- Cool. How would you measure conditioning?
You don't. As I explained, it is the most subjective of the three categories evaluated at a pro show. This explains why a guy with great striations bu with muscles that look soft as well as one with very hard muscles but no striations can win shows. Conditioning is the category where judges have the most leverage to exercise their biases. For instance, some judges love vascularity, while others regard it isa the hallmark of the amateur bodybuilder, and consider it inadequate at the pro level.
- I'll buy that.
During my adolescence, I worked briefly as a salesman. Good to see that my sales pitch is still sharp...
- Are not there some tribes in South America in which the gender-roles are switched and the female plays the more masculine part (as compared with our more 'conventional' setup)?
No, this has been debunked. Feminists love to spill this bullshit about masculinity being a social construct, but the bottom line is that there are physiological differences between the male and the female brain, and this is refelected in behavioral/occupational differences that can be observed even in toddlers.
There were tribes studied where the males took stereotyoically female roles, and so forth. However, what was ignored is that while the gender roles reversed, the significance of the roles changed as well. In this tribes, what was deemed the more important status roles were the ones that were sterotypically female in Western Societies. So, the males played at females roles, but they maintained a "male" or superior status significance. See the book "The Inevitability Of The Patriarchy", which touches these issues.
- I don't agree with that at all. How else can you argue against a perspective without breaking it down? It's common in all philosophical doctrines. Shouting 'it's just semantics' is commonly a tactic used when one can't justify one's position in the light of an opposing argument.
Breaking it down to logically evaluate it's consistency is one thing, but to break it down to debate how the words used to define what the argument inplies and how this is relevant in the especific context at hand is a typical post-modern tactic. Sartre would be proud of you.
- I disagree; visual perception is highly involved when evaluating Nasser and Wheeler and asserting that Wheeler has less muscle than Nasser. For all the criteria involved, the judge still has to look at the two. Ultimately, the assertion is either true, or it isn't. But you can't escape visual perception, even if you got out a tape measure.
This is exactly what I'm saying. I never said that bodybuilding is mathematical. You just arrived very, very late at this discussion and lost it. I was arguing a specific measure, which is mathematical. You can argue that Ronnie's lats looked as wide as Dorian's, but you cannot say that they were as wide without a mathematical proof. This is not even debatable.
Futhermore, you have confirmed what I said: bodybuilding is visual up to some point, becasue absolute measures evenetually overwhelm the subjectivity of visual perception. No matter how much smaller Wheeler's joints were and how much rounder his muscles were than Nasser's, the former still looks smaller than the latter due to the difference of 60 lbs.
What do you mean by conceptual perception at the metaphysical level?
That perception at the metaphysical level is dependent on axiomatic definition. Conversely, visual perception is an interpretative process that occurs in the human brain. Two completely different things.
- Yes, I agree. But, when you say that the laws of physics are objective, this means that they exist independently of our consciousness of them. If we all got up and insisted that gravity is caused by bovine flatulence, it wouldn't affect the nature of gravity itself.
However, our perception of the objective laws of physics is subjective.
Likewise, to meta-reality, the perception of our specific reality is also subjective. It all breaks down when you try to define the samllest gradient of reality and why reality exists as it is.
Subjectivity and objectivity are not mutually exclusive absolutes- the two interact.
Exactly. They interact metaphysically by subjectively determining that out reality is objectively restrained.
SUCKMYMUSCLE
- Yes, bodybuilding does suck now 
Blame Coleman and his somatostatin-C induced gut.
SUCKMYMUSCLE
