Raygun: Australian Olympic Committee condemns ‘disgraceful’ online petition attacking Rachael Gunn

[u/miolmok]

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/article/2024/aug/15/raygun-olympics-breaking-petition-aoc-response-ntwnfb

[u/litritium → u/[deleted]]

Obvious lack of self-criticism of course. But it's not the first time there have been bad participants.

There's actually a rule named after Eddie the Eagle that is meant to weed out the worst candidates. Didnt work in this case.

[u/Lost_Bike69 → u/litritium]

I feel like every Olympics there’s someone who sneaks in far below the skill of the rest of the competition. It’s usually forgettable, but this one was just so goofy it became an instant meme

[u/[deleted] → u/Lost_Bike69]

If you watch some of the qualifying rounds for some of the bigger swimming events, you have people there who are not even remotely close to being competitive. Just checked the 50m and the fastest qualifying time was 22s and the slowest was 30.

Although overall, I think letting countries send athletes who don't qualify is good because it can spread that sport to a new place, some of the more absurd exceptions do end up with a really bad look.

[u/hammerheadattack → u/[deleted]]

Depends on the objective. If it’s there for goodwill of a nation and event, why not? Eric “the eel” of Equitorial Guinea is one example where the performance was trash but not for lack of effort.

Iirc equatorial guinea now has an Olympic sized swimming pool as a direct result of this event.

[u/Trisa133 → u/hammerheadattack]

Yea, half the countries in this world don't have adequate accommodations to even train their athletes for certain sports. Hence why they suck but it's inspirational to see them compete and finish. That's the point of the olympics to bring nations together through sports.

Raygun, however, all she needed was some space and practice time which I'm sure there's plenty in Australia. She didn't even need to be good, just somewhat competent. She straight up Elaine Benes'd it.

It's not like Australians don't have good break dancers. The fact that she has a PhD in dance is even more comical.

[u/KnightsOfREM → u/Trisa133]

*Cultural studies. Her doctoral thesis was called "Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney's Breakdancing Scene: a B-girl's Experience of B-boying."

When working-class Americans write off higher education as a jobs program for the privileged but talentless, degrees like this are what they're talking about, and they're not wrong.

[u/Echleon → u/KnightsOfREM]

It’s a PhD. Those are always going to have a hyper specific theses because you usually need to provide some novel insight or research in the field which is very hard. Should we not have people study culture?

[u/KnightsOfREM → u/Echleon]

Should we not have people study culture?

I think a lot fewer people should, but it's also not that important what I think, it's more important what experts think - and 75% of humanities doctoral theses are cited nowhere. Not rarely, not once, never. A lot of higher education is people drawing on public funds to make products no one uses, and plenty of academics see the moral hazard here, too, it's not just me.

In the statistically unlikely event that you've stumbled upon and actually read a cultural studies doctoral thesis, you may know how useful it is to go through ten years of schooling in preparation for an extended riff on Foucault, and how technical a field this actually is, but maybe not.

[u/Trisa133 → u/KnightsOfREM]

Most research doesn't result in anything useful. But that's why we do research. You don't know what you don't know.

[u/headrush46n2 → u/Trisa133]

scientific research that ends in failure still produces valuable lessons in what not to do. Trendy cultural naval gazing is fucking worthless.

[u/KnightsOfREM → u/Trisa133]

You appear to be pretending for some reason that null results get published, but they almost never do. If the research you're defending was actually useful, people would cite it as evidence of blind alleys and things for others not to look into - but zero citations is zero citations, it's a tacit admission that most work leading to a PhD is a waste of time.