Family Matters: Everyday Life in the Neo-Assyrian Empire
laphamsquarterly.org
laphamsquarterly.org
https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co85238...
(Oddly enough reminded me of SAM segmentation ..)
> Forbidden. You don't have permission to access /roundtable/family-matters on this server.
Tumblr was a source of fragility and fearful censorship.
And, thanks to Twitter, Tumblr won.
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/688/love-sex-and-marria...
(that slave-master dialogue reminded of a chat gpt session .. how to prompt your slave for accurate feedback, circa 2000 BC)
https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-a...
Weird source but I’m in mobile.
Maybe this gender fluidity notion isn’t just post-modern made up nonsense.
For example, castration for the goddess was a big deal. (Kali had her crazed devotees as well. Modern S&M gives you echoes of this urge of the male pysche..) So there is no going back, no back and forth, no "fluidity" when you plop ye old bloody member on the temple floor in front of the goddess. Gender change. Yes. Fluid? No.
Btw, can't recall the source, but there are mystic schools that insist the '[Mother] Goddess' slaughters all these males because she is seeking her Perfect Man/Lover. So the drones that go 'fluid' for her are really just playing their part in the selection process.
https://aratta.wordpress.com/2015/08/02/inannas-sumerisk-og-...
[p.s. for historians. Since this comment was posted, I have lost 10 karma points in minutes - it is a touchy topic that elicits emotional responses. ;)]
(Though, also, where are you getting the castration thing? There were definitely goddesses whose priesthoods went in for that in that general part of the world, eg Cybele, but I don't think Ishtar was particularly one of them?)
An intellectually honest response to the link supplied by weakfish would be to question why defender of gender fluidity is the right description while acknowledging that this is new information and that your initial response was wrong. That the description defender of gender fluidity might have some merit to it but you remain skeptical and would like to learn more about why people use this description.
A bit unacknowledged fact is that many books Nazi burned were about transexuality. The modernity they hated was also this. Transexuals and gays were particular target.
― Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?
It's interesting to know that, hundreds or thousands of years from now, historians will be studying this piece mentioning Ishtar, not to learn any more of Ishtar or the Assyrians, but to help corroborate the zeitgeist and ethos of our own time, of 2023, by studying this historian's personal impositions onto this ancient deity, in this case, the historian's claim about the deity's ostensible role as a "defender of gender fluidity".
Really makes you think.
Consider the possibility that experts who study this stuff came to the conclusion because that is where the evidence lead them. That if you had expertise in this area that you too would see this as at least extremely plausible.
Looking at historical works about prior historical works can absolutely teach you about the source event. But it is also an incredibly relevant and accurate way to learn about cultural norms and the society the piece was created in.
Most experts go their entire career just trying to identify their own biases and eliminate them from their scholarship; it's harder than it looks because they're so ingrained into our personality.
In theory, the perfect expert follows the evidence to the appropriate conclusion. Only in theory.
In execution, they follow only specific lines of reasoning, certain thought patterns, and certain investigation patterns because of the cultural expectations and social mores the expert has developed, was trained under, and has lived with their entire lives.
edit; OP also said nothing about baseless claims. Just that the scholarship we read will be relevant in the future as a snapshot into our lives, as well as whatever the research is about.
This gives me the impression that VoodooJuJu thinks the historian had an ideological agenda and was making a square be a circle so to speak. If the historians claims are not baseless then how can personal imposition be an apt description?
I agree with what you wrote but I think your edit is wrong. VoodooJuJu didn’t use the word baseless but I think that is the essence of their claim. How can the historian’s claim be an insight into today’s culture, views, and lives if the claim is well reasoned and substantiated by the known facts? A claim that is well reasoned and substantiated by known facts is a claim that could be made by anyone whose language has words for what we call transvestism, gender fluidity, and androgyny. It seems to me at most, with a claim that is well reasoned and substantiated by known facts, one can only infer the level of permissiveness that experts had to discuss such topics.
>How can the historian’s claim be an insight into today’s culture, views, and lives if the claim is well reasoned and substantiated by the known facts?
