#pseudoscience and mystic bullshit

[tuulikki]

Hello star seed ✨✨⭐️

I’m a star seed empath

I’m sending blessings and greetings 🙏🏽 seasons greetings

This website's hatemail game is insane

[greencheekconure27]

Sigh.

I was listening to Lithuanian folk music on YouTube and made the mistake of looking at the comments and it's all "We don't need Jewish gods since we have our own! Greetings from Poland"* and "we're losing true white European culture" and "what has Europe become we need to go back to [idealized conservative pagan past that never existed].

This is why I'm suspicious towards neopagan religions y'all.🤦‍♀️

*verbatim

** pretty sure I even know what "pagan" cult the Polish guy is from😒

[katistrophe]

I am so annoyed at my new shower gel right now. The only cheap non-floral-but-still-scented shower gel I could find was a „detoxifying“ one with activated charcoal and lemon.

And… okay, activated charcoal taken by mouth works against some types of poisoning, so technically yes, but no. And the scent isn’t my favorite.

But that’s not even the worst part.

The worst part is that the Spooky Creachure part of my brain LOVES it because the charcoal makes it look like corruption sludge of doom.

[tuulikki]

And, now, their episode on the MBTI!

I can't keep having the same conversations about love languages, mbti, iq, bmi, "brain fully formed at 25" and shit over and over again...

[tuulikki]

Ooohhhhh my god I can't believe

Homeopathy? For real? You're telling me to take a pill/cream from the people who believe that water has a memory?

Just in case anyone needs a refresher on this bullshit:

Homeopathy is based on the law of similars (‘like cures like’) which states that a substance that causes specific symptoms in a healthy person can be used to treat those symptoms in a sick person. Remedies undergo a process called ‘potentization’ which describes stepwise dilution from the ‘mother tincture’ combined with ‘succession’ (vigorous shaking). The underlying assumption is that the more dilute a remedy the greater its potency, even though according to Avogadro's number, with potencies beyond 12C (12 centesimal dilutions) the chance of a single molecule remaining in the final solution tends to the infinitesimal.

TL;DR: If you were bitten by a snake, homeopathy would try to cure you by giving you the venom from the snake. But don't worry! They also believe that diluting the active ingredient makes it more potent!

"As world-renowned scientific skeptic James Randi put it: 'this would be tantamount to grinding a grain of rice into tiny particles, dissolving it in a sphere of water the size of our Solar System, and then repeating this process about 2 billion times.' One of the ways by which followers of homeopathy deal with such criticism is their claim that water retains a memory of the substance: even after it is gone its properties are embedded in the water molecules."

[tuulikki]

Me when my son is being taken away by aliens and I can’t even move or help him and I’m so frightened: OMG

[tuulikki]

Absolute confluence of things calculated to make me go “ugh”

My cringe sports watch (what performance am I going to optimise with all this data, I ask you? But I have it anyway)

Getting app notifications on said tryhard watch

Amazon

All the grifty bullshit that gets wrapped up in “wellness” and the way that industry preys on people’s quest for meaning and peace

The cynical consumerist manipulation involved in offering people any of that for $20

“Under $20” as the max budget people would probably be able to allow for their hopes for wellness in late-stage capitalism, so that’s what Amazon pitches

Ugh

[tuulikki]

If you’re like me, you saw this and immediately wanted to scream over the obvious sensationalist bullshit of it all. Happy to say, watch the WHOLE video.

Not addressed in video: you know how one of the Great White Fears is black men being sexual, like, at all? Yeah… men fucking chimpanzees being the origin of HIV is about as racist of a medical myth as we can get in the 2020s, I think. Because chimpanzees aren’t native to goddam Norway. When they say “men” fucked chimpanzees, they mean to say black men caused HIV.

I’m just amazed they didn’t say the Black Death was caused by people fucking rats. I guess I have to admire that their ability to lie had some limits.

[tuulikki]

Underlining the bit about DSHEA for those who aren’t familiar, but I’m really horrified by the poll results

Nearly 70% of people think herbal supplement manufacturers have to report whether the stuff they sell could be dangerous. That’s so fucked. Because the supplements industry doesn’t have to report fucking anything. They don’t have to prove it works; they don’t have to prove it won’t kill you.

