Guys, guys !! C'mon :roll:

I've been patient, I've been good
Tried to keep my hands on the table
It's gettin' hard this holdin' back
You know what I mean
I'm sure you'll understand my point of view
We know each other mentally
You gotta know that you're bringin' out
The animal in me. — 'Physical' - Olivia Newton John

Let me hear your body talk, body talk.
Let's get physical, physical practical, practical.

The question is often raised about the paucity of female philosophers. Some bemoan the lack of female voices on forums such as this. Why? So many reasons, so little time.

Do we even know or care about the missing female contributions to 'Pragmatism'?
Did their bodies and minds go AWOL? Is it related to sexism or the predominant male perspective? :scream:

'Pragmatist Feminism' in Philosophy, a few excerpts:

Pragmatist feminist philosophers have been addressing several different projects over the past decades, including:
a) the recovery of women who were influential in the development of American pragmatism but whose work subsequently all but disappeared in the history of philosophy,
b) a rereading of the “canon” of pragmatist philosophers, analyzing their writing in light of their philosophies and attitudes about women,
and c) the utilization of pragmatist philosophies as a resource for contemporary feminist philosophy and activism.

[...] Recovering these women thinkers also allows us to hear new or excluded voices in the philosophic conversation, in some cases resulting in opening up the definition of philosophy itself.
Recognizing “philosophical techniques are means, not ends”, these women rejected “philosophizing as an intellectual game that takes purely logical analysis as its special task…” (Seigfried 1996: 37).

Because of the gender-based discrimination against women as rational thinkers and their exclusion from the academy, history has rarely carried the names and texts of these women into our philosophy textbooks (see for example Eileen O’Neill’s 1998 essay “Disappearing Ink”)

[...] many of the women whose work has been brought into the feminist-pragmatist discussion were college-educated activists rather than professional academic philosophers;

Pragmatism originated in a time when our culture was in the midst of enormous change in women’s roles, yet early-century male pragmatists were often unaware of how gender biases affected knowledge and culture as well as their own ideas. Like many figures in the philosophical canon, at times they universalize the male perspective.

[...] Currently feminists and pragmatists share an effort to radically change oppressive political and social structures, an effort that finds resonance with the early feminist-pragmatists. Jane Addams and other feminist reformers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman were continuously involved in fighting oppression, especially of women, children, and minorities.

[...] Nancy McHugh’s (2015) The Limits of Knowledge highlights one of the most compelling aspects of feminist pragmatist work: the need to engage along and across borders.

McHugh argues for a transactionally situated approach that aims to generate and sustain a vantage point from which to see complex, interconnected problems facing both local and global communities across social, economic, cultural, educational, and political divides. This means we begin in “the complexities of the everyday world” and engage with those who are impacted by the results. — Pragmatist Feminism - SEP

So, are you bored yet? :nerd: When did the :yawn: :yawn: :yawn: start, huh?
I'm guessin'... at the word 'Feminism'? Or just not enough editing. I know, never mind :kiss:

Hey, I don't know if this was already said; But I want to say these as I think they might help! So, In my opinion:
What is a man?
A person, a being; Which usually (but doesn't need to always) checks with most of the traits a man has in that culture. Mostly, it is an identity that the person who is identified chooses. Mostly a mix of already put traits and what the person "chooses" to see themself as. As something one identifies as, it can be a bit wonky and with fuzzy-lines at times.

What is masculinity?
Masculinity is something that is only a human idea; Something we corelate only because we were though to corelate, as these traits can be way different from culture to culture.
Again masculinity may have other traits, depending on the culture; But also might apply to anybody;
As masculinity is usually a set of moral/personality based traits, so they can be associated with any gender.

Hope you have a good day!

That was a pun?

BTW, 'gullible squirrels' was a pun on the daily Canadian news show, As It Happens. They always end their day's lead in with a pun on one of the day's stories.

Which one are you referring to?

A pun is:

a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words which sound alike but have different meanings.

A pun, also rarely known as paronomasia, is a form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use of homophonic, homographic, metonymic, or figurative language. A pun differs from a malapropism in that a malapropism is an incorrect variation on a correct expression, while a pun involves expressions with multiple (correct or fairly reasonable) interpretations. Puns may be regarded as in-jokes or idiomatic constructions, especially as their usage and meaning are usually specific to a particular language or its culture.

There's more if you need it.

