Gender Roles

[Politesse]

Oh dear god, we're misreprenting anthropology and archaeology again as well. Funny how pop anti-gender rhetoric and anti-indigenous rhetoric are so often found together.

 

[Elixir]

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.

It would equally be nonsense to say there is nothing to be learned for me, from what appeared on my screen due to your typing.
That is where the transfer of information was fulfilled, not in the machines that magically made those characters appear in a location distant from yours.
You would infer that I think dirt “learns” where ants should go, when it is marked with pheromones or whatever. Marshall McLuhan might agree.

 

[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.

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.

You're wrong, Jarhyn.

Let's try this, I will say this about myself.

I like soap flavored Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Bean more than I like vomit flavor.

Do you think this implies that I like soap flavored jelly beans? Or do you think that the phrase "more than" is an important element of that statement, and that it's entirely possible that I actually dislike both of them?

 

[Emily Lake]

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

None of my posts in here are doing this.

 

[Emily Lake]

Oh dear god, we're misreprenting anthropology and archaeology again as well. Funny how pop anti-gender rhetoric and anti-indigenous rhetoric are so often found together.

What are you talking about?

 

[Jarhyn]

I like soap flavored Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Bean more than I like vomit flavor

And this is where we differ: I do not pretend my "like" and my "hate" are binary ends of the same scale.

You seem to be particularly incapable of parsing that things YOU consider binary are not actually binary ends of the same scale.

Your understanding is so simplistic on this point that it's scarce to be believed.

I like both those things exactly 0, and I hate one more than the other. To hate something less is NOT to like it.

The fact that you would even frame it as a "liking" is indeed the subtext here, in trying to rhetorically paint someone in some way.

Nobody likes such trauma AT ALL. That's why it's fucking TRAUMA, and the fact that you present it in terms of like rather than hate says a lot about you.

 

[Jarhyn]

Do you think this implies that I like soap flavored jelly beans

Yes, this implies at least part of you does like soap flavored jelly beans, because like is not the inverse of hate.

I could say "I hated when I was raped because I had no control and was under the influence, but I also liked it just a little bit because someone was paying attention to me sexually, and yet I hate that I liked it".

Being able to actually parse complex emotions seems foreign to you.

 

[Bomb#20]

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, <snip>

If you have a scientific argument for that contention you'd like to share with us, knock yourself out. If all you have is a shift-key, pressing it over and over is unlikely to stop anyone from perceiving the contention as a religious doctrine.

As I've said, and we've gone around this circle of yours more than once: "woman" is a social construct so your demand

Let me cut in right there. Exactly which part of "If ... you'd like to share with us" didn't you understand? Where in Cthulhu's name did you see me "demand" anything of you? I extended you an invitation, and I pointed out the foreseeable consequences of you persisting in your habit of treating capitalization as evidence. Demanding others do stuff is really more your thing.

for science outside the realm of sociology is not warranted.

Um, do you live in some parallel universe where Bomb#19 wrote "If you have a scientific argument outside the realm of sociology for that contention you'd like to share with us, knock yourself out."? IMNSHO, "woman" is a linguistic construct, so if you want to put together a substantive argument for your contention I'd recommend doing it in the realm of linguistics; but hey, if you have a sociological argument for that contention you'd like to share with us, knock yourself out. But as you're no doubt aware, an awful lot of sociology is cargo-cult science; if your argument strays into that territory it will probably be noticed. What falsifiable prediction, sociological or otherwise, can you derive from the hypothesis that trans women are women?

The nature of social concepts is that they are given only and exactly as much power as people give them investiture: People deciding between themselves what woman is decides what a woman is. That's how it works. ... It's the sociological equivalent of the mathematical theorem of arithmetic.

And? Do you have an argument you'd like to share with us showing a decision to define trans women as women has been made between people in general, as opposed to a Humpty-Dumpty decision between the people of your narrow religious community?

As Jokodo has discussed here, and I discussed in the last 15 threads on the topic, this basic social concept is not sufficient as a dividing line for a vast array of purposes including but not limited to bathrooms, prisons, or sports, and because individual decisions generate such social concepts, they cannot be solidly defined.

I have presented things that can be solidly defined, but none of these are exactly "man" or "woman"; and "male" and "female", while solidly defined, are defined solidly only as imaginary statistical objects, and in different ways among different fields of inquiry even as such.

I.e., you cannot derive a falsifiable prediction from the hypothesis that trans women are women.

 

[Emily Lake]

I like soap flavored Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Bean more than I like vomit flavor

And this is where we differ: I do not pretend my "like" and my "hate" are binary ends of the same scale.

You seem to be particularly incapable of parsing that things YOU consider binary are not actually binary ends of the same scale.

Your understanding is so simplistic on this point that it's scarce to be believed.

I like both those things exactly 0, and I hate one more than the other. To hate something less is NOT to like it.

