#an anthropologist on mars

[quotesfrommyreading]

This was the case with the B.s, the autistic family I had visited in California—the older son, like the parents, with Asperger’s syndrome, the younger with classical autism. When I first arrived at their house, the whole atmosphere was so “normal” that I wondered if I had been misinformed, or if I had not, perhaps, ended up at the wrong house, for there was nothing obviously “autistic” about them or it. It was only after I had settled down that I noticed the well-used trampoline, where the whole family, at times, likes to jump and flap their arms; the huge library of science fiction; the strange cartoons pinned to the bathroom wall; and the ludicrously explicit directions, pinned up in the kitchen, for cooking, laying the table, and washing up—suggesting that these had to be performed in a fixed, formulaic way (this, I learned later, was an autistic in-joke). Mrs. B. spoke of herself, at one point, as “bordering on normality,” but then made clear what such “bordering” meant: “We know the rules and conventions of the ‘normal,’ but there is no actual transit. You act normal, you learn the rules, and obey them, but . . .”

“You learn to ape human behavior,” her husband interpolated. “I still don’t understand what’s behind the social conventions. You observe the front—but . . .”

The B.s, then, had learned a front of normality, which was necessary, given their professional lives, their living in the suburbs and driving a car, their having a son in regular school, etc. But they had no illusions about themselves. They recognized their own autism, and they had recognized each other’s, at college, with a sense of such affinity and delight that it was inevitable they would marry. “It was as if we had known each other for a million years,” Mrs. B. said. While they were well aware of many of the problems of their autism, they had a respect for their differentness, even a pride. Indeed, in some autistic people this sense of radical and ineradicable differentness is so profound as to lead them to regard themselves, half-jokingly, almost as members of another species (“They beamed us down on the transporter together,” as the B.s liked to say), and to feel that autism, while it may be seen as a medical condition, and pathologized as a syndrome, must also be seen as a whole mode of being, a deeply different mode or identity, one that needs to be conscious (and proud) of itself.

  —  An Anthropologist on Mars (Oliver Sacks, 1993)

#oliver sacks #temple grandin #an anthropologist on mars #psychology #autism #disability #marriage #family #children #parenting #stimming

[garblegox]

• Humpty Dumpty Elegy 10 | Five Books On 🙉"Monkey Brains"🙈 •

Whatchu know 'bout incels?

If your answer to that is, "nothing." then I'm impressed. It's a dirty dirty word to describe dirty dirty people. Ignorance of them is a sign of a good soul. Bless your heart.

"Incel" is short for "involuntarily celibate". That name alone should be a bright red flag.

Now, most of the time when this word is used, it's just a way to call a dude unfuckable. Which is always useful. But there's so much more to it than that. It's not some passive state of being. It's a philosophy and a subculture for the most rotten shitbags on the planet.

The way they see it, they're not celibate by any choice of their own. The only reason they're not getting their peepees touched or smooched is because society is rigged against them. Because women are hypergamous automatons who all want exactly the same type of dude (Chads or Tyrones). Because they've got physical defects that absolutely nobody will overlook. Because they're neuroatypical. Or according to some, because they're not white... or because they are.

Take the heartless and practical cynicism of the "Red Pill" brought to us by the Men's Rights Movement and MGTOWs, then add nihilism, racism, pedophilia, zoophilia, rape/murder fantasies, a proprietary blend of quack evo-psych to make it all official, and thus you've got the Incel movement. Also known as, "The Black Pill".

[Here's a handy glossary for all the newspeak these gimps use]

Their problem isn't simply that nobody will give them a chance. But that even if they do get a woman in bed, it's a diabolical trap. That there's no point in even trying, because women just get knocked up by Chads, and then get a brainy betamale to raise their kids. Or that it's all an elaborate scheme to rope you into alimony, child support, or to have you thrown in jail over fake sexual assault charges just for sympathy and attention. Long story short, women are scary, don't go near them. But they should still paradoxically smooch our peepees, even as we're running away.

And this is where I get to my main point: "Involuntary," my motherfucking ass. These are just celibate narcissists, afraid to be rejected, afraid to lower their standards, afraid of catching feelings over someone and getting dumped, and afraid to admit that they're cowards. Assholes with a pathologically external locus of control; endless victims of fate, rather than of their own choices.

I originally thought incel forums were places for those with severe mental disabilities, or ghastly physical disfigurements. Which didn't offend me one bit. If a dude with werewolf disorder wants to commiserate with a guy who has an untreated cleft lip, I say more power to 'em. It's gotta be hard out there.

But that's not what they are. People don't blurt, "incel!" at those guys. They blurt, "Oh dang, that sucks, well uuuh... good luck I guess." Those real-deals make up an infinitesimal fraction of the incel movement, which the rest hold up as emblems. The remaining majority are two types of guys:

The first type of guy isn't evil. He's just lost. I had a friend like this, we'll call him Kabbage. Kabbage wasn't disfigured at all, he was just a bit thicc, pimply, had a big fat nose. He was also debilitatingly shy and anxious. But under all of that, truly one of the best people I've ever known; smart, creative, sensitive, a beautiful soul, double-plus dad material. If he lost the weight and cleared up his skin, he'd have very little to worry about. Plus, girls don't really mind a big nose, it's masculine. He's the one who introduced me to their subreddit before it was purged.

My reaction was immediate disgust and condemnation, and I assumed he showed me so we could rip on them together. But he got quiet, changed the topic, and I haven't spoken to him since around that time.

Kabbage, I hate to say, was a coward in many ways. His parents were identical to the Glouberman family from the show, Big Mouth. He struggled to ask for salt & pepper at other people's dinner tables, so as not to offend anyone. Imagine how scary he found asking a girl out. He felt lonely, and liked the sympathy he found among the incels.

The second type of guy IS evil. Humpty was this type of guy.

If I had to pull stats right out of my ass, I'd say the incel community is made up of 0.01% disabled/disfigured guys, 5% Kabbages, and 94.99% Humpty Dumpties.

And I'd feel no particular need to shit on these guys, if not for the incel community's growing body count. Most famously, Elliot Rodger, and Alek Minassian. The latter I've mentioned already, because Humpty was a fan. He said if Minassian succeeded in his plea of insanity, based purely on his autism, that'd open the door for a spree killing of his own.

There's more than two killers, but I'm a strong believer in strictly trying to forget about these losers. The best punishment is to send their names to oblivion, ignore any statements or manifestos they made, and just heap praise and sympathy on their victims. Suffice it to say, too many spree killers are proud incels.

Yes, I am embarrassed to have spent time with Humpty. I know how terribly this reflects on me. The RCMP would probably be coming after me with some questions if they weren't all busy kidnapping and murdering First Nations women.

But GREAT NEWS! Humpty is fucking GONE! Humpty admitted to Wednesday that he never gave a shit about us or any of his ex discord amigos 😃. So Wens told Hump to officially fuck off! Yay! They were going to do a pity vote to maybe let him back into the discord this June, but not anymore. He wasn't reading this series. He never planned to. I don't have to act like I care about his wellbeing whatsoever. YISSSSS! Go skip rope you worthless fucking rotten egg!

I will still send him a link to this when he inevitably winds up in prison. But now I'm officially writing this for everyone else's benefit.

With that out of the way, what's all this "monkey brain" shit?

It depends. Like "incel", it's a question of who is saying it.

To some, it's a pop-psychology buzzword. A reference to Paul MacLean's "triune brain" model of brain evolution. The idea that our brains evolved layer after layer. Starting with our instinctual "reptile" layer, then developing into our emotional "mammal" layer, and culminating in our rational "human" layer. When people say "monkey" they mean the lower "mammal" layer.

To others, it's a Buddhist concept along very similar lines. A state of mind that is, "unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable". While it's along similar lines, there are no Buddhist incels. Humpty was the least Buddhist dude I've ever met. He didn't throw out "monkey brain" to keep track of and tame his negative impulses.

Maybe some people came here thinking I had five books on that one scene from Faces Of Death...

nope.

To incels like Humpty Dumpty, "Monkey brains" is vague and versatile. Based on the dog-shittiest pseudo-psychology in existence at this moment in history. A simple get-out-of-introspection free card; an exemption from all moral responsibility. Almost like demon possession, it wasn't me, it was my gersh dang monkey brain what done it again.

Incel monkeybrainology is a confused mix of genetic and cultural determinism; a denial of the fact that one of the many wonderful things humans evolved to do was act civilized; a half-assed bastardization of modern neuroscience; and a complete romanticization of the worst sides of every impulse.

You don't just suddenly find yourself an incel (I don't give two shits about the Donnelly Study. It's a worthless woozle hunt). You find incels, and work your ass off to join them and conform to their blackhole gravity well of despair.

While I couldn't drag Humpty Dumpty out of that well, I might still be able to talk some sense into the Kabbages among him, or people that know some Kabbages. People aren't incels because they're unfuckable; they're unfuckable because they think like incels. OR, they're comfortably celibate, but not comfortable enough to admit it.

In fact, Wednesday is a perfect example: He describes himself as maybe the ugliest person on the planet. Now, I disagree, and think that's some obvious dysmorphia talking. But it's also true that Wednesday qualifies as "deformed" thanks to his crooked eye. He'll tell you it's been a real obstacle to dating. But here's the kicker: He's been slangin' dick since he started highschool. And for one huge reason: He's brave enough to constantly put himself out there; not too proud to beg; and not afraid to put in work only to lose someone. He didn't disqualify himself from a sex life before even trying. And you know, a pity fuck is still a fuck.

Wens could have given up from the start, and been a proud member of the incel community's 0.01% elite. But he's simply not that much of an irresponsible pussy. He worked his ass off for those peepee touches, and never once decided he was just entitled to them.

This is the one topic Wednesday and I tried the hardest to change Humpty's mind on, and made the least progress. This is a central pillar of the incel community. In this entry of the Humpty Dumpty Elegy I'm going to do my best to unravel the incel pseudo-biology/psychology that has thusfar gotten innocent people killed, and wasted the precious time of thousands of silly young men.

Meanwhile, for everyone else who is comfortably removed from the incel cesspit, and uninterested in wading through it, these are still five books that can give you a deeper and more endearing connection to this magnificent species we're all a part of. Modern psychology is founded on biology. A solid understanding of the latter can tell you more about yourself than any checklist, index, or diagnosis psychology has to offer.

• #1 The Moral Animal by Robert Wright •

Lets start with them genes, mommy 👖

It's probably unwise to be promoting evolutionary psychology on Tumblr. Evo-psych, or as it used to be called, "sociobiology" came into this world under a salvo of controversy. Its founder, E.O. Wilson was labeled a racist, sexist, fascist monster.

Academics, particularly feminist ones, lumped him in with social Darwinists (which shoulda been called "Spencerists" because Darwin had nothing to do with them), eugenicists, group-selectionists, genetic determinists, and any other goblin that made the 20th century so bloody.

To be fair, while the smearjob towards Wilson was wildly off-base, they did predict people like Humpty, and the blackpill movement. But not because Humpty is an orthodox sociobiologist. It's just that the old models of psychology made his warped philosophy more difficult to justify. And many of Wilson's critics had just as much of a bastardized understanding of the topic as Humpty does.

There was a fear that if you added a "hard science" like biology to a "soft science" like psychology, you'd get something especially dangerous and pernicious. But as Wright correctly pointed out, notions like "there's no differences between men and women" came from the social sciences, have done plenty of harm, and didn't rely on biology at all. Same with strict behaviorism. Social engineering is a risky game, period.

This is why it's so important for incels to get the full picture. Many of them say things like "It's evolutionarily adaptive for a man to have a drive to rape." but completely ignore the other side of that coin which says, "women evolved an equally adaptive hatred towards being raped".

Society is just a bunch of individuals negotiating compromises over their competing, often opposing, self-interests. Incels just want the world to compromise 100% to them. They're screaming babies.

Incels love to conveniently look at random primates for justifications for everything, ignoring the fact that each primate species is hugely different from every other one, including us.

When it comes to relationship fidelity, what are we? Winner-takes-all tournament animals like gorillas? Klingon-style rape monsters like chimps? Slutty bonobos? Or saintly Victorian gibbons, who pair for life and serenade each other from the treetops each day?

