Meme - Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens: "Truly incredible things are happening on Reddit. Generational crashout. The plucky rebels were supposed to defeat the evil empire, and now they don’t know what to do."
Melissa C... @MsMel...: "Feel like bringing up Epstein is the only way for them to feel better about themselves"
"USA winning the sports ball competition is just the thing to make the drones forget about that whole zero arrests being made regarding the Epstein clients."
Rick Fox @rickhfox: "Losing game makes me want to drink blood from a skull.""
hoser1: "Well, at least our prime minister isn't a pedophile"
Neuraxis: "small massive victories"
Full_Hunt_3087: "A win for a unifying democratic country Canada would have been like finding an extra chicken nugget as a kid, a nice but deserved extra surprise. A win for the United States, a country run by pedophiles, is more like giving a participation medal to a kid who will brag about it to all of his friends and pretend he's the best in the world. Giving them way more satisfaction proportionately than it should, because they need that superficial satisfaction."
PauseJazzlike6819: *laughs* *showing the finger* *medals* *Eagle* *US flags* (-11 karma)
Full_Hunt_3087: "Good for you, champ. Have a cookie!"
Meme - usernamedmannequin: "I cannot fathom how bad of a mood I'm in right now and I can't even process my emotions right now. I feel ready to die in fight to the death for my country like never before and I don't understand how a fucking hockey game did this to me."
Lampadaire345: "That's because that game was symbolic of our National Unity and struggle to be seperate from those fascists down South. Winning would have been a show that we stand together and that we are not backing down or getting pushed aside by their bloodthirsty empire, and that we strike back against bullies. Although symbolic, it was much more important to us than most people in the USA who are ignorant enough to actually support their war seeking president."
usernamedmannequin: "The men's and women's both lost to the USA and I swear if Trump says a fucking word about it (which he will) nothing will satisfy me besides drinking the blood of my enemies from the skull of my fallen enemies. (I'm a tad bit fired up bud)"
Left wingers have awful sportsmanship
🖤 Christine on X - "To be clear, I don’t hate Eileen Gu. She was born and raised in America. Her Chinese mom embraced capitalism when her daughter was 15 and set her up for a comfortable life. This is actually a version of the American dream too. Even if people feel a certain way about it. As an adult with full agency, Eileen continues to choose China because it remains financially lucrative. That’s fine. But choices have consequences. She's smart. She has a script. But that script isn't working anymore. The willful ignorance and “weight of two countries” “build my own pond” act worked better when she was a naive teenager. As an international relations major at Stanford, come on. This coming from a former international relations major from BU. The reality is, she has taken money from the Chinese government and the brand sponsorship benefits that come with it. That comes with strings attached. One of them is not being able to openly criticize China. She can criticize her own country (she’s likely still a U.S. citizen). But she can’t criticize China for the same reason anyone with family or financial ties to China can’t. If you do your access to China gets cut off and the risk and retaliation is real. Eileen can’t comment on human rights issues in China. She can’t comment on her Chinese citizenship status even though China doesn’t allow dual citizenship. She can’t comment on transnational repression of Chinese dissidents overseas. She has to pretend that doesn’t exist. Don’t ask her about why her mom was able to cheer her on at the Beijing Olympics in 2022 while Alysa Liu’s dad wasn’t able to because he’s a Chinese dissident. She has to pretend she knows nothing about any of that. Don’t ask her what she thinks of a fellow Bay Area gold medalist being targeted by the same government that made her a multimillionaire. Don’t expect the China experts to weigh in on any of this either. There are conditions to keeping their visa valid and their access to China open. Being openly critical of the U.S. is encouraged and so is gaslighting everyone who is critical of China. It is what it is."
Eileen Gu and Chinese nationality law - "Let’s establish two factual premises first.
(1) Eileen Gu has not renounced her US citizenship and remains one. Does anyone seriously believe that Eileen Gu has renounced her US citizenship? Not only is it virtually inconceivable even in the abstract, but are we supposed to think she’s at Stanford on a student visa? That would severely limit her ability to earn money in the US; she would only be allowed to take on-campus jobs. Nor has her name shown up on the State Department’s periodic lists of people who have renounced their citizenship. (See immigration lawyer Gary Chodorow’s blog post on this.)
