POG Politics Thread Version 3

Look up the butterfly ballot in 2000, manual recounts and then the halting of those. Yeah, the Supreme Court halted the manual recount, and then the FL legislature gave the delegates to Bush, Gore conceded and it was over. The manual recounts were in Palm Beach, Broward, Dade and Volusia counties, with Palm Beach and (i believe) Broward still incomplete when it was halted. I lived in Palm Beach county. I was watching that **** on tv, 3 people at a time looking at signatures, and 'chads' and ultimately deciding whether the vote counted. It was kinda wild to see just how many were rejected because they said the signatures were a little off.

so ****ed up. what a ****ing joke

man, some truly evil **** going down on twitter over a couple of female boxers. people calling them men, and trans.

they were both born female, and have naturally elevated levels of testosterone.

it's especially bad for this one poor girl from Algeria, where it's illegal to be gay or trans. her father forbid her from boxing because it wasn't feminine. she had to sell scrap metal to get bus fair to go to the gym. her life was hard af. she struggled. she made it to the Olympics, and now has to face bullying on a global scale.

an Italian woman(a cop) took one punch from her, and quit the match and cried, basically saying it was unfair to fight a man.

Wow, wasn't aware of all that... Why in the world was I surprised that this story is much more nuanced than my MAGA cult family are portraying all over their social media accounts?

happy to arm you with the truth, if you want to do battle with your maga cult family and let them know they've been duped. again.

I think the most interesting part was that it was a Russian boxing organization that banned her, giving reason that she was intentionally trying to deceive. And the IOC doesn't recognize it. She passed the IOC's requirements for women's competition. She's competed her entire life rightfully as a woman. And now I'm seeing all these comments about about how trans women shouldn't be in women's sports, like wtf she's not ****ing trans. This at the same time the absolute dumbest thing, but scary because I imagine the hate is extremely impactful to her well being.

yeah it's really heart breaking. I imagine it's something she's struggled with her entire life, not being feminine enough. and now here she is at the Olympics and getting bullied and hated on a global scale.

and she is gonna have to compete with all this going on. gotta be just brutal.

also the Italian girl who quit is a cop. and check out how she quit last Olympics too. 0 respect for this person

That's insane...I wonder what her motivations are to compete at all?

It's funny, I saw my mom posted a clipping of that JK Rowling tweet about the boxer on Instagram, captioned "who is standing up for women's rights?"...apparently not my mom, but anyway...and my first thought was that trans women in women's sport is such a tough subject, and I was sort of hesitant to look this up. I didn't want to see it, knowing it would be tough to defend (even if I wanted to defend it at all, I still don't know how to think about the subject). But I did, and she literally just quits while upright, after a basic jab. Similar to several she had already delivered herself. She gave up. And then I saw your post and looked more into it, and this post now. This is just awful that someone would take a look at a competitor they think they can't beat and just quit, then imply she's a man.

Here's a quote from the Italian after this latest match:

'Carini, speaking after her fight with Khelif, said: “For me, it’s not a defeat. For me, when you climb those ropes, you’re already a warrior; you’re already a winner. Regardless of everything, it’s okay, fine like this. I didn’t lose tonight [...] I only did my job as a fighter. I got in the ring and I fought. I didn’t make it. I’m coming out with my head held high and with a broken heart.'

Read it while watching the clip you just posted for maximum humor

Sounds like y'all implicitly agree trans women shouldn't be competing then.

Reading the wiki of the 2000 election was interesting. Lasted a lot longer than I remember. Republicans putting out a tricky ballot in palm beach county

What led you to that thought? We've been talking about a biological female person.

I absolutely do NOT believe that trans women don't have the right to compete in high level athletic competitions, I just don't have enough knowledge to know what the right way to do it is.

I think it's funny that the radical right wants to define people by their genitals alone, but as soon as they are presented with a person with female genitals that has a Y chromosome, they go straight to calling her a man. It's almost like they would do anything to put down more women.

Funny that the results of that election are still echoing throughout the world. And I feel like a lot of people still don't understand exactly what went down

I think it's impossible to know what went down exactly unless you are part of the insiders.

If you think trans women should be able to compete it shouldn't matter if he's male our trans female. It would be equally "disgusting" either way.

Sure, maybe we don't know what led to the FL legislature doing what it did and why SCOTUS did what it did, but we certainly saw it happen. Like seeing a boulder roll off a cliff...can't say for sure what made it fall, but you could see it. It was actually quite easy to see what went down, I think you are just arguing that we can't know exactly what the motivations were?

I'd say Scotia was least likely to do political maneuvering and more likely everywhere further down. The tricky ballot was likely intentional but we don't know obviously. And the hanging chat situation would be very ambiguous.

If we had a total recount of ballots with our best interpretation I don't know who would have won, but a total recount with voters intentions seems likely Gore would have won.

Right so it doesn't matter if they are trans or not. Or does it?

Yeah, I think you said it tbh.

My current belief is mostly that if you are competing in some event, you are agreeing to whatever rules they have in place for competing in that event. If they have rules for entry into a category that you pass, you get to compete. If you understand those rules, choose to compete, and then give up saying it's not fair...well you agreed to the same conditions as everyone else. I get you can still feel cheated if say, a literal man entered disguised as a woman and the rules for eligibility weren't very thorough to catch it. But that's not what happened here.

So I guess, in a way, I kinda agree that it doesn't matter all that much. Two competitors went into the ring bound by the same rules, same tests, etc. One lost because she quit.

what's disgusting is discrimination against people who don't conform to gender norms.

this Algerian woman is catching hate on a global scale because she is different, but she's different in a way that makes people uncomfortable. it's not that she's abnormally tall or strong or fast, cuz that would all be great(assuming her appearance was acceptable to the masses), but she's masculine. and that's not ok with people.

and it's highlighting the absurdity of the bigots. "protect women" "only 2 genders, and it's decided at birth"

this is a woman, born a woman, but not woman enough for the bigots so they're attacking her.

it's people telling us we have to conform to gender norms. **** that. as a man, I can be as feminine as I want. anyone of any gender can be as masculine or feminine or androgynous as they want... it's bs anyway

Is women boxing at all conforming to gender norms?

Not sure what you think gender norms means. I agree people will pick on like deformed people, though.

The great musical prophet Warren Zevon predicted this all years ago:

lmao