More on sports

I spent decades arguing against types of social constructivist essentialism in feminism which ignored/side-lined reproductive biology; I now find myself arguing against forms of biological determinism and essentialism in feminism. Go figure.

Women's sports has become a battlefield – not for equity with male peers but in relation to transgender and intersex athletes' right to compete in women's events.

In the past, women athletes were subjected to inferior status, remuneration, and conditions. Training regimes were based on data drawn from male studies, to the detriment of female athletes. Female sports were almost completely dominated by male coaches, administrators, judges etc all without as much as a peep of protest from most people, including a lot of feminists. 

That so many people have recently developed an interest in women’s sports and issues of fairness and equity is great and long overdue, but perhaps they also need to consider how much of a role the rampant commercialisation and commodification of sports has played and still plays in all this. 

 

“Bread and circuses” is now "fast food and football".

 

Professional and semi-pro sport in the modern era is ALL about money, and in realms where the mighty $ reigns, aided and abetted by toxic nationalism, fairness struggled to survive even before transgender and intersex issues elbowed their way centre stage and complicated things.

 

We know that men on average run and swim much faster; jump and throw much further/higher; lift much heavier weights; punch and kick way more powerfully than women …. because, evolution. 

We also know the more extreme the endurance element in a sport is, the smaller the male APA gets…. also because, evolution. 

 

At the core of that evolutionary, material reality lies the two different roles in reproduction. Fact.

 

There are a few sports in which women have an average performance advantage over men, they’re just not the "blue riband", big money events largely because sports have been and still are designed to showcase male abilities – and in the modern era, to make money, mostly for men.

 

Star athletes – mostly male – are paid obscene amounts of money, and trailing behind them like a school of suckerfish, are a host of agents, PR people, trainers, nutritionists, psychologists, consultants ….  And on a wider front, a vast array of mainly male technocrats, bureaucrats, administrators etc. 

 

As some women’s sports move out of the cinders in terms of financial and status rewards, and with the rise of transgenderism as a political movement, there are now people who were born male, who went through male puberty and competed in male sports, who see a financial and competitive / status advantage in identifying as women and competing against natal females. 

 

These are not elite athletes; they are, to date at least, the also-rans and the has-beens. The financial and status rewards in male sports are simply still too great for an elite male to make the switch.

 

I very much doubt the elite pro bike rider who, as Robert Miller, won stages of the European Grand Tours, would have transitioned to compete as Philippa York in women's races back in the day. 

 

Even with the genuinely gender dysphoric, the switch only happens once an athlete is over the top of the elite male performance hill, or if they were never going to make it up the hill. 

The rewards gap is still too huge and it’s natal male athletes who either no longer make the elite grade, or were never going to make it, who are moving into women’s sports.

 

We know that the post-pubertal physiological and psychological performance advantages accrued by male athletes are not all lost with a lowering of androgen levels – and that an average performance advantage still applies, especially in those areas where the APA is huge, like weightlifting. 

 

Most of the world's elite female super heavyweight weightlifters were out-lifted by a 42-year-old transgender lifter who, even at his male peak was never likely to make it beyond national junior level competition.

 

And with the acceptance of a surgically transitioned trans athlete’s right to add back, on health grounds, synthetic androgens up to the IOC limit of 10 nmols/L, the playing field is completely unlevel – tilted even more against natal females. 

Having presided over the debacle, the IOC has raised its manicured hands, rolled over and waved its be-suited legs in the air and tossed the hot transgender/intersex potato to sporting federations to deal with.

 

And there are no easy answers. The simplistically-minded, ideologically blinkered on the transactivists' side say that it's all down to a subjective gender identity and any male APA a trans athlete has must be viewed as no different from any other naturally occurring physiological advantages. 

The simplistically-minded on the other side look for the solution in DNA, eg the presence of a Y chromosome makes a person male and ineligible to enter women's events. End of story. 

 

Maybe the answer lies in decommercialising and denationalising sport, making it about the individual’s love of sport not national hubris and money.

 

Yeah, I know – like action on climate change, mass pollution, and species extinctions, that ain’t going to happen because ... bread and circuses.

Don't Look Up the Robes of the Elite

The film "Don't Look Up"  irritated the hell out of me on first viewing – so much so, I fast fowarded through it but I watched it again properly and I revised my opinion, somewhat.  

Mark Rylance is an acting genius as is Meryl Streep but I'd rather they hadn't made a US female president a raging narcissist who sends pictures of her fanny to porn stars she elevates to the Supreme Court, etc etc.  