(2) Eileen Gu has been given Chinese citizenship by the Chinese government, and possesses a Chinese passport. The International Olympic Committee said that Gu acquired Chinese nationality in 2019 and confirmed that they had seen her Chinese passport both to Emily Feng of NPR and to Lizzi Lee...
the Chinese authorities have clearly decided that they are not bound by the rules of the Nationality Law, and can therefore issue a passport to whomever they please if they deem it expedient to do so. And they have the actual, unchallengeable power to do so. It is important to remember this important feature of China’s legal system when evaluating claims about what the Chinese government can and cannot do under its own law.
Meme - "What people think Nietzsche's idea of Ubermensch is: *Gigachad*
What it actually is: *Alysa Liu happily skating*"
Often unseen, flower kids help keep the Olympic figure skating flowing - The Globe and Mail - "Their official title is ‘flower kid’ and their moment starts as soon as the music ends. In figure skating, it is customary for fans to throw gifts on the ice for skaters after a performance, but this show of appreciation can slow down the whole event and cause tripping hazards if anything is missed. That’s where the flower kids come in and you’ll see them in the background each night here in Milan. At the end of a skate, as stuffed animals and the occasional wrapped bouquet rain down from the stands, half-a-dozen little kids in matching blue-and-pink zip-ups bolt onto the ice, grab the goods, and get off again before the marks are announced and the next performance is set to start. When a new teddy bear hits the surface, another one sprint-skates into the rotation... Capasso is from Turin. She is one of 30 young figure skaters – aged 8 through 12 – from across Italy who were selected to be the flower kids during the Milan Cortina Olympic figure-skating events. For any skating competition, they’re an integral part of the event as they keep the program going and the skaters safe from debris on the ice. And for the dozens of kids chosen, it’s the chance of a lifetime to have front-row seats to the best skating in the world... And this isn’t the flower kids’ only job. They can also be spotted during the ice resurfacing, performing seated choreography to the intermission music."
How Israel’s strategy made seven Olympic medals normal - "Israel understood that to improve its Olympic achievements it needed to consider its size and relative strength. To that end, five sports were chosen to receive excess funding: athletics, gymnastics, swimming, sailing, and, of course, judo. The Olympic Committee of Israel understood that the state budget alone couldn’t provide for the professional development needed to compete with leading teams, so partnerships were developed with 11 businesses, including Bank Hapoalim, Arkia, and Shufersal. A scientific-medical support system – employing 110 people – was developed to provide athletes full support in nutrition, medicine, therapy, and data analysis. It was also decided to offer significant financial rewards to winning athletes: NIS500,000 for a bronze medal, NIS750,000 for a silver, and NIS 1 million for a gold – all tax-free. This has positioned Israel as a world leader in rewarding its athletes. However, pouring money into the Olympic effort isn’t the only solution. Singapore, for example, tops the list of rewarding countries with a grant of NIS 2.7 million for gold medalists but had to settle for a single bronze medal in Paris. The real difference lies in a combination of professional leadership, long-term planning ability, early investment in talents, significant development budgets, and a population large enough to supply the best athletes... if we zoom out, it’s evident that Israel’s achievement in Paris was statistically normal and reflected a result that matches its population, size, and resources. When Israel won a silver and a bronze medal in 1992, it had only half its current population (5.1 million), and its GDP per capita was significantly lower. Those medals were a huge achievement. Seven medals for Israel 2024 were what is now expected. However, looking at other countries with similar population sizes, it’s clear there’s still room for improvement"
Meme *Sad guy Happy guy bus*
"ASS-MEN DURING OLYMPICS
TITS-MEN DURING OLYMPICS"
Noah Lyles was selfish to run Olympic 200m with COVID. But he's not alone - "they all look for an edge, the proprietary one or two per cent they believe makes the difference between contender and also-ran. In Lyles’ case, it meant staying mum for two days about a positive test for COVID, lest he let his competitors in Thursday’s 200-metre final know about the condition his condition was in... Tebogo, incidentally, was asked if he was ready to be the face of track and field. “I can’t be the face of athletics because I’m not an arrogant or a loud person like Noah Lyles, so I believe Noah is the face of athletics.”"
TracingWoodgrains on X - "It's incredibly dumb that I've wound up so fixated on this example, but this story has driven me mad from the first moment I saw it and the madness compels me to write. I call it "The story of Imane Khelif and the lying liars who lie." Let's start with a bare-bones rendition of the facts:
1. At the 2024 olympics, Imane Khelif won gold in women's boxing.
2. She was raised as a woman.
3. After challenges, she took several tests, one of which led to her disqualification from the 2023 women's world boxing championships
4. The IBA maintains she has XY chromosomes; her trainer said she had a problem with her hormones and chromosomes; independent journalists report seeing multiple independent tests that indicate XY chromosomes.
