Big Tech Taking Advantage of a "Tragedy"

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How does an equally trained, equally skilled male to female transitioning teen or adult whose been taking transition hormones for maybe a few years not slant the playing field in things like weight-lifting, wrestling, sprinting, MMA, basketball, baseball, soccer, etc..? It's a bit like reconditioning a Ferarri engine and frame, putting a Ford F-150 shell on it, and throwing it in a competition strictly for that class, or a bit more mundanely it's like telling girls that juicing testosterone is perfectly okay and whoever takes the steroid load the best wins.

One of the biggest problems today with our culture as I'm seeing it is we're bowing to algorithms (mostly tautologies), and not wanting to see the output of those algorithms. Capitalism for example can be optimized so well that it doesn't need people. Sports can be optimized so well that we don't need weight-classes or gender division. We can just take every one and everything at absolute value on specific parameters - it's not equitable in the slightest but wow is it efficient.


They're a proxy for Iran which in turn is a proxy for Russia. I don't think anyone would suggest that Assad is any better than Saddam Hussein (at best he might lack the acid shower stalls). I think people ask 'is it worth it' when they look at how Afghanistan, Iraq, and especially Libya went. Although America might still be the front-runner I'm not even sure it's properly in a sole superpower position, it's waning the way the British Empire was during the early 20th century. The point being - there are a lot of different ways to look at this problem and different conclusions one could come to, and all of them can be derived by relatively sane people based on which angle strikes more alarm bells for them.

That's part of why - unless Tulsi was really on the record saying 'You know, I really thing Assad's a good guy deep down and he's just misunderstood' - the idea that she's an Assad-supporter or indirectly an Iranian and Russian asset really isn't applicable. I mean who knows - I might learn something here, maybe she 'did' say something to that effect and moderates are just too quick to grab her up because she doesn't look, act, or behave like a Democratic Party machine product but it hasn't hit my radar yet and the general sphere I tap into does its best to be self-critical.

And there are other people who might naturally have things like more testosterone that gives them an advantage for being equally trained, sports does slant a bit into the naturally gifted and require certain people to put in more effort in. But it is generally about how these sports are separated out based on gender and how they naturally exclude people who may have transitioned, while also disadvantaging trans people if they take the hormones to match their gender, that a trans female athlete must then be the one being pushed out because they would not be able to keep up with the cis men.

It should be about the science, see what is needed to make it look even, how long needed transitioning. If there is something that there is a no going past line, like puberty, then that is all the more that we should be more accepting of identifying the possibility of transness in youth and be able to provide things like puberty blockers. They might be then at a disadvantage whilst on those blockers, but at least trans people would not be blocked entirely from being allowed to become athletes, or have to choose between being able to have a career or suffering from gender dysphoria.

Scientifically, there would be other ways to break up brackets other than just gender.

The thing that really hurts trans people on any properly equitable solution is their percentage of the population and the likelihood of assembling trans leagues in certain areas, either based on population density, politics, or both. It's a very difficult situation in that there's no way of stopping it from being a zero-sum game without having particular highly-affordable areas be culturally known as places for trans, and then it's the question of whether a person should have to want to relocate (especially with a tight economy) and it does nothing for a trans teen who really can't do much in most cases about 'the places to be' until they hit 18 years of age which in most cases is either past varsity sports or senior year - and if they have no experience on the field then they won't be competitive.

People's opinions on Douglas Murray may vary but he said at least one really insightful thing about situations like this - it's virtues (inclusion vs. equity) being forced to go head to head.


The only down side with the science - by the time they can tone down transitioning transwomen to female body specs we've entered something like biological transhumanism of a sort where they'll have a victory of a sort at a time where the wheels are coming off of everything else for cis people and where people will be able to modify themselves to such a degree where athletic talent will be a far more complex thing than simply natural ability, genes, and work. You'll have whatever fixed factors a person has left perhaps causing them to decide to go up or down in drastic ways for things like wrestling. The distance someone can throw a football or how fast they can move on the basketball court might have more to do with CRISPR treatment at that point and it's hard to know what the world will look like.

These aren't objections so much as pointing out that we're in a world heading toward transhumanism of this sort (possibly even in the next few decades) and one of the scarier things about this as, like any other species, we're competitive in zero sum Darwinian fashion, it means that people will take just about any advantage they can if the tradeoffs work for them.

