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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyz...
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    7 days ago

    Do you or have you ever worked in science? I did for a bit and that was not my impression.

    I imagine it depends heavily on the field. In some fields there are ideas that one can’t seriously study because they’re considered settled or can’t be studied without doing more harm than any believed good that could be achieved. There are others subject to essentially ideological capture where the barrier to publish is largely determined by how ideologically aligned you are (fields linked to an identity group have a bad habit of being about activism first and accurate observation of reality second).






  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneBiology rule
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    2 months ago

    Because English is a Germanic language that has half of it’s vocabulary as borrowed words from a Romance language (French) that then got chewed up and mangled for a few centuries.

    Not like Gaelic, which has to own the fact that most of it’s words are pronounced in the least sensible way one might think that series of letters is said.




  • So basically, “gender pay-gaps are fine, because the value of a woman is decided by the free market.”? Fuck that capitalist drivel…

    Pay differences between different groups of performers are fine, because you can’t pay more than you bring in in revenue and be sustainable. The WNBA makes 2% as much as the NBA and also gets subsidized by the NBA (as in the NBA pays the WNBA to be a thing).

    Tear down the entire sexist gender-segregated professional sports industry for illegal/unconstitutional gender discrimination and require professional for-profit sports be co-ed like every other industry in this country is mandated to be.

    Every “men’s” sports league in the US allows women to compete, presuming they can compete at the same level. This is rare because of the general differences in height, weight and upper body strength between men and women, which are exacerbated when you start talking about professional athletes as they tend to be on the tail of the curve for those things.

    Only women’s sports leagues discriminate with respect to sex. Same as competitive chess, amusingly. This extends down to the school levels too, where a girl that wants to play a sport with only a boys team must be allowed to try out and make the team if she can perform at the requisite level but a boy wanting to play a sport with only a girls team is simply SOL as according to Title IX policy the former is sex discrimination but the latter is not.

    The existence of women’s sports is a form of protectionism.

    Fuck the centuries of sexist tradition around sports. Just because it’s the way things have been, doesn’t mean it’s the way it ought to be. I’m sick and tired of the sexism and sexist apologia. If you think women deserve less, I don’t care what your excuse is, especially if your excuse is “the free market”. smh…

    Professional sports is only sustainable if the athletes are paid less than the total amount of revenue less the costs of equipment, facilities, etc. In the case of the WNBA, their regular revenue is something like 1/50th of the NBA, and the NBA additionally pays about $15 million per year as a subsidy to help keep them afloat.


  • Didn’t say that, my involvement in all this started with the question of what another poster meant by “vanilla women”.

    Personally I think the question of where to draw the lines is going to be particular to the sport, since the whole point of women’s leagues in the first place is protectionism for women athletes who would otherwise just be dominated in many sports by male athletes out of a sense of fairness and no one was even thinking about trans or intersex athletes at the time.

    So how intersex is too “masculine” to be a “fair” competition is going to depend on the sport, as is what guidelines are required for trans women to be “fair” competition against the protected class of cis women.


  • They are, but they’re not remotely as dominant on a global scale at 31% as things like “has XX chromosomes” or “has female sex organs” or “produces little testosterone and comparatively large amounts of estrogen” are for women as a group.

    Because religion tends to be much more regional than that - for example the US is about 2/3 Christian and one can expect that if you grab a random person off the street they are at least passingly familiar with the broad strokes of what Christianity is, can recognize the most major Christian symbols, are familiar with Christian holidays, etc even if they themselves are not a devout Christian because of the impact the normality of Christianity has on the culture. The same thing applies to Islam in say Saudi Arabia. Or Shinto or Buddhism in Japan.

    Again, normality is not morality. It’s just resembling the statistical mode. Often the least normal things about people are the best parts.


  • It was her choice which leagues to try to join. She didn’t try for the NBA and fail - she didn’t try for the NBA. There were even some commentators far deeper into the sport than I considering the possibility that she might do so before she joined the WNBA instead.

    As far as it being the Air Bud rule, one woman has officially been drafted by the NBA in 1977. She decided not to try out because she got pregnant. Mark Cuban talked about considering Britney Griner back in 2013, and there’s currently some chatter about possibly drafting Caitlin Clark though she’d be one of the smallest dozen or so players at only 6’ tall.

    But yeah, there is no professional sports league in the US that bans women from participating if they can compete at the relevant level. There’s even the occasional woman that tries out for the NFL, the last of which got injured early on in the process and bowed out. High contact sports are a hard sell for women to compete with men just because of size, weight and strength differences and professional sports athletes being more than a standard deviation from the mean.


  • By that argument, Christianity is normal. It’s the most common religion.

    So I assume you think Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam are abnormal, yes?

    I think when talking about what religion is “normal” you’re better off to talk about within a given society or region because it is an extremely regional trait and trying to consider it globally makes it less useful. And it shows a lot in how those societies interact in the broad strokes with those religions. Including the presumption that one is at least probably familiar with it and it’s broader teachings by default. For example, in India Hinduism is “normal” and you would expect a typical person to have a familiarity with Hinduism, to be aware of it, to see it’s influences on culture even if a given individual isn’t a devout Hindu. You see the same as regards Christianity in most of western Europe and North America, Mormonism in Utah, Islam in the Middle East, etc.

    By comparison, unless you are in one of a few very particular contexts, Scientology is almost never normal.

    But then you’re trying to assign a moral value to being “normal.” The degree to which one resembles the average or typical person of some group or social context is not a measure of their goodness or morality.


  • Realistically she had a choice - she could have either become the first woman in the NBA and been essentially an also-ran beyond that or do what she did - join the WNBA and set a single game record and tie a career record in her first game. Just going to point that out again, she tied a career record in the WNBA in a single game, the first one she played under them.

    Now she’s better known for being arrested and thrown in a Russian prison for trying to bring a weed vape into Russia when that’s illegal there. Pretty sure that’s technically international drug smuggling, albeit in the smallest and most innocuous possible way.


  • Or, why is it necessary only in women’s sports?

    As a general rule in sports, men participate in essentially “open” leagues, while women’s leagues exist to protect women from having to compete against everyone else to promote women taking part. In other words, women’s leagues are already a form of protectionism to encourage participation because people care about women having a “fair” environment to participate in in a way they do not for men.

    This idea that sports leagues for women/girls are a form of protectionism even extends down to school sports and Title IX, which is why under current Title IX policy girls must be allowed to try out for boys teams but not the reverse.



  • Realistically it probably depends on the sport. Y chromosomes, being exposed to certain levels of testosterone in utero (unless one is resistant or unresponsive to the hormone), being exposed to certain levels of testosterone in puberty and maintaining certain levels of testosterone all do things to the body than could effect performance and that’s all still mostly just focused on the one hormone. How much each of those things has an impact (if any) is going to depend entirely on the nature of the sport in question.