Re: Ted Rall Subscription Service (fwd)

[robert <http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert>]

Couldn't agree more.

 > From: Noelle <noelle>
 > Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2022 12:03:01 -0700 (PDT)
 >
 >  > From: Ted<http://www.send.mailchimpapp.com/~tedrall.aol.com>
 >  > Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2022 16:53:06 +0000
 >  > 
 >  > The Ted Rall Subscription Service
 >  > Thank you for supporting independent political commentary
 >  > Here is this week's column. Thanks for subscribing to the Ted Rall 
 >  > Subscription Service.
 >  > 
 >  > A new Washington Post poll (
 >  > https://rall.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=317c94f76a09aa357140ea82c&id=ed6080c35&e=c3adcc1cdb )
 >  > about Americans’ views of transgender athletes 
 >  > offers a lot to think about. I found the margins more interesting than the 
 >  > headline. Like, who are these 2% of people who think that transgender girls 
 >  > are at a physical disadvantage when they compete against cis girls in youth 
 >  > sports? Why would they think that?
 >  > 
 >  > Another takeaway is that 16% of respondents have a close friend or family 
 >  > member who is transgender. One in six! As a writer and cartoonist who works 
 >  > from home—but in New York, the most diverse city in the country—clearly 
 >  > I need to get out and meet more people. Last week a Pew poll found that 1% 
 >  > of Americans are nonbinary, a figure that rises to 3% for people ages 18 to 
 >  > 29. I know hundreds of people, including lots of Millennials. How come I don�>  > ��t know anyone nonbinary in a country with 3.3 million of them?
 >  > 
 >  > But what I’ve been thinking about most is an issue that is so baked into 
 >  > our society that it is no issue at all: the idea that competition is a good 
 >  > thing.
 >  > 
 >  > Most respondents to the Post survey oppose allowing transwomen to 
 >  > participate against cis women in competitive sports at any level. Yet a 
 >  > majority are also concerned that the mental health of transgender athletes 
 >  > might suffer as a result of such a ban—meaning that, even among some of 
 >  > those who view such competition as unfair, some worry that transwomen 
 >  > athletes denied the opportunity to compete against other women in sports 
 >  > will suffer psychological damage.
 >  > 
 >  > It’s an intractable issue. As transgender athletes have argued, 
 >  > segregation by gender in sports is in and of itself arbitrary (
 >  > https://rall.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=317c94f76a09aa357140ea82c&id=36aee43cff&e=c3adcc1cdb
 >  > ) since some cis women have inherent biological 
 >  > advantages over some cis men. Any attempt to make physical competition 
 >  > fairer, as with weight classes in boxing and wrestling is inherently 
 >  > arbitrary. Where does it stop? Shall we have separate basketball leagues 
 >  > based on the players’ heights? Should the 152-to-164 lb. weight class be 
 >  > split up more finely? Down to the ounce?
 >  > 
 >  > There is little political appetite for allowing everyone to compete against 
 >  > one another regardless of sex or gender, and for obvious reasons: in most 
 >  > sports, people who are born male have bigger and stronger bodies, and 
 >  > hormonal advantages, on average than those born female. Eliminating the 
 >  > gender divide would effectively downgrade half the human race to intramural 
 >  > athletes, with no chance to win anything more than the joy and satisfaction 
 >  > of participating.
 >  > 
 >  > But then, what’s so great about competition? Personally, this cis male has 
 >  > always found competition of all kinds — in sports, at work, in the arts —
 >  >  to be toxic.
 >  > 
 >  > I attended elementary school in the mid-1970s, when soccer was first gaining 
 >  > a foothold in the United States. In my Ohio town it started out as 
 >  > exclusively intramural. I signed up and loved it. (It’s not relevant here, 
 >  > but I was pretty good.) Then they converted the intramural league to the 
 >  > competitive teams we have today. Coaches, and then players, got serious 
 >  > about winning. They turned mean. Grown men ordered us kids to target the 
 >  > best player on rival teams and injure them so that they couldn’t play. It 
 >  > wasn’t fun anymore so I quit.
 >  > 
 >  > Competition ruined every sport I tried: track, wrestling, baseball. Winning 