5. The IOC president, when addressing calls for her disqualification, explicitly walked back remarks that it "was not a DSD issue" to clarify that he meant it "was not a trans issue."
6. One journalist has leaked alleged lab results indicating an intersex condition.
All of these point in one extremely clear Occam's Razor direction: she has an intersex condition involving XY chromosomes and elevated levels of testosterone as a result. She is genotypically male, phenotypically androgenous/female, and was raised as a woman. All of that should be reasonably straightforward. But because it's a culture war issue, a thousand lying liars who lie have descended and stripped any semblance of sanity from the conversation around her. Here's the problem: there are a lot of nasty, aggressive arguments around trans issues with a lot of people who bitterly hate each other. This is tangentially related to trans issues. So if one side says something, for the other side, they have to be wrong. And lying liars who lie will find any possible way to make it so. Snopes is the best example, because it is at least facially honest. You can get the full story from it, which is more than you can say for other sources. But watch what it does: while none of the facts are in dispute, it fixates on specific wording choices to create a sense that Something Is Wrong. Watch as it confirms the core details of the story, then immediately pivots into "not necessarily":
"According to the alleged medical files produced by Ait Aoudia, Khelif had testosterone levels that well exceeded that of a typical female and, upon examination, lacked ovaries and had internal gonads. Such a person might be considered chromosomally male, but that does not necessarily mean they are accurately or conclusively described as biologically male."
Snopes highlights wording from the reporting it wants to dispute:
"Results? The pelvic MRI shows "an absence of a uterus," the presence of "gonads in the inguinal canals" (testicles in her abdomen, editor's note), "a blind vagina" and a micro-penis in the form of "clitoral hypertrophy"."
How does Snopes dispute this wording? Again, "not necessarily:"
"Describing undeveloped internal gonads as testes is a scientific conclusion inserted by Ait Aoudia. DSDs can sometimes cause ambiguous gonads with both ovarian and testicular tissues. Clitoral hypertrophy — an enlarged clitoris — is not necessarily the same thing as having a micropenis."
It's not arguing the facts. It's not disputing anything concrete. It's playing definition games, quibbling over the edges. The whole dispute is like this. Some people falsely said Khelif is trans, so rather than focusing on the intersex claim, lying liars who lie clamor to Debunk the trans claim. The journalists who reported the details and noted having seen the report were from relatively small organizations, so lying liars who lie clamor to emphasize Unverified without substantive counters. The athletic association who disqualified Khelif had a falling out with the IOC, so lying liars who lie emphasize that it has ties to Russia and claim (falsely) that the disqualification came after Khelif defeated a previously undefeated Russian boxer. Khelif was raised as a woman, so when people who use chromosomes as their definition for "man" call her a man, lying liars who lie act like those people are fundamentally confused instead of operating from a different definition. Everybody who has paid attention knows the facts I outline at the head of this. There is no serious dispute around them. But lying liars who lie insist, on Wikipedia, around Twitter, and anywhere this conversation is brought up, on litigating every minor detail they can find, anything not conclusively and unambiguously admitted by parties they have no choice but to trust. They don't have serious counterpoints. They don't have serious counterevidence. They don't have, really, any reason at all to think she is anything other than the intersex athlete all signs point towards her being, but lying liars who lie are paying attention and arguing only to the extent they can use arguments as a weapon to ensure The Other Side doesn't score points, and as far as they are concerned they will go to their graves lying about it.
Anyway. I was reminded of all of this because @jimmy_wales wanted examples of Wikipedia pages that have been protected for bad reasons, and this page was protected because lying liars who lie are dead-set on ensuring that everyone who reads Khelif's Wikipedia page comes away thinking she's very likely not intersex and all attention on her was baseless. It's stupid that I know about this story. It's stupid that I think about it. It is stupid that thousands of lying liars who lie have become so invested in promoting a stupid lie at all costs that they will only acknowledge the facts of the case under extreme duress, and will instead spend countless hours quibbling over absolute nonsense. I have nothing against Khelif, and on a personal level I have sympathy for what it's like to be at the middle of a firestorm of attention. I don't think people should attack her or make anything personal, and I absolutely understand impulses to defend against anti-trans sentiment or to stand up for someone in the middle of a firestorm. But I am beyond sick of lying liars who lie creating fake, pedantic, quibbling arguments with purely instrumental standards that adapt on the fly to whatever points they think they might be able to turn into contested territory, just because they would rather kick and scream and lie than admit that their opponents were ever right about any factual claim, ever, at all, ever. ...ok, I think that's it. Blech."
