The Off Topic Topic

[Tamas]

I have seen that trans women have been banned for two years from attending women's chess competitions.

Why are there even still separate competitions for the two sexes in chess? It sounds ridiculously sexist.

[Josquius]

I have seen that trans woman have been banned for two years from attending women's chess competitions.

Why are there even still separate competitions for the two sexes in chess? It sounds ridiculously sexist.

It's hilarious how the kneejerk anti woke stuff has gotten to this level.

From what I have heard the reason for seperate women's competitions is precisely sexism. Chess by nature tends to attract a lot of guys on the spectrum with big social issues that outnumber and make women feel really uncomfortable at the grass roots tournaments they need to win to get anywhere in the game.

[Tamas]

I find chess to be terribly overrated anyhow. I mean, they have been able to write excellent AI for it decades ago, while even FPS bots totally suck to this day. Tells you everything you need to know. 

[The Brain]

Putting bullying victims in a special classroom isn't obviously a great solution.

[Josquius]

Putting bullying victims in a special classroom isn't obviously a great solution.

They are free to enter the open tournaments too. They've just got this option as well.
I'd imagine in some places it's more important than others.

[Josephus]

I have seen that trans women have been banned for two years from attending women's chess competitions.

Why are there even still separate competitions for the two sexes in chess? It sounds ridiculously sexist.

Yeah, I mean we can make the argument--and I believe we have-- about transpeople in sports. But chess? Chess?

[crazy canuck]

Not sure about UK law, but under BC law that might be a valid claim.  The uncertainty is created when they say they will look for a "similar" product.  If it was exactly the same product there would be no problem - they could claim the difference in price as damages (assuming they could prove it was the best price they could reasonably get).

But by getting a similar product, they are introducing the possibility that the increased price is due to the fact that the other unit is that much better and so no damage is suffered.

One other uncertainty is the terms on which the deal is made.  If the terms allow the seller to back out, then no claim would exist.

Haven't sold anything on eBay for a long time, but in the day the seller liability was limited to a refund plus shipping costs.  No one would sell if they were vulnerable to this kind of manipulation.

But it was the seller that breached the contract by failing to deliver so I am not sure what the manipulation is that would be the concern of the seller.

Those terms are interesting.  It creates a situation where sellers can breach the first contact without liability if they get a better price even after the original purchase price was paid. Good for attracting sellers to use that app.

Less fair to a buyer.

[Valmy]

From what I have heard the reason for seperate women's competitions is precisely sexism. Chess by nature tends to attract a lot of guys on the spectrum with big social issues that outnumber and make women feel really uncomfortable at the grass roots tournaments they need to win to get anywhere in the game.

Color me skeptical the best way to solve this problem is segregation.

If some men are acting inappropriately wouldn't it make more sense to ban people acting badly then doing something idiotic like creating a whole new division just to protect grown ass adults from neuro-divergent people?

[DGuller]

Color me skeptical that this is the actual reason for women's chess to exist.  The real reason women's chess exists is pragmatic:  there aren't that many women at the top of the chess world, or even any depending on how you define the top.  Without women's tournaments you probably wouldn't have any women getting headlines for winning something, and it's thought that having women in headlines would promote chess among them.  For the same reason, there is a woman version of the chess titles, with a 200 lower Elo requirement for each corresponding title.  An open GM title requires 2500 Elo (and some norms), whereas a WGM title requires 2300 Elo (and some norms).

It's definitely not a universally accepted state of things, among either gender.  Judith Polgar at her peak was #8 among all players, which by itself is a strong statistical proof that there aren't any material biological barriers towards success in chess for women.  She was also a strong critic of having women play in their own tournaments, always encouraged women to play in open tournaments so that they would learn more, and largely refused to play in women tournaments herself.  Many also consider the existence of women chess titles as an inherent assertion of inferiority of women at the game, and question whether it really helps to attract women to chess when you welcome them with lowered expectations.

[Josquius]

It's not why women's chess originally existed. It was created a century ago afterall. Just saying I've read female players commenting they like the womens game being a thing as they find it a much nicer playing environment.

From what I have heard the reason for seperate women's competitions is precisely sexism. Chess by nature tends to attract a lot of guys on the spectrum with big social issues that outnumber and make women feel really uncomfortable at the grass roots tournaments they need to win to get anywhere in the game.

Color me skeptical the best way to solve this problem is segregation.

If some men are acting inappropriately wouldn't it make more sense to ban people acting badly then doing something idiotic like creating a whole new division just to protect grown ass adults from neuro-divergent people?

A lot more work to ban the dodgy men. Not to mention a lot of it is endless general shit rather than something outright terrible in its own right.

As said its not segregation as the women can still enter general tournaments. They've just got these specific woman only ones too.

I'm not a chess fan, I'm not sure I even know the rules enough to play it, but reading up on things apparently the system of keeping the safe inroad is working with the number of top female players ticking up a lot in recent years.

[Valmy]

A lot more work to ban the dodgy men. Not to mention a lot of it is endless general shit rather than something outright terrible in its own right.

And surely having more diversity in the space would lessen this issue. I also question simply having codes of conduct is harder than maintaining an entirely separate league.

As said its not segregation as the women can still enter general tournaments. They've just got these specific woman only ones too.

I'm not a chess fan, I'm not sure I even know the rules enough to play it, but reading up on things apparently the system of keeping the safe inroad is working with the number of top female players ticking up a lot in recent years.

It isn't segregation yet transwomen are being banned

Explain how that works.

Recent years? If it works so well why did it take 100 fucking years for top female players to just recently start to tick up? Could it be because more women are not putting up with this idiotic backwards ass system and are playing more in open tournaments and online instead?

