If it helps: I'm another trans person, approximately agree with that line, and think one expression of it is that in those indigenous cultures, trans people were held to the norms of their target gender as stringently as everyone else. I don't know of historic cultures that do mixed-gender role mixing the way we do. AFAIK transition, in cultures that had it, was uncommon and a way for someone to move from one tightly-maintained box to another tightly-maintained box.
In other words, I don't think "physical sex" is just one thing - for example, it seems "postmodern" and "bizarre" to me that both some pro-trans and some anti-trans people claim that taking estrogen doesn't make a trans woman more female than she was before - but I think it's more real and relevant than current culture admits for. (I think this came about as an enforcement mechanism for women's rights, so on net I bet it's a good thing.)
Chapter 1:
I don't remember where, but I recently saw a compelling argument that modern art has a revival after each war where a big chunk of the population served - the two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam, in the last hundred years of American history - and that it's a form of processing war trauma. In this model, the alienation, meaninglessness, and inimical-to-nature aspect are useful for communicating about or post-processing the trauma of war.
Regarding cffffcc: I'm very confident that unboxing video playlist was made by a small child. My kid's Youtube history has several playlists like that in it, it's easy to end up creating them by button-mashing while illiterate.
Feedback: when I read this post title and the title of "You are probably not a good alignment researcher, and other blatant lies", I felt a little ashamed. I dropped out of high school before learning how to use the quadratic formula, Fizzbuzz is the outer limit of my programming ability, and I have a panic reaction to math and CS which has made improving these skills in adulthood intractable. I think I am not qualified to do technical alignment research.
Reading through both posts, I acknowledge that they're hedged enough to account for the fact that some people aren't good alignment researchers. But I think small changes to the titles and internal post phrasing would leave me feeling less desire to step in with a "well, actually". I don't know the costs of these changes very well - sincerely, if LessWrong is a forum primarily for people who have at least a BA in CS or equivalent knowledge, then my request is overstepping. But if the intended audience is more general, then it would be an improvement to make the intended scope of "people who think they aren't qualified to do alignment research, who may actually be so qualified" more clear.
One factor is that bread is made sweeter now, dairy is more readily available in skim which is higher sugar content per calorie, and I'm less sure of potatoes but "in the late 1800s, the modern-day russet potato was born" (<https://www.littlepotatoes.com/blog/origin-of-potatoes/>) and I wonder if there's been genetic engineering/selective breeding since then to change them as well.
Food allergies and intolerances are on the rise, I think even controlling for increased recognition (edit: I'm less confident about this than in the original draft of this comment. What would controlling for increased recognition look like?) I don't know what's up with that.
Unrelated: when I looked into it earlier this week, it seemed like in New York City mid-2021 to mid-2022, on any given night about 60,000 people were sleeping in homeless shelters and about 3,000 people were sleeping rough. 640 homeless people were thought to have died during that year. Seventeen of those deaths were of exposure.
I've been in live contact with how horrible it would be, to die like that, the last few days, and plenty of people who don't actually die just suffer a lot. But I'm also a little proud of humankind in general and New York City 2022 in particular, for making this horrible thing happen less than it otherwise would.
Thanks for posting this speech - I agree about the problems that arise from expecting a new open-hearted moment of darkness speech every year, and this seems like a good approach.
I think that if I were the person in the community, in the audience, hurting, the focus on how the community has Not Done Enough wouldn't land for me. Usually in that situation, I feel pretty anti-conflict-theory and want to be seen in that. In that situation, I would get more out of it if the passage focused on... illegibility between people who are trying hard to communicate about their needs, their un/willingness to fulfill the needs of others, and their material constraints?
I gave the recording from this year's Boston solstice a listen and disliked it - I feel bad about saying this, and am pushing through that bad feeling not due to unkind intent, but because I imagine you want access to negative feedback as well as positive. It feels like the same reason I dislike the original tune of [] Wrote The Rocks and prefer the Alex Federici version (https://humanistculture.bandcamp.com/track/god-wrote-the-world). In both cases, the tune I like less seems meandering, overly jazzy, and out of sync with the serious/gritty character of the lyrics.
I agree that singing the original tune of Level Up as a group wouldn't work for the reasons you name - I heard that the Bay Area solstice asks the audience to be quiet while the choir performs it, which seems good to me.
> And if maybe this is key to why (...) feeling sexually safe at a job has been such a royal pain these last many years
...reads like a mistake a feminist would not have made.
(Implicit assumption: "postmodernism" was coined in 1980 and "postmodern feminism" the mid-90s, and most people who talk about gender ideology date it to the last 10-20 years, so I'm assuming that's the time period you're referring to by "last many years".)
Men feel a little less sexually safe at work than they did sixty years ago, and women feel vastly more sexually safe. My grandmother, and the other women her age I've been close with, have stories about their bosses making explicit crude comments about them, groping them at work, and the like. In the story I remember most clearly, the boss didn't try to hide his behavior, because everyone agreed this was a normal liberty to take with your female employee. If she had complained, she would have been not only punished and likely fired, but also criticized by her coworkers for being precious about the situation.
I think separating the sexes into distinct classes ("kitchen staff are one sex and serving staff are another") wouldn't output a separate-but-equal situation; it would instead output a society that subjugates women overtly (again).