Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
I’ve opened a new “Sandbox” thread as a post as the new “ignore commenter” plug-in only works on threads started as posts.
Yes I got that, but we are talking about topics that are on the table right now, are we not? Women’s right to vote was clearly visible when the suffragettes marched through the streets and so are LGBTI+ rights now.
No, what happens in your country is going on in other places as well. In a long-established democracy a lot of power is with the voters and the way the extremist right and fascists mobilize that power is through an appeal to nationalism, traditional values, ressentiment and good ol’ racism (“closing the boarders”). By scapegoating unpopular, vulnerable minorities they lure people into allowing them to erode civil rights and neutralize counterforces: journalists, the legal system, universities and artists. This is the classic approach and it is playing out right now.
Oh, and I am not that short, longshins.
Corneel:
Haha. Where is Bill, anyway? Did he finally realize that trying to defend the worst president in US history is futile?
I was actually quoting a song about prejudice, worth a listen:
I was going to cite a sketch about “apart-height” that I had thought was the Two Ronnies (since Barker often derided Corbett’s short stature), but was in fact The Goodies (with Bill Oddie as the victim), and let’s just say it has not aged well.
keiths,
What was futile was getting you and others to support your claims and not revert to special pleading and projecting.
More later, but I think it’s amusing that Bill is projecting his projection onto us.
Whenever Trump accuses anyone of doing anything, you can be sure that’s what he’s doing. Never fails.
colewd,
Heh. As opposed to yourself, supporting claims of propaganda-not-lies by saying “it’s propaganda not lies”.
I miss the days when people voted for a guy but could still call them out once in a while. Meantime, 5th Avenue littered with dead guys…
colewd:
Add ‘special pleading’ to the list of terms Bill doesn’t understand. At this point, I think he just looks for terms that he senses are negative and applies them to us indiscriminately, despite the fact that he doesn’t know what they actually mean.
ETA:
Revised homework list:
Is there a vaccine for STD?
I know there is one bullet proof 100 % but I doubt people like Bill Gates would like to invest in it…
Question for DNA_Jock:
What does this mean?
“Khelif has confirmed that she, in fact, has a female phenotype, despite the presence of the SRY gene, which is associated with the male sex.” Could the SRY gene have been a competitive advantage?
Can STD’s be prevented by vaccines?
I really liked Epstein files because they show without any doubt what I have been saying all along: covid-19 pandemic was fake and the military did it.
If this is true, why would this be done?
I know why…
Yes
I can’t post images… which means that the admins love them?
I’ll let it slide this one time then.
Nobody can: Image upload is broken. I believe keiths is using some hack to get around this.
J-Mac,
Sadly, J-mac was shot before imparting the all-important coda to this thought, and died, neurons firing feebly in tragic ellipsis…
RIP, J-Mac.
A week ago I wrote about a special election in Texas:
There was another blowout yesterday in Louisiana. The Democrat won by 24 points in a district Trump carried by 13 points in 2024, for a 37 percent swing to the left.
I found a Brookings Institution article from December 4th that reported:
Allan:
We hardly knew ye.
Well, scratch that. We knew ye.
Flint,
Am I correct, then, in concluding that this comment was in reference to Imane Khelif? If not, then whom?
Looking back, I was referring to a mis-remembered article I read, in which I had misunderstood Imane Khelif to be transgender. Now that I’ve read a bit more about it, Khelif is female but with a genetic feature I don’t understand. So I thought if anyone knew what it meant, you would.
So it’s clear that if current trends hold for 9 more months, Republicans face heavier losses at the polls than can be reversed by, for example, banning mail-in ballots or demanding identification most people don’t carry. Something more drastic and direct will be required. Pundits are saying now that the real dangers aren’t pre-election (like the mail-in rules) or even during election (like armed paramilitary people at the polls). Instead, the smart money is on Trump simply seizing and ignoring ballots already cast, bringing suit against all precincts he lost, overwhelming the courts, and using the resulting delays to discard the results of all elections Republicans lose. I suspect Trump has figured out (or Stephen Miller told him) that he runs the DoJ and the military, so there really isn’t anything anyone can do to stop him.
