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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2024

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  • There is a photograph which accompanies the article of one of the protesters holding a placard which reads, “this is fascism”.

    I feel like it’s totally wrong to apply such a broad generalisation (“They don’t want the [genocide] to stop”) to such a group of people. The people of Israel are not a monolith, and I know for a fact that there are those in Israel who have been protesting their genocidal policies the whole time. It seems very plausible to me that a good number of the protesters calling for an end to the current violence will be opposed to the whole settler-colonialist project, in the same way that I wholeheartedly despise the state of the country that I was born in.







  • I absolutely 100% believe that the US wanted to replace Maduro with a president favourable to them. But if the claims that the election results are fraudulent hold no water, it would be trivial for Maduro to simply release the receipts. I can’t think of any reason why he wouldn’t do so other than to cover up that he lost the election.

    Now there’s a whole other conversation about whether US propaganda led him to lose the election, but that’s immaterial to the outcome. As much as I believe all of these systems are flawed, by their own measure, he should publish the receipts or step down.







  • I feel that that it’s very difficult to formulate any real statistically significant findings from this data because you’d need way more information than we have available to us from the WADA report, personally. Your point that China has a very low rate is completely fair, and I agree with you on that, but there are just so many variables in the mix and the sample sizes are so low, I’d be uncomfortable in making a real conclusion with the data available - all you can really do is point to correlations.

    I’m not arguing with you or saying you’re wrong or anything, just to be clear - just saying it’s really messy and complex. And I agree that the US is broadly pushing sinophobic propaganda as per usual.



  • While China’s WADA positive test rate is indeed low, it’s higher than the Chinese anti-doping agency (CHINADA) positive test rate, by quite a significant amount, which may suggest that the national agency aren’t policing doping as closely as WADA. The USA’s national anti-doping agency (USADA) has a higher positive test rate than WADA’s, again, by quite a significant amount. Additionally, WADA has significantly higher sample rate in the US compared to the sample rate in China - despite the fact that CHINADA has a much higher sample rate than USADA.

    My point isn’t that the US is better or more honest at handling doping than China, just that the analysis of doping test rates has quite a lot of variance, and it’s difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from them.


  • This is a great question! I’d say that the reason is to actually protect the athletes, rather than protect the “purity” of the olympics. If they changed the rules so that people could do all the drugs they wanted to, then it would basically mean that you’re required to do drugs to effectively compete - those without the drugs would have a big disadvantage against those who use them.

    We know that many performance enhancing drugs can have very harmful side-effects, so that would ultimately lead to athletes harming themselves to be able to compete.

    That would not be a good outcome for anyone, I don’t think.