Women fear for their safety around men in public, and rightfully so. Period. It’s so fucking bizarre that anyone would ever try to argue against this.

I am not. I am arguing against the fact that men don’t (need to) worry about their safety in public. It’s such a cartoonish way to think. You don’t worry, good for you!

The statistics you’re quoting (and likely making up, but I don’t care enough about this to look) aren’t really relevant, I’m talking about real women’s real life experience.

So one comment ago you were telling me to look at statistics, now it’s real life experience that matters.

BTW, just search and you will find data, for example https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/crime-and-justice/recorded-crime-victims/latest-release, https://www.statista.com/statistics/423245/us-violent-crime-victims-by-gender/ (which shows 2022 is essentially identical, but quite a gap in 2021), etc. Note that I am searching generic violent crimes. In terms of murders men are quite universally in higher number.

Again, talk to women. Or if you can’t do that, read what actual women have to say about this subject. Do you not value the opinions of women? Do you not believe them when they speak about their personal experiences?

This has nothing to do with my argument. I am not contesting women (need to) fear for their personal safety in public. If I were a woman there would be a host of additional things I would worry about. What I am contesting is the way you present this fact, as if the difference between men and women was a 0-100 difference, when it’s not.

I don’t really see the reason to make up bullshit exaggerations to drive a point that stands on its own without them. Women have to worry and do worry differently, both in terms of quality and quantity than men when they go in public. There are certain risks that in public are fairly irrelevant for men, which doesn’t mean “men have nothing to worry about”. There are also certain risks that are much smaller for women (e.g., getting into a fight in a bar because some dude’s ego was hurt and needs to assert being the alpha).

Why is it necessary for you to make a completely unrealistic assertion (which BTW disregards my opinion as man while talking about men, so “Do you not value the opinions of women? Do you not believe them when they speak about their personal experiences?” cit.) to support a very reasonable thesis? Do you think people can appreciate the safety issue for women only if they contrast it with a completely opposite (i.e., no issue at all) situation for what concerns men?

All the crimes I have mentioned are statistically way more likely than sexual assaults, a crime that notoriously happens mostly within one’s home. So what you just said seems to me completely in antithesis with the original message.

Also, I completely disagree with your assessment. I live in a perfectly safe city and country, but when I travel I sometimes also go in worse areas, and most importantly I don’t even know whether I am in a “bad neighborhood” or not, because I don’t know the place. Hence I worry for my personal safety, which is exactly what prompts for those basic measures that you listed (and more), such as not flashing wealth unnecessarily. You do this exactly because you are aware that man or not you can be victim of such crimes just as much. In fact, statistics show that men are more likely to be victims of violent crimes in general, so I am not really sure where your core thesis come from.

Also worrying is not being terrified, is understanding a risk exists and taking precautions. Either way, this idea that as a man you have nothing to worry about is completely idiotic.

As someone from Rome, I feel you. Pickpocketing is somewhat an issue. In more than 20 years living in the city (before I moved) I never suffered from it, but it’s very common among tourists (especially in the underground and certain bus lines). It sucks and often police does nothing because by the time they catch the people (if they do), everything is gone anyway.

That said, beside pickpocketing Rome is very safe (or at least most of the places where a tourist would go, except maybe the surroundings of Termini station).

Because robberies and mugging do not exist, because I should not worry about them or because they don’t happen to me as a man?

When men leave the house, the worst thing we walk around in fear of is ridicule and rejection.

Do you live in a cartoon? Seriously, this is complete nonsense. I worry about my personal safety very often, when an environment presents certain risks (e.g., getting robbed, mugged etc.). It’s true that I don’t generally fear to be sexually assaulted by a woman, but to say that men don’t (need to) worry about their personal safety is completely absurd.

For too long it told men they can treat women however they want

This is demonstrably false, as we have certain narratives that are literally millennia old (latin literature) about courtship, romantic gestures, protection and all the other stuff usually associated with how men should treat women. Usually this is some form of protection/care for a lower/weaker being, but it is absolutely a way society has been telling men how to tell women for centuries.

I would say that what you said applies not to feminism in general (who historically had strong links to class struggle and anticapitalism), but to a part of the modern status quo feminism which is focused purely on individuals and has been absorbed by the ruling class (e.g., once the CEO is a woman, the goal is reached). This is not a representation of feminism in general though, and I would say the same can apply to many other movements as well (e.g., ambientalism, antiracism, etc.) that (in part) lost their revolutionary nature and are left fighting for small changes within the status quo.