Next step: taking control of all news outlets so the American people won’t know what’s happening. He’s now killing NPR and PBS, and his allies are taking control of CBS, Paramount, Washington Post, etc. He’s also on the offensive against academia and major law firms, and being gifted with multi-million dollar contributions from Ellison, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Thiel, and others. Democracy may die in darkness, but it’s defeated on many fronts at once. The first time he tried to overthrow the government, there were too many adults in the room. There aren’t any of those left – he learned that lesson.
I haven’t been following the debate here very closely, but I ran across the following and it seems germane to what you guys are discussing:
‘There’s no reason to ban us from playing’: Analysis debunks notion that transgender women have inherent physical advantages in sports
Americans already don’t know what is happening. See Trump’s re-election – it’s impossible for this to have happened had people known wtf they were doing. Knowledge of Jan6 would have told them to not vote for Trump. They did not have the knowledge. And now they don’t have the knowledge of Trump’s connection to Epstein, his disastrous tariff and immigration policies, his ludicrous levels of corruption and lawlessness, none of it. Americans swallow everything Trump does with hardly any complaint.
This debunks the claim that transwomen are women. The more accurate statement would be: Transwomen are *close* to women in physical fitness *after* hormone therapy.
When it comes to sports, this is an indigestible sauce – doping. Enough said.
A predictable Trump meltdown:
I’m not a fan of Bad Bunny’s music, but I love that he’s got the xenophobes all riled up. Here’s Laura Loomer:
ETA: It’s also hilarious how many of these MAGA dipshits don’t realize that Puerto Rico is part of the US.
In my understanding, the point of doping is usually to improve athletic performance in order to gain an unfair advantage. This sounds more like the opposite.
Well, I barely speak a word of Spanish and rap ain’t my thing, but I enjoyed Bad Bunny’s halftime show. Playing with stereotypes, celebrating Latin culture. If it annoyed Trump, that’s a plus.
keiths,
Loomer:
The show featured a mock proposal and an actual wedding. If she’s looking to uphold values of fidelity, she should look elsewhere than Trump.
Allan:
Meanwhile, the Turning Point USA “alternative” halftime show featured Kid Rock, who once sang:
MAGA is a self-parody.
Your understanding becomes correct when you understand that it is all about unfair advantage, not necessarily improved performance. Men going after women’s titles is an unfair advantage. Someone in a heavy category in schwerathletik using substances to lose weight to get into a lighter category is after an unfair advantage.
My uncle was a weight lifter and diabetic. He had to use insulin in order not to collapse while doing sport, but insulin was considered doping, so he could not compete. Rules are rules.
Of course they did. You seem to forget that in the USA, elections have more than one candidate. In voting for one, you are voting against the other. Check out the many polls where people who voted for Trump will say that Trump is a terrible President, dishonest, corrupt, ignorant, stupid, and still better than Harris, and would vote for Trump today if Harris were his opponent.
Flint,
So, Imane Khelif is (as you put it) female. I would say she was intersex, but female-presenting.
You ask “Could the SRY gene have been a competitive advantage?”
Well, there’s a lot of variation in gene expression in humans.
That SRY gene could lead to a competitive advantage. Depends on whether it is functional or not. Depends on whether various downstream genes are active or not (AMH, androgen receptors, androgen synthesis). High levels of testosterone can certainly lead to an advantage in certain competitions, in most individuals (for example, Jackie had high levels of testosterone – did her no good whatsoever). High levels of hGH could lead to an advantage in volleyball or basketball. High levels of EPO can lead to an advantage in middle distance running, rowing, cycling… There’s lots of other polymorphisms that affect performance. As others have noted, sports are inherently unfair, in terms of individuals’ innate abilities.
Individual sports need to decide on a ruleset that treats intersex and trans athletes as human beings, whilst also honoring fair competition. Performance-enhancing drugs are a far more prevalent issue than intersex or trans athletes, but not a right wing talking point.