[Jacob]

I expect that having separate gender leagues allows women from places with strict gender separation norms to participate. You probably won't see many women from Iran participate in chess tournaments if they're mixed gender, for example.

Whether that's an argument for, against, or neither is a separate question.

[DGuller]

I expect that having separate gender leagues allows women from places with strict gender separation norms to participate. You probably won't see many women from Iran participate in chess tournaments if they're mixed gender, for example.

Whether that's an argument for, against, or neither is a separate question.

I'm not sure that's true.  I think all women participate in mixed gender chess tournaments, it's just that many also participate in women-only tournaments.  Even Iranian chess players participate in mixed gender chess tournaments (though they better wear their hijab if they intended on coming back to Iran).

[grumbler]

But it was the seller that breached the contract by failing to deliver so I am not sure what the manipulation is that would be the concern of the seller.

Those terms are interesting.  It creates a situation where sellers can breach the first contact without liability if they get a better price even after the original purchase price was paid. Good for attracting sellers to use that app.

Less fair to a buyer.

The manipulation is that the buyer claims to be able to purchase what they consider an "equivalent substitute" and then sue the seller for the price paid for the substitute.

The penalty for the seller for failing to follow through on the deal is a bad rating.  Ratings matter a lot.

[Sheilbh]

The Times Literary Editor on those dodgy straplines - the Alain de Botton "moving" example is incredible

Jordan Peterson and the art of the dodgy book blurb
An extremely selective quote from James Marriott's review of Jordan Peterson's book ended up on the cover of the paperback. It happens all the time, says the Times literary editor
Robbie Millen
Friday August 18 2023, 12.00pm, The Times

Publishers are like medieval alchemists. They can take the base metal of a stinking book review and turn it into the gold of praise. James Marriott, for instance, reviewed the oddball guru Jordan Peterson's last book, Beyond Order, in these pages. He wrote that "ideas that flit and glimmer in Peterson's videos look bloated and dead when strapped to the page" and his prose is "repetitious, unvariegated, rhythmless, opaque and possessed of a suffocating sense of its own importance". Ouch.

But this week the former book-desk imp came across his stern words transmuted by the magicians at Penguin into praise on the paperback version. From his radioactive review glowed words of approbation — "A philosophy of the meaning of life . . . the most lucid and touching prose Peterson has ever written." Well, Marriott actually wrote "his philosophy, which is bonkers", and it's true, Marriott said that one chapter, about interior design, had "one of the most sensitive and lucid passages of prose he has written". Faint praise.

Marriott tweeted (or, to be more precise, posted on X) about it. My colleague, the Sunday Times literary editor, Johanna Thomas-Corr, saw her scathing review likewise magicked into an endorsement: "genuinely enlightening and often poignant". Her words, but wrenched from the context of "a lumpy soup of bromides about marriage, Old Testament commentaries, Jungian archetypes, Mesopotamian myths and endless deconstructions of Disney movies".

Publishers have long been sneaky, playing fast and loose with critical reviews. My favourite is this — and I reckon it's the most outrageous example — which appeared on the paperback of Alain de Botton's novel The Course of Love: " 'moving', The Sunday Times".

Hmmm, that didn't quite capture the spirit of the review. Peter Kemp, a duffer-upper of mediocre novels, wrote this: "Cropping up as frequently as every few paragraphs, these blackboard-rapping intrusions loom large among factors making the novel unengaging. Turning its pages, you come to dread the sight of yet another chunk of de Botton's italicised opinions moving towards you." Genius. You have to admire the chutzpah. You feel the publishers were trolling the reviewer.

Or take this — the mighty AN Wilson wrote a book a few years back called The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible. The Times reviewer, in the course of an admittedly mainly favourable review, wrote "accreted over the years, the work of many hands, translated and altered, the Bible is an almost accidental work of genius". I then gave the review the headline, referring to the Bible itself, "Believe it or not, this is a work of genius", and a standfirst that read: "The Bible is full of profound beauty, even for the godless."

Of course, the publishers in their blurb now claim: "Believe it or not, this is a work of genius." Wilson is a superb, puckish writer, but I'm not sure even he believes that the divine being is guiding his hand.

Edward St Aubyn's novel Double Blind was widely panned. Yet the words " 'heroic and astonishing': Sunday Times" appeared in the later publicity material. But that came from an interview in which Bryan Appleyard, marvelling at the author's terrible personal story of overcoming childhood abuse, said "St Aubyn's reinvention as a writer is heroic and astonishing"; the review itself said it was "self-pleasing, mannered — and sometimes even dull". Naughty, naughty.

My colleague Oliver Moody, our man in Berlin, wrote a brutal review of a biography of Angela Merkel. The paperback ran a line quoting the one kind thing he had written: "[Kati Marton] has recruited a formidable cast of talking heads . . . and obtained a remarkable degree of access to the chancellor's inner circle."

But it omitted these lines, which I suspect were more useful as advice to a bookshop browser: "She drops clanger after cast-iron clanger . . . Presumably these errors will be corrected in future editions, unless the publisher does the decent thing and pulps every copy of this balderdash." Moody then mentioned "on the back of the [hardback] book a puff quote from a Pulitzer prizewinning writer hails Marton's 'signature superpower of rigorous research'. It seems this superpower does not extend to footnotes, basic fact-checking, kicking the tyres on apocryphal anecdotes or indeed reading German newspapers."

So here's the moral. Be suspicious of the quotes on the back of paperbacks. Know that the clever people in publishing have used all their skills to take someone's words and bend them into new, more pleasing shapes. You can admire the ingenuity. But never ever believe the puffs on a hardback. That's where the real deception takes place: fellow authors praising their mates, often without even reading the damn thing.