The fact that you would even frame it as a "liking" is indeed the subtext here, in trying to rhetorically paint someone in some way.

I don't consider like and hate to be binary in any fashion, nor have I suggested it. Your interpretation of my view on this is false. It's a reflection of your own fantasy about my mind, rather than an actual representation of my mind. My understanding of it is not at all simplistic - your errant interpretation is.

Nobody likes such trauma AT ALL. That's why it's fucking TRAUMA, and the fact that you present it in terms of like rather than hate says a lot about you.

You present your errant interpretations of other people's views in terms of your own emotional reactions as a regular means of interaction. You are unrelentingly insulting, and you are persistent in your misrepresentation and harassment of me.

Which says an awful lot about you.

 

[Emily Lake]

Do you think this implies that I like soap flavored jelly beans

Yes, this implies at least part of you does like soap flavored jelly beans, because like is not the inverse of hate.

This is wrong, and wrong-headed. Tall might be the inverse of short, but when we're talking comparatively, it's equally true to say "Andre the Giant is taller than Peter Dinklage" as it is to say that "Peter Dinklage is shorter than Andre the giant". When we say that Andre is taller than Peter, it does not in any way imply that Peter is tall; when we say that Peter is shorter than Andre is does not imply that Andre is short.

It's just as true to say "I dislike vomit flavor more than I dislike soap flavor" as it is to say "I like soap flavor more than I like vomit flavor".

Being able to actually parse complex emotions seems foreign to you.

This is nothing more than an ad hominem attack.

 

[Jokodo]

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.

I'm sorry that's just not true. It's not even remotely plausible from the get go. As it did anywhere else in the world, the end of the last glaciation brought massive climate change to Australia. A culture cannot remain "essentially the same" when their old ways no longer work. What's more, we have concrete evidence of massive sweeps of cultural change encompassing much of the continent several times within the last 10,000 years, and while contact with Southeast Asia was sporadic, there may never have been an extended period without any contact. I give you the following:

• The dingo: while the dingo lives in a semi-domesticated state, it forms a central part of the cultures of many indigenous Australian groups. However, the oldest dingo remains dated so far are only 3,500 years old. Even if we allow that dogs have been around in Australia for much longer, 12,000 years ago seems to be a kind of hard upper limit, as that's when the land bridge between mainland Australia and Tasmania submerged - and there never have been any dingoes in Tasmania. Indeed, no dog remains older than about 4000 years are known from Southeast Asia either, so it seems likely that dogs were introduced not much earlier than the oldest remains would suggest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo#History, though other evidence suggests an earlier date around 8000 years ago - still way less than what you're suggesting:
• The Pama-Nyungan language family: At the time of European's arrival, more than 90% spoke languages from one family. The similarities between the languages - enough to form an easily recognisable family - suggest that they diverged no more than 5000 years ago, certainly much less than 40,000. It's implausible that a language or language family would spread over the entire continent without carrying with it significant cultural changes.
• There's good evidence that people who were in contact with/influenced by the Lapita reached Queensland, or that local Queensland populations were in contact with people from the Solomon islands and/or New Guinea some 2,500 years ago. I actually started a thread about pottery found on an offshore Queensland island a while back, which didn't get much traction: https://iidb.org/threads/prehistoric-queensland-contacts.28229/

The same is true for a whole lot of undeveloped tribes.

Can you give examples? Preferrably "a lot" of them? Every example of an "undeveloped tribe" that I can think of has been radically influenced by global developments within the last 500-2000 years. The staple crops of the Yanomami in the Amazonian rainforest are cassava and banana - only one of them is native to South America. Among the Khoisan of Southern Africa, the Khoikhoi (Hottentots in the old literature) are pastoralists, and their lifestock are Eurasian natives, sheep, goats, and cattle - and there is some evidence that at least some of the groups we call "San", i.e. hunter-gatherers ("Bushmen" in the old literature) are descendants of pastoralists who gave up lifestock herding when moving into poorer territories; as far as I can gather, the consensus among experts on the prehistory and anthropology of the region seems to be that the distinction between "Khoikhoi" groups abd "San" groups is one of modes of subsistence, not a genealogical one, and the linguistic classification of Khoisan languages cuts across that divide. Every single hunter-gatherer group in the Arctic has been linked up in the global fur trade network often centuries before making direct European contact.

Hell, it was even fairly true for most of Europe through the dark ages.