Because the facts are evaluated through the lens of the historian. The lines of reasoning, logical conclusions, and modes/methods of investigation are all, inherently influenced by how the historian was raised, trained, and how/when/where they live. It's just part of being human. It is impossible to present literally anything without it being biased in some fashion. In deciding what to report and what not to, how much weight to give to historical accounts versus other historical accounts, what sources to chase down, even where to look in the physical world, we are imposing our own beliefs on the event.
That's what I'm trying to get across.
Not about this specific article, or the concepts of gender fluidity, etc. But the actual process of investigating and reporting historical facts. It is an inherently biased process. It just is.
And I believe that was the OP's point.
A baseless claim says much about the person making it. A claim that is well reasoned and supported by the facts says very little about the person making it.
If I say: The IQ of blacks in the U.S. is on average lower than that of whites. that says nothing about my ideology. If I say: Black people are stupid. that says much about my ideology.
Making a claim that is well reasoned and substantiated by the known facts says that the person making the claim reasoned it well and had facts that supported that reasoning and they possessed the vocabulary and permissiveness to discuss those ideas. One can not infer a person’s ideology from such a claim. Of course biases and experience play a role in these things but looking from the outside you can’t say of well reasoned claims: personal imposition. That is too strong of a conclusion.
What is interesting about your comment is that I made no appeal to authority. I did not quote anyone or make any references to an authority. What I did was to ask JuJu to consider something and to state what I think.
What’s ironic about your comment is that JuJu did make an appeal to an authority.
EDIT: You believe 1+1 equals 2. I doubt you know how to prove this rigorously. Your belief is based on an appeal to authority. Have you independently verified that electrons exist? Or that the moon is a little more than one light second away? Have you ever supplied links to an article to support a position you have?
The crux of your post was “I trust the intent of the experts because they’re experts”. I don’t think that is a good reason to trust somebody.
If someone would for example say that gender fluidity is a new concept with no known history, that claim would be very hard to defend because there are certainly cultures where it was present, but with carefully choosing which historians to cite, any claim can be supported. Lying by omission.
No, exactly the opposite. It was much much more centralized before the internet: you had one or two dominant TV channels with news in each country (mostly somehow state-operated), same with radio and a few big newspapers. And the institutions where deep knowledge was produced (mostly universities) also functioned as gatekeepers for knowledge, deciding what can be dispersed and who is worthy to receive it.
Internet changed that: there are no gatekeepers and distribution is free. Anyone can write and distribute anything. Now actually grabbing attention of enough people to matter is a different issue and you are right this is a big problem. But it's a different one: before it was easier to control the history-writing and publishing at the source, now that's impossible and you have to control the attention of consumers.
We are on Hacker News debating an article published by Lapham's Quarterly. No big corporation in sight.
Like, the majority? Can you support that?
Now, that's the theology, of course; if you were to poll a few thousand Catholics or Anglicans or Muslims on whether God had a gender and what it is, they'd probably say yes He does and that He's a he. Though even then it'd get messy if you poll in more detail; virtually no followers of Abrahamic religion would think of God as having _physical_ male attributes, say.
EDIT: I see you were downvoted for that. Wasn't me; it's a fair question IMO, and something that people are often unaware of.
As for the male attributes, my guess would be that the majority of Christians would assume that God, being male, was equipped with an appropriately sized shlong, but did not avail Himself of it for any purpose.
To support that view, I submit that in Christian art, He generally is depicted with a sizable beard, and without functioning testicles, that beard would have to have been immaculately grown.
(Back vaguely to the topic, that's a big difference for Ishtar; she would have been thought about far more in terms of being a _person_ than the Abrahamic God).
The art thing is a bit of an oddity, arguably; Christians didn't really depict God in art at all much until the Renaissance, and many Protestants in particular objected, and sometimes still object, to it. The art has no theological significance in any case (it's obviously not canonical) but yeah, it may have reinforced the idea of God as a _person_ in peoples' minds.
> We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God.