The campaign for equal heights in the NBA starts here! 
(Although if someone bans all those lovely willowy swedish ladies from the high jump, I may be forced to go on a killing spree.)
The people here who are unfamiliar with motorsports may not realize that, unlike other forms of sport that don’t involve cars, all forms of motorsports competition – pro, semi-pro, and amateur – have extensive rule books that mandate, usually in excruciating detail, technical parameters that the competing cars must meet. These rules are intended to establish an even playing field for the competitors so that a lesser driver is not able to succeed through some technical advantage in the hardware that other drivers don’t have. In other words, as Ellis Dee has been saying, they’re intended to make the competition fair.
Only in the broadest sense are the rules of the various racing series “arbitrary.” One set of rules, taken as a whole, gives you a NASCAR car, and another set gives you a Formula 1 car. At that level, can you say they are arbitrary, in a way. But at the micro level, virtually every rule within a series rulebook is intended to limit what a team can do to give its driver an unfair advantage. This is to establish a degree of parity so that the competition comes down, as much as possible, to the skills of the driver and the team. (The Unfair Advantage is the title of a popular book about racing by 1960s driver Mark Donohue.)
But most motorsports rules are not arbitrary in the sense that declaring that four strikes is an out instead of three would be an “arbitrary” change to baseball that wouldn’t affect the fairness of the game.
And just in case Ellis Dee didn’t make it perfectly clear to non-race fans, weight is almost certainly the single most important factor in racing automobiles, because of the laws of physics. Given two identical cars, and two identically skilled drivers, adding weight – even as little as a pound or two – to one would give the other a significant, perhaps winning, advantage.
As I mention upthread, races in the top series are being won by thousandths of a second over a two-hour race. Teams spend literally millions of dollars to make every component of the cars as light as possible. Not factoring the weight of the driver into the overall weight of the car was an unusual aspect of the old IRL rules. Yes, everyone knew about it and agreed to it, but there’s a reason it was changed: it was unfair.
Heh, I realized the irony of citing steroids as an example of a “fairness rule” shortly after I posted it. I’m actually against banning performance-enhancing drugs.
But the official position of the leagues in question is that those bans are purely for leveling the playing field. They serve no other purpose.
But the point is that “unfair” is itself a completely arbitrary concept. It’s impossible to be a six-foot jockey. Unfair? It’s almost impossible to be a five-foot basketballer. Unfair? If you’re not a beanpole you can’t do the high jump. Unfair? Every sport is intrinsically arbitrary; not just in the “broadest sense”, but in the most fundamental sense there is. All of these rule sets are just people picking out individual arbitrary rules to show off some particular skill or attribute that they find interesting.
You can make a perfectly convincing case that you don’t find it interesting to see lightweight but undertalented drivers winning at racing all the time, but then I might equally claim that pretty much the only people who get to be top level drivers are those that were massively overprivileged as kids, since the cost of entry into racing is so high. What’s interesting about seeing a bunch of rich gobshites pootle around a track when I’m pretty sure there are a thousand more talented drivers out there who never even got to sit in a go-kart*? Even at the sharp end, motorsport is infested with shit-but-monied drivers who are there more because of the sponsorship they bring than because they’re fast (which quite possibly applies to Danica too, of course). Racing isn’t fair in the slightest. Pretending that a two stone weight difference is unfair when you’ve got some teams that can afford to use gearboxes like tissues while others cobble theirs together from spit and nails seems to me to miss the wood for the trees.
The upshot of this is not that it’s unfair to change the rules, incidentally - merely that fairness doesn’t enter into it. Unfair would be having different rules for different people. Paul Tracy can lose weight if he’s worried about Danica being tiny. Hell, even in F1 David Coulthard has admitted to effectively starving himself in the past because lighter drivers still benefit from allowing the mechanics to distribute the weight lower in the car. There are all sorts of physical attributes that make a large difference to how fast you can drive. Unless you’re legislating for absolutely all of them, then claiming that one particular advantage is unfair simply doesn’t wash.
I’d still prefer to see car+driver weighed, incidentally, precisely because weight isn’t a particularly interesting attribute, in my view. I just have no illusions about it being some immutable law of driving. Yeah, Indycar was rare in not doing so, but then why didn’t all the fat fucks go to a series that did?
(*actually, this is precisely why I can hardly be bothered to follow F1 any more…)
Not every advantage is unfair, and the teams that build the cars work all day every day to try and make their car faster than the other cars, they just do it within the parameters allowed by the rulebook. In this case, one of the ways to make your car faster is to go on a diet.
This also assumes that a 100lb woman can have identical skills to a 190lb man. There is one aspect of driving that she cannot possibly match him in, upper body strength. I’ve never driven an Indy Car, but I imagine it’s a bit more strenuous than tooling around town in a Lincoln Continental. We happily tell Danica that she’s just got to suck up the negatives of being a small framed woman, god forbid we tell the men that they get to suck up the negatives of being tall and muscular.
Here you go.
This new rule doesn’t level the playing field. It does just the opposite. Different weights of drivers have different rules. That’s unleveling the playing field.
And as has been pointed out, you can’t just isolate her size advantage and scream “unfair”. Her size advantage also means she’s disadvantaged in other ways (e.g. strength). People are full packages. Trying to divorce this one physical attribute for handicapping strikes me as far more unfair than the way it was.
That’s what I said? When? I think I said something more along the lines of, “men and women have different strengths and weaknesses - men have more upper body strength, women weigh less. Why should a woman have to be penalized for weighing less if a man doesn’t have to be penalized for having more upper body strength?”
