on some reading and a basic understanding that your suggestion might not be it.

Thanks for the head’s up!

Are you misunderstanding my argument on purpose?

You and I both know that testosterone is not the only thing. There are people who have different sensitivity (low reception) to it, for example, then there is the problem that testosterone (and probably other stuff too!) has an historical effect on development that is not captured by a snapshot in time. I am not strawmanning, I simply assumed that since both of us know that testosterone level at time T is insufficient data, you would need at least more parameters to make fair categories. If that’s not the case and you actually meant just using testosterone level and weight, than I think this is a bad idea. Actually, I think this is worse than the sex categorisation. This way you are 100% bundling together people with high T and low reception (I.e. didn’t get most of the benefits) with people with low T and high reception. You are also exposing yourself to men artificially lowering testosterone levels after having gotten all the historical developmental advantages to compete in “lower” categories (similarly to how it happens today with weight).

They are only “corner cases” because you define gender as red and yellow and thus leave out orange, green, and purple.

No, I don’t. They are corner cases because we can look at the reality and observe that this is a problem with a relative small incidence. I think your proposal will present way more corner cases and problematic situations.

Swimming is not one of them for fucking sake.

Are you done dancing around rethoric arguments to avoid saying that you were wrong?

Comparing the performance of a non specialized teenager swimmer with that of a specialized adult woman in peak adult performance is a shitty comparison.

This is a fact that can be easily confirmed if you do 10 seconds of research and you check swimming records by age category.

It’s fine, you used as source an article that made this claim based on shitty data, you have been shown that the data was shitty. The mature thing to do is to say “OK, that was a false claim”.

I give up. You have tons of data available that you can still compare from Olympic games that just happened. I specifically didn’t mention “every sport ever invented”, but I mentioned “most sports” and you quote something that is supposed to prove…what? Lol

Nevermind. Continue living in a fantasy world in which Phelps swims slower than Ledecky (at 15, but who cares?!), because denying reality is a great way to approach problems.

You see how when you demand orange not exist, and that’s apparently “good enough” for you, that it doesn’t represent reality?

I am saying that it’s better to have 10 corner cases that can be dealt with than 2000 corner cases.

It’s often the way sports are designed that keep women out intentionally

I am really curious how you would design running in a way that having stronger muscle doesn’t help, or combat sports in a way that power doesn’t help etc. Also, women have their own category with almost in all cases same rules. How does this keep women out?

hmm don’t be so confident about that.

Go check all time-trial based sports, let me know if any women would have won anything.

but instead the sport should adapt and sort athletes by T levels if it truly matters

I may even agree with you here, but I think this is going to be a nightmare. Continuous testing, plus, while sex is a proxy for many attributes at once, testosterone is only one. Then you need many more parameters to compare and create categories, on a global scale. This assuming we actually understand such parameters well enough.

Men shouldn’t be getting hurt by other men with higher testosterone, either.

I guess the difference between low testosterone men (assuming there are many in high competition levels) and high ones is smaller than high testosterone women and low testosterone men. So yes, I agree, but this is hardly a problem in practice.

If women can get their hips over stuff, they are good, but for men it’s often their shoulders. If women run the course a little differently, they can often do really well.

I really don’t see how you could do this in most sports and make it fair and interesting. Sure, you jumped 20cm lower, here is your gold medal because there is an estimated disadvantage for you of 25cm. Yes, you arrived 45s after, here is your gold medal. It seems like a terrible idea and even harder to implement in sports with points (football, tennis, volleyball etc.). Considering the relative low amount of “corner cases”, keeping sex as a category seems more reasonable imho, although with its limits. I am interested in what women athletes think.

That’s not because they are “worse” athletes, they are just athletes different than men.

There is nothing moral behind “worse”. There are differences that simply provide advantages to men and make them faster/stronger/taller which is an advantage in many sports.