Glen -
Avoiding my usual hydra-expansion of larded point by point responses and
tangents I'll try two succinct (hah!) points I take from what you said
here while extending lots of implicit nods and tacit agreements and a
few stifled quibbles:
1) Testosterone: As an "old man" who is not (as) plagued by the
hormonal drives which at one point felt grounded out in "Fight or F*ck",
somewhat rooted in my olfactory/pheremonal level I think. And a pet
familiar (dogs, dogs, dogs, cats, cats, chickens, geese, fish,
arachnids, insects, worms, foster-horses, mules, goats) over the years,
I've never kept amale *mammal* intact past one year, and the one who
kept his manhood to death had some pretty difficult habits or
propensities that came with/from that. I do not recommend. I know few
people including/especially livestock people who think maintaining an
intact male mammal is generally a good idea. I think Kristy Noem had to
kill a dog and goat because she didn't realize what she'd
created/allowed/failed-to-raise-right. Many things *can* be solved with
a bullet it seems. If you want to be a bull or bronc rider, sure, keep
one or three around to compete with in that way... go ahead... it's your
male birthright to dominate other males who would in fact stomp your
useless monkey ass into the dirt if you weren't so upright, opposably
thumbed, clever and having of tools (like braided horse hair nooses or
bridles, etc). Or if/when/as you want to manufacture more of the
beasts through natural procreation and need a sperm donor (I think most
Bulls and Race/Show horses are not even allowed the benefit of
exercising their God given right to mount and hump, it is handjobs and
turkey basters all the way?) I'm sure I'm off base in some fundamental
way and most of the men (which are most of the constituency here) might
cross their legs and turn their backs when I say this, but I
suspect/wonder at whether we (humans) will be able to achieve the
peaceful, egalitarian, collective aspirations we claim while we still
have so much testosterone (and it's familiars) coursing and spiking in
our bodies and brains. Perhaps if men were only allowed (by whom
exactly? some fascist govt/society, "liberal self loathing principle"?)
to remain "intact" past puberty if they and their community, more to the
point had a good plan to manage them (as farmyards and ranches with
intact male animals do or should). Some (not just RadFemmes I have
known) might think Lorena Bobbit had the right idea (only she mistook
the offending organ next door for the real "root" of the cause... I
doubt that compulsory or widespread eunuch or drone-creation will be in
our future but I find it a confrontational hypothesis to offer in some
circles. I want to believe this circle of circles (jerkers? sorry,
wordplay not passive-aggressive attack) is a venue who can take it for
what it is intended (at least the few who can/do read this deep into my
rambles). China had their one-child, the first world has our ZPG,
techbros have their meritocratic technophilic procreationism (while LDS
and Catholics have or have-had their own variant), Japan (and parts of
the West) have a spiraling (to the point of being problematic
demographically?) population, so I don't feel like my "proposal" is that
far out of line for both population and collective attitude control?
2) (redoubling attempt to be succinct) Is anyone an "integrated self"
without therefore/also being a psychopath, narcissist or both? I do
think something about the "distributed self" might well be more
(w)holistically healthy in the same way worshiping a pantheon of
god(desse)s to try to understand human and Gaia nature might be a better
fit than the typical Ibrahamic Yahweh, Allah, God-the-Father. Even the
Catholics (and other sects) try to do the Trinity thing
Father/Son/Holy-Ghost-Toasty thing to allow for more nuance? Minsky's
/Society of Mind/ touched on this from a cognition/intellect aspect, why
not emotional/spiritual as well? Even the Moon Lander (apocryphal?) had
3 computers who had to agree to make any decision (error
detection/correction in a high cosmic-ray flux environment)?
