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Re:Harrison Bergeron (1961) by WalterBright on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @01:31PM (#32998426)
Americans idolize athletic skill and beauty, but look down on intellectual achievement.

"nerds"

Re:Harrison Bergeron (1961) by MichaelCollins on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @02:36PM (#32999266)
Media and popular culture teaches the nerd/jock dichotomy to children, who internalize it and let it become a self fulfilling prophesy. When the influence of this meme is diminished, athletic and intellectual ability have a positive correlation with each other. People with healthy strong bodies are more likely to have healthy and strong minds as well, and vice versa. The quality of a school and a community's attitude towards intellectualism can be judged by how much overlap there is between the sports teams and honors courses. The less overlap there is, the worse that school/community is.

One way that popular culture teaches this dichotomy is with role playing games, where you choose to spec into INT or STR, but if you split your skill points between both you'll be mediocre at both. Real life doesn't work like that.

Re:Harrison Bergeron (1961) by LtWorf on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @03:38PM (#33000096)
Mens sana in corpore sano
Re:Harrison Bergeron (1961) by MrZongle2 on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @01:51PM (#32998703)
That's an unnecessary large brush. There are 300 million of us. Are we all the same?
Re:Harrison Bergeron (1961) by WalterBright on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @02:35PM (#32999255)
When I say "people like ice cream" and you say "not all people like ice cream" I reply "I didn't say all."

"All" is a modifier for a reason.

For example, people are demanding that the SATs should not be used to evaluate students academic ability, because it's unfair that some students do better on the test than others.

Have you ever seen anyone advocate this sort of thing for the school sports program? How about it being unfair and inequitable that top athletes have a leg up on college admissions?

Did any PE teacher shower attention on me or the other inept students to bring us up to speed? Nope. The attention was all on the top 2 or 3 athletic students. The rest of us were just an annoyance. (I'm not saying this to complain, as my interests were elsewhere, just illustrating an example.)

Re:Harrison Bergeron (1961) by choko on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @03:02PM (#32999640)
Using the term "people" or "men" or "women" without a quantifier is misleading. I could say "people think the earth is flat" and it doesn't matter if it's one person or one billion people but the difference is very important.
Re:Harrison Bergeron (1961) by WalterBright on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @03:43PM (#33000170)
> Using the term "people" or "men" or "women" without a quantifier is misleading

If I say "people have two legs" and you reply saying what about amputees, that's a debate tactic, not a misinterpretation. If I say "people are amputees" that would be a false statement.

> I could say "people think the earth is flat" and it doesn't matter if it's one person or one billion people but the difference is very important.

The term "people" by itself means people in general. Not all people, and not one person in a billion.

English is neither a mathematics nor a programming language, and should not be treated as such.

Re:Harrison Bergeron (1961) by choko on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @06:05PM (#33001719)
Seems like you moved the goal posts a bit there. Your first comment indicates "people" could be any quantity, now it seems you mean that "people" means people in general, which indicates a majority of people? It's important to be precise in language if you want your thoughts understood.
Re:Harrison Bergeron (1961) by WalterBright on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @07:05PM (#33002272)
> It's important to be precise in language if you want your thoughts understood.

I can't help but conclude you understood me perfectly, and are just being argumentative.