Obviously fuck homeopathy, but at least it’s not capable of doing active harm: it can only do the sort of passive harm that delays people seeking real treatment from dangerous conditions. The cancer patients don’t die faster from homeopathy, they just die at normal speeds from untreated cancer. At least it’s not actively poison, you know? The kinds of monsters who sell actively dangerous bullshit to sick, scared people should be drawn and quartered.

[tuulikki]

“We humans have rather reductionist minds, and are beguiled by clear, straightforward explanations.”

—Ian Tattersall, Masters of the Planet: The Search for our Human Origins

Damn me if that isn’t the root of so many evils

[tuulikki]

“Multitudes of people are utterly worthless or worse than worthless, having no just claims whatsoever upon the civilization which they burden with the dead weight of their existence.”

—Katherine Myers, co-founder of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality test

But by all means, continue to use her weird 1920s Jungian white suburban supremacist eugenics bullshit in your tumblr bio

[tuulikki]

And to highlight a key aspect of the “two-person cult” dynamic:

Not all high-control groups are religious. Secular cults exist.

I’d strongly recommend reading this brief bio of Janja Lalich. She’s a deprogramming therapist, but she’s also a cult survivor from a political cult.

America has a weird relationship with cults where they’re terrified of small cults (or organizations they think are cults) but completely normalized massive cults that hurt many more people (eg: LDS Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Amish, Scientology, most Megachurches)

[tuulikki]

One day I’m going to go on a rant about the supplements industry and how they’ve successfully lobbied and manipulated to make sure that they remain free of scrutiny let alone any burden to prove that their supplements work or even contain what they claim to contain. The public perception of them as friendly and “natural” is such bullshit.

But the best relic of the last time anyone tried to regulate them was the scare tactics they used for the ad campaign fighting regulation. They said “They’re trying to take away your vitamins!” which sounds much scarier than the truth, which was that “they” were trying impose some requirements like proving that a supplement actually does anything other than cost you money. Because something that’s real would be legally classified as a “drug” and therefore subject to scrutiny about whether it contains, say, illegal amphetamines or rat poison.

Starring Mel Gibson…

It has real anti-vaxxer vibes, ofc, because they’re the same group of people, just with varying degrees of woo.

[57sfinest]

something i’ve been thinking about is the intersection of racism & fascism with conspiracy theories/pseudoscience and the supernatural in disco elysium. it’s a well-documented phenomenon irl and i think the game is very good at easing you into the “levels” of how these things are inherently related.

on the surface you have the racist lorry driver, who literally has “racist” in his epithet and is the most out-and-proud racist-fascist you could possibly meet, and measurehead, another open racist and fascist whose nickname is given to him by his belief in phrenology. here we see these people as pretty much cartoonishly racist and very vocal about *why* they believe these things: it all comes down to pseudoscience. these are people who have been convinced that racism is just a fact, justified by science that others are just too “soft” to recognize. we all know about measurehead and his phrenology and such but the RLD also espouses pseudoscience to justify his racism:

and, in addition to this “supporting” his racist beliefs, on top of this he believes in conspiracy theories like an immigrant *Invasion* and an anti-Occidental (anti-white) “cultural victory”, which sounds suspiciously like real-life “white eradication” conspiracy theories:

okay, this is some obviously deeply racist and fascist shit. but it’s not just this. measurehead goes beyond this and believes in other conspiracy theories unrelated to race supremacy, like his thing with semen retention, which is also a real-life conspiracy thing:

i’ll tie this all up at the end, so let’s move on to the next layer. gary is explicitly identified as a cryptofascist by his epithet. a cryptofascist, for those unfamiliar, is someone whose beliefs and ideals align with fascism but who doesn’t openly identify as such because they’re aware of the social unacceptability of it. if you play the fascist route, you’ll have to play as a cryptofascist in order to maintain positive relationships with NPCs and not take constant morale damage from saying fascist things. gary also says blatantly racist things, and here’s where it gets a little deeper than RLD and measurehead: the very basics of what he says are factually true-- that seol exports microtechnology, for example, which ties them to a lot of global governments-- but these actual facts have been spun by fear and *conspiracy theory* into a load of racist bullshit:

and you can actually see in that half light line at the bottom how the fear leverages belief in this stuff! you can argue against gary this whole time and still, an appeal to *fear* can start to slip in through the cracks. gary opens with facts and logic, devolves into fear and conspiracy spinning, and we get another layer of how racist rhetoric and belief spreads. then, to add another layer to the fear angle, you have plaisance. it’s not fear of immigrants with her, though. she’s afraid of this curse-- the supernatural-- that she thinks will be responsible for ending her business, and in her fear she turned to racist caricature and stereotypes:

it’s not the same as the direct “you’re seolite, fuck you” that RLD directs at kim or the “non-occidentals are inferior” he and measurehead parrot or “immigrants are trying to take over the world” that they and gary all buy into. it’s a far more insidious thing: this is something she takes as fact, so deeply that she doesn’t even *question* it. these nonwhite people are special mystical people with magic and that’s just how it is! while it’s not quite conspiracy theory, it’s supernatural, which functions the same as conspiracy when you talk about how racism is rooted in some fundamental disconnect from reality. and this brings us to our final subject, lena. lena comes in from the same angle, a belief in the supernatural (cryptozoology) that ultimately results in racism. (the juxtaposition of cryptozoology/cryptofascism with morell and gary was not an accident!) she seems like a regular sweet old lady who likes cryptids, until you’re randomly slapped across the face with this:

she believes that seolites are a different *species*, and that’s just a fact to her. you point out the racism and she just doubles down-- no, she’s not trying to be offensive, it can be a good thing actually! that’s just nature, just like the cryptids she loves! it’s just fact! and we see this echoed by plaisance and even gary, where they’ll say something deeply racist and follow it up with “but [x group] is very intelligent/crafty/etc as well!” as though saying this somehow cancels out the racism (when in actuality, these “good traits” are part of what they use to fearmonger about these “other” groups they’re so afraid of).

in general this group of characters serves really well to demonstrate how people who are out of touch with reality in other ways (conspiracy, magic, the supernatural, and some extreme forms of spiritualism) are frequently deeply racist as well, and some of them aren’t even aware or doing it intentionally. it really just comes with the territory, and some people choose to lean into it while others aren’t even aware of it, which is why the process of recognition and unlearning is so important when considering the latter population.

[corpsepng]

I just finished this book, and I hesitate to articulate the totality of my feelings toward it because of what it did for me personally (knocked me out of what was, in hindsight, a 13 year long delusional/dissociative thought bubble that was, at severe times, spiritual psychosis).

That being said, I fully recommend that everyone, and I mean everyone, read this book. It’s almost 30 years old and its content is still, if not MORE, necessary now. It illuminates the shadows of pseudoscience, logical fallacy, misinformation, new age mysticism (and its unbreakable ties to harmful ideology), and intellectual control. It criticizes politics and religion while not denouncing their value to society, and conversely, does not place science on an untouchable pedestal. He is an astronomer that spent his life’s work seeking signs of extraterrestrial life, so more than anyone knows that wonder and curiosity are vital to the human experience, even if current UFO conspiracies are bullshit (very vehement chapters plural about UFO bullshit lmao). 

It is not a quick read. It is not an easy read. At times, it is an objectively dense and difficult read. He is, of course, a scientist who includes scientific, first hand, and historical references to properly bolster his argument.

And he does not shy away from sensitive topics; chapter 9 titled “therapy” discusses the fallibility and manipulability of memory, mainly the harmful methods of regression hypnotists and ill-intentioned psychologists in regards to sexual assault.

The thesis of this book is plainly: the more we know, the better we are as individuals, and as a collective. Knowledge IS freedom, and those who seek to oppress you will (intentionally or unintentionally, often systematically) misinform you and deny you access to education. To know what the truth is, you must also know lies. He encourages skepticism at all fronts. 

If you feel like you’re going crazy, I think this book will make you feel sane. Also, the audiobook is well narrated. 

For a quicker related read that is just as phenomenal, I recommend this essay by Ismatu Gwendolyn about reading and knowledge as freedom. I have a long list of nonfiction I'm getting through (mainly science), so if any more (or, any more essays) feel pertinent I'll share here!

[sluttyquarantinetheory]

fucking hate how looking anything up for allergy reasons just instantly leads to faux health pseudoscience bullshit. Like I'm not avoiding the thing because I think it'll grant me mystical antiaging immortality abilities or whatever the fuck I just have a fucking allergy and trying to not die.