Answer? We're humans, asshole. We're the primates who evolved to build civilizations. We're the ones who have all of those possibilities within us, and more. And this is the point of Wright's book: Humans aren't inherently moral animals, but we're all potentially moral, which makes us one-of-a-kind.

A lot of our behavior evolved to be, "frequency dependent". Basically, as we grow up we observe the people around us to decide where we plan to fit in. When there's too many cooks, try your hand at being a waiter.

Like with the "Madonna/whore" or "Dad/cad" dichotomy, if you grow up around Madonnas, it might be wise to try being a whore. If everyone's a cad, try acting like a dad. If everyone has a hipster beard, you'll look cooler with a clean shave. There's not one "naturally" right strategy for life. It depends on the environment.

"In your genes" is practically meaningless a good chunk of the time. In the tug-of-war between nature vs nurture, or genes vs social environment, genes do only between 1/3 to 1/2 of the work in determining who we are.

This is why determinism is such a sin, genetic OR cultural. This book deals with the genetic side, while later on The Blank Slate deals with the environmental side.

A huge thing incels like to believe is that their placement in the social hierarchy has been completely determined for them. They believe they're stuck firmly on the bottom. In fact they romanticize their lowliness. That icon at the top, of a slouching bitchboy, is the symbol of their wiki.

This is how the black pill makes the red pill, despite all its flaws, look 100x more healthy and productive. A pickup artist would tell you there's no excuse for not standing up straight or grooming yourself, and a MGTOW would at least tell you to take ownership of your choice to avoid women.

Nobody is born a winner or a loser. Take the leaders of fraternities for example. Aka, "chads". If you tested their serotonin levels just before entering the frat, they'd be extremely unremarkable. It's only after they ascend the ranks do they have a surplus of serotonin.

Serotonin gives you confidence, similar to the effects of alcohol. People don't become leaders because they're full of it, they're full of it because they became leaders. We evolved it to maintain status, not to determine who leads and who follows.

And here's an important detail about male hierarchies: They're extremely fragile and dynamic. Today's chad could be tomorrow's homeless guy, reminiscing about the days he was hot shit. Bill Gates never had to be sexy to take over the world. Charles Darwin was a gentle little niceguy, with an ugly face, who didn't touch a woman until well into adulthood, yet he had 10 kids and was buried in the same cemetery as Isaac Newton.

The incel definition of an "alpha" = Duke Nukem... and that's it. Because once again, they're just stupid narcissists.

There are dozens of behavioral changes a man can make to encourage some endogenous serotonin production. Taking on responsibilities, setting and accomplishing goals, exercising and taking care of your health, etc. are a good start. In a way, this whole series is partially about facilitating that. But disturbingly their main focus is on cultivating "dark triad" personality traits. Based on the asinine belief that women prefer abusive men, and that that's the only way to keep them around.

Really, they just think like criminals. Criminals, especially the ones who commit impulse crimes like robbery, assault, or rape, actually have a massive deficit of serotonin, not a surplus. One hypothesis suggests that people in that state of mind commit crimes to kickstart their serotonin levels back up to baseline.

But like I've said, that's not a good excuse; crime is not a valid antidepressant. Ruining your rep and getting punished for bad behavior is a great way to lose all your happy brain chemicals. The dark triad scheme is a terrible gamble. This is where the concept of "reciprocal altruism" enters the picture, and it's one of the key details incels leave out when they discuss the evolution of human behavior.

Like with all other primates, the social hierarchy cannot be ascended alone. If you think you can just max your strength and ignore your charisma, you're in for a mutiny. There's no future in abusing your way to the top.

The incel sour-grapes attitude towards high status men is a fairly natural response. Generally speaking we all have a tendency to attribute our successes to skill, and our failures to luck, and the reverse for others. They never look at a guy with a healthy social life and assume he earned it. They blame it on some halo effect, because he's got "hunter eyes" or some stupid bullshit like that. And they never look at their own awkwardness as a result of isolating themselves and trying to learn about people through movies, videogames, or god forbid, dating simulators [shudder].

We no longer live in a world where a high-status person will just straight up violently attack a low-status person for their hubris or insolence. Incels act like if the Alphas come by and see them standing up straight, they're going to attack them like an angry chimp.

Evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense to conceal your high self-esteem, and brandish low self-esteem. It's a holdover from our more primitive tournament days. Back then, reconciliation was a better survival strategy for most people than overt dominance. Also, seemingly all cultures discourage boasting, and see it as something to grow out of. But what do people grow into? Just more subtle boasters.

I used to floss the albatross like Daddy Kane with the chain. I'm tryin' to jettison the ballast with the hazardous waste. -- Aesop Rock, Dorks

But once again, we don't live in those times. This is the beauty of an individualistic society. Nobody is asking you to stare at your feet. This is the danger of the naturalistic fallacy. On one hand, they love the idea that "it's only natural" for a man to be attracted to minors, or that celibacy is a pain worse than death, or that rape may be justified if that pain gets too unbearable. But then they also have to swallow the idea that evolution is fine with them staying subordinate to everyone forever, or that we're an anthill-like superorganism that has no particular interest in them creating offspring.

Nature gave us a frontal lobe for a reason. If you got a problem, you can think your way out of it. Whether you have to make compromises, barter, collaborate, or just read a god damn book. Fate is only real if you believe in it. If you do, then amor tuum fati, and shut up.

• #2 Behave by Robert Sapolski •

I can't tell you how silly it feels to take a book this comprehensive and robust, and focus it on sexless douchebags on the internet.

But it's where I came up with what I'll call the, "Incel's Dilemma". See, incels often have an above-average understanding of the science of human behavior, genes, and environmental effects. It's just that this info is conveniently selective, and poisoned by a powerful confirmation bias.

The more you know about all this, the clearer it is that you have control over your life.

Once you know what you have control over, to not improve yourself is no longer a passive thing, it's active. Once you know better, you suddenly become responsible to do better; it gets harder and harder to say your problems are not your own god damn fault.

So incels tiptoe like Egyptians over the responsibility landmines scattered all throughout the desert of their self-imposed shitty lives. They're constantly at risk of losing their beloved victim narrative. They're participants in their own misery, whether or not they want to admit it.

They look at data to confirm their hopelessness like a lot of fat people do to get out of dieting or exercise.

"95% of diets fail" What the fuck does that have to do with you? Take that as a challenge, not a cop-out. Any rehab center will tell you, most people relapse three or four times before finally achieving sobriety. It doesn't mean don't try, it means you've got at least three failures to get out of the way before you can succeed, so hurry up and get those failures over with.

It's all a big Texas sharpshooter fallacy with the data-driven incels. A look at Incel Wiki's "Demographics of Inceldom" might fool you into thinking these cunts have a point, but that's precisely how the fallacy works. Take a bunch of scattered data, and draw your own bullseyes over whatever suits your narrative.

Believe it or not, human life is not a 2D plane with some scribbles on it. It's far more complicated than that. This is that over-systematization Simon Baron-Cohen talks about. But for the systematizers out there looking for a data-dump, how 'bout an 800 page, 26 hour long book/audiobook? If learning face-to-face ain't your jam, here's plan B.

To blatantly plagiarize the introduction: This book explores the biology of violence, aggression, and competition. The ways in which humans harm one another, but also the ways we do the opposite. The biology of cooperation, affiliation, reconciliation, empathy, and altruism. Sapolsky started from a pessimistic nature, but tried to reign it in for the sake of his kids, and as he learned more on the topic he learned much of the harm humans do is not universal; He learned to be optimistic.

You can't understand much of human behavior without biology. But you also can't understand it all with biology alone. Same with neurochemicals, childhood trauma, social environment, etc. It's multifactorial; it's a complicated pain in the dick.

There are dozens of things that influence the decisions you make. Sapolsky breaks them down from one second before, seconds to minutes before, hours to days before, days to months before, and centuries to millennia before a decision.

One thing that blew my mind was the info on testosterone. Turns out it's not true, the idea that testosterone makes you aggressive. See, if I eliminate all the testosterone from your body, your aggression will disappear. When I give it back, it returns to baseline. However, after you hit baseline again, any extra testosterone I give you will do nothing to your aggression levels.

Incels love to believe high-testosterone = antisocial (dark triad/asshole chad stereotypes). But in fact it has plenty of prosocial effects. When subjects in a cooperation-based game are secretly given testosterone, they're more likely to cooperate and prioritize generosity and good sportsmanship. It makes you more likely to value social norms, and try to do "the right thing".

But here's the kicker, if you give someone a placebo and tell them it's testosterone, they become more antisocial, and less charitable. Suggesting that "toxic masculinity" is a cultural defect, and not a byproduct of too much testosterone. It's not only incels that think "asshole" = "manly". But biology and neuroscience beg to differ. Incels are just as confused as the average fatherless gangbanger.

What testosterone is best for is responding to challenges. It's that Teddy Roosevelt, "Walk softly and carry a big stick" type'a shit, or that Robert Deniro, "You talkin to me?" style. Testosterone doesn't make you start fights, or bully the weak and helpless, it's about minding your own business, and deflecting intruders. An immovable object > an unstoppable force.

Just like with serotonin, behavior mostly comes first; testosterone doesn't stimulate aggression, aggression stimulates testosterone. Prisoners tend to have higher testosterone than the general population. Not because testosterone makes you act more like a criminal, but because prison exposes you to daily challenges from aggressive people, forcing your body to produce more in defense.

The other mind-blower has to do with the vaunted and beloved neuropeptide, oxytocin. Long story short, it doesn't make one as lovely as people commonly believe. It makes you lovely to people within your ingroup, and pretty gross to everyone on the out. Like what you get in small rural towns; people are sweet as pie towards their neighbors, and venomous like snakes to the other 99.99% of the world they find foreign and confusing.

This book is just full of surprises. From the variety of roles your frontal lobe can play, and the effects of damaging it; to the counterintuitive influences of estrogen and progesterone, and what they do at different ratios; to scared hyena boners; to the reality of adolescence; to the devastating effects of "hospitalism"; to the psychology of bullies, the bullied, and the bullied who like to bully; to the effects of permissive vs authoritarian parenting styles, and their outcomes in different socioeconomic environments; to how much of our genetic code is completely unused, waiting for our environment to activate it; to the difference between "inherited" and "heritability"; to whether the "warrior gene" would be more accurately labeled the "pull your pants down in public" gene?; and much much much more!

After reading (and then re-reading) this book, one should never feel the need to return to a stupid fuckdump like the Incel Wiki. If it isn't clear yet that places like that are a textbook example of the Dunning Kreuger effect, and not a dose of clarity, then you obviously haven't consumed this book yet. Which I understand, it's as dense as a curling stone 🥌. But meanwhile, here I am, free of sympathy, arms akimbo, foot tapping, waiting for these incel pigs to catch up to reality.

As I've said dozens of times, I tried gently feeding all this info to Humpty, as a friend, trying to coax him into a more optimistic state of mind, and it wasn't too complicated, he wasn't too stupid, he just didn't want to hear it. He loves his despair. How the fuck else would this rotten bitch find pity?

I could go on, but this entry would wind up more than twice as long as it already is. I only covered nine of seventeen major chapters so far and suffice it to say it doesn't start leaning in Humpty Dumpty's favor. This book is absolutely nuclear; Sapolsky's magnum opus. I got halfway through this and it dawned on me that I'd need a second month to pull this edition of the Humpty Dumpty Elegy off. This is a monumentally large topic for a sweaty, brain-damaged fry cook to tackle all on his own.

If ya don't know, now ya know.

• #3 The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker •

Lets all just take a moment to fart in B.F. Skinner's general direction 🍑💨

I've spent nearly all my time in this series writing about the ways in which you can change yourself. And I stand by all of them. I'm not the same person I was before I read these books, and I don't believe it was all just a matter of time before this stuff sunk in; I had to work for it all.

Humpty Dumpty came to Wednesday, having seen all the progress Wednesday made since highschool, and wanted a piece, allegedly at least. For every one step I made to repair my state of mind, Wens made ten, simply by virtue of starting from a deeper pit of despair.

