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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • It’s a bit ridiculous to say the only obstacle between us and “monstrous behemoths created in labs” is some sports regulations ^^'. Luckily there are already laws that severely restrict what you’re allowed to do with genetic engineering, so don’t you worry.

    But coming back to your “monstrous behemoths”, wouldn’t some basketball players for example already fall in that category ? How tall is too tall? When it’s about basketball, you could be 8 feet 1 (2.46 m for my metric brethren) and no-one would try to have you banned from the game, they would probably congratulate you on your lucky genetics instead. Similarly, I’ve never heard of any suggestion of, say, enforcing a minimum resting heart rate for endurance based sports.

    Yet if you’re a woman and too muscular for some obscure regulatory body’s liking, you face the risk of being ostracized and banned from competing. The same genetic lottery winning ticket would in this case be considered an unfair advantage. This goes to show that unfairness is not rooted in any hard, undeniable, mesurable quantity, but is at its root a cultural phenomenon. Fairness is in the eye of the beholder, there can be no objective measure for it, -which is why I’m say it simply doesn’t truly exist in sports.


  • The people clamoring against the inclusion of biological outliers are operating under the false -and frankly poorly thought out- idea that sports are fair and that it’s only by training the hardest that you can and will achieve victory, shonen style.

    Ultimately the only completely fair-ish competition is the one where you try to outdo your previous best performance and beat your own records. Otherwise, there are so many other variables you’d have to correct for to level the playing field (and testosterone levels is not a great pick for that anyway) that you might as well have single athlete categories.









  • Jeebus ! The number of people commenting here who don’t have any knowledge of the situation is annoying.

    France vowed in the Noumea Accord of 1998 to gradually give more political power to New Caledonia. Since, under the agreement, New Caledonia has held three referendums over its ties with France, ALL rejecting independence. Now, the last referendum in 2021 had something like 94% people voting to stay French BUT the independentists had called for a boycott of the referendum, and so turnout was only about 44%. In 2018, New Caledonians rejected independence at 57%. In 2020 it was 53%. In both these votes, the turnout was 80+% .

    So this is not a case of France imposing control on the local population, there seems to be at least a small majority of people who wish to stay French.

    New Caledonians have French nationality, they vote in all french national elections (presidential, parliament, etc. ) and could absolutely vote in local elections if they moved to say Paris or Marseille.

    The thing is, the electoral lists in New Caledonia were frozen in 1998, and so anyone who came to live there legally after that still can’t vote in local elections. This is now being reversed, allowing citizens who have lived there for at least 10 years to vote, and that’s why the independentist party is rioting. They fear the independentist vote would be diluted by these newcomers, which presumably would vote to stay French.

    Edit : To add some context on the independentists, they are mostly of the Kanak people, the aboriginal population of the islands. Today, they represent about 41% of the ~300k people living in New Caledonia.They are usually poorer and benefit from a lesser level of education than Neocaledonians of European or mixed descent.









  • I think it mostly comes down to increasingly unfair distribution of wealth, which leaves people with no hope to better their standards of living.

    Our civilization creates things with constantly increasing productivity, which should lead to better pay and less time spent working, and more time to live a fulfilling life. Instead, all this added wealth is funneled towards a few mindbogglingly rich individuals.

    This happens with the help of a sizable fraction of the population, which has become convinced that their mediocre situation is in fact caused by even poorer and more miserable people, rather than the assholes siphoning everything and everyone from the top of their already obscene piles of riches. And there’s no sign of this changing anytime soon. No wonder people are desperate.