It got way too heavy handed – often slipping from satire into a sort of parodic slapstick. I still can’t decide whether the film makers were being self-consciously heavy-handed – deliberately going beyond satire into cartoonish parody in order to reach those they think they need to reach, i.e. not the already environmentally aware and active, but all those who have been successfully blinded, deafened, and dumbed down by all the plastic shite and disinformation.

 

Did they decide that the target audience needs an apocalyptic beating about the head with the star-spangled obvious because their critical faculties have either not been developed at all or have been corroded by the toxic garbage that is US-style popular entertainment and information media?

 

Were they being doubly ironic? Were they self-consciously and cynically cashing in on the impending environmental catastrophe as much as the Rylance character sought to cash in on a planet-killing asteroid on collision course with Earth?

 

One pretty obvious layer of irony is the title – the injunction “don’t look up” is precisely what all the layers of plastic garbage and fake news are meant to achieve – don’t look up to see what the economic and political elites are actually doing to us and the planet, keep your eyes fixed on the screen and your head filled with ephemera.

 

One thing’s certain, people are watching it, but whether they all get the urgent, allegorical message is another thing entirely – as is whether enough of them will get off their well-padded butts and act. 

 

Another facet that annoyed me was the use of the plot device of a planet-killing comet with all its speed and urgency. The thing with climate change is it's just not that screamingly obvious – yet – and if it were, many people, being what their masters have made them, are as likely to slide into fatalism or nihilism as they are to unite to take the actions needed to save the planet and all who currently survive on her. 

It's a delicate balance – conveying the absolute urgency of acting hard and fast whilst still making people believe that doing so will mean their kids and grand kids will actually have a planet to live well on. 

 

On Public Health

The NZ public hospital system is in crisis. The predicted massive surge of Covid infections, with vulnerable people and the unvaccinated forming the bulk of those needing hospitalisation, could easily tip it into chaos.

If you need any sort of diagnostic procedure or are in need of some sort of elective surgery that is deemed to be non-urgent – and if you don't have insurance or the cash to pay the huge fees of the private sector – you may just have to continue to suffer.

If you are unlucky enough to have a heart attack, a serious accident etc you will be entering a system which has inadequate ICU provision even without a mass of critically ill people with Covid.

THIS is the primary reason for the controls. 

Ardern's government inherited an inadequate public health system and we cannot reasonably blame it for not reversing all the trends of the past forty years – especially not given it has been dealing with a global pandemic for most of its current term – and was hamstrung by a rightwing coalition partner in its first term. 

It's not possible to build, equip, and staff primary health centres and new hospitals in the middle of a global pandemic.

But imagine if all the money that has been poured into wage subsidies, vaccines, tracking systems, PPE etc had been invested in the creation of a proper NHS. One in which there are primary health hubs with a full range of diagnostic equipment and trained staff, a range of auxiliary services, and GPs employed by the NHS, not a privately owned practice with an eye on profit margins. Primary health centres which engage with community health issues, health promotion and disease/injury prevention. 

Well, an old advocate of a socialised, holistic health system can dream.

So, this government gets a bit of a pass – but only a bit and none of those which preceded it do. And let's not forget, National has governed for most of the past forty years of neoliberal asset-stripping and diversion of state funds into private pockets.

That Covid-sceptic, Christian, doctor up north who claims to care so much about his community – owns the practice, i.e., it's a business first, health provider second. He cares so much about his Māori community, his practice doesn't even employ a te reo speaker.

So he, and all like him, can sod off with his posturing in the robes of a defender of democratic freedoms, as can all the other medical people who are choosing, not just to be unvaccinated, but who are trying to persuade others to do the same.

Vaccination is one part of the wider approach to managing this virus. The vaccine gives degrees of protection against the Delta variant but it won't necessarily stop you getting it or passing it on. Nor will it stop other vaccine-resistant variants from emerging.

The biggest danger to the public health strategy is that among the vaccine-resisters, there will be a higher proportion of people who are sceptical about the dangers of the virus, and with that about the need for other infection-prevention and control measures, such as masking, hand washing, social distancing, scanning, etc.

Unvaccinated people are statistically more likely to catch the virus and pass it on, including to people who are highly vulnerable because of known or unknown vulnerabilities. All the evidence points to the fact that an unvaccinated person is more likely to catch and to transmit the virus, to become extremely ill, to need ICU treatment, and to die. It might be their choice, but their choice may well adversely affect other people.