But it's crucially important that I take a moment and separate myself from the social constructionists out there. The people who think every mind is a blank slate, and infinitely malleable. They're the people who don't believe in a human nature at all. While I accuse Humpty and other incels of having a pathologically external locus of control, it's important to recognize that a 100% internal locus is just as insane.

Now, before we assassinate this crock of shit, lets give the social constructionists some credit, their hearts were in a very good place.

The "blank slate" hypothesis, right off the bat, completely undermines old justifications for things like slavery or aristocracy. It's extremely difficult to justify the idea that anyone was born to serve or be served if we're all made from the same starting materials.

Blank-slaters carry with them a perfectly healthy anxiety towards the idea of human nature:

If people are innately different, oppression and discrimination could easily be justified

If people are innately immoral, there's no hope to improve oneself

If people are products of biology, free will would be a myth, thus moral responsibility would vanish

If we're mere biology, then life no longer has meaning

All blank = all equal.

Though this idea of a blank slate is as old as Aristotle, it picked up most of its academic oomph during the 19th and 20th centuries. First in an effort to poop on colonialism, then in response to racist genocidal atrocities.

But there's a serious catch: If we're all infinitely malleable, there's no basis to say slavery is a miserable existence. A slave merely has to be conditioned properly so that they learn to love their role, like an animal in a Skinner box. A person only hates being raped because society told them to hate it. You're only fond of your individualism because we live in a greedy capitalist society that requires you to desire that lifestyle, so that you work/consume more. Etc. A soul? That's cute, go fuck yourself.

E.O. Wilson wasn't labelled a fascist because he promoted fascism in any way. He was labelled so because the "science" he questioned was, for a very long time, fascism's most prominent antagonist. But while social constructionists deserve points for picking the right enemy, they lose most of them for having little basis in observable science, and even more for having committed plenty atrocities of their own.

B.F. Skinner and Chairman Mao saw the world through a disturbingly similar lens. While Hitler and Mussolini got millions killed for some warped idea of human nature, Marx got even more killed based on the idea that humans have no nature at all.

Thankfully, social constructionism is dying. Even according to Wednesday, while he was in school training to be a therapist, they had a whole module dedicated to debunking the idea, which is beautiful news. But though it's on its way out, it's taking its sweet ass time, and all the while creating creepy little permutations that slip past people's better judgement.

Concepts like "The Lean Genome", "Connectionism", and "Extreme Plasticity", which I'll just let Pinker handle on his own, for the sake of brevity.

This doesn't have a whole lot to do with the incels' particular philosophy. They're way more likely to make a naturalistic fallacy, than a constructionist argument. However it's true to say that the culture we live in is still greatly influenced by these ideas. And this is the culture that spawned incels to begin with.

In school there's no sense that a student is the way they are for some natural or evolutionarily adaptive reason. There's one, maybe two ideal student types, and everything beyond that range gets slapped with a disorder label.

Teachers are mostly lazy shitbags. There's no filter for assholes or narcissists. They don't need to be entertaining, compassionate, or even have a solid theory of mind. If a kid is a little unusual, there's no impetus on the teacher to get inside that kid's head, and connect them with all the beautiful knowledge within their reach. Kids are just pigeons you need to convince to peck the right buttons and work for the same reward pellets.

These disorders fuck with people's identities, long past their time in school. To some it's a simple nadir that helps them find their zenith. It's useful to understand your own shortcomings, of course. But for many it becomes a mental prison.

A doctor told me I was sick. Why? I was doodling? Playing with and entertaining my friends? I found something more challenging to do than listen to the teacher repeat themself for the third time? Oh, no I know why, because I insulted the institution, and they wanted to insult me back. Ah, gg then.

This isn't just the authoritarianism Pink Floyd rapped about. We've traded fiery religious rhetoric for clammy psychobabble, and most parents are absolutely snowed by it.

It seems blatantly insane when you see it in that Uncle Buck clip. But we're not too far off from that in real life. We have still pathologized "twiddlers", "dreamers", "silly-hearts", "jabberboxes", etc. It's just that we've gussied it up with Latin or Greek polysyllabic words, all tucked into acronyms and initializations.

Parents have been taking a beating for so long with all this shit, too. Cultural determinism puts ALL the blame for someone's behavior on their parents. This is where the "concerted cultivation" style comes from, which Jonathan Haidt does an excellent job of exploring in The Coddling Of The American Mind.

All this is to say the millennial/zoomer generations are an anxious and uncertain bunch. We all seem to hate ourselves, and everything that comes most naturally from our hearts. We're ironically detached from our ironic detachment from our authentic detachment from our authentic selves. We're optimized for life in an institution, be it a school, corporation, gov't job, or prison. If you don't jibe with Skinner boxes, it's easy to get the impression that there's no place for you in this world.

The worst thing you could do, would be to take that negative impression, and romanticize it. Humpty was the king of getting beaten with a stick, and thinking the best payback he could give his punisher was taking the stick and beating himself, only harder.

"Oh yeah, you think I'm a muddy pig? Watch this, I'm gonna roll in some shit! Then I'll be a shitty pig! Take THAT!"

When behaviorism fails us, we often believe we're the ones that failed behaviorism. Forgetting, or perhaps never knowing at all, that it's an inhumane, dehumanizing, industrial process of extracting compliance. Many of us are defined by our troubled days in Skinner boxes, and it never occurs to us that we didn't belong in one in the first place, or that maybe we did the right thing by putting up a fight.

When I read incel forums, I see people who have been tragically disconnected from their own natures. Grasping at more and more data, more and more graphs, still convinced that they and their lives are mere algorithms or games.

It's not simply Asperger's; Autists can (slowly but surely) cognitively wrap their head around human nature, in a way that still preserves beauty and meaning, even if they don't feel the typical emotional response to those things. What we have here is an active corruption of people's concept of human nature, which I believe is responsible for an incalculable amount of suffering. Mental and physical.

"It's just my Monkey Brain again" is Humpty's version of fighting the power. It's one step further towards reclaiming his nature from a world that told him he didn't have one. But his understanding of human nature is so poor and underdeveloped, that it's almost as pathological as the allegorical cave he started out in.

• #4 Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari •

Wheat be whispering to yeast like, "psst, hey cmon lets go catch some monkeys"

Robert Wright did an excellent job of sticking up for evolutionary psychology in The Moral Animal, and spelled out how we managed to evolve a moral compass. Yuval Noah Harari skips the debate and puts all this scrumptious information to good use, telling the story of our species from the days when we were neighbors with Neanderthals, all the way to the present moment with its head-spinning exponential rate of change.

This book is a an antidepressant. I've found psychology, philosophy, and spirituality to be priceless assets in getting my head straight. But sometimes there's nothing better than than putting yourself in some ancient shoes. History, if you don't exclusively confine your focus to the last 200 years of dystopian jibber jabber, can be up there with psychedelics in it's mind expanding, perspective enhancing capabilities. I recollect some historical lessons the same way I do with epiphanies I've had on shrooms. With the same oceanic significance Sigmund Freud talked about.

We've been over genes, we've been over environments, we've been over the importance of finding the balance between the two. Now lets add to that complicated slurry of factors: MEMES!

More than just evanescent shitposts on a sandcastle of digital noise, whether spicy or dank, memes are the motherfucking glue that holds our silly species together. When we group up, we meme. Scoff all you like, memes are one of the defining characteristics of human beings.

Like Ernest Becker points out in Denial Of Death, humans are unique in their ability to believe in things they've never seen or experienced, like death and the afterlife. Beyond mere survival or reciprocation instincts, humans bond over shared myths, faiths, and fictions. We didn't just evolve to tell stories, we evolved to believe the ever-loving shit out of them. In fact, storytelling may be the key difference that helped humans overcome Neanderthals, despite being weaker, and having smaller brains.

Now before we move forward, I've discussed a lot of things that "influence" our choices. So what about free will? If my choice to buy Rice Krispies over Corn Flakes is one part genes, one part environment, and one part memes, where does "choice" come into play at all?

Well, it's tricky. As I discussed with Sam Harris', Free Will, it seems pretty clear that free will is just an illusion. Or rather, a fiction. But as Harris also pointed out, that fact doesn't really make a single damn difference in anyone's life.

That said, how can I tell incels anything they do is voluntary? They would also agree that their life is a series of factors beyond their control or premeditation. But that's the thing about free will, you either claim it, or you deny it. And the choice to do one or the other determines how society treats you.

When you act up, and someone says, "hey stop, that's bad." You can do one of two things, you can say you don't have free will, or you can own your decision. If you disown your free will, then you get placed in the uncomfortable, "defective object" category. OR, you can elect to stay in the far more dignified, "subject with agency" category. Defective objects get either fixed, abandoned, or destroyed, without any say in the matter, as dehumanized and hopeless as one can be. While the options for subjects with agency are greatly expanded, with all the benefits of a human who takes moral responsibility.

Free will may just be a legal fiction, but so are corporations. Our lives are dictated by dozens of imagined orders that leave nearly no trace on the physical universe. However that doesn't make them irrelevant or unreal as phenomena.

Imagined orders are fragile though, as you might expect. Which is why we evolved to be so gentle with them. Wanna escape an imagined order? There's not much actually stopping you, save for maybe isolation. The only catch is that you either need to convince others to come along and join, or you need to join an established alternative. Just don't join the incels.

99.999% of the time, there's no need for violence. That's truly something we don't share in common with other primates; big swole brutes don't really have much actual power. We oughta be grateful about that.

Our ability to tell stories marked what anthropologists call the Cognitive Revolution, which helped us outwit Neanderthals. That eventually led to the Agricultural Revolution, where we got domesticated by wheat, and misery as we know it began. But man, the smell of a bread aisle... Mmmm!

Don't let the second bit bum you out too much, it comes with great news! These two revolutions did something neat: They opened up niches for weaklings and dimwits! Wahoo! Pre-agricultural humans knew basic botany, astrology, zoology, bushcrafting, toolmaking, etc. Their general knowledgebase, let alone strength, would make most average modern people look useless. Nowadays, you can live a comfortable life specializing in asinine busywork. You don't have to know anything about your own food, shelter, clothes, geography, local flora or fauna, how to swim, hunt, or climb trees, etc. We "specialize and collaborate" as The Knowledge Illusion puts it. Or we, "work a bunch of bullshit jobs" as David Graeber would.

Incels feel left out because they're not Dwayne Johnson. Meanwhile it's mediocre nerds who are the powerhouse gigachads of civilization, and have been for millennia.

Some imagined orders are global, and frankly you shouldn't waste much time trying to oppose them, unless you're a real cocky coolkid who thinks you're going to be the next axis of global change that comes once only every few centuries. These would be the global monetary, imperial, and religious orders. And not to be a dick, but lets just go ahead and put modern science in the religious category, because it's really blowing up god's spot. Fighting these things is a losing battle. I say the only way out, is through.

So much of our pain is man-made, not natural. The upside to that is if we made it, we can unmake it. To you and me, there's no "natural way of life". There hasn't been for as long as we've been recording history. Which is why history is so useful to us. Everywhere you look in the past, you find people struggling with the cognitive and agricultural revolution. Some truths evolve, while others haven't changed one bit.

If we live by memes like they're microbes or viruses living inside our heads, then it's fair to say nihilism is a deadly pathogen. I disagree with memetists who say the success of a meme is determined by the effectiveness of its host. Like with genes, they don't give two shits about their host, only about replicating. When an incel goes on a killing spree, it's like a zombie virus, killing a host, and infecting multiple people after the fact.

Fundamentally this is all a question about happiness, this business with incels. They're searching for contentment just like everyone else. Problem is, they seem to only use science in their pursuit. But science is incapable of setting its own priorities. Its funding is based on whether it empowers the already powerful. Stephen Hawking can fuck off when he says there's no longer any need for philosophy. He was a dick.

What is happiness? Pleasurable brain chemicals? Meaningful self-delusions? Or some sort of Buddhist/Stoic mental judo? As always, I'm a real simp for the idea of trying to balance all of these things together.