It definitely wasn't true in any part of Europe I can think of. Details will vary and depend on exactly what period you want "Dark Ages" to refer to, but let's assume you are using the more or less standard Anglo definition of "from the withdrawal of Roman troops to the Norman conquest", that is early 5th to mid 11th century. Europe at the end of that period was a very different place from Europe at its beginning. The period saw the Christianisation of large parts of Europe (by the year 1000, Southern Scandinavia and Russia were at least nominally Christian, it saw the rise of of Islam in the Mediterranean and the rise and fall of a slave trade where mainly Eastern European slaves were sold to Syria, Byzantium and Moorish Spain, which was in decline by the end of the era because most of the formerly pagan populations which could be easily enslaved and sold to Muslims without the church objecting had been Christianized, it saw the transition from the Roman's slave-based economy to feudalism and serfdom, it saw the fusion of "Barbarian" and Roman culture that had existed side by side (though not without exchange) into a single unified thing. There arguably wasn't any other half-millennium in European history with more radical cultural changes than the second half of the first millennium AD!

 

[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.

I'm sorry that's just not true. It's not even remotely plausible from the get go. As it did anywhere else in the world, the end of the last glaciation brought massive climate change to Australia. A culture cannot remain "essentially the same" when their old ways no longer work. What's more, we have concrete evidence of massive sweeps of cultural change encompassing much of the continent several times within the last 10,000 years, and while contact with Southeast Asia was sporadic, there may never have been an extended period without any contact. I give you the following:

• The dingo: while the dingo lives in a semi-domesticated state, it forms a central part of the cultures of many indigenous Australian groups. However, the oldest dingo remains dated so far are only 3,500 years old. Even if we allow that dogs have been around in Australia for much longer, 12,000 years ago seems to be a kind of hard upper limit, as that's when the land bridge between mainland Australia and Tasmania submerged - and there never have been any dingoes in Tasmania. Indeed, no dog remains older than about 4000 years are known from Southeast Asia either, so it seems likely that dogs were introduced not much earlier than the oldest remains would suggest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo#History, though other evidence suggests an earlier date around 8000 years ago - still way less than what you're suggesting:
• The Pama-Nyungan language family: At the time of European's arrival, more than 90% spoke languages from one family. The similarities between the languages - enough to form an easily recognisable family - suggest that they diverged no more than 5000 years ago, certainly much less than 40,000. It's implausible that a language or language family would spread over the entire continent without carrying with it significant cultural changes.
• There's good evidence that people who were in contact with/influenced by the Lapita reached Queensland, or that local Queensland populations were in contact with people from the Solomon islands and/or New Guinea some 2,500 years ago. I actually started a thread about pottery found on an offshore Queensland island a while back, which didn't get much traction: https://iidb.org/threads/prehistoric-queensland-contacts.28229/

The same is true for a whole lot of undeveloped tribes.

Can you give examples? Preferrably "a lot" of them? Every example of an "undeveloped tribe" that I can think of has been radically influenced by global developments within the last 500-2000 years. The staple crops of the Yanomami in the Amazonian rainforest are cassava and banana - only one of them is native to South America. Among the Khoisan of Southern Africa, the Khoikhoi (Hottentots in the old literature) are pastoralists, and their lifestock are Eurasian natives, sheep, goats, and cattle - and there is some evidence that at least some of the groups we call "San", i.e. hunter-gatherers ("Bushmen" in the old literature) are descendants of pastoralists who gave up lifestock herding when moving into poorer territories. Every single hunter-gatherer group in the Arctic has been linked up in the global fur trade network often centuries before making direct European contact.

Hell, it was even fairly true for most of Europe through the dark ages.

It definitely wasn't true in any part of Europe I can think of. Details will vary and depend on exactly what period you want "Dark Ages" to refer to, but let's assume you are using the more or less standard Anglo definition of "from the withdrawal of Roman troops to the Norman conquest", that is early 5th to mid 11th century. Europe at the end of that period was a very different place from Europe at its beginning. The period saw the Christianisation of large parts of Europe (by the year 1000, Southern Scandinavia and Russia were at least nominally Christian, it saw the rise of of Islam in the Mediterranean and the rise and fall of a slave trade where mainly Eastern European slaves were sold to Syria, Byzantium and Moorish Spain, which was in decline by the end of the era because most of the formerly pagan populations which could be easily enslaved and sold to Muslims without the church objecting had been Christianized, it saw the transition from the Roman's slave-based economy to feudalism and serfdom, it saw the fusion of "Barbarian" and Roman culture that had existed side by side (though not without exchange) into a single unified thing. There arguably wasn't any other half-millennium in European history with more radical cultural changes than the second half of the first millennium AD!

At this point, it's going to come down to a question of what you consider to be the fundamental aspects of culture.

I concede that you have a much stronger point with respect to the dark ages in europe, in that the spread of christianity did proceed across the various regions throughout that time period. And religion (or comparable systems of belief that place behavioral constraints upon the populace) are inarguably a material element of culture.

I am inclined to argue that culture is largely definable as the set of values, beliefs, and traditions that bind a group of people together. Within that larger structure, there can be changes in the day-to-day operations of a group that still fall within that culture. Technological changes, including agriculture and animal husbandry, might very well produce a shift in the zeitgeist of a group of people without fundamentally altering the fabric of the culture.