The greatest irony in all this is that the main reason for mass vaccination and control measures like mandates, is the parlous state of the NZ health service. This is not a phenomenon that can be blamed on the Ardern government alone – the erosion of the already compromised principle of free health care (I'm looking at all those self-interested doctors who refused to participate and have leapt on every opportunity since to make money out of the contract culture) – can be laid at the door of successive governments which have enabled the encroachments of the private sector and under-funded the public sector.

Treatment of people with Covid in hospital is massively resource intensive – not just in the ICU – and puts already over stretched and stressed hospital workers at far greater risk of harm. 

Covid-sceptics in Canterbury should be aware that when there is the predicted mass wave of infections as Auckland borders open for the summer exodus – we will see an upsurge down here, not just of mildly sick people, but people ill enough to need to be hospitalised and to be rated in ICU – in a DHB which has now formally closed its waiting lists for any and all non-urgent procedures.

The Canterbury DHB has been upping its triage game over the past year – refusing all diagnostics to anyone not considered by them to be an urgent / acute case. Pretty much the only way into Christchurch public hospital now will be via an ambulance or for life-saving treatment.

And, if you have a heart attack or a serious accident, be prepared to enter a system that will be diverting massive amounts of resources into treating critically ill people with Covid – a high proportion of whom will be vaccine-resisters. A large number of people with Covid will be left to isolate at home and we will see yet more deaths in that scenario. 

So for all those who will now try to blame this government for what is about to happen – if you have never bothered to engage with any of these issues in the past; if you stood by and watched a two-tier health system develop; if you pocketed profits from the sale of publicly owned assets or excused that happening; if you have refused vaccination and/or not taken other infection control measures seriously–-I very politely request that you sod off with your cynical, sceptical, or stupid claims about defending democracy.

US justice - what is it good for?

However hard Jesse Singal tries to spin the outcome of the Rittenhouse trial, using extant state and federal laws, it’s impossible to remove race or class from this situation. 

Would a black kid have had supporters who could quickly raise $2m for bail, and an undisclosed amount for a top flight legal defence? 

US history does way more than suggest that a 17-year-old black kid with an assault rifle who shot three people, killing two of them, would not only NOT have been cleared on all counts, but would most likely have been incarcerated for decades. 

 

The skin colour of his victims is irrelevant because they were deemed to be left wing / troublemakers / mentally unstable young men who contributed to their own demise by a) being there with a presumed ill-intent, and b) chasing an armed man.

 

The fact that Rittenhouse cried and vomited when he turned himself in as logically attributable to the after effects of high levels of adrenaline and fear of what would follow if he were jailed, as it is to remorse. 

 

Those who want to cast Rittenhouse as a Disneyfied, soft-focus, citizen-vigilante, too young to make good judgements, caught up in a terrifying situation and genuinely in fear of his life at the hands of those he saw as the enemy of all he holds dear …. are also logically and ethically obligated to oppose the insanity of laws and a mass popular culture which allows cognitively immature people to legally own, and carry in public, military grade weapons. 

 

A society which has a mass culture that promotes and legitimates the presence of heavily armed citizen-militias, which incarcerates more of its (poor and black) citizens per capita than any other country in its prison-industrial complex, which could house, feed, educate and keep healthy its entire population with the money it wastes on its military-industrial complex.... is a fundamentally flawed society. 

 

The side of US society that Rittenhouse identifies with, sought to protect – the side he inserted himself and his assault rifle into – is also the side that created, and which perpetuates that toxic culture.

 

I’m of the opinion that he should have been found guilty of manslaughter by virtue of his age,  been barred from owning or using a gun for the rest of his life, and been entered into some sort of rehabilitative programme rather than the hell-hole of a US prison – but such a verdict only becomes just if all other neurologically immature US citizens in similar situations, irrespective of race and/or class, could reasonably expect such a response from the courts. 

 

They can’t. And as things stand, they won’t. 

 

And a bit closer to home while we are on the subject of miscarriages of justice  – a  young man, also aged 17, also white and middle class, who drove a powerful car at speeds of up to 180 kph in city streets, who ran into and killed a 19 -year-old Chinese student, who fled the scene and conspired with his mates to lie to the police about his car having been stolen; who, when dobbed in, expressed racist views and sought to deflect from his culpability by suggesting the young woman should not have been in NZ - was charged with, and pleaded guilty to, manslaughter even though his actions were so reckless they met the criteria for murder. He “used his car as a lethal weapon” and “drove at insane speeds” – the Judge’s words – but got a five year sentence, and was out in under two.

The reason for the charge of manslaughter was he was white, middle class, driving a car, and deemed by the cops to be too young to fully comprehend the consequences of driving in that fashion so no jury would convict him of murder.