All this is relevant to the Masculinity thread because Universeness and I are engaging in typical masculine rhetorical maneuvers.

You haven’t made any argument in support of your rash assertion as yet. Give us an example of how sensitivity to initial conditions is relevant to human social and political structures.

Are you really wanting to claim they are simply chaotic and random outcomes like the weather? Provide some evidence.

Biosemiosis puts it the other way round. Criticality is the resource that informational structure harnesses. It takes just a spark to explode petrol, gas or even powdered coal. We then wrap the machinery of an engine around that useful fact. And control the spark with a flick of a switch.

So you are making a claim about the physical world as it is without being wrapped in its human system of mechanistic constraints - the formal and final causes represented by our notions of social, political and economic order.

The “butterfly effect” is already notorious as the most pop-sci hot take in non-linear dynamics. Let’s see you flesh out your claims here in some fully argued way.

Sure, there is a tempting metaphor there. Any spark of unrest could be claimed as the tipping point in that it later produced the political storm. But try that on with any real life example like the Arab Spring or Jan 6. You will soon find you are hand-waving as it is the generalised criticality rather than the specific fluctuation that is the material “cause”.

The key is that it is “any spark” that will do the trick. And biosemiosis is about how to harness such criticality and milk it for scalefree growth.

China’s belt and road policy is a good example of this in practice.

Transport networks - as systems of trade flows - are naturally fractal because of agglomeration effects (and no-one calls them “affects”). They reflect millions of individual decisions about where to move to and set up shop once enough economic energy is flowing through a populated landscape.

To maximise growth, the social and political constraints are tuned to maximising this freedom of free attachment over all geographic scales. For something like airports - the classic example - you have a long tail of tiny fields but also the super-hubs that - with a lot of political re-engineering - are allowed to grow to any scale.

So human infrastructure generally reflects this understanding of growth as being the smart harnessing of the vitality that the physical world already provides. Nature is organised by its dissipative structure in ways we began to understand through non-linear dynamics - the kind of dynamics in which constraints can develop or emerge from collective action. Human policies only need to work with that dynamism in a ratcheting fashion.

China is an example of a new player trying to enter an established world system. The international trade circulation system had already been colonised by others like the British Empire and the US’s Bretton Woods deal. China had to impose its own fractal transport structure on all this in the hope that it could then spark the markets which would use the logistics network it provided.

Not a huge success so far. But at least China’s understanding of the situation shows how the real world works. No one is waiting for butterfly “affects” to blow storms their way. Both the Arab Spring and Jan 6 were fires stoked by political actors hoping that the scalefree criticality of social media opinion could be guided in particular directions.

So sure, the physics of dissipative structure are right at the centre of a biosemiotic understanding of society and politics. And we have robust mathematical models of criticality, scalefree networks, spontaneous symmetry breaking, and much else. We can see how dynamical systems are naturally structured in terms of downward constraints acting on upwardly constructing degrees of freedom.

And it is against this sophisticated metaphysics that I am criticising your hand-waving mentions of the butterfly “affect”.

That “any spark could have caused the explosion” was a shocking idea for a hot moment there. But the worst interpretation of this sensitivity was that this meant one particular spark must thus be given the credit. Instead, the emphasis should have been on the “any”. The fact that the world would be better understood through the uniformity of a state of criticality where sensitivity is the property that has been maximised.

A butterfly’s wing beat might have done it. So might a half beat, quarter beat and even virtually no beat at all. The frog fart nearby, the bee coughing a moment later - anything can be regarded as the material/efficient cause of a storm. But then what really explains the storm are the boundary conditions rather than the initial conditions. An atmosphere driven by a solar flux and dissipating turbulently. A system of vortical motion over all scales, from the tiniest ones of no reasonable human concern like butterfly beats to ones of no reasonable human control, like weather systems.

But a well placed fan or windmill or sail? Biosemiosis can use its smarts to insert itself into the entropic flows of nature. And that is where any useful mathematics of self-organising chaos - order for free - comes in.

All this is relevant to the Masculinity thread because Universeness and I are engaging in typical masculine rhetorical maneuvers. — BC

Hah. A fascinating analysis. We will never know how pure the masculinity cos we can't see the serial sensations of the feminine fluttering kind. Or the apparel. Who wore the fake fur and eyelashes, and who the horned helmet? A rhetorical question.

I blame @fdrake - the mad, male mod for increasing the momentum of 'The Fight of the Butterflies'.
So there. Put that in your pipe and blow smoke in your eyes. Or poke them out. I don't care.