Specifically, you wrote:
Not something I ‘pointed out’, obviously.
Put yourself in the place of Khelif’s parents when their daughter is receiving death threats because of stuff like this:
Sorry if I got a little short with you.
You described Coyne’s position as, these people are so rare we don’t need to be concerned with them, and they can fuck off. I tried to present that position as typical of the far right in this culture war.
Flint,
Aha! I mis-parsed your sentence as having “by the far right” not modifying “they are irrelevant”. My apologies.
Just saw an interesting poll result on CNN. Among voters without a college degree, Trump is down 23 points from where he was in November of 2024: +14 then, -9 now.
But I repeat, the more likely he believes he is to lose, the more dangerous he becomes. He has come out and said “if we don’t win the House in November, they’ll impeach me!” So he can’t lose the house. Voting is likely to win the House, and he can’t lose the house. Which means he can’t lose the elections. But he controls DoJ, and the military, and DHS (which has the largest police force in the history of the world). So losing elections is only hypothetical.
Loomer criticises Bad Bunny for dancing on electrical poles when he could have highlighted Puerto Rico’s electrical grid problems….
The song is “El Apagón” – The Blackout. The poles spark, stadium lights flicker, for absolutely no reason. Shame on him for not highlighting the grid crisis instead…
These people are not the brightest.
The irony of the President raging from Sea-to-Lake about Latin representation at the Superbowl in the famously Anglo-Saxon city of Saint Francis is worth a chortle or two.
Also the Loomerian family values portrayed by Kid Rock, with lyrics about underage girls: “See, some say that’s statutory/ But I say it’s mandatory”. It’s almost clever. I say almost.
Allan:
Along those lines, I thought this bit was revealing:
Yeah, I’m sure none of the almost 30% of Californians who speak Spanish could make out a single word.
Of course to Trump “nobody” means “none of us”, and Us excludes Them Hispanics.
Even W understood and could speak a few words of Mexican. Is Trump worse than W? <– this is a question to Trump
keiths,
When I did the PCT, I was surprised how deep into California the Latin influence went. Of course, given its history, shouldn’t be too surprising.
The influence went everywhere. Everything from Texas to Oregon was Mexico before the US-Mexico war, which started by the takeover of Texas by means of the good old invasion of illegal immigrants.
The UK better up its game. One of the most Trump-favourable nations in Europe – and we hate him! He has his fans here of course, but there is very little fear of contradiction in expressing an unfavourable opinion in public. We’re all brainwashed, o’course.
Allan:
We’re immersed in it. I live in San Jose, and my subdivision is along San Felipe Road. I drive on El Camino Real all the time. Cities in my part of Northern California: Los Gatos, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, San Carlos, San Mateo, San Bruno, San Juan Bautista, Salinas, Santa Cruz, Modesto, Merced, Los Baños, Monterey, Santa Rosa, Sonoma, San Martin, Sacramento, Alameda, Manteca, San Rafael, Vallejo, Milpitas, Pacifica, Alviso, Martinez, Benicia, Sausalito.
Those are off the top of my head. I’m sure I’m missing a bunch. Southern California is the same.
keiths,
I felt it faded round about Tahoe*. But that’s still 1,000 miles of walking: 10 weeks or so. Shorter straight line distance of course.
*Although I did go to Chico for new shoes!
Allan,
That sounds about right. Chico and Mendocino are both north of Tahoe, but I can’t think of anything else.
2 good jokes re the Bad Bunny furore:
“Kid Rock – is that what they’re calling Epstein Island now?”.
“If they released the Epstein files in Spanish, maybe MAGA would finally give a shit about them”.
🙂
Turns out we are saved after all:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/congressman-thanks-god-for-sending-trump-to-protect-america-from-homosexuality/ar-AA1W99zt?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=698cc518889549ba9035833d42be9af4&ei=93
A great way of visualizing the magnitude of 52 factorial — the number of possible arrangements of a standard deck of cards.
52 factorial seconds