Misc. comments 31

[redbird]

More saved LJ comments:

oursin wrote that it has occurred to me that possibly one of the subversive notions embodied in feminism is about men, and the possibility that they might be rational beings who don't have to be manipulated and tricked and cajoled.

One aspect of that subversive notion, or maybe a related subversive notion, is that communication is possible. So much of the culture, and especially the crap that is often pawned off as "how to have a relationship" to innocent heterosexuals, assumes that men and women cannot communicate with each other. Sometimes it's generalized to the idea that nobody can communicate, at least not with those they love: tainting not just heterosexual relationships, but homosexual ones, and important non-sexual relationships like those between parents and children.

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This was in response to a friends-only entry about appearance and attitudes to the body:

A thought that occurred to me is that [the behavior described, which includes wearing clothes that fit badly and sometimes uncomfortably*] is the low-budget form of hating your body (or one low-budget form: diet plans and pills can be expensive, but the day-to-day not-eating of anorexia isn't).

Also, there's a difference between the attitude that was stated to me as "my body isn't me, it's just where I live right now," by a person who does take good care of their body, and something like "this meat puppet." Both imply not only an acceptance of mind-body dualism [which is practically built into the language] but an expectation of not always being that body: the difference is respect, maybe an aspect of self-respect.

*I'm having trouble phrasing the gloss on what originally said "this" after a two-paragraph quote succinctly, in ways that are misleading neither about what you said, nor about what I'm trying to say, in part because we don't have a good vocabulary for proprioception and in part because it's hard to draw lines between, for example, a withdrawal of even basic attention from the physical world, and clumsiness or asymmetry that have neurological or other physiological causes (e.g., scoliosis). Yes, the person likely knows—though not always, as mild scoliosis is often diagnosed late if at all—but a casual observer probably won't. (The post I was commenting on was someone discussing people zie had known for a long time, but I'm using it as a jumping-off point.)

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In response to peake talking about "long wars":

As autopope says, I think you're not taking a long enough scale here. Israel became an independent state in 1948, but that wasn't ex nihilo: it was in the context of (among other things) Zionism and the pre-1948 Jewish immigration to the region, and the same imperialist thinking that led to the creation of Iraq as a nation-state, and to the often-arbitrary borders that European governments drew for most of Africa.

I suspect [emphasize suspect] that there might be value in connecting those three, and maybe connections to the division of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War. At the same time, while it's clearly true that ethnic nationalism has been a force in the Balkans for a long time, it's also clearly true that the actions and policies of Moscow in 1914 had different motivations than the actions and policies of Moscow under Stalin, or under Brezhnev.

If we're willing to consider that wars are in part about and between ideas, as well as groups of people fighting over land, the rise of nationalism and how that interacts with (at least) imperialism, religion as a group identifier, and capitalism might be more relevant to the idea of a Long War than Israel specifically.

N.B. This is all done from memory and while I'm working on the morning's first caffeine. If it's useful, great; if there are obvious holes, I apologize, and will not be terribly surprised.

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callunav was talking about her parents' imposition of a total ordering on the entire universe, including but not limited to aesthetic questions, and how it's still affecting her. I wrote this:

I want to sit down and hand you an entire pot of tea, and either sashimi or cakelings.

One of my problems with my father seems tangent to this: there wasn't a general expectation of that sort of total orderings, but when he did decide that he was right about something, he'd just shout me down. (This wasn't about household rules, or indeed any aspect of what would normally be called disobedience: this was disagreement about ideas.)

Probably not very useful mathematical side note: if there are n items in a set, there are n! well-orderings of that set. Which means that for a set like "books," while the number of available well-orderings is countable in the technical sense (and even finite), it's larger than convenient for the human mind. From an aesthetic viewpoint, many of those well-orderings will be as senseless as the less-useful hexagons in the Library of Babel, but there are many that will make sense to humans and thus be used. Is Le Guin better than Gene Wolfe? At what, and to whom? When I asked rysmiel what Iain Banks I should try reading, I got The Player of Games. Someone else would probably have gotten Use of Weapons, a book that squicked me enough that I decided at the time that I didn't want to read any more Banks.

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misia took a poll on some gender stuff, including terms we'd use to identify ourselves:

Looking at this, I realized that I don't use "feminine" to describe myself, and probably wouldn't use "womanly," though I'd definitely say "female" [in this context; depending on the purpose of the self-description, gender or appearance might or might not be part of it] and don't consider myself trans or intergendered. Interesting.

Also, I don't actually know how I'd react to being described as "masculine" because I have no datapoints on that. Probably a little weird, because the men I get on well with tend not to be the ones who particularly identify with or attract that adjective.

Comments

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I think the Iain Banks you should read is Raw Spirit, which is not fiction but an account of his travels to visit single-malt distilleries all over Scotland. I'm still working sporadically on building a taste for single malts, but I enjoyed that book a lot, and not only because I have a perverse fondness for Odd Books (by which I mean books unlike anything else an author has written). It made me want to go to Scotland, certainly, though it didn't necessarily make me want to read any of his fiction.

gender

[klingonlandlady.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way. I think it boils down to while not denying one's physical gender, not really needing to conform to the stereotypes that go along with it, either. I tend to have some attitudes and preferences associated with either one, and most of the people I prefer to hang around with tend to as well.

Kinda looking forward to the day when we can all be "just folks"...

[gothgeekgirl.livejournal.com]

One of my problems with my father seems tangent to this: there wasn't a general expectation of that sort of total orderings, but when he did decide that he was right about something, he'd just shout me down. (This wasn't about household rules, or indeed any aspect of what would normally be called disobedience: this was disagreement about ideas.)

Sounds like my mother when I was young. Fortunately, she's mellowed a lot over the years.