But no matter how you chose to blend those into your life, you can always fuck it all up by forgetting two major caveats: Be very careful who you choose to compare yourself to, and disappointment is all about expectations.

Don't believe the pre-modern hype. A deadly toothache sucked dick. Be grateful and don't romanticize the past. Modern life has comfort, safety, culture, knowledge, etc. like early sapiens couldn't have begun to dream of. We're almost god-like, even the lowliest of us. There's still plenty of wilderness you could go run off into if you'd like. Shit, in North America, there's a wild boar infestation, you could be a well-fed nomad. But you don't want to do that, admit it.

The only problem with these improvements is that as things get better, expectations balloon, and disappointment follows at the exact same pace. It's a treadmill that spins as fast as we can run. One major fact about our evolution is that we as a species only used to compare ourselves to a few dozen people at most. A young human looking for a partner only had a small sliver of the tribe in the same league as them to make them feel insecure. Now we have a slideshow of perfect specimens in front of us every day, till we've seen more 10s than our Dunbar number can track.

Lets add, "connecting with our past" to the list of things that truly make humans happy.

His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. -- Albert Camus, The Myth Of Sisyphus

• #5 An Anthropologist On Mars by Oliver Sacks •

Alright lets end this bitch on a positive note!

Humpty started out as a friend. Someone who said off-the-wall crazy shit almost competitively, like he was always trying to out-weirdo you. We had a lot of fun. Wednesday said he alienated most other people, and had a lot to learn about socializing, but he was funny and interesting underneath it all. Which was true, for a couple months.

Our group's unofficial theme is "freaks with potential". Bring all your misfits and maniacs. We say, "Who are we to judge?" We've got plenty of autists, and you're damn right they get on our nerves, but in an endearing, forgivable, manageable way. Shit, we annoy them back, and nobody has ever thought of banning someone for being too autistic.

Humpty however was a whole different dimension of fucked up. To call him autistic is an insult to autistic people. He's not the type of cutie Amy Schumer tells heartwarming jokes about. He's hate on the spectrum.

The point is, I approached him from the best angle anyone can. Unlike scientists, we didn't treat him like he was a gigantic insect, under a dry dehumanizing light. We cracked jokes about pooping, and dicks, and stuff guys talk about when they really like each other. He wasn't a patient he was "my friend Humpty."

I'm always railing against the way psychologists, especially school psychologists, tend to just objectify everyone they're trying to help. Like the further the distance between you and a patient, the more "scientific" the process is.

She said, "When you start getting all expressive and symbolic it's impossible to actualize an honest diagnostic." I said, "When you start getting all exact and algebraic I'm reminded it's a racket not a rehabilitation" -- Aesop Rock, Shrunk

You don't go to a shrink to big yourself up and hear about how well you're doing. You go there to discuss how unwell you are. A good psychologist's #1 goal is to never have to speak to you again. But it's still a business, and endless treatment is always more profitable than a cure.

Scientists tend to get so distant and impartial that perfectly familiar things begin to sound strange and aberrant. Sacks says, "It's like saying a man has a proboscis in between his eyes, or that he falls down in a fit of insensibility once every 24 hours."

Oliver is marvelous in that his aim was to take off the lab coat and join his patients in their daily activities. Understanding them not by getting outside of their lives, but by getting inside.

What he learned by doing this was extravagant. As he examined his patients' disabilities he found in them unique adaptations, in some instances almost superpowers. Not deficits, but tradeoffs; alternative states of being. "Other forms of life, no less human for being so different."

A painter that loses all sense of color, even in his imagination; A hippie who can't remember anything post-1960s; A surgeon/amateur pilot with dramatic Tourettic tics; A man who was blind for the first 45 years of his life that regained his vision, and had to learn to reinterpret the world through his eyes; A man obsessed with his home town in Tuscany, with an exquisitely detailed 3D model of it in his head, down to the shape of the bricks in each wall; An autistic savant who can draw a whole cityscape from memory after glancing at it for seconds; and the famous Temple Grandin, an autistic woman whose deep understanding of animals helped her radically reform livestock facilities to be more humane.

As Sacks puts it, there's an assumption that all sickness is a "contraction" of life. But in the case of his patients, these illnesses focused their lives, defined their callings, and gave them a unique purpose or specialty. His findings make one wonder if some diseases are products of evolution, that actually contribute to humanity as a whole.

Like how Malcolm Gladwell talks about the memory benefits of dyslexia in David And Goliath. Would a dyslexic parent wish dyslexia on their kids? Hell no. Would they trade their powerful memories in for the ability to read fluently? Quite often, also no.

As any incel will tell you, narcissism has its benefits. They get laid more, make more friends, quickly advance in careers, etc. Granted, there's two big caveats: They often don't keep partners, friends, or careers for very long. And they don't get very far if they're the covert, sensitive type of narcissist; The type of narcissist that doesn't leave their basement.

But as Simon Baron-Cohen points out, autism has plenty of its own upsides as well. Arguably more. The systematizing nature of autists makes them fit to do tons of things "normies" often can't. The world is more and more in the hands of the systematizers, which makes them fitter than ever, in an evolutionary sense.

Many of the most famous and successful people you've ever heard about are/were either cold-blooded shitty narcissists, or equally cold-blooded annoying autists. Not successful in spite of their mental makeup, but because of it.

Ask not what disease the person has. But rather, what person the disease has -- William Osler

Wednesday once again comes in as a role-model in this series. His PTSD, while being an incredible source of pain in his life, also gives him an uncanny ability to communicate straight to the hearts of other traumatized people. He makes them feel respected, understood, and at-ease. So he started a career in therapy, and is currently working in a rehab facility. He's literally every client's favorite person. And frankly, everyone that knows Wednesday knew he would be.

It's not about what weaknesses you have, it's about how you compensate for them. Wednesday's PTSD makes plenty of other vocations difficult, if not impossible. But you don't need to be good at everything. As I keep repeating, humanity flourishes based on our ability to specialize and collaborate. Intensity is more powerful than extensity.

I believe my ADD has always been a powerful bullshit/relevance filter; My head injuries give me a creative edge, and the sort of recklessness that adventures are made of; Moving around so much may have made keeping friends in my life more difficult, but it's also made me a social chameleon who can always quickly make more; Fighting with my step dad strengthened my backbone to stand up against corrupt authority and narcissists; Introversion isn't a bad thing, I'm one of those rare people who actually enjoys being alone with my thoughts. I'm always studying something or journaling. These "issues" in my life may have sent me off course, but not backwards, not retrograde. They define who I am and what I'm great at. It's all about how you frame things. Feces is fertilizer.

The colorblind painter found a new style, after he eventually forgot about color altogether and his depression over the matter subsided. The change also massively improved his distance and low-light vision, making the world beautiful to him in a way you or I will never perceive; The hippie may have needed to be institutionalized to keep him safe, but he had the kind of demeanor his former Hare Krishna peers found to be saintly. Before they discovered his "enlightenment" was a pituitary tumor, he was seen as a spiritual exemplar; The surgeon's tics may have caused him to convulse and vocalize continuously, and beyond his control, but it also contributed to his precise and fastidious way of life, paradoxically making him an outstanding surgeon and pilot. You knew he'd never miss a step. And somehow when he was at work, his Tourette's would disappear; Even though the blind man regained his vision, it wasn't automatically good news for him. His eyes may have been back in perfect condition, but his brain still struggled to use them. He came to see the loss of his disability as a sort of curse; The Tuscan artist's perfect memory of his home town was part miracle, part black hole of nostalgia. He couldn't seem to talk or think about anything else, all day every day, making him mostly friendless. But in the end his home town lauded him as a hero, never to be forgotten in return; Steven Wiltshire, though he scores low on most other markers of intelligence, had a skill people payed millions of dollars to own a piece of; and Temple Grandin, despite having no intuitions about the thoughts or feelings of others, could empathize with animals, sharing in common their strictly visual way of thinking. She's done more to improve the quality of life for livestock than anyone you know of. Her findings also extend to the way we treat prisoners. And she's a powerful advocate for finding meaningful ways for other autists to contribute to humanity.

Humpty and other incels LOVE to hold up their disadvantages like, "Look, there it is, game over." Now, not all colorblind people have superpowered vision, not all autists are savants, just because the Hare Krishnas think you're cool doesn't always mean you're cool, etc. I'm not saying there's no such thing as a disability. But your calling is based on what you can do best. There's no such thing as heroism without adversity, and there's no way to demonstrate your fitness as an animal if you don't apply yourself to anything.

Incels want to give up. They want to hear their dreams are impossible so they can quit ASAP, and save themselves the energy. Comfortably numb; Fortuna's redheaded stepson.

The Freaks With Potential are all about highlighting each other's specialties. Humpty's only specialty was his bottomless well of self-pity. And that is the only opposite of potential we've ever found.

• End bit •

This was a fucking doozey to write. I don't double check the playtime when I pick audiobooks each month. So when I decided to focus on evolution and behavior, I unwittingly bit off a 92 hour reading project, not including the incel literature.

I realized as well that this month I'd be punching down on not just one guy, but thousands of them, so I wanted to be a bit more thoughtful, and careful with the points I'm making. Humpty truly is the pinnacle of piece-of-shittiness, with few others to compare him to. It's an exaggeration to call 94.99% of incels Humpty Dumpties. But that still doesn't get them off the hook. They're still counterproductive nihilists with nothing to offer but deeper despair.

When this is all over, and I start looking for things to write about in much shorter form, I'll definitely have to work on picking incel philosophy apart, piece by piece. Like, "hunter eyes", which I swear to god made me shout at the top of my lungs at my screen, "IT'S CALLED 'SQUINCHING' YOU FUCKING MORONS!"

I'd like to give a big shoutout to all the regular-shmegular celibate people out there, who aren't pointing the finger at anyone else. The ones taking responsibility for their lifestyle, and owning the consequences of their decisions, without bitterness.

Before the sexual revolution, celibacy was considered in many circles to be an impressive display of self-control. Now I'm not promoting the idea of going back to those days, but it really fucks up the idea that a sexless youth is naturally an excruciating one.

Soldiers, laborers, servants, various types of courtiers, etc. didn't get to date and hookup recreationally. They had shit to do, and weren't going around pissing and moaning about how horny they were. People kept this stuff personal, it was rare in entertainment, and FOMO was at a relative fraction of what it is today.

And what is a priest if not a celibate alpha male? While that may not be natural, remember humans haven't lived "natural" lives for as long as we've recorded history.

Plus, these fucks aren't just talking about 35 year old virgins, they're also talking about dudes who have fucked multiple times already but just not in the past six months, and married men in sexless marriages. The "official scientific definition" of "incel" is uselessly broad, with men that have very little in common, other than a desire to wallow in pity and shake their fist at the world.

Maybe celibate men are just being cautious, recognizing that they have time to wait a bit longer than women; maybe they're trying to work on themselves before involving another person in their insanity; maybe they're justifiably afraid of the corrupt family court system, or their own attraction to abusive partners; maybe they don't want to risk adding another human to a miserable dying planet; maybe casual hookups are an option, but they don't want to waste a woman's precious time; maybe they're afraid of humiliating themselves, etc, etc.

Who knows? But the point is none of those "maybe"s justify misogyny or rage. It's a cost-benefit analysis, and it's everyone's choice where they come down on these questions. You can be cautious, or you can be brave; patient or impatient; proud or willing to beg. Either way, nobody's making that decision for you. What you get out of life is based on what you're willing to put in.

I know a man with cerebral palsy, on disability payments, in an electric wheelchair and his head fixed in place, and he's got a girlfriend. I knew a drunk old cab driver with three teeth and not a skill to his name, and every month he had a new woman. There's someone out there for everyone. Unless the only thing that can get your dick hard is hentai catgirls. Incels are hypergamous too.

So boo hoo hoo. Fuck their tears. You're only an incel if you call yourself one, and give up.

NOW TO CLEANSE MY SOUL!

Next month (September, not August. Sorry, summer's a nightmare for me. I get 0-1 days off a week, and my brain is fried like a chicken parm) We're gonna talk about the soul! Or whatever the fuck that means to an atheist like me.