Second scenario involves five young brown, poor people, the oldest 17 and youngest 12, who staged a classic horizontal crime of robbing a pizza delivery man, also ethnically Chinese. They hit him on the head with a baseball bat, robbed him; took him back to his car unaware that he had a brain bleed, and because no one nearby came to his aid or called for help, the poor man died.

Utterly tragic on every level.

But did the police or the courts consider that those young kids might have been incapable of fully understanding the consequences of their actions – especially in a society in which kids are assailed constantly with images of people being bashed on the head with no resulting brain damage or death? Were they that much more culpable than the car driver that their actions constituted murder?

Aggravated robbery – causing bodily harm or death in the commission of a robbery always carries a heavier tariff because our society places such a high value on protection of property. 

Causing injury or death by dangerous driving is often treated more lightly because of the high social value our society places the right to drive, a value driven by the lobbyists  pushing the huge economic interests of the car and petro-chemical industries. And in the neo-liberal era, there is a greater need to drive because of the erosion of public transport and growth of satellite communities.

It was no accident that those kids were Māori and poor. Nor was it an accident that the media talked up the crime shamefully lurid, tub-thumping, amygdala-exciting terms.

Similarly the trial of Lipine Sila. His reckless actions caused immense harm and ended two young lives, but I have no doubt that had Sila been the scion of a white, affluent Christchurch family and his victims been two working class brown girls, the charge would have been manslaughter plus ABH and he would have got a lighter sentence than life with a mandatory non-parole period of 18 years.  Nor would we have had the local newspaper covering the prosecution case in terms that eventually drove the judge to order them to tone it down – in time for the defence case.

 

Rittenhouse is a victim in a sense. He’s a kid who has bought into the American dream and constructed a scenario in which the angry young people drawn to antifa are his enemy, while heavily armed, right-wing militias are his patriotic allies.

A Perfect Storm

The Nuremberg Code is being invoked by anti-vaxxers in the UK, and picked up by people here in NZ. It's a weird movement that engages in forms of theatrics such as threatening medical staff with prosecutions and capital punishment for violating a code developed to prevent the recurrence of the obscenity of Nazi medical experiments.

Some of those drawn to the movement are genuinely frightened; some are reflexively oppositional, and some are just vexatious shit-stirrers.

IMO, anyone who has swallowed prescription, or over the counter medications, without knowing or even wanting to know their mechanism of action; who fails to question the ethics of NZ allowing TV advertising and OTC sales of powerful medications; who eats foods full of synthetic chemicals without questioning their effects in isolation, let alone in combination with all the other synthetic chemicals they are exposed to daily; who fails to address the wider economic and political context of all of this –  has no business getting all holier-than-thou, or forming wanna-be lynch mobs over Covid vaccination.

We are reaping what our corporate and political masters have sown for hundreds of years – get angry with them, not with each other.

If you want to hurt Big Pharma and the wider petrochemical industry – stop buying all the shit its various branches produce; challenge the symptomatic-pharmacological paradigm that modern medicine is wedded to; start agitating for a proper national health service in NZ –  one which provides high quality, FREE primary health and dental care, not this weird hybrid which pours state and individuals' money into private pockets.

And, start organising to stop the petrochemical giants poisoning the planet, and look to how we can combine to develop ways of living in and with nature instead of devouring it.

Disaster capitalism will always seek to turn a threat into a market opportunity, and Covid is just the latest on a long and ugly list. Those who run the world know there is a perfect storm brewing – one that is of their creation because of their greed and their utter heedlessness of consequence. 

Their sole concern is to weather that storm with their lives and their power intact. They know that forms of authoritarian governance are inevitable in the future and they've been preparing for the point when the ideological controls they prefer become too thin and frayed to be effective any longer – when people realise they've sold their kids' future for a load of actual and virtual junk and ephemera. 

When the lies become exposed and the contradictions become too sharp and jagged to be borne any longer and enough people start to demand structural change – that's when the iron fist of the compliant states' paramilitary and military wings will be utilised to effect control. 

Anyone who thinks the rise of paramilitary police forces globally is to fight crime is living in a cartoon.Their primary function is to protect the corporate criminals and their political stooges.

There is only one way out of the mess the corporate criiminals have created and that is mass organisation. For that to work, there has to be at least a broad consensus of the need for change, what we change to, and of the strategies for achieving and retaining change. 

The start point has to be to stop allowing ourselves to be divided from our natural allies, distracted away from the essentials, and diverted away from what needs to be done.

