Gender Roles

[Elixir]

Reproductive success is indeed necessary for the continuation of the population, but that doesn't say that a population that has culture cannot thrive if the culture itself doesn't contribute to reproductive success.

Again, the timescale issue. If the culture doesn’t contribute to reproductive success, it is waning. If it becomes detrimental to reproductive success it can doom the population. Over a long enough timescale, a culture cannot remain static while not contributing to reproductive success in a dynamic fitness landscape.
/unsupported opinion

Or it always was maladaptive. This may be more common than we intuitively think, though this also depends on the granularity of the analysis. Tuning down the immune system during pregnancy is arguably adaptive as it allows the fetus to escape being eliminated - but there wasn't a point in our evolutionary history when pregnant women being more susceptible to infectious diseases than the population average was adaptive.

Good thought. There’s usually an upside/downside to any adaptation. Even if the adaptation itself is uniformly (reproductively) beneficial, it almost always comes at a cost.

It's going to be a fuzzy border. We're talking biology after all.

It (distinguishing the learned from the instinctive) may be a totally intractable problem, as I suspect.
A complete answer might not even contribute to our overall understanding of behaviors, even if couched in terms of population genetics.

 

[Jokodo]

Reproductive success is indeed necessary for the continuation of the population, but that doesn't say that a population that has culture cannot thrive if the culture itself doesn't contribute to reproductive success.

Again, the timescale issue. If the culture doesn’t contribute to reproductive success, it is waning. If it becomes detrimental to reproductive success it can doom the population. Over a long enough timescale, a culture cannot remain static while not contributing to reproductive success in a dynamic fitness landscape.

Is culture ever static, though? 21st century Catholicism is arguably a very different beast from 18th century Catholicism, and again from 15th century Catholicism. Even in more down to earth areas like what crops and animals we farm four what purposes, there are significant changes over time, and seemingly arbitrary differences between related cultures in similar environments. The Anglo tabu against horse meat is an example of the latter - in Austria, Hungary, parts of Germany, Belgium and France, (and I believe in Francophone Canada) horse meat is regularly consumed. The history of rucola/arugula/rocket in Central Europe is an example of the former: up to the 19th or early 20th century, it was a common poor man's salad before it fell into oblivion. It was reintroduced starting in the 1980s as a Mediterranean delicacy, now under its Italian name "rucola" while the old German word "Rauke" its all but forgotten*. Another example is ground elder/ bishop's weed (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegopodium_podagraria) today a common weed in Britain, but apparently it was introduced to the island as a garden herb, with a taste somewhere in between parsley and carrot greens.

* I think there's a similar story for why it has two-three names in American English: "arugula" is a barely edible weed working class Italo-Americans used to pretend to enjoy because it reminds them of the Old Country. "Rucola" is a secret ingredient used by chefs in fancy restaurants; and "rocket" is the British bastardisation if the latter (the British have been fancy for longer). They are however all the same plant.

 

[Elixir]

21st century Catholicism is arguably a very different beast from 18th century Catholicism, and again from 15th century Catholicism.

Yeah, and that is a VERY temporally collapsed version of what happens to ant cultures - over thousands or millions of years.

 

[Jarhyn]

21st century Catholicism is arguably a very different beast from 18th century Catholicism, and again from 15th century Catholicism.

Yeah, and that is a VERY temporally collapsed version of what happens to ant cultures - over thousands or millions of years.

To be fair most of "ant culture" at this point is a "truth machine" or "zombie culture": it's baked right into the interplay between their DNA and chemical state and any "special" information carried by the queen.

Human culture doesn't "go to egg" as it were.

 

[Elixir]

21st century Catholicism is arguably a very different beast from 18th century Catholicism, and again from 15th century Catholicism.

Yeah, and that is a VERY temporally collapsed version of what happens to ant cultures - over thousands or millions of years.

To be fair most of "ant culture" at this point is a "truth machine" or "zombie culture": it's baked right into the interplay between their DNA and chemical state and any "special" information carried by the queen.

Human culture doesn't "go to egg" as it were.

Hey - what I said to Jokodo;
They’re ANTS!

 

[Emily Lake]

@Bomb#20

You are clearly ignoring where she said to the effect of "trauma doesn't come from X it comes from Y", and then accused me of LIKING violence.

I did no such thing, not even remotely!

 

[Emily Lake]

Not to mention that without details, without context, any approval or disapproval of an action so general and abstract is premature. Judgement is not warranted either way in such a vacuum, and the people who would judge in an informational vacuum, these are not worth anyone's time.

I made no statements expressing either approval or disapproval. Details are entirely and completely irrelevant to the point I was attempting to make. In fact, I'm quite happy having no details at all.

Look, just take a step back - both you and @Toni and just consider a singular statement:

"I feel traumatized because I threatened someone with violence"

What is your core response to that statement? What is your primary thought on someone claiming to be traumatized because they threatened someone with violence?