These last two months have been psychically exhausting. I had to stare right into the incel abyss, and all I had to comfort myself with was science. Shit got cold, right here in my heart. So we're gonna fix the bejesus out of that.

This August, I'll be doing shrooms with Wednesday and our mutual friend (pseudonym to be coined), then after we read about our souls, we're gonna read about psychedelics. I can't fucking wait.

#the moral animal #behave #the blank slate #sapiens: a brief history of humankind #an anthropologist on mars #robert wright #robert sapolsky #steven pinker #yuval noah harari #oliver sacks #psychology #philosophy #self help #incels #responsibility #book club #mental health #evolutionary psychology #behaviorism #misogny #human behaviour #anthropology #nihilism #human nature #monkey brain #cultural determinism #blank slate #long reads #Humpty Dumpty Elegy #GARBLEGOX

[the-stray-liger]

Maybe I'll make Sliwka deaf I feel like that would be an interesting thing to play

#goes to read about deafness #gotta dig out that chapter from an anthropologist on mars #the one about gallaudet university protests #it was super interesting and full of information about deaf culture! #edit: nvm it was in seeing voices #everyone should read oliver sacks

[chicago-geniza]

Working on fake thesis definition of cosmopolitanism as classed category & it is essentially "the late imperial & immediate post-imperial European middle classes, at a certain level of education & institutional enmeshment, were all six degrees of separation," but the way it came out was [to the tune of Me & Bobby McGee] 🎶[Secular] humanism's just another word for uzkii krug...🎶 (Substitute also "universalism.") The class-tusovka theory of cosmopolitanism...

#assimilation and its discontents #everything is about human relationships and it makes me insane #anthropologist on Mars hours

[anthronewb]

Anthropology is a reflection of the Prominant Political/social beliefs of the time

Anthropology is the study of what makes us human. Anthropologists study various cultures (past to present) to better understand them, and the data collected is used to develop anthropological theories. Despite claims of the research/findings being unbiased, factors such as the prominent political and social beliefs of the time influence the anthropologist's research (unintentionally or intentionally). Due to these factors, it is important to examine the prominent political and social beliefs of the time when reexamining anthropological theories.

When you create a timeline of anthropological theories alongside the political and social beliefs of the time, it's clear to see the influences.

18th century

Anthropological theory

Unilineal Evolution: Presented the e idea that there was a sequence of stages that all cultures would go through (Long & Chakov, 2017). Those cultures may not necessarily go through the stages at the same time or pace but would go through the same developmental stages. This would be most popularly become known as the Three Age system. The categories being; THe Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. Each indicative of the stage of development through technology

Physical Anthropology: “scientific” approach to study the development of different racial groups. Studies humans through their biological and physiological characteristics to study human development.

Cephalic index: calculations from the measurement taken of the skull. It measured the breadth and length of the skull, which would be then used for the classification of racial groups.

Samuel Morton, a physician furthered this research and linked cranial capacity with moral and intellectual endowments and assembled a cultural ranking scheme that placed large-brained Caucasoid at the pinnacle

 Anatomist and natural historian Johan Friedrich Blumenbach believed racial differences were due to adaptation to different environments

 Social and Political Beliefs of the time

Enlightenment period: The biggest influence on the formation of scientific development. There was a push away from the religious doctrine, in favor of a more science-based view of society.

There was also an increase in encounters with non-Europeans with the emergence of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade.

These factors combined to develop an interest in the scientific notion of race

Despite the push away from religious doctrine, scientific thought was still developed based on religious knowledge.

E.g. the Bible story Adam & Eve

They were believed to be Caucasian, making Caucasians the ‘superior’ race, and thus anyone else was inferior.

The main takeaway is that Caucasians were the Superior Race (more specifically Germanic) and all other races delineate from them making them inferior.

These ideas of racial superiority/inferiority would be used to support racist ideologies. Nazis would use this to support their movement.

1920’s-Boasian

Boasian Anthropology: A theory developed by Franz Boas, who is considered the “Father of American anthropology”

These consisted of Boas’s theories on culture and its development.

Cultural Relativism: We must make evaluations based on other cultures rules/beliefs and not our own. Using our own culture as a basis for analyzing other cultures results in biased research.

Boas would argue that “classificatory schemes of evolutionary theory dividing the world into “savage”  "barbarian," and "civilized" peoples were "artificial," their pretensions to universal, scientific validity marred by their grounding in Western values.

He would ignore the predominant theories in favor of conducting research.

 Social and Political Beliefs of the time

There wasn’t much change in political and social beliefs of the time, but much of the research was influenced by the cultures that were studied. The idea of cultural relativism was influenced by the cultures that boas studied, specifically his study of the Inuit people.

Boas would study under ethnologist Adolf Bastian, a person who believed in “psychic unity of mankind” (idea that all humans held the same intellectual capacity and all cultures were based on the same mental principles)

This would cause a shift in Boas’s approach to his study of the Inuit people.He wanted to understand Inuits as they understood themselves, rather than through his lens

Boas would influence anthropological theory into the mid-twentieth century as evidenced by his students like Zora Neale Hurston

Mid-20th century to the Present 

There was a push for a more scientific-backed discipline. Processualism as it would later be classified as was first introduced by Lewis Binford. He believed that there was a certain way that anthropological research should be conducted. His main goal was to develop the

field into a “hard science” by using the scientific method. His focus was on the sub-category, archaeology and how the material evidence was identified.

Archaeological data would be classified into either Technomic (technology/tools, socio-technic (social/relation to social subsystems), and ideo-technic (ideological/ rationalizations in social system)

There was a push for reflection of traditional anthropological research- especially that of the study of race/racism.

Tody anthropological theory mostly focuses on the reflection of traditional anthropological theories

A launch of a public initiative titled, “Race: Are We So Different?” by the American Anthropological Association (AAA)”

 Social and Political Beliefs of the time

There was a rise in criticisms and challenging of early anthropological theories. This was due to the rise in the fight for equality by several groups (women, gays and lesbians, African Americans, and Native Americans) with The Civil Rights movement being one of the largest movements. 

This was evident by the rise in more people of color entering the discipline.

Processualism as a whole was mostly influenced by the academic community and trying to make it into a scientific discipline. A byproduct of this was ignoring the racist ideologies of past anthropological theories

There was a continued push for reflection and change in the academic community following the Civil Rights Movement.

Anthropology not influenced by society?-Counter

With the use of science, there was this idea that it created an unbiased way of interpreting information, and the outside factor was irrelevant. While it is true that science can be objective, scientists aren’t. Scientists choose what they study and can interpret data in different ways. Due to this, science will only ever offer a glimpse of objectivity. Physical anthropology used a scientific justification with the use of the cephalic index and the systems created based on the data collected for racial classifications. It is important to recognize that just because something claims a scientific basis, doesn’t make it so.

What does it mean when there is anthropological theories developed counte the predominant anthropological theory? Anthropologist like Gordon V. Childe was heavily influenced by Marxist theories. He developed/presented his theories during a time in which Marxism was heavily criticized. While he was still able to publish his works, it was much harder and prevented him for being recognized for his contributions to the field. 

Just because there are examples of anthropologists developing theories counter to the prominent political and social beliefs of the time, it doesn’t mean that there can't be a relationship between the two. Rarely in life do you see everybody agree on a single thing. Take “4 out of 5 dentists recommend (blank) toothpaste” for example. The overall opinion of the toothpaste doesn’t change if one disagrees. In the case of anthropological thought/theory, anthropologists remained influenced by political/social beliefs.

While these are good reasons to dispute my claims, there isn’t enough data to support this claim.

Conclusion

The evidence supports the idea of the inter-connected relationship between prominent social/political beliefs and anthropological thought/theory. From the foundation of early anthropological theories in the eighteenth century to the present, anthropology has been formed and reformed by the ideological movements of its time. Creating a lens through which anthropologists can view and interpret cultures, reflecting the wider societal mindset, and forming a dynamic relationship between Academic research and the cultures it seeks to understand

Much of early anthropological thought/theory was rooted in the personal biases of the anthropologists conducting research. They would use religion and “science” (what we would call today pseudoscience) as justification for their beliefs. Franz Boas would become one of the first anthropologists to question this idea as his research found that the earlier thought/theory didn’t reflect his findings. This would later be called Boasian anthropology (named after its creator). This would be the driving belief into the 1960s, where anthropology would then focus on the criticism of early anthropological thought/theory and processualism which was influenced by the many movements pushing for equality. More anthropologists of color and more research on black culture were conducted. Today we still reflect on and criticize early modes of anthropological thought with the continued push for equality.

In conclusion, some may try and argue that there is a distinction between predominant social/political beliefs and anthropological thought/theory, its relationship is undeniable. To study anthropology is not to view it statically but dynamically. It is important to recognize that anthropology isn’t just a story about a culture it studies, but also about the anthropologist’s narrative and how it is influenced by society.

#anthropology #history #university of maryland

[matrose]

list of interests:

- the cultural connection humanity has forged to mars (especially the martian fascination of the 20th century)

- beginnings and endings (language, religion, speech, art, love)

- girl on girl action

- the overlap of arts and sciences; linguists, historians, anthropologists, artists as main characters in science fiction

- earth

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Alex Byrne

Published: Mar 14, 2024

“Computing is not binary” would be a silly slogan—binary computer code underpins almost every aspect of modern life. But other kinds of binaries are decidedly out of fashion, particularly where sex is concerned. “Biology is not binary” declares the title of an essay in the March/April issue of American Scientist, a magazine published by Sigma Xi, the science and engineering honor society. Sigma Xi has a storied history, with numerous Nobel-prize-winning members, including the DNA-unravellers Francis Crick and James Watson, and more recently Jennifer Doudna, for her work on CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing. The essay is well-worth critical examination, not least because it efficiently packs so much confusion into such a short space.

Another reason for examining it is the pedigree of the authors—Kate Clancy, Agustín Fuentes, Caroline VanSickle, and Catherine Clune-Taylor. Clancy is a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Fuentes is a professor of anthropology at Princeton, and Clune-Taylor is an assistant professor of gender and sexuality studies at that university; VanSickle is an associate professor of anatomy at Des Moines. Clancy’s Ph.D. is from Yale, Fuentes’ is from UC Berkeley, and VanSickles’ is from Michigan. Clune-Taylor is the sole humanist: she has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Alberta, with Judith Butler as her external examiner. In short, the authors are not ill-educated crackpots or dogmatic activists, but top-drawer scholars. Their opinions matter.

Let’s talk about sex, baby

Before wading into the essay’s arguments, let’s look at the context, as noted in the second paragraph. “Last fall,” the authors write, “the American Anthropological Association made headlines after removing a session on sex and gender from its November 2023 annual conference.” The session’s cancellation was covered by the New York Times as well as international newspapers, and it eventually took place under the auspices of Heterodox Academy. (You can watch the entire event here.) Scheduled for the Sunday afternoon “dead zone” of the five-day conference, when many attendees leave for the airport, the title was “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.” The lineup was all-female, and included the anthropologists Kathleen Lowrey and Elizabeth Weiss. According to the session description, “With research foci from hominin evolution to contemporary artificial intelligence, from the anthropology of education to the debates within contemporary feminism about surrogacy, panelists make the case that while not all anthropologists need to talk about sex, baby, some absolutely do.”

Nothing evidently objectionable here, so why was it cancelled? The official letter announcing that the session had been removed from the program, signed by the presidents of the AAA and CASCA (the Canadian Anthropology Society), explained:

The reason the session deserved further scrutiny was that the ideas were advanced in such a way as to cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.

Why “the Trans” were double-counted (the T in LGBTQI) was not clear. And although ideas can harm, a handful of academics speaking in the Toronto Convention Centre are unlikely to cause much. In any event, the authors of “Biology is not binary” seem to think that the panelists’ errors about sex warranted the cancellation, not the trauma their words would bring to vulnerable anthropologists. “We were glad,” they say, “to see the American Anthropological Association course-correct given the inaccuracy of the panelists’ arguments.”

Never mind that no-one had heard the panelists’ arguments—what were these “inaccuracies”? The panelists, Clancy and her co-authors report, had claimed that “sex is binary,” and that “male and female represent an inflexible and infallible pair of categories describing all humans.”

