Laura Ingraham guest chastizes Simone Biles for not “working through” her sex abuse trauma before competing in the Olympics

@RSPetc: Over/under on the men using that site to pick up each other?

@Mexican Hot Chocolate

Simone Biles is the BEST GYMNAST IN THE WORLD.

If I understand it correctly, she’s actually even more than that—it sounds like she is the best gymnast who has ever lived (so far, at least).

I find just about all competitive gymnastics superhuman to the point of incomprehensibility; I will go right out there and say that not only can I not perform a cartwheel, I can’t effortlessly touch my toes (and I feel sure that Tucker Carlson and his other right wing windbag middle aged man friends are at least as unfit as I am). But do all reigning world champions increase the global difficulty level of the sport the way she has? I didn’t know that, if so. I also have no problem admitting that I am profoundly unqualified to evaluate what she does other than to be astounded by it when she’s on.

The first thing that struck me was how cruel this sounded. The second thing, how wrong – factually. That “part of a team” crap makes no sense, since she was thinking of her team as well as herself.

OT, but I was watching some hurdles and running races and one thing I thought was a bit unfair is that false starts are completely disqualified – as in, you’re not allowed to compete if you start slightly before you should. Given that this is most likely accidental, I think runners should be given a warning and one more chance. But I don’t know what’s normal for these sports.

And there’s that whole Russia thing. In western coverage, the Russian competitors’ name cards all indicate a country of “ROC” instead of the normal “RUS”, and they keep referring to the country’s Olympic committee in lieu of just referring to the country itself, unlike the case with all of the other countries in the games — even Iran, one of the countries perennially on the international naughty list, and China, easily a stronger geopolitical rival, where there’s an ongoing genocide, and whose government’s cack-handed incompetence inflicted the fucking virus on the world.

Sure, the Russian government’s been up to some dirty dealings recently, including inflicting Trump on an unsuspecting populace, but this systematic snubbery doesn’t seem like an effective, or a very mature, way of responding to it. And it’s not like they’re unique. All imperialistic great-power governments do dirty dealings. They are just usually better at doing it deniably, with the exception of the USA, which prefers the Refuge in Audacity trope (backed up, of course, by the world’s largest military daring anyone to raise a fuss about it).

Taiwan is a half-assed compromise, as I expect its own population would agree. Also Hong Kong. Of course that’s not unique to China. Every imperialistic state has these sorts of small peripheral quasi-autonomous quasi-states with quasi-independence, which usually in practice means “taxation without representation” and being considered part of the imperium for diplomatic and military purposes but as soon as there’s a disaster then they’re on their own.

The US has Puerto Rico; taxed, no representation, and left to fend for itself after Hurricane Maria, though mostly left to administer itself without much interference. America and most of the European (former?) great powers all have miscellaneous Pacific isles; and any of these can become a geopolitical tinderbox. A repeat of the Boer War, the Falklands War, or similarly but with nuclear-armed powers involved would not likely be much fun.

The US gets extra irony points for having started out as such a state itself though.

This pattern is by no means recent. Rome governed its more far-flung conquests in the same way: built roads for the tax man and for the army to follow if he came back unsatisfied, but not much interference in local politics. Maintaining an oppressive occupation is far too expensive at those distances, a lesson the US apparently forgot under W. Bush. His father had it down pat though, as did Bill Clinton in between: punitive raid when they did something wrong and otherwise let them have autonomy as long as the petro-dollars kept flowing into US coffers. No attempt to maintain a boots-on-ground occupation long-term.

Which is not to say that this sort of imperialism is right. H. W. Bush was just more competently evil than his son.

The one variation is whether the imperium claims the colony officially as part of its territory. The US does claim Puerto Rico in this way, but not Iraq. Yet both must pay tribute or suffer the consequences. De facto, they’re both under the yoke of the American imperium.

This predicts exactly what gets punished and what doesn’t. You can gas Kurds inside your borders all you want, but screw with the oil flow by invading Kuwait, or worse try to undermine the whole petro-dollar system, and here come the bombs.

