They Thought They Were Free (1955)

What you wrote can be even an anarchist view. What’s the difference in your point of view? How should a government solve problems without laws? What other options are there? Besides ignoring, obviously. I’m absolutely not familiar with the tools of an imagined truly libertarian government (AFAIK this never happened).

Except this violence will absolutely be preceded extensive operations by the giant existing police and national guard presence that knows the neighborhoods like the backs of their hand. They would put a giant dent in that well before a single shot was fired. Would that absolutely be the case if we invaded, say, Canada? Quite likely. The US government has so much existing control on US soil that I'd eat my hat if any US city lasted a week in active conflict.

German citizen and German nazi sympathizer are two different things. They are overlapping, obviously, but they are not nearly the same thing. As in, German citizens were not free nor felt free by 1938 - very dominant feeling was fear. Evans quotes a non Jew German who said that living inside Reich meant living in constant fear (of being denounced due to either saying something wrong or just simply because someone wants to harm you).

1.) Notably, German Jews were German citizens, fought in WWI and actually frequently patriots. Likewise their non Jew partners. But beyond that, German political opposition were not free nor felt free, but they definitely were German citizens too. It is present in their writings.

2.) As for Jews, we have literal diaries (most notably by the Victor Klemperer) show fear, disgust and hate toward former friends Germans that went Nazi. In statistics, we see Jews committing suicides in larger numbers and running away.

> Was there a reason you cited that particular quote..?

Because that annoyed me the most. It is very cherry picked example that creates completely wrong picture of what Jews were saying and writing at that time.

> only being Jewish because of birth into Its customs

Nazi defined Jewishness per blood, if you had one grand parent who was Jew, you was Jew. They did not used religious definition and they did not cared about lifestyle.

Linking to past threads with comments (i.e. actual discussions) is a longstanding convention here. There's no implied criticism, as other users have already pointed out.

We do treat reposts as duplicates when a story has had significant attention in the last year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but that's a separate issue.

> Retroactively stripping the titles from trans men (§4.1) does not "encourage female participation", no matter how you slice it.

Section 4.1 is the logical outcome of FIDE categories being split into Open, where both men and women can compete, and Women, where only women can compete. If a female player changes her chess-gender to man, then it no longer makes any sense for her to hold titles from the Women category such as Woman Grandmaster. She is choosing to exclude herself from a restricted category and the titles that only exist in that category.

I actually don't agree with this policy overall but given that they've decided to let men register as women and women register as men, I'm glad they at least included some restrictions in Section 3 to prevent the men from competing in the Women's category.

> if you were more familiar with the social pressures on trans people, you'd realise that they aren't well-modelled as cis members of their AGAB, for the purposes of inclusivity measures. Your perspective isn't a valid worldview.

I think we just have different worldviews.

This article by Susan Polgar, a trailblazer in women's chess and who has been a role model for female chess players worldwide, makes the case for why separate tournaments for women and girls are needed: https://web.archive.org/web/20250306124806/https://chessdail...

She describes the challenges she faced as a young girl and then as a woman in this male-dominated field, how she had to deal with sexism, social stigma, unwanted sexual advances and threats to her physical safety - all because she is female and wanted to play chess.

With that in mind, the question is, how would including male players (who call themselves women) in these tournaments benefit women and girls? I don't see how it would. The ask seems to be driven from these males requesting to be included, rather than female players requesting these males' inclusion.

> you haven't explained why you believe the World Athletics decisions hold up

I've read their policy and from my understanding the restrictions they've put onto eligibility in the female competition are both evidence-based and prioritise fairness for female athletes (rather than inclusion of male athletes). That's why I personally welcome them.

It's actually quite nuanced when you look at the details, for example, athletes with CAIS are eligible even though from a strictly technical perspective they are 46,XY males. The reason they are eligible is because, being entirely sensitive to androgens, their bodies developed an external female phenotype with no testosterone-driven advantage over 46,XX female athletes.

Whereas the policy excludes male athletes who have DSDs like 5-ARD, even if they have female documentation (e.g. Caster Semenya), because of the male physiological advantage and how unfair this is to female competitors.

> Meanwhile, your "whatever that is" remark suggests you haven't thoughtfully considered the perspective of trans people before.

I have actually, in many discussions with trans-identitied people both in real life and online, in reading articles and books, and in reading forums where they talk to each other. It's mostly why I ended up rejecting the idea that woman and man are merely identities to be claimed. Personally I find that notion quite sexist.