You mentioned Dine (I don't know how to make the accent show up) earlier. The introduction of sheep didn't materially alter Dine culture - but the long walk did. Even more material was the introduction of compulsory boarding schools, which resulted in a pretty significant loss of cultural knowledge by displacing the belief systems and the traditions of the Navajo.

 

[Jarhyn]

Let me cut in right there. Exactly which part of "If ... you'd like to share with us" didn't you understand?

"If you'd like to share with" is no less a demand, however polite.

Regardless, I did share the scientific argument.

Woman is not a linguistic construct so much as a sociological one. Linguistic constricts would, to me, extend only to that which is handled in IL, and arbitrary categories are outside of that in the realm of OL (see the Sapolsky thread on that) and of sociology as a result.

If we're getting into the nuts and bolts of language here, it is a concept that exists even without words to speak it, through some set of arbitrary heuristics--personal class definitions

Linguistics in terms of "common language" is sociological anyway. They are about some shared heuristic generated through group activities and declarations and beliefs.

Do you have an argument you'd like to share with us showing a decision to define trans women as women has been made between people in general

Why would I need to? At most I need to point to the fact that it's a social concept, and this has no solid meaning in the first place. Once we are there, it's as much a "your religion vs theirs" problem.

Whichever group you select will, of course, create selection bias.

you cannot derive a falsifiable prediction from the hypothesis that trans women are women

I never said you could, except from the perspective of some given group's beliefs, and then I reiterate, there will be a selection bias effect.

My point has ever been this: that "Man" and "Woman" are not useful categories except for idiotic political games and general discussions of social treatment, and that "trans women are women" is created by the belief that it is so. When a trans woman says she is a woman, she is saying something about herself: that it would be polite, to her, to call her a woman and use pronouns such as "she" and "her". This is literally all you have to do in response to ANYONE telling you they are a woman, if you wish to be considered "polite" from their point of view (and from the points of view of anyone who accept their proposition of womanhood).

Trans Women are Women insofar as (generally) treating them as "not-women" is rude: generally you would be put out if they disregarded your own beliefs about yourself and how you like to be treated.

All you get from "is a woman" is "identifies as a woman", whatever that is supposed to mean; usually it means "treat me like you would a 'woman' such as I am".

I don't get involved much with "how you treat women", or "how you treat men" beyond "call 'women' her/she" and "call 'men' he/him"; anything beyond that seems rather essentialist to me.

 

[Jokodo]

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.

I'm sorry that's just not true. It's not even remotely plausible from the get go. As it did anywhere else in the world, the end of the last glaciation brought massive climate change to Australia. A culture cannot remain "essentially the same" when their old ways no longer work. What's more, we have concrete evidence of massive sweeps of cultural change encompassing much of the continent several times within the last 10,000 years, and while contact with Southeast Asia was sporadic, there may never have been an extended period without any contact. I give you the following:

• The dingo: while the dingo lives in a semi-domesticated state, it forms a central part of the cultures of many indigenous Australian groups. However, the oldest dingo remains dated so far are only 3,500 years old. Even if we allow that dogs have been around in Australia for much longer, 12,000 years ago seems to be a kind of hard upper limit, as that's when the land bridge between mainland Australia and Tasmania submerged - and there never have been any dingoes in Tasmania. Indeed, no dog remains older than about 4000 years are known from Southeast Asia either, so it seems likely that dogs were introduced not much earlier than the oldest remains would suggest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo#History, though other evidence suggests an earlier date around 8000 years ago - still way less than what you're suggesting:
• The Pama-Nyungan language family: At the time of European's arrival, more than 90% spoke languages from one family. The similarities between the languages - enough to form an easily recognisable family - suggest that they diverged no more than 5000 years ago, certainly much less than 40,000. It's implausible that a language or language family would spread over the entire continent without carrying with it significant cultural changes.
• There's good evidence that people who were in contact with/influenced by the Lapita reached Queensland, or that local Queensland populations were in contact with people from the Solomon islands and/or New Guinea some 2,500 years ago. I actually started a thread about pottery found on an offshore Queensland island a while back, which didn't get much traction: https://iidb.org/threads/prehistoric-queensland-contacts.28229/

The same is true for a whole lot of undeveloped tribes.

Can you give examples? Preferrably "a lot" of them? Every example of an "undeveloped tribe" that I can think of has been radically influenced by global developments within the last 500-2000 years. The staple crops of the Yanomami in the Amazonian rainforest are cassava and banana - only one of them is native to South America. Among the Khoisan of Southern Africa, the Khoikhoi (Hottentots in the old literature) are pastoralists, and their lifestock are Eurasian natives, sheep, goats, and cattle - and there is some evidence that at least some of the groups we call "San", i.e. hunter-gatherers ("Bushmen" in the old literature) are descendants of pastoralists who gave up lifestock herding when moving into poorer territories. Every single hunter-gatherer group in the Arctic has been linked up in the global fur trade network often centuries before making direct European contact.

