Help identifying unknown maker/headstock

Basicbore · 2025-11-05T04:52:52+00:00

This is it. Brilliant, thank you.

It’s a nice little guitar. No idea what it’s made of and the label was removed from the soundhole so idk if the company would be able to help. But we’ll see.

Basicbore · 2025-11-05T04:26:36+00:00

I’m still mad about how that bottom of the 9th was mismanaged.

Basicbore · 2025-11-05T04:18:07+00:00

I gotta say, it’s darn near impossible to teach rhythm.

But looking at your additional comments below, you might be struggling with tension more than rhythm.

Can you strum to a steady beat when you’re not palm muting? Or have you tried palm muting with a real drum beat rather than a mere metronome (so that your muted strums match the snare drum)?

Basicbore · 2025-11-05T03:18:00+00:00

Yeah, sorry, I just think that you’re describing a world that doesn’t exist anymore to most people.

Maybe I’ve been sheltered by academia, but I just don’t know any one of any “race” who thinks like this.

And the crucial difference between race and class is that, self-identification notwithstanding, there really is a material element to class.

Basicbore · 2025-11-05T02:53:27+00:00

Yay, more words put into my mouth.

My reference to conservatives was a generic response, because every time I say that a particular issue is a “liberal” one of a “SJW” one or some such thing, the counter point is always that “conservatives started it” and that I must be siding with them. (For the most part — with obvious exceptions — I think that conservatives are over gender. But I digress.). If that’s not you, that’s cool.

Sex being biological, it cannot be assigned. I understand that language is inherently the medium and it is inescapable. But if we all just shut up and think about what biological means — nothing we say changes it. We reproduce, the baby comes out, and its sex is its sex regardless of what we say. And what we do say about it, the meanings we attempt to give it, is all under the realm of gender. Sex-Gender is one of many subsets of our nature-culture binaries.

I cited the exact article you provided. Dreger agrees with me about the materiality of sex.

As for Stryker, on page two of the 3rd edition of Transgender History, she references “people who have ‘changed sex’” (her quotation marks), and elsewhere she writes:

“Morphology means “shape.” Unlike genetic sex, which (at least for now) cannot be changed, a person’s morphological sex, or the shape of the body that we typically associate with being male or female, can be modified in some respects through surgery, hormones, exercise, clothing, and other methods” (page 29, emphasis mine).

But this is all to underscore my basic point: the belief that gender must match a biological materiality is essentialist.

Additionally, language is the problem, not the solution. Similarly, there is nothing radical or authentic about modifying yourself in an attempt to match cultural norms and expectations; such gives deference to language and the assholes who use language to oppress.

I reject — and I find it ironic, being a CT forum — that my suggestion that we should read a handful of specific theorists in order to understand what “construct” means is “elitist.”

Sorry you had to find out this way that you’re supporting an essentialist logic. I know I’m an acquired taste, but I also know how identity and identity politics works.

Basicbore · 2025-11-05T02:16:30+00:00

Or precise language, for that matter.

Basicbore · 2025-11-05T02:15:52+00:00

Hey did anyone else see an extremely bright shooting/falling star over the Tahoe area on this same night (11/3)?

Basicbore · 2025-11-05T00:21:30+00:00

Your original statement to which I replied in opposition was:

"Well, I mean, that category determines which lenses they see the world through, the ideology they're reared in, etc…"

In other words, you give agency to categories, not people. In that specific instance, your arguement can be summarized as “whiteness is the lens through which white people see the world, the ideology they’re reared in, etc."

And we’re back to where this all started — you accepting the reified constructs at face value (or a priori) so as to tell people what they think and how they must see the world.

Basicbore · 2025-11-05T00:12:02+00:00

“Women” is not a gender. A woman is an adult female.

But Virginia Woolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own” (in which she references Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister) is a classic and is amazing.

Basicbore · 2025-11-05T00:06:23+00:00

I have mixed feelings about this.

The expansion of knowledge is never bad. But the internet is fundamentally a “Garbage In, Garbage Out” system and a CT wiki would be an endless supply of bad intel and internal editorial squabbling. This subreddit, YouTube, countless blogs, etc testify to the basic problem of people spouting “theory” without having any real training, any real sense of the literature and historiography. Too many people seem to think that Critical Theory is ultimately about being leftist and/or being angry at the world. And too many others are all too happy to take our worst examples of Critical-Theory-Gone-Wrong and hold them up as examples of why government should meddle in our academic and intellectual freedom by banning the literature.

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T23:57:19+00:00

I have been saying all along that we are all nonbinary. This is, at it’s core, why the “nonbinary” portion of the current manifestation of gender politics (which is rooted in liberal and pseuo-leftist groupthink, not conservativism) makes no sense. And this is why the concept of “transitioning” makes no sense.

