edgerunneralexis

Oh I have theories about gender, but alas I'm too tired to elaborate much right now. Suffice it to say, I think which gender we identify with (I.e. what people, and only then by extension, sociocultural concepts, our ideal self-image is shaped in dialogue with) is probably innate (and I have a whole etiology for this), but what gendered behaviors and expressions and identities and ways of being we adapt from that identification come from gender as a sociocultural construct, which is largely "arbitrary", multifaceted, and so on. This does not mean you can arbitrarily change or remove people's identification with other people, or their desire or lack thereof to express aspects of that concept, however. I think my account of exactly how that cultural construct functions, is identifiable, and what it is, as well as my account of the etiology of gender identification, are probably less rigidly medicalized than Serano's, however. I'm a poststructuralist through and through, and dislike essentialization, and enjoy using tools such as Wittgenstein's language games and family resemblances.

I haven't read it yet, but from what I've just read on the Wikipedia page — and other things I've heard about it previously — I'm very interested in reading it! As a cyberpunk, a queer, a trans woman, and a feminist, with an interest in poststructuralism, I think there'd be a lot of interesting things I can glean from it.

(I've always felt that challenging essentialized notions of gender, and engaging in radical body-modification and self-expression, is a pretty cyberpunk, and feminist, thing to do)

Non-PDF version for those like me who can't stand PDFs: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto

This is an interesting idea!

Personally, from my study of it, I conceptualize the relationship between modernism and postmodernism a little differently — namely, modernism itself was concerned with questioning assumptions and critically analyzing dogmatic beliefs, trying to find justifications for them and discarding the ones that could not be justified. It was actually a response to the dogmatism and unquestioned assumptions and lack of proper justifications that was common in religiously-influenced philosophy and theology. It was also a revolution in epistemology, in trying to figure out how we could understand the world and justify our beliefs and know what is true in the first place. Postmodernism is thus, in my opinion, not a reversal of a key concept of modernism at all, but an acceleration of modernism — modernism taken to its natural conclusion, by applying modernism's own desire to critically analyze assumptions and remove unjustified ones to modernism's own assumptions about empiricism and objectivity and the existence of universal truths itself. And in many ways this was prefigured by Hume; in fact, Stirner, who is considered a proto-postmodernist by most scholars, explicitly cites Hume as a philosopher he respects — a rare thing indeed!

To the degree that postmodernism ends up inverting modernism, and having a completely different methodology than modernism, this is a result of the bringing of one of modernism's core ideas to its logical fruition. And this naturally results in something far more radical and interesting and capable of bearing new intellectual fruit then modernism itself, because postmodernism's benefit doesn't merely come from blindly reversing an aspect of a previous philosophy, but from what it chooses to continue and strengthen and what it reverses as a result.

I think this differs strongly from the relationship between cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk because while post-cyberpunk does invert one of the aspects of cyberpunk, it does not do this as a result of a deeper undercurrent of philosophy or logic or ideas from the cyberpunk ethos that motivates this reversal, and so this reversal doesn't really bear new fruit at all — it just undoes what cyberpunk did and returns to the science fiction world before cyberpunk came about. It doesn't take the cyberpunk project and move forward to even more radical and thus fruitful new worlds further on beyond what cyberpunk could discover, which is what postmodernism does to modernism, because there's no aspect or undercurrent of cyberpunk that it actually takes further. The reversal is actually just a reset.

This is why I have a lot less interest in postcyberpunk than cyberpunk — it feels like a genre created by those who have reached middle age and bought into the system, and so now, being comfortable and benefitting from the system, they willfully blind themselves to the need for radical critique and deconstruction and rage at it, and thus wish to return to a more reformist genre. Postmodernism would be more like postcyberpunk if it had looked at modernism and reversed the assumption that things need critique and critical analysis and decided to just return back to Catholic philosophy!

Yup, you're exactly right with your analysis. They're pulling typical tankie BS ironically.

Yeah I know, I don't think them being tankies is really a problem for Lemmy as a whole. I was just annoyed that all they had to say is "no we aren't tankies" and people just took them at their word lol

Yeah they confuse criticizing China with racism against Chinese people. Additionally they claim that any source from and news agency or journalists in the US that says anything bad about the USSR or China is CIA propaganda and should be ignored but then exclusively site Chinese propaganda websites.

There's also a lot of other evidence: https://raddle.me/f/lobby/159606/-/comment/294792

Just because they said they weren't? They just dismissed the claim without linking to any real counter evidence by claiming it's just a random Mastodon user or whatever

Here are some mod logs from lemmy.ml (which is an instance run by the Lemmy devs) from a few years ago: https://raddle.me/f/TankiesGonnaTank/89852/the-lemmy-ml-admin-is-banning-anyone-that-mentions-stalin-or

Here's one of the Lemmy devs (you can tell it's them from their profile activity) denying genocide: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xq49ct/deleted_by_user/iq954mu/

Insisting that fascists are good, actually not fascists at all, as long as their nationalism makes them oppose the US (because the enemy of my enemy is a totally good guy!): https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/comments/vgg2x3/thoughts_on_slavoj_zizek/id2cxb8/

There's more here: https://raddle.me/f/lobby/159606/-/comment/294792

Summon the choir for we've made a discovery - that cat

Interesting! Anachronistic/retrofuturistic tech is far from essential in cyberpunk (even the aesthetic) for me, but I can certainly see why it might be for others.

I won't argue that there is a possibility that things could go wrong for federated and a decentralized social networks like Lemmy and Mastodon, and we are going to have to fight a cultural and technological battle against that, but I think at least this is a very good start, and I don't think it inherently has to go that way either.