Honest Sabe on X - "The gait really says it all."
Billy Bragg on X - "Trying very hard not to judge Imane Khelif on looks, walk, or the fact that he's the only "woman" not wearing hijab....trying very, very hard...."
'Khelif is a man': Former sparring partner's shocking claims on Olympic champion boxer, says ‘has some kind of…' - "Joana Nwamerue, who fought against Imane Khelif during a sparring match in Bulgaria, has made shocking claims about the Olympic champion boxer who faced intense scrutiny over her biological sex and gender identity. Nwamerue, Bulgarian-Nigerian woman boxer, has claimed that (Khelif) has some kind of internal issues, but he is a man. “I will stay [by] my words until he/she does a test to prove to the world that he/she is a woman. But we all know that won’t happen,” reported Reduxx quoting Nwamerue. Stating that she played 3-4 sparring sessions, Nwamerue said, "(I) can confirm that this (Khelif) is a man to her. ‘Male power. Men’s techniques, everything’.” The Bulgarian-Nigerian boxer also claimed that [Khelif’s] teammates came to her and told her “Imane is not a man. She is a woman and just lives high in the mountains with her relatives and parents and so there may be a change in her testosterone or chromosomes and the like.”"
Huge row after Imane Khelif, Paris Olympics gold medalist, confirmed as man in leaked medical report - "In a surprising turn of events, the gender identification of Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who just won gold in women's boxing at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, has come under scrutiny due to a leaked medical report. According to the document, which French journalist Djaffar Ait Aoudia was able to secure, Khelif has internal testicles and XY chromosomes, hinting at a disorder called 5-alpha reductase insufficiency. Experts from the Kremlin-Bicêtre Hospital in Paris and the Mohamed Lamine Debaghine Hospital in Algiers drafted the report in June 2023. The report describes Khelif's biological traits, such as the existence of internal testicles and the lack of a uterus. Additionally, an MRI revealed the presence of a micropenis... A chromosomal test reportedly confirmed that Khelif has an XY karyotype and a hormone test revealed Khelif's level to be that typical of males. Khelif's reported sexual development deficiency causes babies to be incorrectly assigned female due to the presence of deformed genitalia, according to Reduxx. The disorder typically becomes apparent by puberty. The report of an XY karyotype aligns with not only the IBA's findings before disqualifying Khelif from the 2023 Women's World Boxing Championships, but also that of Alan Abrahamson, an associate professor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism who said that he had viewed the results from tests administered by the IBA."
Weird. We kept being told that it had been proven that she was a woman and claims to the contrary were "Russia disinformation", even though even her coach admitted she had been found to be a man
Time for the left wing gaslighting to start again
One of the strangest original copes was that she couldn't be a man because it was illegal to be trans in Algeria. By that logic, crime doesn't exist anywhere in the world because crime is illegal everywhere
Blinded by ideology: Inside boxing row that tarnished Olympics - "It was a telephone call to Dr Emma Hilton, the developmental biologist whose work illuminates why sex matters in sport, that gave a first inkling as to the freight train hurtling down the tracks. Given her research had illustrated the average man could punch 162 per cent harder than a woman, I had wanted to establish what, to put it bluntly, the International Olympic Committee was playing at by allowing two biologically male boxers into the female category. “They are trying to balance fairness, inclusion and safety,” she said. “But safety isn’t about balance. Safety is a cut-off. If it’s not safe, nobody cares if it’s fair or inclusive. You can’t do it.”... Dr Hilton’s warning of the danger came on Monday, July 29. But far from heeding it, the IOC did nothing. Almost two weeks on, its inertia and flat denial of science has enabled both Khelif and Lin to sweep to Olympic titles, each achieved with four lopsided victories. Mired in politics and blinded by ideology, it has presided over the perfect storm of a scandal. “They are women”: this, all along, was president Thomas Bach’s incantation about Khelif and Lin, which is what they consider themselves to be. And yet he still cannot even present a persuasive definition of what a woman is. To Bach and his IOC acolytes, in hock to a belief that your sex is whatever you say it is, womanhood can be determined by passport status. Except athletes do not compete at the Olympics using legal documents or self-declared gender identities. They compete using their bodies, with their capabilities governed by the immutable laws of human