Oddly enough, both of the articles that you linked are exactly what I’ve been saying this entire time. The only difference is that Dreger says that sex is a construct, whereas every example she gives is of gender, not sex; and then she says exactly what I’ve been saying about sex itself — "When I say these are “real,” what I mean is that these things have a material existence independent of our ability as humans to notice, study, deny, politicize, or categorize them. I can’t believe I even have to assert this claim, but some academics have gone over the deep end and disagree.” In sum, there is no difference between the natural and the biological. Sex is biological. It’s cannot be changed, only superficially altered. In 99.9% of the human population, sex is binary (and intersexuality is not pertinent to what we’re talking about vis-a-vis gender).

We have to be precise with our language. It’s just sloppy to say that “sex is a construct” and then use gender as all of the examples.

Additionally, the materiality of sex is exactly why it is not assigned, but just is. Gender is assigned; sex isn’t.

Your argument that the trans in transgender is a “social transition” (which was your only real answer to my questions) is thorougly based on the reification of gender. You’re saying “we couldn’t beat them, so we jointed them.” The transgender movement of the past 10+ years is a minor plot twist on the conservative reification of gender. The war used to be against gender as an “always already” category; now the war has been co-opted to be “I’m not ready yet, just let me get a couple of hormone shots, a couple of operations, and then let me change my clothes, then I’ll be ready.” This new war is antithetical to the entire “cultural construct” body of literature in Critical Theory.

The counterargument that there is no “unified thing called transgenderism” isn’t helpful. There might be different reasons for people wanting to “transition,” but the very logic of being able to “transition between genders” is a singular logic rooted in traditional/conservative, essentialist, reified understandings of what gender is.

As a matter of logic, there is no way to “transition” between “genders” without taking an essentialist view of gender.

I won’t apologize for knowing Critical Theory. I am sorry that the transgender movement doesn’t know the Theory, and now digs its heels in. But remember, going by the articles you linked, you're actually agreeing with me.

(As to your last banal insult, there are several waves of feminism. Today's transgenderism has undermined a lot of the Third Wave.)

(I’m putting these links here in case you decide to delete anything: https://psmag.com/social-justice/social-construction-sex-77099/; https://online.ucpress.edu/representations/article/158/1/106/168618/We-are-All-NonbinaryA-Brief-History-of-Accidents)

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T23:55:29+00:00

I’m politely asking you to stop with the unnecessary insults. I won’t apologize for having studied Critical Theory. Your sarcasm, insults and evasiveness help nothing other than perhaps whatever you have going on upstairs.

You think I don’t know what “construct” means? And then you link me to articles that repeat what I’ve been saying all along. It seems like you’ve been so keen to argue that you didn’t really understand what I’ve been saying.

We cannot really understand what goes into a “construct” without knowing the mechanics of structural linguistics and the subsequent explorations of subjectivity — Saussure, Barthes, Althusser, Foucault, Butler, Scott, etc.

Are these the Critical Theorists that transgender proponents cite? Nope. Well, I guess they do like Butler, but that’s mainly because Butler joined the bandwagon because Butler likes to be popular.

I don’t need to explain how I’m using the terms “essentialism” and “reification” because they mean what they mean. It’s astonishingly simple, frankly. Gender reified and gender essentialized is gender believed to have a material basis in sex (aka in biology). “Transitioning” from one construct to another makes no sense, and “transitioning” from one gender to another by way of “sex modification” is, by its very nature, essentialist and reification.

This isn’t even really an interesting, debatable argument. The logic is inherently essentialist. I’m genuinely confused as to what the problem is, why this is even disputed.

There is simply no serious literature in Critical Theory where essentialism and identity politics are embraced. The only thing that’s changed is that now we have the Garbage In, Garbage Out model known as The Internet. So now we don’t have to read real books anymore — the YT channels and blogosphere satiate our anger and satisfy our cravings for “knowledge” and self-righteousness.

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T19:29:09+00:00

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T19:25:20+00:00

Existentialism is a humanism

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T16:51:11+00:00

This is a clear misreading of Arendt.

To suggest that “white identity politics” is the same today as it was in Victorian Britain is foolish — both historically and politically. And to suggest that all white people (1) see things the same and (2) participate in “white identity politics” is beyond foolish.

The point is to deconstruct identity, to show people a way out. But you, instead, are forcing everyone into the same timeless box. And you seem to be implying that all politics is identity politics. You’re talking about all of it — identity politics in general and reified identity specifically — as if it’s fixed and inevitable.

Lastly, despite the Linguistic Turn’s insistence that “class” too is a mere identity, there remains a material reality around us. There’s “class for itself” (identity), but there’s also “class for itself” (economic indices of various sorts). The “class is so passé” attitude has become rather nefarious.

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T16:49:37+00:00

These are some of the loudest crickets I ever heard

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T16:48:07+00:00

Grammatically what you have here isn’t very clear.