Hell, it was even fairly true for most of Europe through the dark ages.

It definitely wasn't true in any part of Europe I can think of. Details will vary and depend on exactly what period you want "Dark Ages" to refer to, but let's assume you are using the more or less standard Anglo definition of "from the withdrawal of Roman troops to the Norman conquest", that is early 5th to mid 11th century. Europe at the end of that period was a very different place from Europe at its beginning. The period saw the Christianisation of large parts of Europe (by the year 1000, Southern Scandinavia and Russia were at least nominally Christian, it saw the rise of of Islam in the Mediterranean and the rise and fall of a slave trade where mainly Eastern European slaves were sold to Syria, Byzantium and Moorish Spain, which was in decline by the end of the era because most of the formerly pagan populations which could be easily enslaved and sold to Muslims without the church objecting had been Christianized, it saw the transition from the Roman's slave-based economy to feudalism and serfdom, it saw the fusion of "Barbarian" and Roman culture that had existed side by side (though not without exchange) into a single unified thing. There arguably wasn't any other half-millennium in European history with more radical cultural changes than the second half of the first millennium AD!

At this point, it's going to come down to a question of what you consider to be the fundamental aspects of culture.

I concede that you have a much stronger point with respect to the dark ages in europe, in that the spread of christianity did proceed across the various regions throughout that time period. And religion (or comparable systems of belief that place behavioral constraints upon the populace) are inarguably a material element of culture.

I am inclined to argue that culture is largely definable as the set of values, beliefs, and traditions that bind a group of people together. Within that larger structure, there can be changes in the day-to-day operations of a group that still fall within that culture. Technological changes, including agriculture and animal husbandry, might very well produce a shift in the zeitgeist of a group of people without fundamentally altering the fabric of the culture.

You mentioned Dine (I don't know how to make the accent show up) earlier. The introduction of sheep didn't materially alter Dine culture - but the long walk did. Even more material was the introduction of compulsory boarding schools, which resulted in a pretty significant loss of cultural knowledge by displacing the belief systems and the traditions of the Navajo.

Can you give an argument for "The introduction of sheep didn't materially alter Dine culture"? That seems like a very preposterous claim. Next you're going to tell me the introduction of horses didn't materially alter Mapuche culture?

At any rate, absent contemporary sources before the introduction of sheep, what is your argument that Diné values and beliefs before and after where materially the same? In pastoralist cultures, a person's (usually man's) status is often in large part determined by the size of his herd, and lifestock is used to pay dowry/bride price (as the case may be). Is none of that true of the Diné? Was any of that true before they had sheep?

 

[Jokodo]

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.

I'm sorry that's just not true. It's not even remotely plausible from the get go. As it did anywhere else in the world, the end of the last glaciation brought massive climate change to Australia. A culture cannot remain "essentially the same" when their old ways no longer work. What's more, we have concrete evidence of massive sweeps of cultural change encompassing much of the continent several times within the last 10,000 years, and while contact with Southeast Asia was sporadic, there may never have been an extended period without any contact. I give you the following:

• The dingo: while the dingo lives in a semi-domesticated state, it forms a central part of the cultures of many indigenous Australian groups. However, the oldest dingo remains dated so far are only 3,500 years old. Even if we allow that dogs have been around in Australia for much longer, 12,000 years ago seems to be a kind of hard upper limit, as that's when the land bridge between mainland Australia and Tasmania submerged - and there never have been any dingoes in Tasmania. Indeed, no dog remains older than about 4000 years are known from Southeast Asia either, so it seems likely that dogs were introduced not much earlier than the oldest remains would suggest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo#History, though other evidence suggests an earlier date around 8000 years ago - still way less than what you're suggesting:
• The Pama-Nyungan language family: At the time of European's arrival, more than 90% spoke languages from one family. The similarities between the languages - enough to form an easily recognisable family - suggest that they diverged no more than 5000 years ago, certainly much less than 40,000. It's implausible that a language or language family would spread over the entire continent without carrying with it significant cultural changes.
• There's good evidence that people who were in contact with/influenced by the Lapita reached Queensland, or that local Queensland populations were in contact with people from the Solomon islands and/or New Guinea some 2,500 years ago. I actually started a thread about pottery found on an offshore Queensland island a while back, which didn't get much traction: https://iidb.org/threads/prehistoric-queensland-contacts.28229/

The same is true for a whole lot of undeveloped tribes.