I think that in fact in at least some cases the lack of respect (or general ability to live a relationship with a man in a mutually loving way) is exactly due to that education. At the end of the day the flipside of the “subservient” attitude is that the man in the relationship is represented as a provider, with all the gender stereotypes that come with it: lack of emotions, self-reliance and of course the expectation for him to be a provider. I would say that most of the examples of bad relationships in this thread boil down to exactly these dynamics.

Also we are not anymore in the 1950, so that education today mostly happens implicitly, but it also gets mixed up with a lot of other messages from the wider society.

I personally also disagree about the fact that men are not taught how to fit in their gender role. I think they are, since very little, symmetrically to how women are too and possibly even more explicitly: you need to protect women (incl. sacrificing because that’s what heroes do), the whole courtship thing, the fact that as a man you are responsible to provide for others, that there are certain activities that are manly, etc… Essentially is the exact same problem: gender stereotypes and sexism go both ways and impact both genders, although in different ways.

No, 670k from 42 investors means less than 20k of investment per investor. 670k is already a number ridiculously small for VC funding, but 20k is basically nothing.

Also, after just a few years, 37 employees and 30k users the company became profitable, which is an insanely low period/scale for usual VC funded tech companies.

I am not a fan of some of his ideas either, especially the ones tending towards libertarianism. Some other ideas instead are quite decent, like how he thinks companies should give back to the community. He also built a tech company without VC funding and with a good share of ownership for workers (which I think is nice), without any marketing (which I despise as industry) and generally without the predatory nature that 98% of tech companies have nowadays.

I am sure you are referring to the Brave debacle of months back, and FWIW, I agree with his position on that particular issue. Anyway, considering that I have no ideas about the positions for the CEOs/founders of the alternatives, I think it’s still a very worthy compromise to have a good product (incl. nonfunctional qualities like privacy, ecological impact etc.).

Completely agree, I started seeing business hours popping up lately, I know that they know it’s an area of improvement.

It’s a premium service but it has very nice features and is a good product overall.

I continue to be one of the happiest customers for Kagi, a service that I am so happy to pay (for my family as well).

To be clear, there are some widgets that might be useful in some cases, but it should not be all you see (and it should definitely not include similar stuff as if the focus for any search is just to find more stuff to consume and please advertisers…).

Do you understand what an advantage is, and that there are N attributes where people have advantages?

Anyway, how is this relevant to this particular comment chain?

Can you now show a glimpse of intellectual honestly and show that your source uses poor data and therefore makes a wrong claim? Can you recognize that your initial claim that “Ledecky beats Phelps in long distance” is based on this one source that uses poor data?

I feel like I need you to acknowledge that a comparison between 1-time trials for 15yo Phelps and Ledecky’s peak performance record was not a sane comparison at all, and that the little difference even in such a shitty comparison proves the opposite of what you were claiming.

Aren’t we discussing the arbitrary nature of the gender binary and the intersection of biology, genetic diversity, and ability?

No. You are, maybe. I am discussing the way certain characteristics relate to categories currently used in sport. You started from here to then contest categories themselves, which in have no problem with, recognizing they have obviously limits and they are simply ok-ish proxies.

Amd I’m pretty sure you are the one who started the confrontation

I started a discussion. You turned every single topic of conversation in a polarizing discussions between two opposite sides, despite me being fully open to a lot of your ideas (like for example that categories are arbitrary, that limits are mostly arbitrary especially considering genders are a spectrum, etc.). You constantly force a me vs you fight, which pushed you to actually misrepresent my opinion a couple of times (remember when you claimed I am gender deterministic and see it as fully binary, few comments down from when I said the exact opposite?).

Per the source, Ledecky beat Phelps.

Bad faith 100%. You just made a rant of few lines about how I refuse to make research to further my knowledge (brb, taking a biology degree in between comments), and yet you deny reality about something so simple that doesn’t even require research, it requires basic math and a pinch of common sense.

Yes, your source shows the the personal best for Phelps for a race he did once, when he was 15 is (few seconds!) slower than Katie Ledecky peak performance record. I told you, I run faster the 100m than Bolt when he was 5, so I am faster than Bolt. I actually also outrun my mom’s car when it was without fuel, so I am faster than cars and I ride faster than the winner of the Tour de France when he was learning to bike, so I am faster than him! You can prove anything if you use a shitty enough comparison!

I won’t even try to convince you, because it’s clear you are not here with the intellectual honestly to say “yep, my claim was bullshit”, I will just lay it out as it is to show how ridiculous your argument is. In fact, the source you showed could be used by anybody with a bit of honesty to prove the opposite: if Phelps at 15, without it being his specialty, could swim only a few seconds slower than Ledecky in her main specialty at peak performance, it is clear that men have advantages in swimming!