“Biology is not binary” is not off to a promising start. Only one of the cancelled panelists, Weiss, has said anything about sex being binary in her talk abstract, and even that was nuanced: “skeletons are binary; people may not be.” No one had claimed that the two sex categories were “inflexible” or “infallible,” which anyway doesn’t make sense. (This is one example of the essay’s frequent unclarity of expression.) Neither had anyone claimed that every single human falls into one sex category or the other.

Probably the real reason the proposed panel caused such a stir was that it was perceived (in Clancy et al.’s own words) as “part of an intentional gender-critical agenda.” And, to be fair, some of the talks were “gender-critical,” for instance Silvia Carrasco’s. (Carrasco’s views have made her a target of activists at her university in Barcelona.) Still, academics can’t credibly cancel a conference session simply because a speaker defends ideas that bother some people, hence the trumped-up charges of harm and scientific error.

Although Clancy et al. misleadingly characterize the content of the cancelled AAA session, their essay might yet get something important right. They argue for four main claims. First, “sex is not binary.” Second, “sex is culturally constructed.” Third, “defining sex is difficult.” And, fourth, there is no one all-purpose definition of sex—it depends “on what organism is being studied and what question is being asked.”

Let’s go through these in order.

“Sex is not binary”

When people say that sex is binary, they sometimes mean that there are exactly two sexes, male and female. Sometimes they mean something else: the male/female division cuts humanity into two non-overlapping groups. That is, every human is either male (and not female), or female (and not male). These two interpretations of “Sex is binary” are different. Perhaps there are exactly two sexes, but there are some humans who are neither male nor female, or who are both sexes simultaneously. In that scenario, sex is binary according to the first interpretation, but not binary according to the second. Which of the two interpretations do Clancy et al. have in mind?

At least the essay is clear on this point. The “Quick Take” box on the first page tells us that the (false) binary thesis is that “male and female [are] the only two possible sex categories.” And in the text the authors say that “plenty of evidence has emerged to reject” the hypothesis that “there are only two sexes.” (Here they mystifyingly add “…and that they are discrete and different.” Obviously if there are two sexes then they are different.)

If there are not exactly two sexes, then the number of sexes is either zero, one, or greater than two. Since Clancy et al. admit that “categories such as ‘male’ and ‘female’…can be useful,” they must go for the third option: there are more than two sexes. But how many? Three? 97? In a striking absence of curiosity, the authors never say.

In any case, what reason do Clancy et al. give for thinking that the number of sexes is at least three? The argument is in this passage:

[D]ifferent [“sex-defining”] traits also do not always line up in a person’s body. For example, a human can be born with XY chromosomes and a vagina, or have ovaries while producing lots of testosterone. These variations, collectively known as intersex, may be less common, but they remain a consistent and expected part of human biology. So the idea that there are only two sexes…[has] plenty of evidence [against it].

However, this reasoning is fallacious. The premise is that some (“intersex”) people do not have enough of the “sex-defining” traits to be either male or female. The conclusion is that there are more than two sexes. The conclusion only follows if we add an extra premise, that these intersex people are not just neither male nor female, but another sex. And Clancy et al. do nothing to show that intersex people are another sex.

What’s more, it is quite implausible that any of them are another sex. Whatever the sexes are, they are reproductive categories. People with the variations noted by Clancy et al. are either infertile, for example those with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) (“XY chromosomes and a vagina”), or else fertile in the usual manner, for example many with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) and XX chromosomes (“ovaries while producing lots of testosterone,” as Clancy et al. imprecisely put it). One study reported normal pregnancy rates among XX CAH individuals. Unsurprisingly, the medical literature classifies these people as female. Unlike those with CAIS and CAH, people who belonged to a genuine “third sex” would make their own special contribution to reproduction.

“Sex is culturally constructed”

“Biology is not binary” fails to establish that there are more than two sexes. Still, the news that sex is “culturally constructed” sounds pretty exciting. How do Clancy et al. argue for that?

There is a prior problem. Nowhere do Clancy et al. say what “Sex is culturally constructed” means. What’s more, the essay thoroughly conflates the issue of the number of sexes with the issue about cultural construction. Whatever “cultural construction” means, presumably culture could “construct” two sexes. (The Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan were literally constructed, and there were exactly two of them.) Conversely, the discovery of an extra sex would not show that sex was culturally constructed, any more than the discovery of an extra flavor of quark would show that fundamental particles are culturally constructed.

Clancy et al. drop a hint at the start of the section titled “Sex is Culturally Constructed.” “Definitions and signifiers of gender,” they say, “differ across cultures… but sex is often viewed as a static, universal truth.” (If you want to know what they mean by “gender,” you’re out of luck.) That suggests that the cultural construction of sex amounts to the “definitions and signifiers” of sex differing between times and places. This is confirmed by the following passage: “[T]here is another way we can see that sex is culturally constructed: The ways collections of traits are interpreted as sex can and have differed across time and cultures.” What’s more, in an article called “Is sex socially constructed?”, Clune-Taylor says that this (or something close to it) is one sense in which sex is socially constructed (i.e. culturally constructed).

The problem here is that “Sex is culturally constructed” (as Clancy et al. apparently understand “cultural construction”) is almost trivially true, and not denied by anyone. If “X is culturally constructed” means something like “Ideas of X and theories of X change between times and places,” then almost anything which has preoccupied humans will be culturally constructed. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are culturally constructed: the ancients thought they revolved around the Earth and represented different gods. Dinosaurs are culturally constructed: our ideas of them are constantly changing, and are influenced by politics as well as new scientific discoveries. Likewise, sex is culturally constructed: Aristotle thought that in reproduction male semen produces a new embryo from female menstrual blood, as “a bed comes into being from the carpenter and the wood.” We now have a different theory.

Naturally one must distinguish the claim that dinosaurs are changing (they used to be covered only in scales, now they have feathers) from the claim that our ideas of dinosaurs are changing (we used to think that dinosaurs only have scales, now we think they have feathers). It would be fallacious to move from the premise that dinosaurs are culturally constructed (in Clancy et al.’s sense) to the conclusion that dinosaurs themselves have changed, or that there are no “static, universal truths” about dinosaurs. It would be equally fallacious to move from the premise that sex is culturally constructed to the claim that there are no “static, universal truths” about sex. (One such truth, for example, is that there are two sexes.) Nonetheless, Clancy et al. seem to commit exactly this fallacy, in denying (as they put it) that “sex is…a static, universal truth.”

To pile falsity on top of fallacy, when Clancy et al. give an example of how our ideas about sex have changed, their choice could hardly be more misleading. According to them:

The prevailing theory from classical times into the 19th century was that there is only one sex. According to this model, the only true sex is male, and females are inverted, imperfect distortions of males.

This historical account was famously defended in a 1990 book, Making Sex, by the UC Berkeley historian Thomas Laqueur. What Clancy et al. don’t tell us is that Laqueur’s history has come under heavy criticism; in particular, it is politely eviscerated at length in The One-Sex Body on Trial, by the classicist Helen King. It is apparent from Clune-Taylor’s other work that she knows of King’s book, which makes Clancy et al.’s unqualified assertion of Laqueur’s account even more puzzling.

“Defining sex is difficult”

Aristotle knew there were two sexes without having a satisfactory definition of what it is to be male or female. The question of how to define sex (equivalently, what sex is) should be separated from the question of whether sex is binary. So even if Clancy et al. are wrong about the number of sexes, they might yet be right that sex is difficult to define.

Why do they think it is difficult to define? Here’s their reason:

There are many factors that define sex, including chromosomes, hormones, gonads, genitalia, and gametes (reproductive cells). But with so many variables, and so much variation within each variable, it is difficult to pin down one definition of sex.

Readers of Reality’s Last Stand will be familiar with the fact that chromosomes and hormones (for example) do not define sex. The sex-changing Asian sheepshead wrasse does not change its chromosomes. Interestingly, the sex hormones (androgens and estrogens) are found in plants, although they do not appear to function as hormones. How could the over-educated authors have written that “there are many factors that define sex,” without a single one of them objecting?

That question is particularly salient because the textbook account of sex is in Clancy et al.’s very own bibliography. In the biologist Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow there’s a section called “Male and Female Defined.” If you crack the book open, you can’t miss it.

Roughgarden writes:

To a biologist, “male” means making small gametes, and “female” means making large gametes. Period! By definition, the smaller of the two gametes is called a sperm, and the larger an egg. Beyond gamete size, biologists don’t recognize any other universal difference between male and female.

“Making” does not mean currently producing, but (something like) has the function to make. Surely one of Clancy et al. must have read Roughgarden’s book! (Again from her other work we know that Clune-Taylor has.) To avoid going round and round this depressing mulberry bush again, let’s leave it here.

“Sex is defined in a lot of ways in science”

Perhaps sex is not a single thing, and there are different definitions for the different kinds of sex. The standard gamete-definition of sex is useful for some purposes; other researchers will find one of the alternative definitions more productive. Clancy et al. might endorse this conciliatory position. They certainly think that a multiplicity of definitions is good scientific practice: “In science, how sex is defined for a particular study is based on what organism is being studied and what question is being asked.”

Leaving aside whether this fits actual practice, as a recommendation it is wrong-headed. Research needs to be readily compared and combined. A review paper on sexual selection might draw on studies of very different species, each asking different questions. If the definition of sex (male and female) changes between studies, then synthesizing the data would be fraught with complications and potential errors, because one study is about males/females-in-sense-1, another is about males/females-in-sense-2, and so on.

Indeed, “Biology is not binary” itself shows that the authors don’t really believe that “male” and “female” are used in science with multiple senses. They freely use “sex,” “male,” and “female” without pausing to disambiguate, or explain just which of the many alleged senses of these words they have in mind. If “sex is defined a lot of ways in science” then the reader should wonder what Clancy et al. are talking about.

In an especially odd passage, they write that the “criteria for defining sex will differ in studies of mushrooms, orangutans, and humans.” That is sort-of-true for mushrooms, which mate using mating types, not sperm and eggs. (Mating types are sometimes called “sexes,” but sometimes not.) However, it’s patently untrue for orangutans and humans, as the biologist Jerry Coyne points out.

Orangutans had featured earlier in the saga of the AAA cancellation, when Clancy and Fuentes had bizarrely suggested that the “three forms of the adult orangutan” present a challenge to the “sex binary,” seemingly forgetting that these three forms comprise females and two kinds of males. Kathleen Lowrey had some fun at their expense.

As if this tissue of confusion isn’t enough, Clancy et al. take one final plunge off the deep end. After mentioning osteoporosis in postmenopausal women, they write:

[P]eople experiencing similar sex-related conditions may not always fit in the same sex category. Consider polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a common metabolic condition affecting about 8 to 13 percent of those with ovaries, which often causes them to produce more androgens than those without this condition. There are increasing numbers of people with PCOS who self-define as intersex, whereas others identify as female.

They seem to believe that two people with PCOS might not “fit in the same sex category.” That is, one person could be female while the other isn’t, with this alchemy accomplished by “self-definition.” PCOS, in case you were wondering, is a condition that only affects females or, in the approved lingo of the Cleveland Clinic, “people assigned female at birth.”

How could four accomplished and qualified professors produce such—not to mince words—unadulterated rubbish?

There are many social incentives these days for denouncing the sex binary, and academics—even those at the finest universities—are no more resistant to their pressure than anyone else. However, unlike those outside the ivory tower, academics have a powerful arsenal of carefully curated sources and learned jargon, as well as credentials and authority. They may deploy their weapons in the service of—as they see it—equity and inclusion for all.

It would be “bad science,” Clancy et al. write at the end, to “ignore and exclude” “individuals who are part of nature.” In this case, though, Clancy et al.’s firepower is directed at established facts, and the collateral damage may well include those people they most want to help.

--

About the Author

Alex Byrne is a Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. His main interests are philosophy of mind (especially perception), metaphysics (especially color) and epistemology (especially self-knowledge). A few years ago, Byrne started working on philosophical issues relating to sex and gender. His book on these topics, Trouble with Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions, is now available in the US and UK.

