Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[GlyphGryph]

I mostly ignored it because I kept getting confused as to what you were actually trying to say.

[XXSockXX]

I loathe the Olympics and the IOC for the way that they've managed to turn competitions that were once about individuals into this... outlet for nationalism, really. Of the questionable sort. The Olympics in London were politicised to the Nth degree.

You may be surprised but I would rather Scotland did not have its own Olympic team. I would rather no country did, that it was about individual sportsmen and their abilities like it was in ancient times.

The modern Olympics were always about political prestige. And most of them had controversies going on, at least in the background.

The ancient Olympics were not much better, that is a very idealized view. If you read up on them, they were at least as political as the modern ones. Also you didn't even have to participate yourself in some cases, many prominent winners were the owners, not the steerers of the horse wagons for example.

@LordSlowpoke
Your longer posts would be much easier to read if you would capitalize the first letter of your sentences or use more paragraphs. (No offense, just sayin'.)

[scriver]

@LordSlowpoke -
Your post was "conveniently not responded to" because it involved saying Jews should have just moved out of Europe when nobody liked them, and everyone was too much in pain from the resounding facepalment upon reading it that they could bother with it.

Also your posts are unstructured and run-on and it's hard to make sense if what point you're even trying to make.

sir

there was even an abbreviation included in the post you're responding to. it should have sated your sarcasmometer by all means. i have no idea what else should i have added.

If by "abbreviation" you mean mouseover text then you should bear in mind that not all browsers can even see them, nor do all computers have mice or mousepointers. So you could begin by not assuming people have read what they might not have any way of telling is there.

[Leafsnail]

It was also at its core a deflectionist argument and those are bad.  If you really care about Kyrgyzstan then you should start a discussion about it rather than going on about how it's so much important than other discussions.

[Pnx]

The modern Olympics were always about political prestige. And most of them had controversies going on, at least in the background.

The ancient Olympics were not much better, that is a very idealized view. If you read up on them, they were at least as political as the modern ones. Also you didn't even have to participate yourself in some cases, many prominent winners were the owners, not the steerers of the horse wagons for example.

They also viewed all forms of doping (at least all the forms they had and tried back then) as perfectly legitimate. Which has always been a bit of an interesting thing to me.

[Graknorke]

The modern Olympics were always about political prestige. And most of them had controversies going on, at least in the background.

The ancient Olympics were not much better, that is a very idealized view. If you read up on them, they were at least as political as the modern ones. Also you didn't even have to participate yourself in some cases, many prominent winners were the owners, not the steerers of the horse wagons for example.

They also viewed all forms of doping (at least all the forms they had and tried back then) as perfectly legitimate. Which has always been a bit of an interesting thing to me.

I never got why not. Eating a healthier diet makes you better at sport, and so do steroids. Really there's no difference between the two apart from whether or not society sees them as normal.

[Pnx]

Well there's the issue of health and well being, there are plenty of athletes out there that would ruin themselves if it gave them a better chance of winning.

But then again we let athletes train in high altitudes for a while, which has some distinctly "unnatural" performance enhancement.

[kaijyuu]

Ideally the limitations on what athletes can put in their bodies depends on the harm it causes them. Steroids give a host of negative issues alongside the boost to muscle mass.

[XXSockXX]

Healthy food and training isn't the same as doping. And it's not just steroids, but all kinds of stuff. If you allow doping, in the end the winner will be the one with the better chemists and doctors in the team. Just like with all the great formula 1 drivers who suddenly suck if their new team has a shitty car.

[Graknorke]

Healthy food and training isn't the same as doping. And it's not just steroids, but all kinds of stuff. If you allow doping, in the end the winner will be the one with the better chemists and doctors in the team. Just like with all the great formula 1 drivers who suddenly suck if their new team has a shitty car.

Well right now the winner is either the one with the best genetics or the best dieticians and trainers.

[XXSockXX]

Sure, training and diet make a difference. And genetics is the most important obviously. But that is all "natural", and that is what most sports are about. Doping can make a much bigger difference than that. With the right stuff you can make superhumans out of relatively normal people (if only for a short time and with some negative impact on their health of course).

[Vector]

Ha-hem

The current diet we're eating is NATURAL, you say?  Our genetics are NATURAL, you say?

[XXSockXX]

You notice the quotation marks around "natural", right? I meant natural in the perceived sense of physical ability vs chemicals in the context of doping. AKA do you have stamina from training or from cocaine? (which ironically would also be natural).
Apart from that I would guess that my genes are natural and most of my diet is too. 

[Graknorke]

Are we going to complain about why the word natural is misapplied so often? Because I would like that.
Fact is that everything is natural. Everything that exists arose from and conforms to natural laws (Unless it's one of Cthulu's friends I guess). When people claim that what humans do is unnatural it's just trying to lift humans above the rest of nature, which is dishonest and self-centred.

[XXSockXX]

True. I don't want to get into a semantics debate.

Regarding doping, let's just say it's against the rules. The rules allow no ability enhancing drugs or medical procedures. Some forms of doping don't even involve chemicals, like the blood doping that was so common with bicyclists.