Weird, in this day and age, little people would be forced to participate in dwarf-tossing without their adult consent. I guess since they cannot make their own choices in life, the State needs to step in and make the choices for them…
Boxing is regulated. There are already lots of laws concerning boxing.
You can’t have an unregulated boxing match in a bar between a straw-weight and a heavyweight. Guess what? They’re “out-lawed”, even when all parties consent.
People have gone to jail for that nonsense, I don’t see why this is different.
Killing and injuring vulnerable people for drunken LOLs.
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I’m not defending it, but I certainly assumed everyone was consenting adults.
Full contact sports are a thing after all. Like football. And boxing. I just assumed that if everyone happened to be okay with the arrangement it’d be weird if I made some kind of stand like I knew better than everyone else.
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Lots of this stuff is already illegal in bars
Bar-owners can’t currently run volunteer boxing matches between drunken untrained patrons.
It doesn’t matter if “everybody consented”. You’d lose your licence or your bar would be shut down.
Bars also can’t legally run “Who can drink five bottles of vodka” contests, even if everyone happened to be okay with the arrangement. Because obvious harmful consequences.
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Reading this might provide insight:
LPA = Little People of America
Key sentence:
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Yeah, I can see the point in regulating it. I’m just saying at the time, as I ate my lunch, it seemed like a fun thing that’d be interesting to see, assuming the best, I honestly didn’t think too hard about it.
Like I said, I’m not defending it.
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I’d suppose that’d very clearly count as some kind of disorderly conduct. And would very quickly devolve into assault. I’m interested if we can find the laws specifically.
I’d also expect liability insurance forbids that kind of thing much more explicitly. And would refuse to pay medical bills or defend the establishment in lawsuits.
Is it really illegal, or is it just very expensive? Perhaps this is JAQing off, but I’d just like to affirm that I’m genuinely interested to see any list compiled of prohibited bar activities. I’m sure there’s something regulators send out to new bar owners to post in the back room.
For your question: You can start here, or here.
I’m bemused at all the other people who seem to think that bars are some kind of “Anything-goes” Libertarian city-state where “the laws of man hold no sway”. Maybe their attitudes will change when they actually encounter a human bar.
They’re one of the more regulated parts of our society, directly because drunken knuckleheads make lousy safety engineers, and bar-owners have historically proven to not care much past their bottom-line when it comes to people’s lives.
Bars, alcohol sales, restaurants are licenced and regulated, because when they weren’t people were poisoned, mutilated, tricked out of their money in rigged lotteries, and left to drown in their own vomit. That’s not theoretical, it’s historical.
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Faith in BB restored…
Browser history cleared…
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I have never seen a dwarf tossed. it is more violent than a regulated boxing game?
re: How is this a thing?
I was wondering this too. I mean, it isn’t the olden times of court jesters, where refusing to be amusing meant prison or death.
So I googled - and didn’t come up with a ton of direct quotes, but some 3rd party quotes from people doing documentaries and the like.
First off, according to this source, it didn’t start in Australia. It started in Florida, because of course it did. They just created a mythology that their little person was an authentic “Australian dwarf” skilled in “Australian dwarf tossing”. Though unlike Florida, it did actually ban the activity after the death of the original tossee, Midge. See, Jeb Bush did a good thing for once.
So why do they do it? Just like other activities where many people consider it demeaning, they do it for fame and/or money. You got 999 people who are like - nope, that’s horrible, not going to do it. And the one person who is like, fuck yeah, let’s do this. Indeed i some of the older photos from the 80s when it had a bit of “mainstream” with contests and the like, everyone looks like they are having fun. In the one interview the subject also does things like take on a Mexican wrestler persona and wrestles naked strippers. I guess he made a push to lift the ban in Florida but it failed.
So yeah - it’s a thing because people want to do it. I find it distasteful, but I guess little people who want to do it have a valid voice on the subject, even if it is the minority.
Yeah, that is a bit of a clickbait headline I posted. She also explained her position in a blog post:
“The issue is not whether laws prohibiting dwarf throwing, burqa wearing, prostitution, or pornography may be desirable social policy. Rather these examples demonstrate that the conception of dignity used to defend such policies is not that of human agency and freedom of choice, but rather represents a particular moral view of what dignity requires. These laws do not purport to maximize individual freedom, but instead regulate how individuals must behave in order to maintain dignity (and in the case of criminal prohibitions, stay out of jail).“
I’m not sure if she addresses it elsewhere, but prohibition of the examples she gives- other than burqas- also relate to personal safety and the issue of whether consent truly exists. The burqa ban is different than those and relates more to a thinly-veiled anti-Muslim sentiment, I think. Although the consent issue is also probably present with burqa wearing.
But we’ve (meaning our society in our recent discussions on the brain trauma many players - especially players in positions where they take a lot of physical damage) has been talking about the very real issues of having black men (primarily) perform for others (especially white America) in a way that is harmful and destructive. Same with boxing - sure, it’s a choice, but if you’re poor, black, and are talented in terms of athletics, it becomes one of the only options to get a decent education, but that’s not what the school you go to is going to emphasize. We STILL need to wrestle with the implications of how we treat people of color and constrain their options as a society. Too many of these kids are making the choice to play a game that could very well hurt their brains because they don’t have many other options for a successful career. Society failed them, because we’re still shot through with racism.
Same with people with this kind of disability. They are still pretty much the punchline to many people’s jokes. They are still not seen as fully human. In the entertainment industry, the vast majority of roles for little people in my lifetime have been elves or people whose entire role is to be made fun of because of their size. Peter Dinklage is breaking the mold, playing more nuanced characters and getting roles not based on his size. If people here can’t see that having that disability constrains people’s choices in a very real way or that our society makes people with this disability constantly the butt of jokes so that THEY believe it’s okay to engage in activities like that, then I don’t know what to tell you. But depending on who you are in our society, you don’t have the same set of choices in life.
I don’t find this shit funny, because these are human beings who deserve to live lives where they are not the butt of jokes. They deserve every bit of respect that you or I do.
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They’re both sometimes fatal. In boxing, you don’t have random untrained drunken bar patrons stepping up to do the violence.
I’m sorry, but you sound like someone who has never been anywhere near a boxing ring.
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Or maybe only seen it in the movies where it’s celebrated as a means of giving a working class dude a way of making it to the big times (which of course, doesn’t happen for the vast majority of professional and amateur boxers).
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[quote=“Mindysan33, post:54, topic:137593”]They deserve every bit of respect that you or I do.
[/quote]
Then treat them with respect like the human beings they are, and let them make their own decisions about what they want to do.
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We don’t let people hold amateur drunk boxing matches in bars.
I can respect people and not hand them a gun because they consent to play Russian Roulette.
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Glad you read my comment in it’s entirety. /s
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Washington State seeks to outlaw “dwarf-tossing” at bars and strip clubs
I wholeheartedly agree. The noble art of dwarf-tossing should only be practiced in the safety of your home.
This thread…
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