#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😒

[tuulikki]

For once I feel like Scorpios got off easy. At least you’re not hurting anybody else when it’s necrophilia. But Scorpio should be the worst one. It’s always the worst one. That’s the trope.

So what I’m saying is the author clearly had a Virgo ex and decided to be particularly petty and wretched about it.

And I am studying the person with the “why is this so accurate tag” like a bug

[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]

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]

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 sweating out toxins at your hot yoga or whatever then why is there not a hazmat bin to dispose of your towels? Are they not toxic now?

If you just replace “toxins” with “evil spirits” none of these statements get less plausible.

Join me on my journey to finally unbalance my hormones, toxify my body, boost my inflammation, maximize my cortisol and absolutely destroy my gut health.

[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]

If I was going to believe in the supernatural and ghosts and UFOs and cryptids and whatnot then I would agree with John Keel because—if you assume it’s all real—then ultraterrestrial whackadoodle stuff provides the only explanation for why people in the Middle Ages didn’t see flying saucers or why people in Nepal don’t see dullahan. The culture-bound part of any experience has to be reckoned with if you posit that it isn’t all in the experiencer’s head.

[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...

[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.

[tuulikki]

Adding this from @pibb in the notes:

And in case people don’t understand… the problem is getting into a habit of essentialism as a way of explaining complex (and often frightening) things, like human behaviour. It’s particularly dangerous when you believe that there are secret patterns that explain the world in simple ways.

It gives you a sense that the world can be predictable (“that’s such typical Aquarius behaviour”). It gives you a sense that you can control outcomes (“I don’t date water signs, they’re too much drama!”). And if you get in the habit of deriving comfort and an illusion of control from things that are pure fabrication, you have put yourself on a part of a pipeline.

Sure, most people don’t end up anti-vaxxers or TERFs or GMO food truthers. But you’re letting yourself think the same way. Best to acknowledge that and take precautions.

it does still make me insane specifically how many queer people lovingly embrace astrology. I went to a poetry workshop yesterday that was genuinely quite good but also included an option to disclose astrology designations during introductions and so many people broke out some variation of "I'm a [x] sum but I have a [y] placement and it SHOWS" girl no it doesn't. that's meaningless correlation you completely invented the causation

[creature-wizard]

Reminder that you can:

Suspect aliens exist

Seriously believe in aliens

Attempt to talk to aliens via mystical means

Suspect or believe that you, yourself, have an alien soul

Without also buying into spiritual eugenics, spiritual colonialism, racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, easily-debunked pseudohistory and pseudoscience, and general QAnon bullshit New Agers go for these days.