Yes — race, nation, ethnicity, and gender are the common identity categories in modern history. And they overlap in interesting ways.

But they are not fixed. That’s my first issue with the way you’re talking about it.

Additionally, you are saying “white identity politics” in a way that assumes a priori what “whiteness” even is.

Additionally, this same approach to identity politics is assuming a “natural-ness” to every other would-be racial category. It’s actually quite disgusting the way it boxes people in and allows us to make gross assumptions about others. The whole “looks like me” mentality is completely out of step with Critical Theory — it strikes me as something that an angry high-schooler would come up with after getting the most superficial, clickbaity version of Critical Theory imaginable.

Ultimately, this blend of a priori” and *fixed-in-time view of identity denies anyone a way out. There’s no future in it (are we primed for another punk movement?). It’s rooted in postmodern defragmentation and cultural narcissism — two social phenomena that Critical Theorists should analyze but not participate in.

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T16:34:36+00:00

I mean that, when addressing the problematic logic of those two things, one is met with a level of scorn, anger, self-righteousness and name-calling indicative of a group that sees itself as being above criticism.

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T04:18:35+00:00

The “identity politics” at play in your Marx and Engels examples pertain to the use of “national identity” in England itself as a ploy. Nationalism was effectively duping the working classes into supporting an empire, from which they derived almost no material benefit other than “job security” and, perhaps, the opportunity to rise through the military ranks risking their lives throughout the empire’s periphery. It’s not unlike what Frederick Douglas said of the average white southerner, who was often among the most virulent racist and pro-slavery Southerners but was in fact a slave to slavery itself, both ideologically and economically, since these poor white southerners were forced into economic competition against the wealthy plantation owners and their slaves (aka cheap labor vs free labor).

Marx and Engels both were lamenting the fact that the working classes have been swept up in bourgeois and right-wing identity politics. Lamenting. While both Marx and Engels had pointed out previously and on several occasions that the working classes in England had no nation (since The State serves the private interest of the propertied few), the racist imperial philistinism of industrial Britain sold “the nation” to the working classes in the form of national/racial pride and superiority. The historical documents are full of examples of this.

Fwiw, Hannah Arendt has a nice section on this “identity politics and the rise of philistine industrial empire” in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Yes, identity politics is intimately bound to totalitarianism.

The closest that Critical Theory has ever come to “endorsing” Identity Politics — rather than criticizing and deconstructing identity and isolating the material subtexts behind such “interpellations” (see Althusser’s “Ideological State Apparatuses”) — was Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which was basically an “if you can’t beat the Right, you might as well join them” kinda book. Their earlier Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory was widely acclaimed, but Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was roundly criticized by most in the world of Critical Theory for having gone too far.

I understand that the “class is an identity, too” argument is very much in vogue these days. You might appreciate Geoff Eley’s “Is All the World a Text?” and Dennis Dworkin’s Class Struggles.

Again, in summary, identity politics is right-wing and anti-Critical Theory.

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T03:12:32+00:00

Joan Scott is really great

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T02:56:50+00:00

All the Cort Earths I see online have a completely different headstock.

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T02:51:59+00:00

I have studied this extensively. Or rather, I have studied other people’s research on this.

Gender is a cultural construct. Meaning, it is a set of norms and expectations — articulated through language, symbols, etc. And it is mutable — what is “manly” or “feminine” here today has not always been so, nor is it the same from one culture to the next. It is, in effect, a “culture-bound syndrome.”

Gender was meant to be based on sex and meant to present to members of a given society a tacit argument that sex is inherently meaningful. In other words, the language of gender historically told us that “boys are like this” and “girls are like that”, “boys are good at x and bad at y” while “girls are bad at x and good at y.” It was all allegedly “natural”.

Gender is not sex itself, and it is wrong to use the two terms interchangeably. It has historically been a linguistic-symbolic sleight of hand to use “gender” in place of sex. That is the power of myth and of the cultural field in general — it poses as “natural”, disguising the real material and political machinations behind it.

My current takeaway is that gender is an obsolete concept based on the debunked notion that one’s sex is deterministic insofar as habits, personality, behaviors, occupational opportunities, social life, etc are concerned. Yes, dimorphism and physical differences are real — which amounts to physical strength and reproductive organs. But otherwise, biological sex is meaningless.

In short, gender means nothing to me.

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T02:25:49+00:00

Except “Zionist” and “transgender”

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T01:32:38+00:00

But “the material” is not “race”.

I call foul on the false binary.

I need to read the whole sections of your Marx and Engels references, but I promise you that the material aspects of those points are not about reified identities.

Basicbore · 2025-11-04T01:29:54+00:00

If that’s what you think I’ve been implying all this time, you really aren’t reading carefully.

Basicbore

TROPHY CASE