Contrast that with two other statements:
"I feel traumatized because someone was threatening me with severe harm"
"I feel traumatized because someone was harassing me and threatening me with false claims"

Do you have the same response to either of those two statements?

 

[Jarhyn]

@Bomb#20

You are clearly ignoring where she said to the effect of "trauma doesn't come from X it comes from Y", and then accused me of LIKING violence.

I did no such thing, not even remotely!

Yes you did. You said that I wrote that I liked assaulting people. You used bold text. Either admit to it and apologize or feel even MORE embarrassed when I dig up the quote again where you did exactly that thing.

 

[Emily Lake]

Well, you were working with Emily on the matter, and maybe you didn't realize what she was trying to do

You have zero understanding of what I was trying to convey. You don't realize what I am trying to do, so where do you get off chastising other people for failing to misunderstand me?

 

[Emily Lake]

Also, I'm going to note that a lot of what I take issue with from Emily is subtextual, and I'm not fluent enough in translating subtext to explain how she is managing to say half the shit I respond to.

The problem is that you absolutely suck at understanding subtext in the first fucking place. You repeatedly assume subtext where there is none, and you attribute beliefs to other people - specifically to me - that I do not hold. And then you have the arrogance to argue with me about what I believe, as if somehow you know my mind better than I do. You don't. You are consistently wrong.

 

[Jarhyn]

Also, I'm going to note that a lot of what I take issue with from Emily is subtextual, and I'm not fluent enough in translating subtext to explain how she is managing to say half the shit I respond to.

The problem is that you absolutely suck at understanding subtext in the first fucking place. You repeatedly assume subtext where there is none.

what your words mean is:

I like to threaten other people with physical violence more than I like being harrassed by other people

This is loud and clear as an accusation, and further, quite ironically, as a result of failing to understand not just subtext but just text in general.

You quite loudly attribute beliefs to text where none is present here and then either you simply forgot about it or you lied like my brother when he was 14 and my parents had him dead to rights and he kept fucking doing it.

There is no excuse Emily. You did it again and again and again.

It's almost like all your accusations would be better made at a mirror.

 

[Emily Lake]

There are a whole lot of implicit assumptions in here, so I apologize for how much parsing this is going to have.

I was talking about some trans women, in a context where I argued they're threatened at the gents' more than they could ever pose a threat at the ladies',

On what basis are you assuming that this unspecified group of "some" transgender identified males could never pose as much of a threat to females in the women's rooms as they would face from males in the men's rooms? What assumptions are you making about 1) this specific group of transwomen, 2) women in general, and 3) men in general that supports this assumption?

and mentioning them in the same sentence as "people with partial androgen insensitivity".

Why do you think PAIS has anything to do with this? Why are you seeming to assume that PAIS is in any fashion associated with gender identity issues in the first place? Why are you assuming a relationship between medical conditions and psychological positions?

In other places, I've specifically said that the optimal bisection needs to be determined in a case by case basis, and that, to the extent this needs legislation at all, the optimal bisection for bathrooms is probably something along the lines of "go wherever you'll cause the least fuss".

That's what we used to have in place, and it worked quite well. Why are you assuming that it needed to be changed in the first place? And why are you assuming that the current group of people who identify as transgender in some fashion or other are inclined to do the sensible thing at all? Are you unaware that the entire reason there is resistance is because they are NOT being sensible?

I have given no indication that I find the category of "trans women" as currently applied particularly useful. It should be clear from context that the "(some) trans women" I talked about are people that are readily distinguished from typical cis males, even if they may not be easily mistaken for cis females when looking closely, and do not include "boys visually indistinguishable from typical boys, with gender dysphoria known only to those they share it with".

In what way are you assuming that this specific category of transwomen is readily distinguished from any other male? What characteristics do you believe they have that makes them easy to identify as somehow "not male"? You haven't elaborated on what you think would qualify them as being obviously not men, you seem to be simply assuming that such qualities exist.

Sorry if that was unclear to you, but I still don't think it should be if you include the context of the conversation and everything else I've said.

It's unclear because you have not added any clarity at all. You've merely assumed that such distinctions are obvious and don't need to be specified. Your assumptions are unsupported. I'm disinclined to accept your presumed premise until you can at minimum elaborate on the assumptions that you are making.

 

[Emily Lake]

Every notion in science is debatable -- that's kind of the difference between faith and science -- but if you mean you find it unlikely to be correct, that strikes me as a reversion to pre-Copernican attitudes of human centrality. "Biologically female cognition" is a perfectly meaningful concept in lions, in ducks, in alligators, in lemurs, in baboons, in gorillas. Why the heck would it suddenly stop being meaningful in humans? The opinion that it isn't meaningful in humans appears to be a politically motivated meme.