Cynical? Sure, but it also fits all of the observable facts. So does this:

Derek Chauvin was convicted not for lynching a black man — plenty of white cops have done so and gotten away with it — but for giving the billionaires a month of sleepless nights. The lynching was so over the top it sparked such widespread civil unrest that it was not implausible for the unrest to become a revolutionary crown fire and not just a Ferguson-riot ground fire. They live in terror of Marie Antoinette’s fate: gloating and saying “let them eat cake” one day, being hauled in front of a drumhead tribunal the next, and convicted and sentence carried out so fast her head would have spun even had it still been attached.

Both the rich and powerful, and the institution of white supremacy, were brought under genuine threat by Chauvin’s actions. I believe some in his jury voted to convict because he committed cold-blooded murder right in front of a camera, but that most did so because he sparked a backlash strong enough to have white supremacists quaking in their boots. Much of the (weak, and declining) opposition to Trump from within the Republican party and among the superrich undoubtedly stemmed from the same thing: Trump was a loose cannon on deck, geopolitically, for one thing; and he might heat the wealthy-white-male-supremacy water too suddenly and cause the frog to jump.

And on the topic of athletes doping: would someone mind explaining to me why they were testing (and disqualifying) athletes for marijuana, and well in advance of the games? I can see that some performance enhancers, such as artificial testosterone or growth hormone, can be used to bulk up in advance and then stopped just before competition, so testing earlier would be needed to catch such cases, but marijuana is not performance enhancing, and in the short term would be the opposite, I expect, similar to being drunk. There’s no rational reason for them to be testing for it at any time. They also seem overly obsessed with natural testosterone levels and with the runners’ private bits, to judge by all the commentary about which runners are or might be intersex … seems like there are some moralizing busybody pervs on the committees acting far outside their ambit of “make sure there’s a fair, level playing field and that you don’t have to use risky and dangerous stuff like steroids to be competitive”.

Though even there one wonders if there’s a bit of hypocrisy and/or moralizing involved. How risky and dangerous are the training regimes, and the diets? Are athletes having to binge and then starve themselves, or dehydrating themselves just before a weigh-in, to gain an allowed advantage? “Natural” is not equal to “safe”, and “safe” may not be a sensible goal anyway, when the sports themselves are often at least somewhat dangerous … a vault gone wrong can break your neck; playing with water/solute balance and diet can lead to heatstroke or other life-threatening emergencies; steroids have side effects and can make you go sterile; why is the line drawn before that last item and not earlier, or later? Is its placement based on a sensible reason or on “unnatural = bad, natural = good” chauvinism? And if the latter, where should it be drawn?

And that heat and humidity they keep talking about! Shouldn’t that place have a maritime temperate climate, given its coastal location and relatively high latitude? It’s at about the latitude of Raleigh, NC, not Miami …

AFAIK Japan is traditionally quite hot and humid in summer, as is North Carolina. From my perspective, it doesn’t seem remotely optimal for athletic games*. Of course it doesn’t help if summer weather during the games happens to be hotter than average, especially with a new climate change adjusted average.

*that must be held specifically at this time of the year, according to tradition, lest you anger the gods of Olympos.

There’s a similar current pattern in North Pacific:

Kuroshio Current – Wikipedia

That’s why the eastern coasts of both Eurasia and North America have rather similar climate patterns to each other, and western coasts respectively too. Also similar patterns work in southern hemisphere, though there’s no large continent at temperate latitudes.

I know that “summer” olympics have been sometimes held at a different season, at least in southern hemisphere. However, a couple weeks’ difference in timing hardly matters.

@Sue
They always were, and it speaks very poorly of you that you didn’t notice. Also that you were ever a fan of fascist media personalities; that leads me to suppose that you are also a fascist, and I’d like yo invite you to go directly to hell

Garnished with extra churlishness is an excellent description of the IOC. I suspect that’s your answer right there.