Proportionality My Ass

Ah yes… so with the Winter Olympics approaching, it’s time once again for some people to indulge in stupid wishful thinking — in this case, setting quotas where none should be set:

The U.S. Olympic Committee says it’s taking its most diverse team ever to a Winter Games, an impressive and deserved boast that requires a caveat of sorts.
Yes, USOC officials are pleased the team includes more African-Americans and Asian-Americans — and even the first two openly gay men — than recent winter squads. But they also realize this year’s U.S. Olympic team, not unlike those of most other nations gathering in PyeongChang this week, is still overwhelmingly white.
“We’re not quite where we want to be,” said Jason Thompson, the USOC’s director of diversity and inclusion. “. . . I think full-on inclusion has always been a priority of Team USA. I think everybody’s always felt it should represent every American.”
Team USA numbers 243 athletes, which is the largest team any nation has ever sent to a Winter Olympics. Of that group, 10 are African-American — 4 percent — and another 10 are Asian-American. The rest, by and large, are white. The Winter Games is typically a much smaller contingent than its summer counterpart, but the demographic differences are striking. The United States took more than 550 athletes to the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. Of that group, more than 125 were African-American — around 23 percent.

I’ll play along with this little game, as long as we apply it fairly — so come the next Summer Olympics we should make the Team USA Basketball squad of twelve equally representative: it should contain at least six White guys, three Black guys and the other three can be divided among Hispanics and Asians. (If we are going to make this team truly representative of America, one of the Hispanic dudes should be an illegal alien. And if he’s gay, that would be doubleplusgood.) Of course, with this squad we would lose more than win, but who cares about Citius, Altius, Fortius when we’re more about iustitia civitate, right?

Fucking idiots. Twenty years ago there were no Black athletes in Team USA Winter Olympics because Black people didn’t do winter sports. Now the team is one-fifth Black — progress by any other name — except that this isn’t quick enough for the race-conscious quota warriors, oh no: we have to shoehorn in more Black athletes right now, regardless of actual ummm merit because slavery (or some equally-specious bullshit).

And for the few Black athletes who are given a pass onto the team regardless of whether they can compete or not, they’ll be part of Team Loser (just as the White-quota basketball players would be) but that’s okay because the United States wins too many medals anyway and it’s only “fair” that we redistribute those golds among the lesser teams who deserve it because they work just as hard as we do.

One second thoughts, these tokenist tools aren’t fucking idiots at all. They’re just adhering to Leninist doctrine, the bien-pissants [sic].

And finally: if the USOC has funding for a “director of diversity and inclusion” in their budget then we’re giving them too much damn money.

Every time I think I’m getting a grip on my high blood pressure, some crap like this comes along to push it into the stratosphere.

13 comments

  1. “and even the first two openly gay men”

    Wait, I thought we already participated in men’s figure skating?!?

  2. Funny thing, some of us think there is a difference between a sporting event and a performance event. In sports there is an objective, measurable result, further, faster, closer and the contestant lives with a result of the event. Speed skating, downhill events, things where the time is posted. Nothing about the contestant matters except the result and it would be fine with me if they all wore the same clothing, had numbers drawn by random and the tallied and posted at the end. Of course that would take the entertainment factor away which means lots of advertisement dollars and large salaries for the staff.

    The other performance events like figure skating and other circus acts that require the judgement calls made by the judges which are very subjective. These events are not sports and they are made worse by having to listen to an announcer tell us about how the contestant had to overcome being raised by a blind, single mother who made her living being a pharmaceutical drug testing subject while recovering from her double amputation and writing children’s stories about multi-racial, transexual kids saving three-legged dogs, which adds more heartfelt interest and makes me turn the sound off because these winners are all getting performance participation prizes not medals for sporting events.

    I don’t care about that crap and neither should anyone else who wants to watch sports and if I want to watch performance stunts I can go to the circus. The people representing my country, the USA should be those who can go further and faster and shoot straighter than anyone else and that’s it.

  3. I just got back from 3 days of skiing here – skifernie.com/conditions/snow-report/

    It serves a number of racially diverse communities nearby. We seem to have a smaller percentage of Blacks and Latinos than the US but a higher one of Asians. The ski hill was full of mostly whites, quite a few Chinese type Asians, including a visiting tour of Mongols, and not one black face at all. I usually see one or two, often my own adopted son, but none on this trip.

    And yes, I do notice them, because they kind of stand out, standing in front of 25 feet 6 inches piles of snow and all.

    I also frequently ski in Whitefish Montana and there may be a very small number more blacks, but still far too few to contribute much to an Olympic ski team.

  4. 6 White guys, 3 blacks, and 3 Hispanic or Asian. Wellll, OK, but what have the Red Indians ever done to earn your wrath? They have been totally rejected by your selection panel. Equal rights for the Red-man, I say !!
    Oh, by the way, are there some Eskimos in the 49th State? Shouldn’t they be a shoe-in for the Winter Olympics ?

    The Lone Ranger and Tonto were surrounded by 743 Indians bent on scalps and revenge. “Don’t worry Tonto, we have always stood together”. “What do you mean by ‘we’, paleface”?

    1. They can just pick a white guy with high cheekbones — like they did for the Senator from Massachusetts.

  5. The problem is that these idiots do not understand diversity. If they were just “casting a wide net” to make sure they were getting the best athletes they could find, everyone with a brain would be behind them.

    The problem with pushing “diversity” as an outcome are many, including of course the double standard side that they don’t really mind a lack of diversity when it is a bunch of some non-Europeans. The larger one though is that there are often very small differences in body type can make a huge difference in what level someone can achieve at the highest levels. The same body differences that make west Africans great sprinters makes them lousy long distance runners. The same body differences that makes east Africans great long distance runners makes them lousy sprinters. The same body differences that makes Europeans great swimmers substantially limits them for running sports at the highest level. Are there exceptions? Sure, but that is not the way to bet.

    Then of course there is the cultural / training aspects. If more from one area, culture, race are attracted to a given sport; the more likely to find the top ones and the more likely they will get access to the training and support to advance. It is what it is and assuming that someone on high knows better than the self organization that occurs naturally is a certain type of arrogance.

  6. Shame that nobody is commending the socially conscious role the old East German and Soviet teams took towards progressiveness by the use of transgendered female athletes back in the old days.
    Of course, we called it “cheating” back then.

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