Pikachu gets stabbed by a Jamaican man and then asks why?
The Jamaican man replies he just wanted to poke a mon.

All this is relevant to the Masculinity thread because Universeness and I are engaging in typical masculine rhetorical maneuvers. — BC

:lol: :clap:

My puns are sooooo much bigger that your puns!

You haven’t made any argument in support of your rash assertion as yet. Give us an example of how sensitivity to initial conditions is relevant to human social and political structures.

Are you really wanting to claim they are simply chaotic and random outcomes like the weather? Provide some evidence. — apokrisis

This universe is formed from the fact that chaotic systems naturally produce order.
Chaos is also demonstrated in every human, all the time, by means of 'random thought.' An ordered thought can naturally form from that process. Watch something like:


Imo, anthroposemiotics is a description of human communication, which is ordered.
Biosemiotics is all it's forms, for me invokes an image of a chaotic system, which actually has meaningful 'signs' within it, almost like wee semaphoric messages that the ordered human mind can interpret or our biology formed from. It seems to support a deterministic universe, which I do not ascribe to, do you?

The “butterfly effect” is already notorious as the most pop-sci hot take in non-linear dynamics. Let’s see you flesh out your claims here in some fully argued way. — apokrisis

Watch the vid I posted above!

The key is that it is “any spark” that will do the trick. And biosemiosis is about how to harness such criticality and milk it for scalefree growth. — apokrisis

This is too restricted to a cause and effect order, but I like your 'any spark will do,' as this suggests that when the spark is the cause of the beginning of a cascade, you do not say anything regarding what caused the spark or indeed, the nature of the spark. So 'any spark' may be caused by 'any event,' just like a butterfly flapping it's wings in London, ultimately causing a hurricane in Florida.
So exactly what constitutes masculine, feminine or even human, can be influenced by an unknown number of factors from biosemiotics to the butterfly effect/affect.

A butterfly’s wing beat might have done it. So might a half beat, quarter beat and even virtually no beat at all. The frog fart nearby, the bee coughing a moment later - anything can be regarded as the material/efficient cause of a storm. — apokrisis

Now you're getting the idea!

What do you think about quantum fluctuations in the vacuum of space?
Do you think they exist?
Do you think they are truly random and chaotic?
Do you think they are semiotic?
Do you think that they are the main happenstance events that produce the current order in our universe?

Isn't it interesting how an exchange about masculinity can quite quickly, result in questions about quantum fluctuations. Do you think we could get from an exchange about quantum fluctuations to asking the question. 'What does a frog fart smell like and why?' Oh Wait, I think we just did!!!

Pikachu gets stabbed by a Jamaican man and then asks why?
The Jamaican man replies he just wanted to poke a mon. — Amity

Could you explain this from a purely biosemiotics viewpoint please!

This universe is formed from the fact that chaotic systems naturally produce order.
Chaos is also demonstrated in ever human, all the time, by means of 'random thought.' An ordered thought can naturally form from that process. Watch something like: — universeness

Pretty pictures but like getting a postcard from the 1980s.

Pikachu gets stabbed by a Jamaican man and then asks why?
The Jamaican man replies he just wanted to poke a mon.
— Amity

Could you explain this from a purely biosemiotics viewpoint please! — universeness

No. But I hear ChatGPT does some neat tricks. Try there. I think it's gender-free.

You seem to prefer asking questions to answering them, perhaps that's just your biosemiology. (sorry for that new term,) I think I received a rather chaotic semaphore message, which set out on its journey towards me, from the vacuum of space, during a duration of planck time event, in the 1980's.
My brain just interpreted the sign and gave it meaning, resulting in the term biosemiology.
Does this help prove your claims?

No. But I hear ChatGPT does some neat tricks. Try there. — Amity

Tricks??? Oh! the humanity :groan:

You missed my late edit. 'I hear it's gender-free'.
Now, I'm wondering if that is the case.

[...] So, if by aggregating humanity’s “intelligence” we inevitably absorb its biases, irrationalities, and stupidity, how can chatGPT avoid being sexist, as well as biased in any of the various ways in which humanity displays its remarkable capacity for thinking poorly of others who they fail to identify with, mostly to inflate its own egos and self-esteem? I asked the bot a few questions to find out:

Q: Would gender parity boost world GDP? — Is ChatGPT Sexist? - Forbes

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomaspremuzic/2023/02/14/is-chatgpt-sexist/

Its an interesting branch to what is a man, woman, human!
Will a future AGI ....... ASI make any use of, or see any value in, our distinctions between the masculine, the feminine, gender, biological sex etc other than it's functionalities towards reproduction.
Especially when it considers asexual reproduction and the fairly wide existence of species that can switch between being biologically male and biologically female, as need dictates.

