Twitter is down: puter on Archbang.

This is a screenshot of the computer this morning. I have swapped, overnight, to Arch, using Archbang. The browsers are working and I can blog. The reason I am doing this is that Xubuntu on both servers has gone flakey. I have installed xfce, (though the picture is the default OS — openbox, running on two screens). I need to ensure that all the work programmes are stable before I change the main production machine.

But Ubuntu is getting too bloated. Going smaller improves things.

Which is nothing to do with today’s passage, which continues from yesterday’s post, that we will be considered fools. Paul explains why.

Those of the world neither recognize the spirit of God nor do they understand it. To them, we re nuts. We have scruples. We do not “just get along”. We stand up when we should bow, and we bow to a LORD they do not recognize.

1 Corinthians 2:1-13

¹When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. ²For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. ³And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. ⁴My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, ⁵so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.

⁶Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. ⁷But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. ⁸None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. ⁹But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” – ¹⁰these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. ¹¹For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. ¹²Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. ¹³And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual.

Lindsay Smith, an elite female crossfit athlete. From the 2010 Games website

We forget that the elite are stupid. and consider that their feelings can trump biology. It cannot. The example I am quoting and will then double quote comments from is about a woman called Chloe who is offended that she cannot compete as a woman after having a sex change. She forgets that being raised as a man makes you taller, stronger and faster. In my youth, back in the ancient days, I was a “B grade” runner. I could never make the top relay teams — my running club had a Olympic medalist and another sub four-minute miler as members — but I could make the B team. Which meant I found myself ahead of female Olympians or slightly behind in most races, including one who also got an Olympic medal

Her lawyer, Waukeen McCoy, said Jonsson, who works as a personal trainer and is an avid CrossFit practitioner, first spoke to company representatives about her background a year ago after a teammate learned that participants in the Reebok CrossFit Games were required to register according to their gender at birth.

“They said she has an advantage over other women because of the sex she was born with, and that is completely untrue, scientifically,” McCoy said, noting that the International Olympic Committee and other sports governing bodies allow athletes who have undergone surgery, taken hormones and secured legal recognition to compete in the category that corresponds to their affirmed gender.

CrossFit’s general counsel, Dale Saran, would not comment on the lawsuit, which seeks $2.5 million in damages. Saran directed The Associated Press to a CrossFit online discussion board, where he posted that Jonsson had never supplied medical documents to back up her assertion that she was a woman. He also dismissed McCoy’s suggestion that transgender athletes are engaged in a struggle as valid as the one black baseball players waged to be accepted in the major leagues.

“The fundamental, ineluctable fact is that a male competitor who has a sex reassignment procedure still has a genetic makeup that confers a physical and physiological advantage over women,” Saran wrote in a letter to McCoy that’s linked to the discussion board. “That Chloie may have felt herself emotionally, and very conscientiously, to be a woman in her heart, and that she ultimately underwent the legal and other surgical procedures to carry that out, cannot change that reality.”

Saran said CrossFit may create a separate division for transgender athletes if enough step forward to compete.

“Our decision has nothing to do with `ignorance’ or being bigots – it has to do with a very real understanding of the human genome, of fundamental biology, that you are either intentionally ignoring or missed in high school,” he said.

Male crosfit, at a regional qualification event

You cannot get away from biology. The men in Crossfit are generally (ahem) strong. Not necessarily big — there are few elite athletes in any endurance sport who are over six feet — but very strong. Some would have a BMI around 30 with a very low body fat. The women are similar, but about 20-30 kg lighter and about 60% less strong. And these are some of the fittest people in the world.

The fact that Chloe is doing crossfit is good. I’m somewhat jealous: My foot is still healing and I cannot do circuits — besides, I am quite aware that Crossfit would rip my always healing tendons apart. I have had too many injuries when I was trying to hang with elite athletes in my 20s.

But the biology of sex trumps any postmodern ideas around Gender. SSM dissects these today..

Radical feminists are a fringe minority, but liberal feminists are really quite influential, both culturally and politically. Yet liberal feminists’ support of transgenderism forces them to hold two opposing beliefs simultaneously:

1. that gender is a social construct; therefore any inferiority that is detected in women is the result of sexism, and legal and social policies should be enacted, including spending lots of tax-payer money, to right these inequities,

but also…

2. that gender is a biological reality and thus transgendered people should be supported in their quest to look and behave like extreme versions of what traditionalists (i.e. normal people) believe about gender – that it is a biological reality, that there are only really two (male and female) and your sex heavily influences your behavior and preferences.

So far they’ve been okay with the cognitive dissonance that transgenderism causes. The problem for them is that other more normal people are beginning to notice that there is something entirely illogical about their beliefs. How can gender sometimes be immutable (when feminists want to support the right of transgendered “women” to compete in women’s sports) and other times be entirely a social construct and not influenced by one’s biology at all (when feminists want to complain about the fact that there are so few female CEOs)?

I think SSM forgets another point. Crossfit was invented, primarily, for the military and law enforcement officers, who needed an intense, generalist workout that would help them do athletic movements. Such as chasing down a young man, who is not encumbered by twenty kilos of armour, cuffs, clubs and firearm. Or the parallel situation in Afghanistan. You need to be strong, very strong. The loads men carry are injuring them: women who have been embedded in these units break down. But liberal feminists forget this: a more rational army would either keep women out of that role (women can fly helicopters, drive armoured vehicles, and shoot guns perfectly well) or feed the women anabolic steroids, and accept this will have consequences in later life.

In the end, the feminist and legal foolishness of promoting feelings against reality comes up against hard biology: hard chemistry, hard physics. And there can be no postmodern twittering here: Gravity does not care if you consider it sexist and that you should be able to fly because you are a brony unicorn — if you do indeed try this of a building, you will find yourself injured or dead.

Men and women are equally morally responsible, of equal dignity, and in the Common Law have equal rights in court. But we are different. we should not be forced to deny self-evident truths to be the same.