The only things I can think of for now that would really get things at least part of the way there:

- Encourage transwomen to take up solo-competition sports where they can get really good at what they're doing and from there leagues could be established in five or ten county areas for more spread-out regions of the country.

- In women's sports they could train with other women, even be exemplar training partners for the case of going up against another really tough girls team, but again - achievements of excellence would probably have to be separated off to some degree, however clearly if a transwoman can run a 4 minute mile she should be getting everyone's attention regardless of whether she fits well in a male or female league.

The two areas where it gets sketchy:
1) Strength against strength or speed against speed in direct tournament competition.
2) Pushing women's records up 33 to 40%, possibly more, and making it nearly impossible for for cis women to break.


I don't think it would be scientific so much as distance and demographics - figuring out how to get such a small and broadly-distributed portion of the population together for league sports.

All of this is where this just seems to be an absolutely brutal problem - as said above - at least at this point it's a situation where the only ways I can think of to avoid it being zero-sum or maximize inclusion without that happening still end up sounding too much to most people like formalized discrimination (made even more formal by unequal inclusion).

Again - no particularly good answers at present. It's an issue where you can't pick one side without harming the other and so people will fall down all around it for all sorts of reasons. My main point though - it doesn't seem like a place where people can nail Tulsi Gabbard to the wall as an evil person.

Yeah? That’s basically what sports are, combined with practice. Once you start regulating it then you start telling women that they’re too good at sport to play sport, which is obviously ridiculous. Look at the numbers of women who are already excluded for exactly that reason. (Weirdly, no men are ever excluded for that reason - it’s a sexist double standard)

Of course, trans women don’t inject testosterone. Most of them deliberately do the exact opposite. But if you start segregating by “birth sex” then you do start forcing men who inject testosterone to compete with women (see: Mack Beggs).

Sure, look at Libya and then look at Syria. Libya is in a much better state than Syria. By far. The death and destruction we’ve seen in Syria far outstrips what we have seen in Libya. The displacement of people in Syria far outstrips what we have seen in Libya. The territory occupied by ISIS in Syria massively outstripped the territory they occupied in Libya. It is absolutely clear that we should have removed Assad and it is an ugly stain on Obama’s legacy, Cameron’s legacy, Hollande’s legacy, that they didn’t.

For her part, Gabbard has:

- Met with Assad during the war without informing the US government

- Characterised all Assad’s opponents as “terrorists”

- Denied that Assad is a war criminal

- Praised Assad’s destruction of Aleppo

- Praised Russia’s air strikes against civilians

- Blamed the US for Assad’s bombing of his own people (and not in the sensible “we should have stopped this” way, in the stupid “we forced him to do this” way)

- Opposed humanitarian aid programmes for the Syrian people on the grounds that they were “thinly-veiled regime change”.

- Voted to ban Syrian refugees from seeking asylum in the US.

This isn’t a well-intentioned “I just don’t think regime change will lead to lasting peace”, which is probably a view that anyone who remembers the Iraq War will sympathise with. It’s active support for a man who used chemical weapons against his own people, who tortured children, who has waged a civil war lasting nearly a decade which has destroyed cities. It’s opposition to humanitarian support for civilians living under him and to extending assistance to displaced refugees.

Sources:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-con ... story.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... -democrats

https://www.businessinsider.com/tulsi-g ... ?r=US&IR=T

https://www.businessinsider.com/tulsi-g ... ?r=US&IR=T

I believe that there have been some female athletes who have broken big records and found out that they were intersex, by technicalities possibly giving them big advantages that cis more binary women might not be able to reasonably compete with. And who knows if there are intersex men who have naturally been at a disadvantage? Kind of sucks that not everything is even, probably more so if we start putting weird definitions where we start having hard definitions of what counts as a biological sex, where even a "cis" intersex person could be kicked out from being an athlete altogether.

I am up for transhumanism, but I don't know about getting my hopes up. Science is weird, and sometimes we just have to do the best we can. I would hope that we don't have different record leagues for people of different races. A though is along the lines of having a race track where the starting or finish line is further back for people on the inside because they would either have an advantage, but there is no way to commodify what each person gets an advantage.