==

The whole "social construction," "cultural construction" thing is idiotic.

Not only does it mean you would be a different sex in a different society/culture, but it becomes necessary that cross-cultural/cross-societal reproduction is fraught with complications.

#Alex Byrne #sex pseudoscience #pseudoscience #sex denialism #biological sex #reproduction #biology #human reproduction #queer theory #religion is a mental illness

[acertainmoshke]

Redoing the Intro One More Time!

Updated 9/30/23

Call me Moshke Palmoni (they/them). I spend as much time as I can writing, but that is not as much as it might be because there's also a lot of life going on right now. I also like to read, knit, collect vintage ephemera, and play with my cat.

General WIP tag list: [your url here!]

Active WIPs:

7 Days for Fae

Coming October 2024

10-year-old Fae is isolated by her disabilities—autism and ataxia—that causes her communication and mobility issues. She doesn’t have any friends her age, and she’s accepted that. She reads a lot and plays pretend in the forest at the end of the street. Her family loves her for who she is and so far that’s been enough. Until, that is, she meets the new kid. His name is Brownie and for reasons Fae can’t imagine he wants to be her friend no matter how weird or awkward she is. When he still invites her over after a meltdown in class gets her suspended for a week, she decides to take a risk and accept. The ensuing adventures are marred only by the other sudden change in her life—an aunt Fae barely knows has moved in with her family. She doesn’t know how to talk to Fae and, worse, refuses to accept Fae’s nonbinary parent’s identity. But since no one else seems to know how to deal with the mess their home life has become, Fae tries—with Brownie’s encouragement—to sort the situation out herself.

Cold Iron

In 1956, Shakatra Zoawin is 40. Or they might be 20, depending on how you look at it. They are a changeling and their aging is kind of weird, but that doesn't matter to them because they have a good life in the subway tunnel with their brother, Kris. Both of them are changelings swapped as infants for human children and then rejected by their human families. Their wits and powerful magic have kept them alive this long, and Shaka is perfectly content to keep going. After they do one little thing to appease their guilt: find the 40-year-old they were swapped for and free her to have her own life in the human world free from servitude in the courts of the Fae. And so begins an adventure that will have repercussions neither of them could have imagined.

Intro posts for the books in this series: Cold Iron, City of Frost, Song on Repeat, and Future Not Found

Character Intro Posts: Shakatra, Kris, Lynn, Tatiana, Liliana, Harry, Doug, Beth, Aaron, Cassie, and Althea

Tag list: @pga-books

Blades of Ice

In the kingdom of Halara, orcs and elms and slimes and centaurs live peacefully side-by-side with humans. Less peaceful is the relationship between Halara and their neighboring kingdom of Eng. The generation-long conflict has drawn in other nearby kingdoms and stagnated artistic and social works. All Aryel ever wanted to do was be left alone to love who they want and practice sparring with their axe, but as a royal child they have responsibilities, namely leading the entire army. There's no talk of ending the war in any way but victory, just as Halara won its initial freedom from Eng 300 years ago, but this endless fighting is getting them nowhere but too many funerals and not enough bread. And then when a familial tragedy leads to Aryel leading both the army and the kingdom, they know they can't balance the tensions and demands of everyone at once and win this war. Something has to give, and they just hope it isn't the entire kingdom.

Backburnered and still-in-planning WIPs under the cut.

Time Traveling Anthropologists

(permanent title coming soon)

Set approximately 2 generations in the future. Esther Dahan has her dream job. She gets to time travel with her new team, and against all historical odds they are there to study ancient cultures rather than do anything violent. Their first assignment is 8 months in the 9th century Jewish kingdom of Khazaria. Everything is going great—illicit romance with a Khazarian blacksmith notwithstanding—until Esther finds a plate that doesn't belong in this time. Curious and suspicious but without enough evidence to involve her boss, she investigates on her own, discovering much more than she planned—and leading to far worse consequences than she could have imagined.

Tag list: @amielbjacobs @kingkendrick7 @moonluringfrost @another-white-hole

To Die Among the Stars:

20 people have been chosen to test the effects of faster-than-light space travel on human minds and bodies. They were taken from prisons, wellness centers, and other areas where near-certain death seemed like a reasonable chance to take. Each have their reasons for being there, and their secrets. Against all odds, the jump to FTL doesn't destroy the ship. But the further away from Earth they travel, the more strange things begin to happen that call the purpose of the experiment into question. And then the impossible: a human distress signal in deep space.

Told from 4 rotating perspectives: Pixel, a semiverbal illegal human modder; Ri, whose body and mind are overloaded with mods; Zippy, a young disabled woman desperate to support her family; and Peppermint, a genetic experiment combining human and cat DNA raised in an isolated lab.

Tag list: @hd-literature

Falling Petals

A multigenerational story about trauma, love, and disability set against the backdrop of one Jewish family. Beginning in the 1920's with Ira Katz, who is brilliant and charming with no understanding at all of tact or why the best way isn't always blunt observations and mean jokes. It follows him as he grows up, marries, and inherits his father's drugstore, and then moves on to following one of his sons, Daniel. Daniel grows up in the 1940's and is naturally gentle, kind, and sensitive, but is treated so harshly for these traits he learns to hide himself away inside and only show emotion in explosive bouts of anger. It follows him through adolescence, college, and marriage, before moving on to one of his daughters, Shoshana. Shoshana grows up in the 1960's and is colorful, young for her age, and full of social panic. None of them know how to relate to each other or survive in a world that each of them see the beauty in but aren't allowed to connect with in their own way. And yet through the pain and confusion, they are full of love. And then everything changes for them with Shoshana's niece, Naomi, growing up in the 1990's, who will not be allowed to see herself as broken.

#moshke writes #writeblr #writeblr intro

[brokehorrorfan]

Robot Monster will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on July 25 via Bayview Entertainment. Celebrating its 70th anniversary, the movie is presented in frame sequential Blu-ray 3D, anaglyphic 3D, and standard 2D.

Also known as Monsters from Mars and Monsters from the Moon, the 1953 sci-fi horror film is directed by Phil Tucker and written by Wyott Ordung. George Nader, Claudia Barrett, and George Barrows star.

Robot Monster has been newly restored in 4K from 35mm 3D archival elements by the 3-D Film Archive. Special features - some of which are presented in 3D - are listed below, where you can also watch the new trailer.

Versions of the film:

Frame sequential Blu-ray 3D

Anaglyphic 3D (with a pair of glasses included)

Standard 2D

3D special features:

Stardust in Your Eyes - Robot Monster's original prologue starring Trustin "Slick Slavin" Howard

Interview with actor Greg Moffett

Travels Through Time & Space - Vintage slide presentation curated by stereoscopic anthropologist Hillary Hess

Adventures in 3D - 1953 3D comic book

Restoration demo

Vintage shorts

Trailers

2D special features:

Audio commentary by Greg Moffett, Mike Ballew, Eric Kurland, and Lawrence Kaufman.

Saving Slick - Featurette on actor Trustin "Slick Slavin" Howard

Mistakes & Innovations - 3-D Film Archive’s Bob Furmanek describes the original day-for-night footage and Robot Monster’s innovative use of “double film”

Rescuing Ro-Man - Featurette on how the discovery of 35mm prints saved the only complete 3D footage

Memorabilia gallery

Trailers from Hell - Trailer commentary by filmmaker Joe Dante

Bela Lugosi on “You Asked For It” - 1953 live TV appearance

A cosmic catastrophe has wiped out humanity, and now the last six survivors must outwit that strangely iconic alien menace, Ro-Man (George Barrows). Taking orders from the pitiless Great Guidance, Ro-Man wavers in his pursuit of human annihilation when he falls in love with a girl (Claudia Barrett). Can dashing young Roy (George Nader) save her?

#robot monster #3d #50s sci fi #1950s sci fi #horror #50s horror #1950s horror #sci fi horror #science fiction #3d movie #bayview entertainment #dvd #gift #phil tucker #joe dante

[deliverance-guy]

Imagine being such a lazy and incompetent writer, that you not only forget to give one character closure but at least two.

Rant incoming:

You can do so much with Narek's character and I would have loved seeing him getting a redemption ark, exploring the cult of the Zhat Vash and interacting with other people than his sister. Dang, let him realise that he has been brainwashed since his childhood, allow him to overcome his prejudice and trauma with the help of Laris or even Elnor and make him a powerful ally through the plot, which could have been so strong and interesting to watch. But no. They literally forgot about him and Chabon’s clarification, or better his planned fate doesn't make sense. Why should he be brought into federation custody?

A) What he did was horrible, yet inside of romulan space and under romulan laws dedicated towards a then illegal life form who has most likely signed a contract agreeing to said laws and possible consequences of conflict with the police/ the Tal Shiar. As a result, they shouldn’t be able to arrest him for anything since he was also way too young to be involved into the destruction of Mars.

B) Moreover, he recognised his mistakes and showed a will to work on himself. Prison will only make him loose that short window of change of mind and harden his believes, since he spends the whole time with himself and we all know how thoughts can spiral into hate and frustration rather than understanding and reflection. His whole world collapsed around him and instead of taking the shot to work with him, they leave him alone with his thoughts and the urge to find someone to blame for his misery?

Even though I am heartbroken to what they did to the La Sirena crew, I felt like they had some sort of resolution inside the seasons and their arcs, not perfect or satisfying but still (we don’t talk about how the writers ripped everything apart in season 3, that is another essay worth of rant). I deeply mourn for what could have been and are beyond mad they threw out Soji and Elnor so fast. It just felt cheap. I can understand why they did it with Elnor, to give Raffi a motive to work through her guilt for manipulating him (which kind of got brushed off and came out of nowhere so idk why you couldn’t leave him in there and work through it alive and together).

For Soji, why give us Core when you don’t plan on doing something more with here than give the actor and Spinner something to do. How great would have been it, if Soji met her look alike and got to understand the origin of her “bloodline” and the reason behind her creation, something she desperately longed for. Let her find acceptance for herself and the confidence in her skin she deserves. Let her be more than some diplomate and a tool to portray the conflict between Agnes and Rios. The money I would give to see both of them coming up the agreement to work together and Soji’s decision to change her job from an anthropologist or doctor (I am not sure what her profession fell under) to an ambassador. SHOW US, please. To be honest, I can’t see Paramount doing a show with the watchers and Core, so why waste that time with a plot you could have given to a character already established in the season before, a whole audience was thrilled for?

And Laris... Cutting her off for nostalgia porn and claiming it was out of budget? How cheap is this please?! She deserved way better and not being tossed in the trash so carelessly by so called fans! If you don’t want her in the main storyline, fine. Just give her an ending. A sentence or brief interaction. She and Picard were literally a couple, so why deny her the interaction with Beverly and her stepson?

You can say what you want about star trek Picard but I think we all can agree on one statement: Picard has been such a massive mess in terms of carrying the plotline, characters and ideas throughout the seasons to a point were it almost felt like they have been completely different series from the beginning. Every season had such an unique idea and character developments, which got tossed aside and completely ignored in later episodes.

I know enough people have talked about this already but I needed to get it out of my system.

#star trek picard #romulans #narek #laris #if you can't cry laugh #can you tell I am mad? #rant #soji asha #this got out of hand

[astralwhat]

tagged by @charliemack the other day!

last song: midnight sun / currently watching: the x-files / currently reading: finishing an anthropologist on mars, starting endless novelties of extraordinary interest next, have been skimming dressed to kill / current obsessions: making historical clothing etc, and enjoying the outdoors (....and many more things big and small)

tagging the first few mutuals i see; but everyone is free to join in or not :) (drawings not at all necessary) @neatodon @simplyirenic @radiojamming @valveillen @clove-pinks

#thank you for the tag charlie! #had to be Extra so it took a minute :')

[quotesfrommyreading]

Some employees in slaughterhouses, [Grandin] notes, rapidly develop a protective hardness and start killing animals in a purely mechanical way: “The person doing the killing approaches his job as if he was stapling boxes moving along a conveyor belt. He has no emotions about his act.” Others, she reveals, “start to enjoy killing and . . . torment the animals on purpose.” Speaking of these attitudes turned Temple’s mind to a parallel: “I find a very high correlation,” she said, “between the way animals are treated and the handicapped. . . . Georgia is a snake pit—they treat [handicapped people] worse than animals. . . . Capital-punishment states are the worst animal states and the worst for the handicapped.”

