drafting "The Social Construction of Reality ..."

diff --git a/content/drafts/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md b/content/drafts/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md
index 5851ac9..97b02d8 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md
+++ b/content/drafts/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md
@@ -4,6 +4,8 @@ Category: commentary
 Tags: cathartic, epistemic horror
 Status: draft
 
+_(Epistemic status: highly speculative, but in an environment of sufficiently intense ambient information warfare, honest speculation honestly labeled as such is probably more reliable than most purported "facts.")_
+
 > The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." 
 >
 > —["Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush"](https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html) by Ron Suskind, _The New York Times Magazine_
@@ -26,17 +28,19 @@ If you can't win the argument (because the motte is genuinely a great motte) and
 
 Again, probably not literally: there probably really are biochemical facts of the matter as to what traits hormone replacement therapy does and does not change, and the biochemical facts aren't going to vary depending on the outcome of a political conflict—as far as I know. (I've never _seen_ an estrogen molecule, have you?)
 
-What _does_ vary depending on the outcome of a political conflict are which facts you can _talk_ about—and thus, [in the long run](https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/it-must-be-said/), which facts you can even _notice_. If you _successfully_ mindfuck everyone into believing that AGPs are really women, then _they really are_.
+What _does_ vary depending on the outcome of a political conflict are which facts you can _talk_ about—and thus, [in the long run](https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/it-must-be-said/), which facts you can even _notice_. If you successfully mindfuck everyone into believing that AGPs are really women, then _they really are_.
 
-Once, in the hateful and bigoted days of our ancestors, people noticed whether babies were female or male, acculturated them into different social roles (childbearing and war being more relevant to their cultural systems then those of today's [barren](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/where-have-all-the-children-gone/594133/), [pacified](TODO: linky authoritarian submission) elites), and had [short, simple words](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) for the resulting types of people: girls and boys, women and men. This is the first, initial stage of [the precession of simulacra](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/). Medical transsexualism of the 20th-century West is a mixture of simulacrum levels 1 (to the extent that hormones and surgery constitute a successful [sex change](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/changing_emotions/)) and 2 (to the extent that they don't, and transitioning consists of [lying](TODO: blatant lies) about one's sex).
+Once, in the hateful and bigoted days of our ancestors, people noticed whether babies were female or male, acculturated them into different social roles (childbearing and war being more relevant to their cultural systems then those of today's [barren](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/where-have-all-the-children-gone/594133/), [pacified](TODO: linky authoritarian submission) elites), and had [short, simple words](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) for the resulting clusters in personspace: girls and boys, women and men. 
 
-But the ancestors, in choosing the words to carve _their_ reality at the joints, didn't distinguish between the fact of sex, and social sex _roles_—from _within_ a given society, there was no reason to make that distinction. For a brief, beautiful moment in the West, 2nd-wave feminism did, giving us the sex/gender split. That incentive lasted about forty years:
+But the ancestors, in choosing the words to carve _their_ reality at the joints, didn't distinguish between the fact of sex, and social sex _roles_—from _within_ a given Society, there was no reason to make that distinction. For a brief, beautiful moment in the West, 2nd-wave feminism's push to make Society [more congenial to masculine-of-center women](TODO: Eric Wulff link??) provided a reason, giving us the sex/gender split. That incentive lasted about forty years: after its crowning victory in _Obergefell v. Hodges_, the [Blue](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) [Egregore's](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/) LGBT activist machinery wasn't about to sit idle or quietly disband, and instead adapted itself to the obvious next growth channel of absorbing new neurotype-demographics into the "T": specifically, capturing a larger fraction of ~5% (?) of men with intense AGP (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been [furtive, closeted crossdressers](TODO: linky transvestivism paper)), and the 5–15% (??) of [girls](TODO: ROGD linky) on the losing end of female intrasexual competition (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been anorexic). 
 
-the LGBT activist machinery wasn't going to peacefully disband after its crowning victory in _Obergefell v. Hodges_
 
-pried apart at such painstaking cost by their feminist cousins
- 
+to collapse the sex/gender distinction pried apart at such painstaking cost by their feminist cousins two generations earlier—in the other direction, 
  
+
+This is the first, initial stage of [Hoffman and Taylor's account of the precession of simulacra (following Breulliard)](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/). Medical transsexualism of the 20th-century West is a mixture of simulacrum levels 1 (to the extent that hormones and surgery constitute a successful [sex change](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/changing_emotions/)) and 2 (to the extent that they don't, and transitioning consists of [lying](TODO: blatant lies) about one's sex).
+
+
 I have a recurring dream
 
 ------
@@ -49,5 +53,5 @@ left to just study it. Judiciously. As I do.
 https://www.gwern.net/docs/philo/2012-sistery-tryingtoseethrough.html  
 https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/the-thing-and-the-symbolic-representation-of-the-thing/
 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web
-https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/
+
 https://status451.com/2018/07/01/the-importance-of-having-your-pain-be-legible/