 >  > was the only thing that mattered. My teammates quickly took to trash-talking 
 >  > batters; I found the practice foul. To me, play is not something that you do 
 >  > at the expense of other people. I’m not alone: Survey data (
 >  > https://rall.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=317c94f76a09aa357140ea82c&id=d936119808&e=c3adcc1cdb
 >  > ) shows that 70% of kids drop out (
 >  > https://rall.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=317c94f76a09aa357140ea82c&id=d10cecb0c1&e=c3adcc1cdb
 >  > ) of organized sports by age 13.
 >  > 
 >  > Studies show that competition causes depression, anxiety and self-harm (v) . 
 >  > And no wonder! Competition turns everyone but the winner into losers. The 
 >  > practice of my professors at Columbia University School of Engineering, who 
 >  > graded on a curve, illustrated the absurdity of America’s winner-take-all 
 >  > culture. No matter how brilliant the students in a class, half of us would 
 >  > receive an F. Objectively, of course, we were all superb at math and science 
 >  > and we all worked hard; we wouldn’t have been admitted otherwise. 
 >  > Objectively, we all should have gotten As. Instead, CU set up a system where 
 >  > they took thousands of students who were by far the best in their high 
 >  > schools, and turned three-quarters of them, me included, into expelled 
 >  > losers, unemployed with thousands of dollars in student loans.
 >  > 
 >  > Because of competitive grading, 49% of students feel a great deal of stress (
 >  > https://rall.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=317c94f76a09aa357140ea82c&id=5ad898c271&e=c3adcc1cdb
 >  > ) on a daily basis. Educators should consider 
 >  > following the example of Hampshire College (
 >  > https://rall.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=317c94f76a09aa357140ea82c&id=618607316b&e=c3adcc1cdb
 >  > ) , which does not issue letter grades.
 >  > 
 >  > If you have held a job, you know how dispiriting workplace competition can 
 >  > be. Brownnosers prevail over those who work harder. Intelligent workers get 
 >  > passed over in favor of those who don’t threaten their colleagues with 
 >  > difficult questions. Unfair promotions piss people off. Workers are more 
 >  > likely to quit a job (v) after a colleague gets promoted than one in which 
 >  > no one gets promoted.
 >  > 
 >  > Competition in the arts is silly and destructive. What makes a song or a 
 >  > sculpture or a cartoon “better” than another one? It’s purely a matter 
 >  > of subjective taste. Who receives the Oscar or the Tony or the Nobel usually 
 >  > has far more to do with contemporary politics and the composition of the 
 >  > prize jury than the quality of the work.
 >  > 
 >  > Columbia University, which administers the Pulitzer Prize, has decided to 
 >  > abolish the editorial cartooning section in favor of a broad illustrated 
 >  > commentary category that also includes comics journalism, comic strips, 
 >  > graphic novels, magazine illustrations, you name it. Effectively they have 
 >  > reduced an editorial cartoonist’s chance of winning a Pulitzer from slim 
 >  > to none, which is bad for a nearly-extinct profession, which is why I added 
 >  > my name to a petition letter (
 >  > https://rall.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=317c94f76a09aa357140ea82c&id=83cae6e569&e=c3adcc1cdb
 >  > ) opposing it.
 >  > 
 >  > In a way, though, they’ve done us a favor. With few exceptions, each year� >  > �s announcement of the winners and finalists has been followed by a flurry 
 >  > of phone calls between the 99% of us who lost. We disagree with the choice 
 >  > of the winner. We bemoan the great work that’s been snubbed. We wonder 
 >  > what the hell happened in the room where it happened (
 >  > https://rall.us18.list-manage.com/track/click?u=317c94f76a09aa357140ea82c&id=ef9c5fc0e9&e=c3adcc1cdb
 >  > ) ; what were the jurors thinking and why are their 
 >  > deliberations unaccountable? Most of all, we wonder what we could have done, 
 >  > if anything — spoiler, probably nothing — to have won ourselves? Even 
 >  > the winner is a loser, because for they know that few others are happy about 
 >  > their victory. I’ve been at this for more than a quarter of a century and 
 >  > I can’t remember any winner being greeted by anything close to universal 
 >  > acclaim by his or her colleagues.
 >  > 
 >  > If you can’t win, you can’t lose.