Thursday Coffee

Coffee with Attitude

How are you today?  It is already the 3rd Thursday of the year!  Life seems to be threatening , little by little, to get back to normal.  Omicron appears to be the end of the pandemic and even Boris Johnson is lifting restrictions. 

Rumour is that he will soon put an end to the vaccination campaign.  Somehow, though, I don’t think that this will go down well with Bill Gates and the Big Pharm lobby.

The US Surpreme Court has already struck down a significant part of Biden’s mandatory vaccination policies, and it is expected that this same court will strike down the rest of them before the summer.

The question will then be how many of the western world’s governments will want to roll back its Covid-Tyranny scam, non-stop 24/7 fear porn campaign and other psy-ops…

So much erosion of freedoms and contstitutional rights and guarantees has taken place these past two years that I suspect the hard work lay ahead.  I am optimistic.

TATA tournament underway

The traditional TATA chess festival is underway, in person.  World Champion Magnus Carlsen heads the list of participants.  The Indian star Vidit finds himself in the lead with 3 points from 4 games, a half point ahead of a crowd of 5, including Carlsen.

gm Carlsen,M – gm Giri,A
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FIDE: Gender Equality, Equity and Breast Implants

I had a good laugh when I read FIDE’s Women’s Commission Chair Eva Repkova’s January 14 ‘Manifesto‘ published on the FIDE website.  Not once does Repkova refer to Dvorkovich’s 2019 mission statement of establishing ‘gender equality’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ in the chess world.  Repkova uses none of these expressions!

Instead, wokish ‘gender equity’ is apparently now the REAL goal of FIDE.  How many of us were even aware of this shift in FIDE’s policy towards women’s chess?

I found the following definitions from a respectable website knowledgeable in these distinctions:

One must also ask how much of Repkova’s ‘manifesto’ is mere window dressing.  Especially given the contradictions so evident with FIDE’s longstanding sexist approach to women’s chess.

The reader need only remember Moscow’s annual ‘Blondes vs Brunettes’ championship (which started when Dvorkovich was President of the Russian Chess Federation)

There are numerous examples of FIDE’s hypocrisy when dealing with women’s chess.  The recently signed contract with one of the world’s leading ‘breast augmentation’ companies for the promotion of women’s chess is just the most recent scandal, and has been written about in much of the world’s leading mainstream media.

FIDE is a laughing stock, and no doubt Repkova is one too when she writes  that she is ”truly grateful” to Dvorkovich for declaring 2022 the Year of the Woman!  Almost as if she still needs a man’s permission…

Equity is successfully enacted when all groups are given the needed number and types of resources so that they achieve equal results in comparison with other groups. Equality, in contrast, is a “one size fits all” approach that promotes equal distribution of resources;  –LINK

My problem with FIDE pursuing a policy of gender equity — instead of gender equality — is that this might require FIDE to change the traditional rules of competition. 

For instance, in the case of 2 players (one man and one woman) tieing for 1st place, the winner might always be the woman, because that is what falls within the definition of ‘fair’ when talking about equity.  Gender equity allows for (arbitrary) discrimination.  Gender equality does not.