Regardless, culturally, we should have acceptance of trans people, and why I think there should not be a lot of tolerance for people who single them out, especially in trying to use their trans identity as some sort of advantage. It is why I would support "big tech" putting up some element of punishment of transphobes who go out of the way to misgender, along the lines of bullying or harassment. That it is not just a case of censoring beliefs not agreed with.

So here's a way of taking a shot at understanding the ingredients. Think of a guy whose relatively thin but in good shape, say 185 to 200 lb, he's not tiny, and he gets into body building a bit more and pushes himself up to 210. He has a friend whose just naturally big and from a big family, the guy's average weight is about 260 or 270 and he doesn't work out anymore than just contact with normal outdoor activity. Who wins that one? I don't know in every single case but anytime I've heard it tried it comes out that cultivated strength ends up being a very weak contender against natural strength. It's not to say that people shouldn't work out, it's just that - like martial arts - you should go in with the idea that you're doing it for your health, to compete against yourself, to be the better you than the you yesterday or last year. Person to person competition - it doesn't quite work out that way.

On the telling women who can play a sport too well and are told to step out - I'm not familiar with that, do you have any links because it would be interesting to know what you mean in that case.


Really no, they couldn't include women who are transitioning to men precisely because they're juicing. That would get them excluded before the scruples question of them still having two X chromosomes factors in.




The Libyan army was still fighting to regain control of the country this past summer:

https://www.latimes.com/world/middleeas ... story.html

https://www.dailysabah.com/politics/vic ... -says/news

They also had open slave markets as late as 2017, and I don't know what information is out there on how much longer it might have lasted.

Also to say that Syria has been much nastier in terms of live conflict I'd agree. OTOH I remember a Waking Up episode (#30) where Sam Harris interviewed Michael Weiss and they talked about there being several dozen factions, that it was such a convoluted mess that any group you might find to consider solid allies was tiny in comparison to the rest:

https://samharris.org/podcasts/inside-t ... mic-state/




The Washington Post article is the only one here that took a particularly sharp angle with her, the others were relatively oblique and even the WP article seemed to contain more instruction than content.

A couple other articles I saw relatively quickly that round this out a bit:

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/tu ... rong-73526

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tulsi-ga ... a3411ebf19

It might be fair to call her a pessimist about the situation as the National Interest article suggested and that her view only makes sense if we don't have any options with Assad other than regime change war. I can also see where Syrians would feel a pretty deep and direct resentment to her message and admittedly as some guy posting on a forum who doesn't have to live in the rubble of a civil war and gets to talk about this from the comfort of an office chair (even one that's a bit old and frayed) I realize I shouldn't feel comfortable making a quick keystroke for or against and TBH, I have zero skin in the game over there.

The question to her would be - if we have an alternative method that doesn't make Syria even worse and cause the US to invade Syria and works as a compromise to keep the Syrian people safe, admittedly at the beginning of 2021 we'd be pretty damn late to be saviors of any sort, would she be on board with a win-win situation of that sort even if it put Assad at a disadvantage without deposing his regime? That scenario may or may never be realized but I think it's the only place where we'd get a sense of whether her analysis is quite normal, if a bit cold, or whether she actually has a problem with foreign strings of influence.

On a public knowledge level it's a bit of a Schrodinger position, either of us could be right or wrong ultimately about that and I'm not sure if there is any information about it out there which could really clear it up.

What I do see of her presence in the US is that she's anti-division, sees massive dysfunction in the House and Senate, and she's one of maybe a handful or so people who are least 'were' in there (she's leaving at the end of her term - skipped running for reelection to run for president) who isn't a partisan hack and sees the depth of the kleptocracy and brinksmanship problem across both parties as clearly as many US citizens can see it from the outside.

I think the one thing that I've heard recently, against the genetic determinism argument (well, at the level of market knowledge at least), was a lecture that Malcom Gladwell gave on the issue of talent capitalization. His argument was that football talent in Memphis was quite likely getting drafted at a 1:6 ratio (14%) or that Kenyans were crushing it in running sports, because there were far more Kenyans running, or that the supremacy of Chinese math scores had to do with the complexities and discipline needed for rice farming:



I still don't know how seriously to take this argument as one that would displace current ideas of genetics in various groups, it's most likely a both-and, however whether the effect is more market capitalization in these cases or more selective breeding based on differential success in highly valued areas is a tough call and admittedly I wish I had more good leads on how that's been parsed thus far.