  —  An Anthropologist on Mars (Oliver Sacks, 1993)

#oliver sacks #temple grandin #an anthropologist on mars #psychology #autism #animals #animal welfare #animal slaughter #meat industry #ableism #disability #usa #georgia (usa) #capital punishment

[professionalowl]

Actually, while we're shaming people for their 452 unread books, here's a list of unread books of mine of which I own physical copies, attached to the year I obtained them, so that you can all shame me into reading more:

2024: Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence (James Bridle; just started)

2021: Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (Cal Flyn)

2024: Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life (Steven Shaviro)

2021: The Unreal & The Real Vol. 1: Where on Earth (Ursula K. Le Guin)

2023: A Study in Scarlet (Arthur Conan Doyle)

2023: Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living (Dmitri Xygalatas)

2023: Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things (Jane Bennett)

2023: The History of Magic: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present (Chris Gosden)

2018: Ways of Seeing (John Berger)

2022: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (Ed Yong)

2020: Owls of the Eastern Ice: The Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl (Jonathan C. Slaught)

2023: My Life in Sea Creatures (Sabrina Imbler)

2020: The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think (Jennifer Ackerman)

2023: Birds and Us: A 12,000-Year History, from Cave Art to Conservation (Tim Birkhead)

2020: Rebirding: Restoring Britain's Wildlife (Benedict Macdonald)

2022: The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (Siddhartha Mukherjee)

2022: An Anthropologist on Mars (Oliver Sacks)

2021: Sex, Botany & Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks (Patricia Fara)

2023: At The Mountains of Madness (H.P. Lovecraft)

2019: Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino; I have been trying to finish this forever and am so, so close)

2023: Brian Boru and the Battle of Clontarf (Sean Duffy)

2021: What is History, Now? How the past and present speak to each other (Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb; essay collection, half-read)

2020: Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England (Thomas Penn)

2022: Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Silvia Federici)

2020: Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Touissant Louverture (Sudhir Hazareesingh; half-read)

2019: The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (Hallie Rubenhold; 3/4 read)

2022: Lenin on the Train (Catherine Merridale)

2020: October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (China Miéville)

2019: The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (Mark Roseman)

2019: Heimat: A German Family Album (Nora Krug)

2018: Maus I: My Father Bleeds History (Art Spiegelman)

2020: Running in the Family (Michael Ondaatje)

2022: Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys; also never technically "finished" Jane Eyre, but I did my time, damn you)

2023: Time Shelter (Georgi Gospodinov)

2019: Our Man in Havana (Graham Greene; started, left unfinished)

2019: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (John le Carré)

2021: Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race (Reni Eddo-Lodge; half-read)

2017: Rebel Without Applause (Lemn Sissay)

2022: The Metamorphosis, and Other Stories (Franz Kafka)

2011?: The Complete Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino; vaguely remember reading these when I was maybe 7 and liking them, but I have forgotten their content)

2022: Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (Lea Ypi)

2021: Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland (W.B. Yates)

Some of these are degree-related, some not; some harken back to bygone areas of interest and some persist yet; some were obtained willingly and some thrust upon me without fanfare. I think there are also some I've left at college, but I'm not sure I was actually intending to read any of them - I know one is an old copy of Structural Anthropology by Claude Levi-Strauss that Dad picked up for me secondhand, which I...don't intend to torment myself with. Reading about Tom Huffman's cognitive-structural theory of Great Zimbabwe almost finished me off and remains to date the only overdue essay I intend to never finish, mostly because the professor let me get away with abandoning it.

There are also library books, mostly dissertation-oriented, from which you can tell that the cognitive archaeologists who live in my walls finally fucking Got me:

The Rise of Homo sapiens: The Evolution of Modern Thinking (Thomas Wynn & Fred Coolidge)

The Material Origin of Numbers: Insights from the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (Karenleigh A. Overmann)

Archaeological Situations: Archaeological Theory from the Inside-Out (Gavin Lucas)

And, finally, some I've actually finished recently ("recently" being "within the past year"):

The Body Fantastic (Frank Gonzalo-Crussi, solid 6/10 essay collection about a selection of body parts, just finished earlier)

An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment (Patricia Fara, also a solid 6/10, fun read but nothing special)

Babel: An Arcane History (R.F. Kuang, 8/10, didactic (sometimes necessary) but effective; magic system was cool and a clever metaphor)

The Sign of Four (A.C. Doyle, 2/10 really racist and for what)

Dr. Space Junk vs. the Universe: Archaeology and the Future (Alice Gorman, 8/10, I love you Dr. Space Junk)

In Search of Us: Adventures in Anthropology (Lucy Moore, 8/10, I respect some of these people slightly more now)

The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin, 9/10 got my ass)

The Hound of the Baskervilles (A.C. Doyle, 7/10 themez 👍)

#if you see a book on this list that you gave me years ago. well. just know that i failed. #genuinely so much worse than i thought it was but i'm making my best effort to get through them #this is honestly just for fun because i love to list things. user professionalowl bookshelf reveal. please offer reviews if you have them #hooting

[doumekiss]

My personal favorites of 2022

Books (Fiction)

Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint (Singshong)

The Murderbot Diaries Series (Martha Wells)

In other Lands (Sarah Rees Brennan)

Nona The Ninth (Tamsyn Muir)

Carrie Soto is Back (Taylor Jenkins Reid)

Nettle and Bone (T. Kingfisher)

The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks (Mackenzi Lee)

A Wizard's Guide to defensive Baking (T. Kingfisher)

The Iliad (Homer)

The Odyssey (Homer)

Tracy Flick Can't Win (Tom Perrotta)

Amber and Clay (Laura Amy Schlitz)

Nothing to see here (Kevin Wilson)

Sorrow and Bliss (Meg Mason)

Sea of Tranquility (Emily St. John Mandel)

Books (Non-fiction)

Nothing to Envy : Ordinary Lives in North Korea (Barbara Demick)

Empire of Pain : The Secret History of The Sackler Dynasty (Patrick Radden Keefe)

On the move : a life (Oliver Sacks)

The Road to Jonestown : Jim Jones and The Peoples Temple (Jeff Guin)

This is going to hurt (Adam Kay)

Voices from Chernobyl : The Oral History of a Disaster (Svetlana Alexievich)

Rogues : True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks (Patrick Radden Keefe)

Mean Baby (Selma Blair)

An Anthropologist on mars (Oliver Sacks)

I'm glad my mom died (Jennette McCurdy)

Killers of the flower moon (David Grann)

Awakenings (Oliver Sacks)

Last Night at the Viper Room (Gavin Edwards)

The Man who mistook his wife for a hat (Oliver Sacks)

Cultish : The Language of Fanaticism (Amanda Montell)

Mangas/Manwhas/Comics

Dungeon Meshi (Ryoko Kui)

Witch Hat Atelier (Kamome Shirahama)

Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint (Singshong, Sleepy-C)

Sousou no Frieren (Tsukasa Abe, Kanehito Yamada)

Beware The Villainess (Bbongdda Mask)

The Trash of The Count's Family (Yoo Ryeo Han)

The S-Classes I Raised (Geunseo)

Fun Home (Alison Bechdel)

Semantic Error (Jeo SuRi, Kim Angy)

I think our son is gay (Okura)

Villain Initialization (CuZn Moyou Tangman Culture)

Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon (Coolkyousinnjya)

Couple of Mirrors (Li Zongchen)

Antique Bakery (Fumi Yoshinaga)

Sign (Ker)

TV Shows

Severance - S01

Yellowjackets - S01

Interview with the vampire - S01

Abbott Elementary - S01-S02

The Sandman - S01

Taskmaster - S12-S14

Spy x Family - S01

Dexter : New Blood - Minisseries

Our Flag Means Death - S01

Ghosts - S01-S02 (US)

Kevin Can Fuck Himself - S02

Kotaro Lives Alone - S01

Bocchi The Rock - S01

Chernobyl - Minisseries

Beastars - S01-S02

Movies

Pearl

Encanto

Fire Island

Everything Everywhere All at Once

X

What did you eat yesterday : The Movie

Perfect Blue

Bright Lights

Luca

House of Gucci

The Last Duel

The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Spiderman : No Way Home

Class Action Park

Our Father

#2022 #books #movies #tv shows #mangas #comic books

[3amomen]

My favorite quotes from books

"People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had." A man called Ove by Fredrik Backman

"I wanted to be a cicada. I wanted to pull my skin off and leave it in the bushes and nobody would recognize me, not even my own mother." Bone and All by Camille DeAngelis

"English did not just burrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular and Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods." Babel by R.F. Kuang

"if he has horns, who's to say he doesn't have hooves?" House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

" 'it's not gentle' he said to me. 'you can see it as whimsical, funny-be tempted to romanticize it- but tourette's comes from deep down in the nervous system and unconscious. It taps into the oldest, strongest feeling we have. Tourette's is like an epilepsy in the subcortex: when it takes over, there's just a thin line of control, a thin line of cortex, between you and it, between you and that raging storm, the blind force of the subcortex. One can see the charming things, the funny things, the creative side of tourette's but there's also a dark side, you fight it all your life." An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks

"She swelled with self-indulgent anger, for indeed she saw she was on the verge of throwing a temper tantrum much in the same way her son tossed himself to the living room floor, kicking and clawing, injuring himself in the process, and then crying even harder- and she could not, she would not, stop it. It was easier blasting the anger out or turning the anger in, and she wasn't willing to keep it there any longer. She would not shred herself up inside, would not churn her guys into acid, would not grind her teeth in her sleep or cause her neck to go out, for the sake of being civil and mature and understanding and levelheaded." Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

"Should you ever outrun the guilt within your past, sorceress, you will have to out run your soul. When it finds you again it will kill you."

Gardens of the moon by Steven Erikson

#favorite book quotes #book quotes #a man called ove #bones and all #babel rf kuang #nightbitch #house of leaves #gardens of the moon #An Anthropolgist on Mars #fredrik backman #Camille DeAngelis #Rachel Yoder #mark z. danielewski #steven erikson #oliver sacks

[valpohq]

BIENVENIDOS A LA REGIÓN DE VALPARAÍSO

whether  it's  a  lavish  vacation,  searching  for  muse  through  the  region's  colorful  streets,  searching  for  someone  to  hold,  or  maybe  for  something  in  themselves;  the valparaíso region welcomes  you  !  you  have  24  hours  to  send  in  your  account,  and  be  sure  to  check  the  after  acceptance  checklist  to  make  sure  you're  not  missing  anything  ! 

Welcome Liberty Rain Martson & Jia Gramaglia ! Vina Del Mar invites you to get lost on Golden Beach Street or take a stroll through Jardín Botánico Nacional de Viña del Mar ! Valparaíso welcomes you to the cultural capital of the region ! We hope you lose yourself amongst the historic district, or find beauty in the Casaplan gallery !

is that  courtney  eaton ?  oh,  no,  that’s  liberty rain marston,  a  twenty - eight  year  old  anthropologist  +  freelance  illustrator  who  uses  they + them  pronouns.  they  currently  live  in  valparaíso,  and  the  character  they  identify  with  the  most  is  rick o’connell from the  mummy  (1999) .  hopefully  they  find  their  own  little  paradise  here  in  el  país  de  los  poetas ! is  that  havana  rose  liu ?  oh,  no,  that’s  jia  gramaglia,  a  twenty - six  year  old  spoiled  brat  ballerina  who  uses  she + her  pronouns.  she  currently  lives  in  viña del mar,  and  the  character  she  identifies  with  the  most  is  lily from black swan (2010) .  hopefully  she  finds  her  own  little  paradise  here  in  el  país  de  los  poetas ! (  awkan,  thirty1,  she + her,  gmt - 3  )

#new rp #appless rp #city rp #oc rp #town rp #accepted #BEAUTIFUL CHOICES FRIEND