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Apolo

Raised and painted relief from the ceiling of the Hathor Temple at Dendera. Egypt, Graeco-Roman period, 2nd/1st century BCE - 2nd century CE.

To be somewhat hyperbolic, it’s a belief that males and females are fundamentally different animals somehow— this often accompanies a belief that people with different skin pigmentation are also fundamentally different animals, unsurprisingly, which is why so many transmisogynists are also staggeringly racist.

I point out the TERF connection specifically because that ideology is deeply rooted in the belief that women are inherently physically inferior and inherently morally superior to men. Men are natural predators, women are natural victims, but also if women ruled the world there’d be no war because they’re biologically better at statecraft I guess.

Human beings are some of the least sexually dimorphic mammals on the planet. There is next to no actual physical difference between the traditional sexes that cannot be linked to culture— ie girls are widely discouraged from doing sports, especially sports which require upper body strength, and thus have less upper body strength on average. But female athletes who spend time developing upper body strength close the gap created by cultural upbringing and will have the same upper body strength as men.

There is no skill where the least skilled male will still match or exceed the most skilled female. There is no “biological advantage.” Just different skill levels and weight classes. That’s why feminists were arguing so hard for getting rid of gender segregation in sports back in the 90’s, before transmisogyny (and especially transmisogynoir) dragged the conversation back to the 50’s.

The few differences there actually are between a male sexed and a female sexed body can be almost totally reversed by influencing ONE hormone. Our bodies are so similar and so ready to switch sides on a dime that people sexed as female can straight up grow a phallus. It’s so easy to develop breast tissue that 35% of men experience gynocomastia— people sexed as male developing breasts— at some point in their lives, and estimates show 70% of adolescent boys will experience it during puberty.

We have no idea how prevalent most intersex conditions really are because they generally have so little influence on the person’s life or health that unless some other condition causes them to get a full body mri or similar, they will never know! The mortician embalming your dead body may be the only person who ever knows you had fully developed ovaries or internal testes.

We are the same animal! Our bodies are the same!Our brains are the same! Our bones are the same! Even our organs are largely the same!

Any road that starts from the assumption that you are fundamentally, biologically distinct from another nearly identical member of the same species will lead you nowhere but pseudo scientific justification for bigotry.

Once you have accepted the premise that your own opposite sexed sibling is a different kind of animal than you, you are primed to accept that explanation for any other demographic group that it has historically benefited someone for you to despise.

Bioessentialism is bullshit pseudoscience.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

"Survival"

Cone 5.5 stoneware, underglaze, glaze, nichrome wire

A piece about caring and bonding deeply intertwined with survival, and death as a legacy to the building of love and community.