BTW has anyone helped Gil? I don't really feel able... not grounded or
focused enough to fully understand his plight? Since this is my fray
from the thread, I suppose I could ask: Gil, /Mansplain ;^) us your lost
data/archive.org-recovery-aspiration-problem again in other terms?/
- Steve
On 10/21/24 1:32 PM, glen wrote:
Along these same lines (I think, anyway), I heard Candice Owens
strawman "toxic masculinity" such that the descriptor "toxic"
translates across all masculinity. I.e. she thinks when people use the
phrase, they're saying that all masculinity is toxic. Of course,
that's not what they're saying. But if it *were*, her inference is
reasonable, if vapid: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
To me, mansplaining is the same as it ever was boorish behavior of the
know it alls we all know ... and love. I've come to lump all this
deceptive fine-graining under the concept of the (Jungian?)
"integrated self". We've trod this road before with Strawson's Against
Narrativity. But people just don't seem that well integrated, to me.
And when I meet someone who does seem to have it all together in that
way, they exhibit narcissistic or psychopathic tendencies ... like
their natural intra-personal diversity has been sacrificed to some
unitary ideal of some kind.
Given that, some lecturers are fantastic and I could listen to them
all day long rant their gospel. Some are good, but insist on explicit
consent. Once you say "Yes, that's what I'm here for ... to listen to
you drone on for hours", the string is pulled and they do what they're
good at. So the key to the denigrating use of "boor" and
"mansplaining" has something to do with implied consent and
Dunning-Kruger. There's a sweet spot in there somewhere that's
difficult to hit. And continuing in the Gellmann amnesia vein, when
you navigate these waters a lot, you're gonna be sensitive to the
uncanny valley. E.g. while Curtis Yarvin sounds, to the untrained ear,
just like any other blathering dork, if you spend a lot of time around
*competent* blathering dorks, you can hear the difference.
On 10/21/24 09:55, steve smith wrote:
glen sed
Yes. It can be frustrating. My latest pet peeve are the foodies. No
matter where I go, what group I'm hanging out in, the discussion of
food absolutely dominates. They'll talk about which pizza place is
the best in town for like, an hour. Or they'll talk about risotto
for a half an hour then move on to some other obscure dish. It's
exhausting. It's even worse when the foodies start mansplaining beer
to me. I've been home brewing longer than most of these people have
been alive. But they'll yap to no end about it while I remind my
self of Gellmann amnesia
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect>
(apologies to Gil for (also) not helping to answer his original plea
for help with archive.org and lost-data retrieval, and kudos to Glen
for offering the Gell-Man reference, new to me)
Let me offer some mansplaining about mansplaining:
My favorite 3rd wave feminist (my numbering scheme, starting from 1
not 0) is Rebecca Solnit and I credit her both with the mansplaining
adjacent precedent in an essay ( circa 200x) titled "Men explain
things to me" where she recounts the experience of attending a
cocktail party invited by a friend (in San Francisco I think) where
the hostess introduced her to a man who had just read the (first?)
book she had published on Edward Muybridge. The man was head over
heels in love with the subject and the book but didn't listen to the
introduction well enough to realize he was being introduced to it's
*Author*, and proceeded to explain everything he had learned from the
book about Muybridge and his work. My understanding of Solnit is
that she is nobody's fool an anything but a wallflower, but being
"third wave" not known to be a "firebrand" styled feminist. I don't
know if she deliberately kept paying out rope to hang himself with or
not but by the time she extracted herself from the conversation, I
think she never interrupted him (effectively?) enough to correct or
inform him on the nature of his travesty of the moment.
I do believe that "mansplaining" as a verb grew popular out of that
incident/recount (maybe not, "all anecdotes are wrong, few are
interesting, none are useful?")
She also coined (FWIW, more self-fact-checking indicates she did not
coin but merely amplify) the hashtag #yesallwomen in response to the
#notallmen hashtag of roughly 2013(fact-check sez 2014)... I was not
a hashtag-kinda-guy but knew the idiom at the time... it was after
the (before the name existed?) incel living with several
(asian-american?) roomates (he being pasty-white) knifed three to
death, drove to a sorority house (where he had been
ignored/excluded), shot several women, then went on a
shooting/hit-run rampage until he self-anhillated.
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