In any event, that’s not an issue of ‘fairness’ in any objective sense. Hell, many sports simply refuse to allow men and women to mix. Is that ‘fair’?
However, if I think rules are put in place intentionally to dscriminate against people in a way that I don’t like, I’ll vote with my pocketbook and TV remote. If someone wants to create the tiny women’s race league, more power to them. That isn’t ‘unfair’ to big men, it just is what it is.
Are you sure? Because in the past (perhaps not in this thread) I’ve pointed out many sports where women compete against men. Aerobatics, for example. And they do quite well.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
In [post=6223226]post 210[/post]:
You said “many”, not “all”.
Please list the “many” sports where the women have to try harder to compete against men.
None of your semantic hoop-jumping makes your argument compelling. There is such a thing as fair, and most everyone is able to see that. Except you and maybe a few others in this thread, that is.
See, that’s not a cite demonstrating a special advantage. ALL MAJOR RACING has variations on the same rule, so that’s a normal part of racing, not a “special advantage”.
Your cite does not back up your assertion. You are arguing against all collective wisdom in the field of racing. In order to support your extraordinary claim, you’re going to have to bring extraordinary evidence.
This is false. Men’s sports as a rule allow women. It’s only women’s sports that prohibit the other gender from participating.
For example, Anika Sorenstam and Michelle Wie played on the men’s tour, but the LPGA will never let a man play even as a one-off exhibition.
You did notice that I said ‘many sports’, and not ‘men’s sports’, right? And I didn’t say that women were excluded - I said women and men were not allowed to mix. You yourself said that the rules in women’s leagues specify precisely that, so I don’t know what your problem is. Other than reading comprehension, that is.
But I think the same is true in many men’s sports. Are women allowed to compete against men in most Olympic sports? Do you think that if a really talented woman came along, she’s be allowed to compete against the men in, say, figure skating? Or ski racing? Hell, women aren’t even allowed to compete in ski jumping in the Olympics. Not even in a women’s division.
I believe there was a large woman a few years ago who campaigned to be allowed to try out for the NFL, and was refused. However, many major league sports governing bodies have at least paid lip service to allowing women to play if they can compete. As you pointed out, this has happened in golf. It’s also happened in Billiards and Pool. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that in many sports, women and men are separated by rule. As you pointed out, many women’s sports do exactly that.
Of course there is, but only as it pertains to people having to play to the same rules. It was “fair” before, and it’s “fair” now. I just don’t see this posturing that weight equality is some immutable law of the universe as anything but, well, posturing. Otherwise you’d be able to explain to me why all of those other sports I mentioned where physical attributes confer an advantage are intrinsically unfair, and you quite clearly can’t.
Fairness means the rules are applied equally. But describing an individual rule as “fair” is almost entirely meaningless. As I said, you can make a perfectly decent argument that for entertainment’s sake you’d rather see skilled fatties come to the fore than have a bunch of midgets race round your track, but don’t pretend it’s some wisdom received from the gods. It’s just one way of doing things.
Are you ever going to list these many other sports?
I don’t know what kind of bullshit philosophical debate points you’re trying to score. This whole line of logic is completely irrelevant.
If I may sum up your argument: All rules are fair as long as they are enforced for everybody. Therefore, no rule can exist purely to enforce fairness, because all rules (applied equally!) are by definition fair.
Please correct me if I have you wrong. I trust you will, because you can’t honestly believe something so retarded. Next you’ll be explaining how that because free will is an illusion, fairness as a concept is nothing but an artificial construct that no two people could be expected to agree on. Even if true, there is nothing meaningful, interesting or useful to be gleaned from that. Much like your “all rules are equally and completely fair” bullshit.
Here in the real world, driver weight is normalized in all major racing circuits to make it fair. That is the stated purpose and result of the rules governing driver weight.
As for this specific point, yes, that is fair. Segregating women into their own league has exactly one goal: to give women a fair chance to win.
I don’t doubt that fairness is often the intent of weighing rules. A rule may have the intended purpose of making a sport more fair without contradicting the fact that fairness is a subjective notion, just as a rule may have the intended purpose of making a sport more fun without contradicting the fact that fun is subjective.
I don’t care what ALL MAJOR RACING does. Having different rules for different drivers (in this case) confers an advantage on the male drivers
So what?
Maybe if I’d made an “extraordinary” claim, I’d worry about “extraordinary” evidence. All you have is “everyone does it this way!!!” That’s less than convincing.
Again, explain why a lighter driver’s advantage is unfair. And while you’re at it, can you explain how the lighter driver’s disadvantages aren’t?
I’m taking issue with your contention that there is one UND PRECISELY VUN vay of [del]makink you think[/del] doing things in racing, when quite plainly there isn’t. All shifting the rules does is alter the equation that determines who’s best in favour of one group or another, which is at best “fair” with respect to one carefully defined group of people. What do you think of series like British Touring Cars, that actually apply weight penalties to drivers with faster cars (or those who just drive faster naturally)? Are they obeying some immutable law of physics that for some reason demands “fairness” of a still different kind to yours, or are they just trying to make things more exciting? Isn’t IndyCar still “unfair” towards shit drivers in shit cars?
Why not just say it? “I would rather see a skilled fat man win a race than an untalented midget, because that’s what interests me.” It’s not an admission of weakness, y’know.
Anyway, should my opinion still bother you (why so aggressive? I haven’t been rude to you), just read Indistinguishable’s post instead. He’s said it far more pithily than I’m ever going to.