More churnalism

On page 4 of today's Press newspaper, there's a story, headlined "Child poverty puts NZ on 'roll of shame' " – the Children’s Commissioner deploring, yet again, the fact that this wealthy nation has an estimated 125,000 kids living in poverty.

Taking up two-thirds of the front page, is a story with a huge photo, headlined: "Transgender woman who waited 80 years to be herself".

To me, those two headlines and their relative positions, sum up the superficial, diversionary priorities of the Neo-liberal era. 

 

The transgender story also takes pride of place on the Stuff website and includes a 5 minute video with a suitably reverential voice over. The child poverty story does not figure on the Stuff website front page at all, and nor was it in the Press Twitter feed at the time of writing this.

 

To a person who lived as a boy and man for 80 years, married, and fathered four children, and who now wants to dress openly in stereotypically female clothing, use a stereotypically female name, and have people use female third person pronouns when referring to them – I would normally say, do whatever makes you happy. I would not make a big deal out of it being written up as a human interest story. 

 

But occupying almost the entire front page of the weekend edition of a major NZ newspaper and headline story on a major news website has made me take a huge decision. For the first time in my long life there will be no printed mainstream newspaper in my house. I will not be renewing my Press subscription, and I will write to the editor to explain why. 

 

Furthermore, until such time as New Zealand no longer has:

 

appallingly high rates of child poverty, extreme and growing differentials in income and wellbeing, and a growing number of so-called working poor;

 

obscenely differential Māori incarceration rates, especially of wāhine, and grossly differential post-surgery survival rates and life expectancy for Māori;

very high rates of family violence and rape;

one of the worst records in the world for native land and marine species extinction; 

 

an economy that is reliant on a mainly for export, industrialised form of primary production which is resulting in a catastrophic loss of top soil, and is dependent on imported artificial fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and anthelmintics, the use of which has resulted in high and growing levels of water contamination and wider environmental pollution ....

...I will continue to call out this sort of knee-jerk, diversionary, superficial, miserable excuse for journalism which, as well as being an insult to women, and promoting what will be viewed in the future as a social contagion, may – by fuelling a conservative moral panic – put transgender people and a host of others, at risk in the future.

I remember the Press too often engaging in populist, tub-thumping, moral panic inducing reportage such as the deplorable coverage of the prosecution case in the Lipine Sila trial. I remember all those crass and racist cartoons. 

This sort of flag-waving in its way is worse than that because it poses as progressive.

This is not a game. This is not a means by which middle-class people, who otherwise tacitly or overtly support the socio-economic status quo, get to acquire some political brownie points and make themselves feel better about their social and economic privilege.

This serves as a diversion away from the vast array of current and looming economic, social, and environmental crises which will hit the poor and especially poor women and kids, first and worst.

If I live long enough to see the knee-jerkers wake up from their gender-identity stupor, I'll get no satisfaction from saying "we told you so". 

 

On being nice and stuff...

I just saw a meme about how women can't afford to be nice or some such wording. 

That rather depends on your definition of "nice" I guess.

Women need to avoid behaving like men do – i.e., swallowing the line that compassion, empathy, cooperation, and mutuality are somehow lesser emotions and ways of being and organising than their opposites.

Women need to protect already stressed female collectives, which sometimes means shelving differences, i.e., remembering that life always involves degrees of compromise.

Whilst I do understand visceral anger – it's an old companion and the multi-faceted chip on my shoulder sometimes still dictates my responses to people and situations – I also know that women cannot afford to waste precious time and energy on misdirected anger and aggression. 

We need to be strategic.

And we need to be consistent. We can't rail against state enabled violence against women on the one hand, and on the other, call for the death penalty for men we disapprove of.

Well, not in my ethical universe.

Sometimes kicking in a door that remains stubbornly closed against us is the only way to gain entry. But sometimes picking the lock might work, or climbing in through a window ... or better still, saying "sod you" to gaining entry to the structure with the closed doors, and create a whole new structure which we control.

Sorry, I'm in an analogy mindset; must be the drugs.

Speaking of which – anyone who is opposed to the Covid vaccine and doesn't also take a stand against the makers of the chemical soup we are forced to live in, is being foolish. 

And that's being kind.

If you take non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs regularly or longterm without understanding their mechanism of action; If you go to the doctor with a cold and expect antibiotics; if you swallow paracetamol as if it's completely benign; if you never check the additives in the food you eat ....you have no business pontificating on the safety of vaccines.

We all know, or should, that modern medicine is bound by its symptomatic and pharmaco-surgical paradigms. If we want holistic, less drug-centred, high quality health care, we need to be aiming at changing the entire edifice -– not just tidying up the waiting room.