19 Animals That Can Change Gender (Updated 2022+Images)

EDIT: Sorry, I think I made typos in every second word. Hopefully I have corrected them.

Its an interesting branch to what is a man, woman, human! — universeness

:up: Doncha just love it when the flying foughts of butterfly brains spark off other trains.
Sometimes though, focus can flee oot the windae. But on TPF, it's all good...I think :chin:

...Especially when it considers asexual reproduction and the fairly wide existence of species that can switch between being biologically male and biologically female, as need dictates. — universeness

Ah, how different would the world be if we could transform rich, political white males currently abusing power to...well, the opposite...? How would they feel? Would there be an increase in empathy or compassion and would it hold when they switched back? Would any pain be forgotten...

I'm sure that's not an original thought...I had Trump in mind. Unfortunately.
Back to the question of 'masculinities and femininities'; the balance thereof...
How feminine is Trump? Putin? What are they trying to prove...with all the chest thumping/dry humpin'?

Doncha just love it when the flying foughts of butterfly brains spark off other trains. — Amity

I tried youtube, but I couldn't find a clip that just said 'don'tcha,' pussycat doll style and I didn't want to put you through the horror of watching the whole song. But imagine I did find a clip with just the don'tcha part and I posted it here. You know it makes sense, DON'TCHA!

focus can flee oot the windae. — Amity

How many Scots or Caledonophiles are on TPF?

Ah, how different would the world be if we could transform rich, political white males currently abusing power to...well, the opposite...? How would they feel? Would there be an increase in empathy or compassion and would it hold when they switched back? Would any pain be forgotten... — Amity

Dunno, but it sound like a cheap, bad tv show we have yet to be subjected to. In a similar vein to:

We transform the current reality of a species controlled by a nefarious, rich and powerful few, by changing our societal drivers on a global scale. Might take a while yet, but we will get there.

Back to the question of 'masculinities and femininities'; the balance thereof...
How feminine is Trump? Putin? What are they trying to prove...with all the chest thumping/dry humpin'? — Amity

They are trying to prove that they should be King/Messiah/God, of the planet and over our species!
They each just don't understand why we don't agree with them and so, in their mind, we have defied our one true god(s) and need to be punished for eternity. If you asked Trump or Putin, I am quite confident that they would agree, (as long as it was off the record and on the QT.)
Competitive unfettered masculinity can result in horrors like Trump and Putin seeing themselves as fully occupying and owning personal images of themselves, such as:

I tried youtube, but I couldn't find a clip that just said 'don'tcha,' pussycat doll style and I didn't want to put you through the horror of watching the whole song. — universeness

Grateful for your consideration.
Hope you don't mind. In the pursuit of balance. 1min 53 secs of King Elvis. No gyrations included :cry:
Elvis Presley - Doncha' Think It's Time ( take 40) with lyrics

I am a massive Elvis fan. He remains the greatest stage performer I have ever watched, with one of the greatest voices I have ever heard. He was also a dimwit when it came to politics and science and I think his theism was based on his lack of general study. I currently own 74 Elvis CD's.

Pikachu gets stabbed by a Jamaican man and then asks why?
The Jamaican man replies he just wanted to poke a mon. — Amity

Hmm. I thought I had heard that pokemon is what Jamaicans call proctologists.

I really don't know what to say...except Wow! :cool: :gasp: :monkey:
Don't ask me to translate biosemiotically, or otherwise :wink:
Why doncha post your most listened-to Elvis song in the Lounge? :fire:

I blame fdrake - the mad, male mod for increasing the momentum of 'The Fight of the Butterflies'. — Amity

Any thread on masculinity is incomplete without authoritarian jouissance.

I thought I had heard that pokemon is what Jamaicans call proctologists. — wonderer1

:roll: "Up yer bum!"

This is not an insult but a congenial Australian toast. But you can't go in half-assed with it.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Up%20your%20bum%21

Any thread on masculinity is incomplete without authoritarian jouissance. — fdrake

Of yes, masterful stroke, right there :love:
Sally concludes her philosophical argument with Harry.
"Yes!" x15 - con accelerando e crescendo...until release...and then...

