Typical woman

as always, the people most upset about the bear thing just so happen to also be sexists.

cop got on the news and used a bike lock chain that was used to barricade the building as "proof" that the protestors were infiltrated by professional agitators, because it was an "industrial chain" or something like that. its the bike lock that Columbia University itself recommends to students.

this is just not a well founded assumption. humanitarian aid was going into Gaza, and was being distributed to the people there before Israel cut off the supply. you're trying to engineer a false dichotomy, where the only solution to the ongoing humanitarian crisis caused in part by the denial of necessary resources is more denial of necessary resources. like, just think for like a moment. Hamas has a surplus of resources to supply their own forces. they aren't reliant on humanitarian aid. not allowing food and other resources to get into Gaza only negatively affects the civilian population, and does very little to harm the supposed actual target of this indiscriminate violence. like, even if nearly all of it was just taken by Hamas, the quantity that remained would almost certainly still help innocent people survive this conflict, and that's a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself.

but whatever, i bet you'll just move the goalpost again. we cannot act based on what Hamas "should" be doing if they were acting responsibly. Hamas isn't taking responsibility for the death and destruction being waged against the Palestinian people, they aren't providing the resources they have, they aren't distributing them to those who need them. and seeing that situation, we should act to prevent the suffering of these people who are not being served by the government that is supposed to represent them, instead of actively preventing aid from reaching into the region.

i wish i didn't have to see dudes who wanna legislate me out of existence in prominent government positions. it fucking bums me out.

gender segregation in some sports is only an effort to filter out uninteresting matches

i'd be more willing to accept this rationale if the history of gender segregation in sports wasn't deeply rooted in misogyny. are you sure that isn't at least partly a post-hoc rationalization for a practice that has a lot of cultural inertia?

Maybe we should appreciate that some people not born with Usain Bolt’s long legs have value as well.

i'd recommend looking into the Paralympics if you want to see what sport, and even competition, without that kind of value judgement can look like.

The US women’s soccer team, the best female soccer team in the world, has played exhibition games against high school boys and lost badly.

oop! maybe look up the context for that one. in short, it was a scrimmage, and as part of a structured practice routine that the US national women's soccer team participates in as part of a youth soccer training program. not exactly representative of a competitive game, same for the women's hockey team.

that being said, its basically a non sequitur. i'm not denying that physical differences exist, they absolutely do, but the idea that these physical differences are the primary reason our sports are structured the way they are isn't historically accurate. there were potent social forces at work, including social forces which prevented women from participating in sports at all.

in any case, the fact that in some sports, some professional women athletes lost to some high school boy athletes in games that explicitly do not count for competition does not, to me, have some larger implications on the field of women's sports more generally. the unquestioning acceptance of reports on these practice games for fun with children as some kind of proof that female athletes just can't perform as well as men reveals, to me, a tendency towards confirmation bias. tell me, do you know if any prominent men's soccer teams have ever lost to children during a practice match? i certainly don't. exhibition matches aren't newsworthy events. the fact that these ones were has much more to do with validating the ancient belief that men are just better than it does with genuine interest in a demonstration of friendly sport for high school kids.

i mean, no, that's ahistorical. historically, the reason they are "split" is because men didn't let women do sports for a really long time, and when women began pushing for their own sports, men didn't want them to be the same thing. it wasn't some dispassionate analysis of sexual dimorphism, it was rooted in the culture of misogyny of the time, and backed by deeply held pseudo-scientific beliefs about the fragility of women. they thought that sport, like higher education, literally caused infertility, and used that as a justification to restrict women from those pursuits.

that frankly isn't the situation that we're dealing with. the idea that israel either has to let Hamas operate unchallenged or kill civilians is a vast oversimplification of how conflict works, and giving the IDF blanket permission to kill civilians if it also hurts Hamas is fucking monstrous. you suck.

so if hamas is exploiting civilians for their own protection, they should kill their victims too? cool dude. you're totally not justifying killing civilians! it's not technically a war crime, so its fine! fuck. off.

i think that's a bit of an alarming stance, to be honest. authoritarians have a pretty long history of characterizing protest movements as looting and rioting, characterizing protestors as "outside agitators", and other nonsense as a way to justify violent oppression, and the vast majority of the time for the vast majority of participants it really isn't the case.

maybe there's some people who would say that (are these like twitter guys or something?), but in the vast majority of cases the actual objection to "antifa smashing up your city" was "no, actually, the amount of smashing being done is much less than what right-wing media sources are saying, "antifa" is often broadly applied to the protest movement in general, and police officers coming in with tear gas and rubber bullets often leads to escalating violence from protesters in response."

how are being a capitalist and despising the direct product of capitalism compatible lol?

right, but how often does that actually work out in people's favor, and how often does that benefit corporate interests with massive influence? how many musicians don't have the right to their own work because record companies dominate the music industry? how many artists working for large corporations are denied residuals because a condition of their work is that everything they produce is owned by their employer? writers? animators?

that's not even considering the ways in which corporations patent technologies that are the result of publicly funded research efforts. a great deal of pharmaceuticals would not be possible without massive public research grants, but the companies privatize the results of that research using the framework of intellectual property.

in theory, you're right, it does protect you against corporations using your shit without permission, but in practice it just stops you from using your shit without their permission. there are far better ways of ensuring corporations cannot exploit you than to make your creativity and invention a commodity to be bought and sold.