biology... The major sports are all controlled here by federations that have seen sense, prioritising fairness by ring-fencing the female category for biological women. Athletics acted in response to seeing three athletes with differences in sexual development on the women’s 800 metres podium at Rio 2016. Swimming understood it had a problem when Lia Thomas went from being the 554th-ranked male in the United States to winning a national collegiate title as a female. Cycling was forced to draw a line when Austin Killips, a post-puberty male, won a UCI stage race for women. But boxing, the most perilous sport at the Olympics, has been left at the mercy of the IOC, the most ideologically captured body of all. It saw no issue in sending Angela Carini into the ring to face Khelif, only for the Italian to be dismantled inside 46 seconds by punches so hard she said she feared for her life. It was not just because it disputed the IBA’s findings, but because it believed the Algerian should never have been tested at all. Its much-vaunted eligibility “framework” is rights-led rather than scientific. This means, in essence, that it is prepared to ignore anything to do with Khelif’s chromosomes. All that matters is being perceived not to discriminate... It is worth studying the precise details of the IBA letter describing the tests carried out on the boxers. Summarising the results as “abnormal”, it declares: “Chromosome analysis reveals male karyotype.” It also includes imaging, for each athlete, of an X and a Y chromosome, highlighting that the tests were conducted at a Delhi laboratory certified by the Swiss-based International Organisation for Standardisation. But still the IOC maintains that the results are “arbitary”, not worth the paper they are written on. The only possible conclusion is that the IOC simply does not want to listen, that it is more interested in burnishing its credentials as “inclusive” than in upholding what is fair. It is no wonder that Bach wanted to be nowhere near the boxers’ gold-medal presentations, instead delegating Khelif’s victory ceremony to Mustapha Berraf of Algeria, one of his arch-loyalists. He has, frankly, made himself foolish on this issue. He had been warned for six years that a story such as this could explode if the IOC did not draw clearer boundaries, but still he refused to react. Despite the IBA claiming that the fighters have been tested twice and that they are male, Bach insists there is no scientific means of discovering who is female. Now, not before time, he has agreed to step aside next year, his credibility severely damaged by his handling of the controversy. It marks the dramatic culmination of a quite extraordinary episode. In the space of a single Games, the IOC has done nothing less than distort biological truth in a sport fraught with physical risk. In the eyes of many women, there could scarcely be a greater dereliction."
The IOC's shameful worship at the altar of trans virtue-signaling will get women killed - "any confusion about Khelif’s biology was clarified by this report, a full year before the Paris Olympics. And the IOC knew it. So why did it still permit Khelif to compete against, and beat — in every sense — women? The answer is cowardice. It was terrified of offending the woke mob, who viciously mobilize against anyone who dares to stand up to this transgender athlete nonsense. Indeed, such was its fear that the IOC hasn’t submitted athletes to chromosomal testing since 1999 and its only requirement for participation at the Paris Olympics in women’s boxing was to have a female sex marker on legal documents. In other words, you just say you’re a woman on a form and bingo, you’re fighting against women — even if, like Khelif, you’re a man... The one thing that never happens in this debate is accountability, despite the mounting evidence that it’s rapidly destroying the integrity of women’s sports. The United Nations recently revealed that a staggering 900 medals have been robbed from women by trans athletes around the world, in 29 different sports. This is a disgusting, systematic global abuse of women’s rights... In boxing, separating the sexes is even more important because lives may be at stake. Kamala Harris has no problem with any of this, which makes a mockery of her claim to be the only presidential candidate who stands up for women’s rights. In fact, it’s Donald Trump who got it right when he said all trans women athletes should be banned from competing in women’s sports."
i/o on X - "I've noticed that certain events at the Olympics tend to contain a distribution of physical attractiveness among participants that's more favorable than what you'd expect to see in the general population. (The men's decathlon and women' high jump come to mind). Does anyone know if this sort of phenomenon has ever been studied? (I vaguely recall that the attractiveness of NFL quarterbacks may have once been the subject of a scientific paper.)"