All this is relevant to the Masculinity thread because Universeness and I are engaging in typical masculine rhetorical maneuvers. — BC

I had that thought too -- which is why I didn't say anything. I recognized "yup that's actually better than all of my theory -- here is a masculinity"

I think that's a great scene. Given Woody Allen: I think he was expressing his own anxiety about sexual contact but then putting it out there out large because he knew this would speak to people's emotions. He took a risk, and it paid off because we still remember this scene -- some for their masculinity, and some because they relate to Meg Ryan.

It hits several points of conflict for our own sexual lives, which is why it's interesting.What if I'm not man enough to even do the basic function of supplying orgasms to my partner, when I get orgasms? It doesn't seem that fair, at least if fairness is something you care about. And given the manly interest in protecting and providing, it's an anxiety.

"Yes!" x15 - con accelerando e crescendo...until release...and then... — Amity

I enjoy that scene. Here are altogether too many words about it.

The scene is ultimately conservative, except for the lady at the end. What prompts the whole dialogue is Harry's perceived transgression of female dignity, where female dignity is equated to the role of a traditional housewife. Sally's using the norm in order to undermine Harry's self esteem, out of jealousy, due to her repressed desire for Harry's romantic love, and simultaneously set her own pleasure up as the object of Harry's desire. Harry in turn is visibly flustered but attempting to repress the simultaneous shame and desire. In that regard it embodies the whole "dance" of patriarchal feminine sexuality, rather than subverting it.

Whatever subversion there is in the scene is only Sally's... vocalisation... of the shame/desire bind patriarchal sexuality demands of both of them - she ain't supposed to be that direct about it. Which opens up an interesting space of merely aesthetic adherence to post-patriarchal norms of eroticism and romance, while in fact embodying them. Like radical feminist couples defaulting to patriarchal splits of household labour when times get tough, women letting men "put them on their front again", and men expecting it. The patriarchal generation of desire tends to prove stronger, psychogenically, than transgression against it.

The crone at the end lampshades that dynamic - she's an anonymous middle aged woman. She simultaneously expresses a desire for genuine satisfaction, but it's directed toward the mere emulation of satisfaction. She instead will receive lunch, off screen.

I guess I should've made more effort to link this to the theme of masculinity in the thread. So when I was talking about "female dignity", I meant the norm which makes sense of Sally's indignation that Harry would leave his sexual partners before the morning. It's a sign of (what's seen as) insufficient fidelity to one's sexual partner, and simultaneously rendering sex too casual.

Harry is also playing into this. Harry is boasting about how easy it is for him to find women to play into the same desirability-through-shame flirting strategy Sally is. He could be seen to devalue any potential partner if the norm above was seen as operative. That devaluation operates on the same norms that enable Sally's castigation, and it inspires her to position herself as an object of Harry's desire.

What's particularly patriarchal about this is the combination of eroticism, mutual denigration, plausible deniability and fidelity. They're both not saying quite what they mean; since their mutual attraction is suppressed. They'll nevertheless flirt through saying things that undermine the other's gender role in a romantic relationship (marked by replaceability for women/and fakeness for men). Then that denigration allows the mutual recognition of desire - Sally's flirty cake eating and Harry's look of lustful respect.

What makes this a good example of eroticism between patriarchal gender identities is as follows; they both use their expected gender role perfectly. None of the moves make sense unless Harry and Sally both feel intimately that sexual fidelity and commitment morally bind them in any relationship; this provides the ability for those norms to shame and anger. Then we have the eroticism in the scene coming from inflicting those norms "playfully" - with anger, in responsive shame, with sexual desire - toward the other. All desire in that scene is articulated in terms of those norms and their imposition. Tellingly, what allows their desire to emerge is the shame of being seen to transgress those norms - when in fact they've simply posited that those norms apply to the other.

Basically that movie wouldn't make much sense if it was set in a polycule. Would be over in about 15 minutes.

Why doncha post your most listened-to Elvis song in the Lounge? — Amity

Because I doubt that many on TPF could care less.
I can listen to Elvis sing about love or even a gospel song as I love his voice so much but songs like 'In the ghetto,' 'If I can Dream,' 'American Trilogy,' and other less serious ones like 'Polk Salad Annie.'
Just takes me through my full gambit of personal emotions.