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[–]Juniperius 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Otherwise we could have truly integrated sports. But that wouldn't make sense.

This isn't parallel. The point of sports is to push bodies themselves towards their limits of ability, to compete on the basis of inherent strength and ability. The point of most other activities is to accomplish some external goal, which is why we use tools, weapons, etc to extend the body in ways that make strength and so forth less relevant. This is why it's possible to cheat in sports, whereas if you come up with some clever way of making it easier to, say, move large amounts of dirt around a construction site, or conquer your enemies without brute force, people won't say, hey, no fair, that's cheating.

[–]MarkTwainiac 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

That remark of Theory's comment about sports was/is a total non sequitur that has nothing to do with what was being discussed.

Theory likes to keep switching the topic from one topic to another: he makes points about violence, then later pretends he was talking about aggression, or about soldiering. Then he pretends soldiering means sports. I used to think he was just a sloppy thinker & writer, but I have come to the conclusion that it's a deliberate tactic he reverts to whenever he is challenged. Rather than respond to the challenge directly, he starts talking about another tangentially related topic. It's tiresome.

I don't think anyone GC would dispute that males & females are physically different in myriad ways that causes males to have enormous advantages over females in the vast majority of sports. Nor would anyone GC dispute that males are better suited to certain kinds of soldiering, such as the infantry or in battles that involve hand to hand combat against males. But even before the invention of gunpowder that sort of soldiering was responsible for only some of the violence men have committed in the world.

Moreover, since the dawn of time, foot soldiers have always been commanded by rulers & officers who are not putting their own bodies on the front lines, or on the line at all, & thus their level or lack of physical strength is immaterial. Many rulers & military commanders have been older or elderly men, some of them with disabilities.

In WW 2, for example, the leaders of the Allied powers were men well past their physical prime whose health problems meant they personally would not have survived long on a battlefield: FDR's legs were paralyzed due to polio; Stalin had limited or no use of his left arm due to an injury sustained when he was 12 & was a very heavy smoker who suffered a stroke at the end of the war; and Churchill, though strong of spirit, was an overweight heavy drinker & cigar smoker with chronic depression & heart disease who suffered a heart attack in 1941 & a bad bout of pneumonia in 1943.

Harry Truman, who became POTUS toward the end of the war after FDR's death, was a slightly-built man who had very poor eyesight since childhood that required him to wear very thick glasses & fit the criteria for "legal blindness;" as a result, he was rejected for West Point & also for military service when he initially applied - he ended up joining the Missouri National Guard, but he only got in because he'd memorized the eye charts. Yet whilst Truman's eyesight & age meant he wouldn't have made it a day as a soldier on the battlefield, nor could he have been a pilot or gunner, neither his age nor this stopped Truman from being able to take the decisive executive actions he did to bring WW2 in the Pacific to a close by dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, events that caused at least 200,000 deaths.