Can you give examples? Preferrably "a lot" of them? Every example of an "undeveloped tribe" that I can think of has been radically influenced by global developments within the last 500-2000 years. The staple crops of the Yanomami in the Amazonian rainforest are cassava and banana - only one of them is native to South America. Among the Khoisan of Southern Africa, the Khoikhoi (Hottentots in the old literature) are pastoralists, and their lifestock are Eurasian natives, sheep, goats, and cattle - and there is some evidence that at least some of the groups we call "San", i.e. hunter-gatherers ("Bushmen" in the old literature) are descendants of pastoralists who gave up lifestock herding when moving into poorer territories. Every single hunter-gatherer group in the Arctic has been linked up in the global fur trade network often centuries before making direct European contact.

Hell, it was even fairly true for most of Europe through the dark ages.

It definitely wasn't true in any part of Europe I can think of. Details will vary and depend on exactly what period you want "Dark Ages" to refer to, but let's assume you are using the more or less standard Anglo definition of "from the withdrawal of Roman troops to the Norman conquest", that is early 5th to mid 11th century. Europe at the end of that period was a very different place from Europe at its beginning. The period saw the Christianisation of large parts of Europe (by the year 1000, Southern Scandinavia and Russia were at least nominally Christian, it saw the rise of of Islam in the Mediterranean and the rise and fall of a slave trade where mainly Eastern European slaves were sold to Syria, Byzantium and Moorish Spain, which was in decline by the end of the era because most of the formerly pagan populations which could be easily enslaved and sold to Muslims without the church objecting had been Christianized, it saw the transition from the Roman's slave-based economy to feudalism and serfdom, it saw the fusion of "Barbarian" and Roman culture that had existed side by side (though not without exchange) into a single unified thing. There arguably wasn't any other half-millennium in European history with more radical cultural changes than the second half of the first millennium AD!

At this point, it's going to come down to a question of what you consider to be the fundamental aspects of culture.

I concede that you have a much stronger point with respect to the dark ages in europe, in that the spread of christianity did proceed across the various regions throughout that time period. And religion (or comparable systems of belief that place behavioral constraints upon the populace) are inarguably a material element of culture.

I'd be willing to argue that the spread of Christianity was the most immaterial aspect of the transformation I mentioned which European societies underwent in the second half of the first millennium AD. For one, a large part of the Continent was already Christian by 500 AD - all of the Roman and former Roman territories in the South and West. Christianity hadn't altered the fabric of society much. The Western Roman Empire just before its collapse still had much the same class system and much the same role for the "pater familias" as its pagan predecessor. The transformations brought about by the fusion of Roman and Germanic cultural norms and the collapse of the Roman social order and establishment of feudalism changed the positions of ordinary people and the ways they saw themselves and each other as part of society more radically than Christianity had. In the North and East of the continent, in areas that had been pagan at the beginning of the era, Christianity was often introduced top-down*, as part of an ideological justification for an already ongoing transition from tribal to state-like societies. I don't know of a single instance of a European society where Christianity took hold before at least a nucleus of a state-like organisation had formed.

I am inclined to argue that culture is largely definable as the set of values, beliefs, and traditions that bind a group of people together. Within that larger structure, there can be changes in the day-to-day operations of a group that still fall within that culture. Technological changes, including agriculture and animal husbandry, might very well produce a shift in the zeitgeist of a group of people without fundamentally altering the fabric of the culture.

I don't see why that would be a valuable distinction. A culture is, at its root, a set of learned behaviors that are widely shared within a population. That obviously includes what feasts you celebrate, what dresses and makeup you put on for the occasion, and what you say to your kids to explain all of that. But it also includes what crops and lifestock your raise and the implications that has on on your seasonal cycle and on what terrains are or aren't valuable arable land or grazing grounds. I really don't see a good reason to treat the former as more fundamental or material than the latter.

* there is a place in
 Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum where they talk of a bishop or bishop's delegate from Salzburg traveling to Pannonia and spiting the Avars by holding a mass for Christian commoners and keeping the pagan elites out at the door, but this talks about a place that had been under Roman rules in earlier times, so plausibly those Christian commoners were remnants of a Romance population that had persisted through the migration era or members of a Slavic-Romance fusion culture, both of which are phenomena that are recorded in nearby Dalmatia or further south in the Balkans. Furthermore, the whole purpose of that treatise is to argue that Salzburg has been doing such a great job of bringing the Christian faith to Pannonia and nearby areas since basically Fieber that recent advances by the Greeks sat entirely unwarranted and should be stopped in their tracks. Exaggerating about how much of a role Christianity had played in the area even before the defeat of the Avars at the hands of Charlemagne and how much of a role Salzburg played in all of that is quite in character, so we should probably take that story with a big grain of salt. Incidentally, since of the missionaries who went from Salzburg to Pannonia to preach among Slavs and Avars were Irish monks - so much for isolation in the early middle ages!

