sudneo @ sudneo @lemm.ee

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No, I believe that not everything an author writes is a political manifesto for their ideas. I believe some is, and in fiction this could be a very variable amount. The chance of minor plot or character features being such a clear representation of the author's views is even smaller, compared to general and major plot dynamics or characteristics of main characters. Your Lovecraft example I think is very fitting, as even I (who studied few of his works) know a bunch of short stories entirely focused on the issue of "others". It's way more reasonable to infer the views of the author when this is a recurring theme, core to some works etc.

BTW from a logical standpoint, the negation of "everything" is not "nothing". Me saying that I don't think every element in a book is a manifesto doesn't mean no element is.

It doesn't bother me, it seems just a silly and far fetched way to retrofit opinions on her, using an invalid methodology (I.e., you don't have to agree with every detail you write about in a fictional book - I don't think the books are a good argument to show she thinks school should start at 11 and last 7 years, for example).

On a greater scale, IMHO it makes the arguments against her less compelling, as I can't honestly take seriously an argument that is based on choosing a name for a character or something like this, or a person who unironically uses this argument.

So there is no need to make triple jumps to infer her political stance based on elements in her books.

I am glad we agree.

I continue to be one of the happiest customers for Kagi, a service that I am so happy to pay (for my family as well).

To be clear, there are some widgets that might be useful in some cases, but it should not be all you see (and it should definitely not include similar stuff as if the focus for any search is just to find more stuff to consume and please advertisers...).

There are a lot of layers of arbitrary interpretation here. Can't we just stick to criticize opinions JKR actually expressed and is known to support, without having to make shit up? There are plenty of them anyway.

P.s. Even in the worst case scenario, not every book is a manifest for what the author thinks. People are able to write stories that do not reflect their worldviews.

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.

Personally, if I think about reversed roles (I.e. some US newspaper putting an Italian gangster hat - a-la The Godfather to some politician with some offer-related pun) I wouldn't think of it as racist, I would understand it's not a statement about Italians in general. This also considering that being a gangster of course has plenty of negative connotations.

The whole thing feels to me like the attitude that is made fun on in Parks and Recreation and the Wamapoke. But anyway, the newspaper is shit and to be honest I find the substance of the article way worse than the image.

Thanks for the head's up!

Yes, colonial mindset refers to the refusal of accepting other cultural backgrounds and cultural lenses, possibly due to an inherent belief that your own is superior or absolutely correct. This is not so uncommon in people coming from an imperial and hegemonic culture (like US). Edit: the colonial nature results evident from the fact that such position translates to the desire/pretense to impose a specific cultural lens or perspective even to facts, discussions etc. that belong to completely different contexts. The same attitude that colonizers have over the colonized.

I have already discussed the merits of the conversation, you refused to elaborate your thought in any way and you are limiting yourself to meta-comments that do not add anything to the conversation. In fact, you wasted several replies not saying anything but implying that your opinion is self-evident, which is a consistent symptom of that colonial mindset I was talking about.

You have been provided with a different, context-aware interpretation and you refused to engage with it at all, including challenging it, because being different from your own is automatically wrong and not deserving even of consideration. In fact you are still stuck on "racism against black people and indigenous people", which means you didn't even take into consideration that your interpretation of something happening in a cultural context you don't understand might be wrong. Of course you also refused to elaborate on the way this is racist, or better, you did in another comment in this post with an explanation that has to do with how racial stereotypes have historically been used to discard opinions of minorities, which while being true doesn't apply at all to this particular event and in general is quite tangential in Italian history, due to a completely different history compared to that of the US, especially when it comes to indigenous people.

So yeah, all in all I think you are showing a classic colonial mindset. Quite common in internet spaces where US culture is dominant, if it is of any consolation.

Or Albanians, Romanians and other people with a history of migration (at least in Italy).

That said, the racist dynamics in Italy are still different from those of a country with a much different history, linked to slavery and colonialism (thankfully Italian empire was a ridiculously failed attempt), with a different racial distribution in population. African migrants are for example a relatively new phenomenon. We are now at the 2nd generation give or take, and I have the feeling things will normalize ad they did for balcan people, as long as right-wing governments will not sabotage immigration on purpose to maintain it as a problem and gather votes...

And lord knows Italy has plenty of its own.

Not when it comes to Native Americans though.

Considering that this is a national newspaper meant for locals, I don't think other culture's baggage should necessarily be taken in consideration.

The "hunt" for the white man refers to her search for a white guy as a vice-president that can appeal to the "wasp" population. It's a reference to western movies. The article is fully on her search for a vice-president and the "real" motivations for her choice.

So you refuse to elaborate, because your opinion is self evident, even though it is based on a lack of cultural context, and lack of understanding of the content of this very page.

My opinion, which I shared and elaborated, which is based on understanding the cultural background, the content of this page, knowing this rag, knowing what newspapers use and do in general, is automatically invalid - without argument - because it doesn't fit your view. It doesn't matter that I explicitly shared an interpretation that has nothing to do with race, which is plausible, coherent (I.e. matches the content) and context-aware. You are right by default because your cultural lens is the only thing you ever need to interpret the world.

Colonial mindset. That's what I get from this.

Cya

Sure, I am very well aware of racism towards immigrants and other symilar dynamics. I am also conscious of fascist history and the consequences of African inferiority in general in culture. I understood the general gist of the source you shared.

Still this doesn't explain to me how a cultural reference to a group of people as per a popular movie genre, that have absolutely no contact point with Italian culture fits into the same dynamic.

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".