Until either you or Jokodo can be bothered to actually explain what you think "biologically female cognition" means in the context of humans, and in what way it's applicable to this topic... I reject the premise as being relevant.

In case there's any particular confusion on this, I reject it because the unexamined assumption here is that it is somehow possible for a human with an entirely typical male phenotype to have a female cognition in the first place... and the subsequent assumption that this hypothetical female cognition which is occurring within a male of the human species is biological in nature.

I would go further and argue that the language being used is misleading and obfuscating. By using the term "cognition" here, the implication is that females form thoughts through a different mechanism than that used by males - and I do not believe there is any evidence to support that. If you wish to discuss behavioral tendencies that generally differ on the basis of sex, that's something else altogether. Behavioral tendencies do exist as part of our evolution, and those tendencies do vary by sex. But that's something entirely different from cognition.

 

[Jarhyn]

Emily, literally your only interests here seem to be to spit hate, and shit on the floor in discussions like this one.

Yes, I feel TRAUMATIZED when I had to threaten someone with violence.

The fact that you cannot parse this statement says a LOT about you, namely that you don't hate threatening people with violence, that you are incapable of even empathizing with someone who does.

Think about that for ONE GODDAMN MOMENT!

I recall watching a segment of "Penn and Teller's Bullshit!", wherein they were discussing violent video games. They brought on a kid who played Call of Duty and brought him to a firing range, and when he fired the weapon at a target, he was so traumatized he started crying.

That is how healthy people who hate violence usually react to violence, any sort of violence, including threatening others. The fact that you cannot understand this is very telling. For me, the consequences were much MORE trauma over the fact that there would be consequences all around if the threat hadn't been effective.

 

[Emily Lake]

As far as "a history of advocating strongly anti-feminist positions on other topics", if you're talking about me, I don't know what history or positions you're referring to. It's true I'm not a feminist, but let me be very clear on that point. In my long-ago formative youth, there wasn't yet any "feminism" in the general meme-scape; there was just women's liberation. Likewise, there weren't any "sexists", just male chauvinist pigs, nor "racists", just bigots. It was a saner time. This modern insistence on turning everything and its brother into an "ism" is a pathology. I am absolutely a women's-libber. If you think I have a history of advocating strongly anti-women's-lib positions on any topic, show your work.

If it's any consolation, I would bristle at anyone calling me a feminist under the current usage of the term. Third wave and current liberal feminists have, in my opinion, entirely lost the plot.

 

[Emily Lake]

I thought I'd repeatedly made it clear I'm not in the "keep the trannies out" camp but the "respect women's preferences"

By deciding to side with specific women over other women, to the extent you decide some of those women must be kept out of womanhood, you very much are in the "keep the trannies out" camp.

Trans women ARE women, and YOU are making the decision here to exclude them, as is Emily, when other women decide abjectly differently.

You are making a blanket assumption that some men are women... and then demanding that all women must accept those men as being women.

I don't exclude any women; I exclude men. That you have taken it upon yourself to redefine words to suit your humpty-dumpty narrative is irrelevant to me. From where I sit, women are females of the human species; men are males of the human species.

 

[Emily Lake]

Ants do not learn new patterns of behavior from other ants over their lifetime.

They absolutely do!
Every chemical signal is a transfer of info from one individual to another.

What is your definition of “learn” that excludes some such events? I guess you could stipulate that the media and messages involved in learning must be of the sort that humans employ, but to what end?

A transfer of information is not the same as learning.

Why I type this sentence, and hit "post reply" I am transferring information from my laptop to the forum server. It would be nonsense to claim that the server is learning anything at all from this process.

 

[Emily Lake]

the Diné/Navajo

 

[Emily Lake]

Is culture ever static, though?

Depends on what timescale you want to impose on it.

Culture among indigenous australians was pretty damned static until England shipped their criminals there. Something like 40,000 years of essentially the same culture. The same is true for a whole lot of undeveloped tribes. Hell, it was even fairly true for most of Europe through the dark ages.

Certainly not a hard and fast rule, but generally speaking the more isolated a group of people is, the more static their culture will be. Culture changes when it comes into contact with different groups of people with different cultures. It's the exchange of ideas and the application of those new ideas that creates a change in culture.

One might hypothesize that our current environment of rapid information exchange contributes to cultural instability.

 

[Emily Lake]

@Bomb#20

You are clearly ignoring where she said to the effect of "trauma doesn't come from X it comes from Y", and then accused me of LIKING violence.

I did no such thing, not even remotely!

Yes you did. You said that I wrote that I liked assaulting people. You used bold text. Either admit to it and apologize or feel even MORE embarrassed when I dig up the quote again where you did exactly that thing.

Dig up the quote, and kindly include the context.

Then I will explain to you once more how you are misunderstanding what I've said, because you insist upon forcing your own assumptions into it instead of actually reading what I am saying.