 

[Jokodo]

Also, the religious justifications of cultural practices are often pretty post-hoc. You mentioned the "sworn virgins" of Northern Albania and Montenegro early in the thread. What you didn't mention is that it is a practice that was shared by Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Muslim groups, as well as Slavic and Albanian speakers, alike, while unknown among Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox Christians elsewhere (or Slavs elsewhere, or even Southern Albanians). Another example from the same general region would the the tattoos of Catholic women in Bosnia (locally known as
 Sicanje). The practice was partly justified as a way of setting themselves visually apart from the Muslims in the region, as body alterations would be a strong taboo for them. However, in Morocco and Algeria, a similar traditions are found among Muslim Berbers - and elsewhere in Europe, Catholics object to tattoos almost as strongly as Balkan Muslims!

 

[Bomb#20]

Trans women ARE women, and YOU are making the decision here to exclude them, <snip>

If you have a scientific argument for that contention you'd like to share with us, knock yourself out. If all you have is a shift-key, pressing it over and over is unlikely to stop anyone from perceiving the contention as a religious doctrine.

I guess we ought to just ignore all culture then, it's all made up anyway, even the concept of money. But that's not how human societies work. There are made up cultural concepts everywhere and that doesn't make them a "religious doctrine".

You appear to have made a hasty generalization. How the heck does my post imply we should ignore culture? How the heck does the existence of made-up cultural concepts that aren't religious doctrines imply that the specific one Jarhyn capitalized isn't a religious doctrine? If it weren't religious it wouldn't need to be spread by shouting -- nobody finds himself needing to say "It's MONEY." to persuade others dollars can be traded for goods and services. We can tell a dollar is money by observing what people do with it. Can we tell trans women are women by observing something?

In fact I would even argue your position is more akin to when religious people try to deny atheists are atheists.

Religious people who do that are arguing everybody is religious, not just specific people who've been caught red-handed engaging in contagious faith. Religions don't have to be theistic. Like plenty of other atheists, Jarhyn appears to have swallowed progressivism's faith-based doctrines hook, line and sinker. It has an awful lot of those. Some of them are vanilla loyalty oaths like "trans women are women" that you're supposed to recite to reassure the self-appointed new aristocracy you're in their in-group; but some of them are fundamental bedrock principles of thought. Chief among these is the doctrine that progressivism has a right to be in charge and everybody else has an obligation to tug his forelock to it. We're supposed to believe trans women are women not because there's observational evidence for it, but because progressives say so, and we're supposed to take their word for it, because they're our betters. It's exactly the same reason so many Christians take for granted the rest of us are supposed to meekly obey Christian dictates. Religion is as religion does.

Do you have an argument you'd like to share with us showing a decision to define trans women as women has been made between people in general

Why would I need to?

Why indeed? What our culture is apparently isn't up to people in general. Our culture is whatever progressives say it is.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

How the heck does the existence of made-up cultural concepts that aren't religious doctrines imply that the specific one Jarhyn capitalized isn't a religious doctrine?

No, it seems YOU are making a hasty generalization, simply by implying such a belief is "a religious doctrine". Not all beliefs are religious doctrines, even fervently held ones. I guess all fervently held beliefs an individual has about their personality are "religious doctrines"!

If it weren't religious it wouldn't need to be spread by shouting

Pretty bizarre definition of religion you have there. It's religious if people shout about it? Lol

 

[Jarhyn]

What our culture is apparently isn't up to people in general. Our culture is whatever progressives say it is.

What our culture is is "not monolithic". You are no more the arbiter of it than I am, and I am no less an arbiter of it than you are.

When there are conflicts of culture, generally these conflicts come down to resolving who is violating compatibility unilaterally and telling them to stop that. You act like you have any more right to put your hand on the tiller of culture than I do.

My issue with your point of view is that it disregards my right to participate and use language as I and my own cosm of culture sees fit.

The difference here is that I can recognize when people are leaning on mere belief (and such that that belief isn't very valuable for much).

When "woman" simply means "someone for whom it is polite to address as she/her", it's actually looking at a reality, at an "is" namely that it "is" the case that this person's goals "are" satisfied by address as "she/her".

That's about as non-religious as it gets, honestly. Trying to attach anything else as "essential" onto that seems pretty much a stretch.

You, bomb, are in the middle of defending a religious doctrine exactly by claiming as a atheist might that the atheist is religious.

The DARVO is again palpable.

 

[Bomb#20]

the theory that liking and hating work like complex numbers is what you think, not what she thinks.

And my point is that she is WRONG on that front, full stop.

"Full stop" you say. The problem is you didn't full stop. You kept going. If you'd stopped at "She is wrong" we'd be done.

Someone can hate AND like something. Someone can hate AND NOT like something. Someone can like something without hating it.

Because her model is wrong, her statement (specifically that this equated to me liking offering violence through some oblique ...) is wrong.

You don't get to say something wrong with a wrong model and then claim you didn't say what you said simply because your model is wrong. It doesn't work that way.