Yes, regressive like fascists and every other terrible person who can’t fathom a better world so they make us all miserable with the status quo.

Yes, exactly like that, it makes perfect sense. It’s obvious that anybody who didn’t welcome without questions your proposal (which is based on solid science and of course deep, deep understanding of all sports - see above for example swimming!) is a regressive fascist who hates a better world. That’s how the world works!

Yes, you could run it in LAN only. You could access it via VPN only.

Obviously this adds friction in addition to security, but if that’s fine with you, you can.

That is simply because you moved the topic of the conversation to something else. You changed topic twice, and now you are burdening me with providing a solution, when I was barely acknowledging the existence of a problem. Not sure why you are so unnecessarily confrontational, but I am arguing in good faith, laying down exactly what I mean and what I don’t. I am not going to search stuff on the fly I am not competent about to entertain a conversation you are forcing.

Let’s also remember the other shameful thread in which you were claiming something objectively false (Phelps swims slower than Ledecky on distance), and after 3 comments of bad faith arguments you simply disappeared without ever acknowlding the mistake in your argument. Who is arguing in bad faith? You are the one that after being shown that your argument was bases on comparibg times when Phelps was 15 yo answered “being a teenager is an advantage in some sports”.

So please, I don’t think you are in any position to moralize anybody. Including in this case, where I clearly said that even though I am not an expert, a quick search showed some objections to your proposal. Instead of addressing any of that, you just wrote this meta-comment about how I didn’t “debate the science”. So yeah, you want to call me regressive to support status quo vs the impromptu proposal of a random internet user who is not an expert in this either, with the proposal having no general support (I found one article having the same idea in addition to that reddit post)? Sure, I am regressive then.

I don’t have a solution. I started this whole conversation by simply answering “why being intersex is different from having scoliosis”, and we are at this point where you proposed a completely alternative way to slice competitions in sports. In my opinion your solution is impractical at least, let alone there might be tens of scientific issues that I am not aware of. A quick search shows that your idea has been suggested already in informal conversations, and even in a non-scientific forum received objections of missing advantages deriving from hemoglobin, reaction times, biomechanical advantages and sizes, all properties for which sex is a good proxy. This should be addressed somehow, and I am not in a position to do that, I am simply not an expert. That said, I am not against finding a better way to make sport both inclusive and fair/entertaining in principle. I simply believe, based on some reading and a basic understanding that your suggestion might not be it.

Personally, if I think about reversed roles (I.e. some US newspaper putting an Italian gangster hat - a-la The Godfather to some politician with some offer-related pun) I wouldn’t think of it as racist, I would understand it’s not a statement about Italians in general. This also considering that being a gangster of course has plenty of negative connotations.

The whole thing feels to me like the attitude that is made fun on in Parks and Recreation and the Wamapoke. But anyway, the newspaper is shit and to be honest I find the substance of the article way worse than the image.

Thanks for the head’s up!

Yes, colonial mindset refers to the refusal of accepting other cultural backgrounds and cultural lenses, possibly due to an inherent belief that your own is superior or absolutely correct. This is not so uncommon in people coming from an imperial and hegemonic culture (like US). Edit: the colonial nature results evident from the fact that such position translates to the desire/pretense to impose a specific cultural lens or perspective even to facts, discussions etc. that belong to completely different contexts. The same attitude that colonizers have over the colonized.

I have already discussed the merits of the conversation, you refused to elaborate your thought in any way and you are limiting yourself to meta-comments that do not add anything to the conversation. In fact, you wasted several replies not saying anything but implying that your opinion is self-evident, which is a consistent symptom of that colonial mindset I was talking about.

You have been provided with a different, context-aware interpretation and you refused to engage with it at all, including challenging it, because being different from your own is automatically wrong and not deserving even of consideration. In fact you are still stuck on “racism against black people and indigenous people”, which means you didn’t even take into consideration that your interpretation of something happening in a cultural context you don’t understand might be wrong. Of course you also refused to elaborate on the way this is racist, or better, you did in another comment in this post with an explanation that has to do with how racial stereotypes have historically been used to discard opinions of minorities, which while being true doesn’t apply at all to this particular event and in general is quite tangential in Italian history, due to a completely different history compared to that of the US, especially when it comes to indigenous people.

So yeah, all in all I think you are showing a classic colonial mindset. Quite common in internet spaces where US culture is dominant, if it is of any consolation.