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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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I'm curious about how you're using "folklore" here. Do you consider any of the following to be folklore in the sense you've used here:

  • Fiat currency

  • The concept of debt

  • National borders

  • Adoptive parenthood

  • The line between a species and a subspecies

  • The line between a genus and a species

  • The concept of species

  • Laws

  • Rules of etiquette

  • Social hierarchies

  • Race

  • Skin color

  • Nationality

  • Citizenship

If you don't consider any of the above "folklore", do you consider them "real"? Until I understand exactly how you're using the term "folklore" here, I don't know if I can really say one thing or the other of the exercise you've done here. Do you believe that the "folkloric illusion" is stupid in other domains, or just in redneg? Do you believe that folklore requires evidence, or can cultures simply create castles in the sky that are locally relevant but seem strange to those outside those cultures? Do you think folklore can be important and useful, even if it isn't "real"?

Similarly, you make the assertion that "half the humans on this planet believe themselves to be the folkloric entity called 'namow'", but I'm curious how you would get to that assertion. Do you mean that if we properly map all folkloric entities in all cultures in some n-dimensional space, we would find a cluster somewhere that every culture would recognize they more or less have in common, and that in our field of redneg studies is called 'namow', and that each culture would independently identify the beliefs of 50% of humanity as being non-different from the proposition "I am a namow"?

Could we train a neural network for "namow" and "nam" and input empirical information we collect about individuals and train it to reliably classify people into these categories, in such a way that there would be broad agreement that the classifier accurately tracks namow-ness and nam-ness? Can a human brain be reliably trained to recognize namow-ness and nam-ness in at least some cultures?

Uh, I think the answers to the questions in your last few paragraphs are generally "yes".

I assume OP had something in mind they were trying to say with this new terminology, so I'm not taking for granted that that is the case. In fact, they make the claim that:

This division of illusory categories is not exactly precise, as confirmed by the abnormal illusion being suffered by that rare group of people who call themselves snart[^4]. The folkloric illusion may seem intelligent and real to many people, but it is stupid because no one can come up with any evidence for its reality beyond sexual dimorphism.

So we are told:

  • namow and nam are "folklore" and also that they are illusory categories without precise divisions (is being folklore the same as being "illusory" or is a distinction intended here?)

  • That being snart is an "abnormal illusion", which confirms that the illusory nature of namow and nam

  • That this "folkloric illusion" is "stupid" because no one can come up with any evidence for it beyond sexual dimorphism

I think one issue is that the referent of a few phrases is a little ambiguous in OP's short post. If the "folkloric illusion" does indeed refer to the redneg-related ideas of namow and nam, then I don't know if I agree that the only evidence for redneg is "sexual dimorphism." To me, the evidence for redneg is the same as the evidence for htog(!) or ome(!) fashion - sure, the exact boundaries of htog and ome are hard to define, but that doesn't mean they're not real enough for people to form a social identity around. They really need to connect the dots of why they think "sexual dimorphism" proves anything one way or the other about redneg, since it seems to be a term related to sex and not redneg?

And given their final statement, are we to understand that OP is a redneg abolitionist? That they want to eliminate the concepts of namow and nam? What would that mean in practice? How would we treat snart people in a redneg-less society? Are snart namow namow, in a society where namow exist? If redneg is a "religion" are other concepts like noihsaf(!) and swal(!) religions as well?

This seems to be your thing.

Unfortunately, you're still presenting it in a very low-effort and trollish way. Reversing letters to make your thesis sound clever is not clever.

"Gender is a delusion, trans doesn't exist."

Okay. And?

State your case plainly, and actually say something other than "This is stupid."

Not sure what you're trying to do by reversing the letters but it just makes this post hard to read. Anyways, I don't think it unreasonable to refer to more social aspects caused by sexual dimorphism with the word gender. For example, consider the following - Men do manly things. One reason for this is that male individuals on average are more predisposed to doing manly things, but actually some male individuals are individually not suited for this. As a society there is a benefit to using the heuristic of sex instead of measuring individual aptitude for tasks in order to tell people what to do.

So, what men do is downstream of average sex differences, but not downstream of individual biology of particular individuals. We can refer to this concept as "gender". In a perfect meritocracy maybe gender can be dead, but in a society, it's sort of real.

Sex is physical, gender is emotional. Both are based in physiology, and both are accounted for in science.

Sex is hardware, gender is software. Software can be misconfigured, and it can be reconfigured.

Sex is a fact, gender is an experience. Experiences are reactions to apprehended facts.

Sex is hardware, gender is software. Software can be misconfigured, and it can be reconfigured.

An interesting description. If hardware was roughly as easy to modify as software, would you be indifferent as to which was altered to create harmony?

If the hardware was able to be transformed and/or upgraded with minimal side effects, and without vivisection in the manner of The Island of Doctor Moreau, I’d probably save up my money and try something new myself. The immutability of the flesh is a barrier to a great many new experiences of self which might be more harmonious.

Wait, how would you inherently avoid the vivisection? The only way I can imagine would be cloning a person, but modifying for the opposite sex.

Off the top of my head?

  • stem cell reactivation/homeobox gene shenanigans

  • clone a groin alone (via homeobox gene shenanigans), graft it in

  • nanotechnology magic/grey goo

I know none of these are anywhere near ready. But I've read about the "pockets" created by MtF surgeries with the risk of a persistent smell of excrement. I've read about the need for sounding rods after FtM surgeries. The idea of transformation is much more appealing than the pale simulation we can now carry out, and it's no surprise to me that the suicide risk is not so highly reduced by the current surgeries as the impression their proponents try to create.

We need a better "control panel" or "configuration file" for the "software", in any case. What we need to teach children is how to deal with the disappointments of life, with a consistent model they can use to talk with their parents or guardians, their spiritual leaders, and/or their psychological counselors. And that means we need to find such a model and show that it works. The current "elevation to trauma/abandonment" model used for unpleasantness and disappointment in conjunction with medications is clearly not working.

I've waxed poetic here before about how useful I've found the Fourth Step of the Twelve Steps, how many of my own past issues have been resolved with it. If everyone were taught a simplified version of it, there might not even be a need for as many X Anonymous meetings in the first place. I accidentally used it to resolve my own species dysphoria, and I find myself far less enthusiastic about the furry fandom than I did in my twenties. I still prefer tales of nonhumans among humans as a metaphor for my autism, and I love animal and anthro animal tales as much as ever, but my fandom is no longer driven by a pathological need.

The science of gender belief is what now?

Observations, correlations, and hypotheses, all based on the subjective reality of gender. Because our brain hardware is relatively close to identical, our subjective realities will all be relatively close to identical. But not identical.

That’s a bit hand wavy. Also these observations are generally frowned upon these days by trans activists, who support affirmation only. If there was a science then we’d use it.