That's a begging-the-question fallacy. Her statement wasn't that "this equated to me liking offering violence", and you can't prove it was by repeatedly assuming it was as a premise and repeatedly taking a fragment of what she said out of context.

The model being bad means the math is bad. That's the point here.

That's a nutty position. You might as well accuse people who add speeds in the Newtonian way without relativistic corrections of making arithmetic errors.

I haven't tried to goad you

Well, you were working with Emily on the matter,

By "working with Emily" you are referring to my correcting you when you made false claims about her?

and maybe you didn't realize what she was trying to do, but I look not at what you were trying to do but what you did by picking up the intent, derived not merely from an assumption but by a clear pattern of behavior.

You are here quibbling over trying to defend Emily's rank ... ignorance on the subject.

I haven't said a goddamn thing on the subject of whether her claims about how trauma works are correct. I'd be frankly out of my depth if I were to do so. Do I look like I have a degree in psychology? I'm defending Emily from the endless illogical claims you make about her. Logic is what I do have a degree in.

How hard is it to just say "Emily, you're wrong and by pushing on this wrongness you are being very unkind; reality is more complex than that"?

Who am I, her mom? I don't know if she's wrong; I do know you aren't kind to people you disagree with. And you think I should defend you? Not a mistake I'm likely to make again. The last time I defended you, you reported my post.

And don't <expletive deleted> pretend that you didn't make a post

"Pretend". Oh for the love of god. That the post isn't there to speak for itself is your doing, not mine.

attempting to goad me on gender and pronouns

I wasn't trying to goad you; I'd have greatly preferred it if you'd overlooked the insubordination and just let me be me. I was attempting to comply with your desire not to have your gender specified without in the process saying a bunch of other stuff that isn't true and that you have no grounds to demand I say.

with <expletive deleted> games pulling in some other language just to not use plain and common English,

The words you're trying to drag kicking and screaming out of my mouth and resorting to social violence against me in pursuit of your imperialistic goal are not "plain and common English". They're Newspeak. English doesn't have words for the meaning I meant to convey so I pulled in a language that does. If I'd said the words you picked out for me as though I meant them, I'd have been lying. I will not lie for you.

or any of the other goads you have attempted to pull.

"Goads". What is it with you needing everything to be about you? It's not about you. You aren't the only one words have an effect on.

Once upon a time there was a little boy who was so intimidated by authority figures that he meekly stood up when they told him to stand up and bowed his head when they told him to bow his head and recited a pile of nonsense about a Father Who art in Heaven as though he meant it when they told him to recite. He gritted his teeth and lied for them because they were grownups and teachers and principals, and he was just a little kid who was afraid to draw unwelcome attention to himself by telling them the truth instead of what they wanted to hear. And when they let him sit down he sat down and felt ashamed of his cowardice and went on with the rest of the day's inseparable mixture of indoctrination and education. And when the boy became a man he may or may not have put away childish things but he never forgot that ashamed little boy.

If I were to say the words you demand as though I meant them, I'd be de facto saying the religion that demands them of me is right. I'd be saying it owns English; I'd be saying grammar rules are whatever the religion says they are; I'd be saying when its adherents insist that the rest of us turn off our brains' hardware accelerators for language production and do the operations in software, they are within their rights; I'd be saying its double-standards are proper; I'd be saying requiring me to pretend to agree with others' unscientific beliefs without requiring others to pretend to agree with any unscientific beliefs of mine is fair because they outrank me on the religion's stack; I'd be saying insubordination to it is a sin; I'd be saying others are gentry and I'm just a peasant. And those things I'd be saying are that religion's doctrines.

If I were to say the words you demand of me, I'd be that scared and ashamed little boy again. I'm not him.

Threatening someone with physical violence isn't traumatizing to you, it's traumatizing to them

This is the specific statement that emilyade that is so dripping with ignorance it is scarce to be believed, linked back to a history of goads wherein she clearly disregards in entirety the trauma of certain situations.

You appear to still be addressing me, even though you're complaining about content of Emily's post I didn't defend. This is a topic you need to take up with her.

I shouldn't have to explain myself three goddamn times that ...

There are a fair number of things in her posts that she shouldn't have to explain to you three goddamn times, but here we are. You two think very differently. If you want each other to understand, you're going to have to go to some effort.

...you only chose to ignore someone "on your side" spouting some pretty ridiculous and ignorant ... and ignoring the details when I explained why trauma was involved.

"Ignore". Who am I, your referee?

You could have saved needing me to tell you the details by ...

I didn't need you to tell me the details -- I'm not commenting on your trauma. Share what you feel like sharing.

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 [what] I respond to. Toni may be better at translating it out, but to be fair, people only very rarely directly address subtext-as-text and doing so is intended to be difficult because the whole point of subtext is often plausible deniability.

Funny, you don't seem to take issue with subtext when it's the subtext of the words you try to bully others into saying.