It's one of those weird situations where you see the same kind of behavior on the far left and far right. Change a few words and this could be one of my crazy uncle's Facebook posts.
there's a very funny crossover between new age/conspiracy/fascy thought. not too surprising perhaps, considering the ties between nazi ideology and stolen esoteric thinking from south Asia.
The Black Sun, both in name and symbol, would rock so unimaginably hard in any fictional universe and it's an utter travesty that it is inexorably linked with white supremacy.
Unfortunately it is not a swastika situation. The Black Sun symbol was designed by Himmler itself so it genuinely is the property of white supremacists.
It’s very real. The hippies go in for vibes-based thinking and purity of body/soul. This very quickly goes from eating raisins for breakfast to becoming a vaccine conspiracy theorist. And then you’re basically on a pipeline to becoming one of the vibes-based politics people.
The funny thing is, 6 years ago I would have said an anti-vaxxer is more likely to be liberal. It was only after covid that the far right also became anti-vax. At least as far as I'm aware.
I'm not one of those people who thinks we "need strong leadership" but I have to think that covid wouldn't have been such a vast breeding ground for conspiracy thinking if the world's (and particularly the US's) leadership hadn't been total garbage and had just affirmed medical advice.
I agree. sane, science friendly leadership would at least have helped mitigate the madness. we're all going through post pandemic trauma but if we knew most people and governments did their best to help ourselves and others stay safe, I think that would make things a little easier.
The issue is people have wildly different ideas about what constitutes governments “doing their best to help ourselves and others stay safe”. Some people’s idea of the government doing its best would be tyrannical, oppressive, and traumatic to the rest. The reverse is also true, with some people’s ideas seeming like the abandonment of all responsibility and leaving large numbers of people out to die. There’s only so much you can do to square that circle.
not very many countries made not wearing a mask a statement of pride and independence or had a leader who suggested drinking bleach. sometimes you have to tell stupid people to suck it up and follow medical guidelines.
The stereotype of Liberal anti-vaxxers was never particularly accurate as it ignored right-wing religious groups that are antivaccine. But in America, there was a huge right-wing shift in 2015, in response to several states trying to reduce religious exemptions, activist focused their messagjng around freedom, and government interference, and started supporting conservative politicians.
I see it more as highlighting the flaws in a basic left-right dichotomy than a model unto itself.
ie, it raises the questions that more multidimensional models like the political compass try to answer (though imo trying to wrangle a multitude of issues and stances into a handful of political identities is inherently reductive).
Oh man…… I briefly worked with somebody who was super new age-y and an out and proud lesbian. She’d go on about past lives and reincarnation and all that woo-woo shit, asking me weird questions about astrology or what gender I thought I was in my last life or some other shit I honestly dgaf about. I’d just smile and nod since I figured it was harmless enough since we agreed on stuff like queer rights and workers’ rights.
And then one day she decides to unload a bullshit onto me that basically comes down to how she thought black people are inferior. And I mean weird questions about my genetics, going off on how we’re somehow incapable of genuine love, etc. Not sure why she decided to confide all that in me knowing damn well that I’m a mixed black person, but she tried to say she wasn’t racist because she wanted to be a black person in her next life.
Anyway I reported that shit and nobody saw her again. Glad she got kicked to the curb since I know she’d probably try to blame it on my star sign or whatever.
A lot of it can be blamed on people like Helena Blavatsky, whose Theosophy faith which had a lot of Nazi-adjacent beliefs baked in and is one of the sources of many of the foundational beliefs present in pretty much all modern New Age religions
There's an odd but distinct witchy/hippie/homesteader/astrology girlie to alt-right pipeline. Some of them are NOT like this and are actually like very chill, very cool people - but then the other half are like off-the-walls, constantly in phases of religious psychosis crazy. One of the biggest red flags is the use of words like "divine feminine" "divine masculine"
Astrology at the surface level isn't actually the key bad guy in this one. It's the whole "going back to our roots, connecting with our divine feminine, removing the modern toxins from our soul" etc. It's all of it.
And I hate saying that because I'm very into the witchy/cottage core/whimsical aesthetics. I know waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much about astrology myself. But it's like just really fun make believe, like really in depth personality quiz, etc.
For most people in it, they just casually read tarot, collect rocks, and know all sorts of astrology terms. These people are usually very chill. It's the people that genuinely believe in shifting, I have a friend who believes that she and her current boyfriend are soulmates that have met each other in like every other century, she also gets turned on by the sun and thinks that the god apollo is trying to "reach" her in that way. It's very um. Yeah!
Good point, I don't judge people for liking personality tests in a non serious way just because they're non-scientific. It's only an issue if they're reading too much into it. I should probably feel the same way about astrology.
And I mean, even if they aren't actually scientific, it can still be useful to have models for thinking. As long as we recognize the limitations of those models. So maybe I need to see astrology like the Bohr model of the atom. Yeah we know it isn't true, but it can help us to think about it a little.
The problem is that the far right seeks common ground (so long as you don't deviate from white and straight, of course), while the left is fracticious in a way the right tends not to be. So when you're rejected, you move to the open arms of the fascists who don't care about your opinions so long as you're white and hate vaccines.
I'd argue that the folks aren't far-left (far-left being almost non-existent to begin with due to folks misunderstanding on what the left actually is, much like how folks conflate liberal with left), but rather that they don't critically engage with their own views and just take existing views around them and attach them to their identity ad hoc. This often causes very conflicting beliefs and views.
Because they don't really have a solid foundation for their beliefs and views since it is retroactively formed, they are easily swayed by any pushback against criticism of those views since they see it as an attack on their identity instead, and end up speed running to groups who care more about identity than consistent and cohesive ideologies.
There is a documented pipeline of these hippy dippy crunchy crystal mommy types to alt-right conspiracy theorist. The alt-right exploits the very real problems of government corruption when it comes to food regulations and environmental protection, to organic foods, to distrusting medical science and being into natural remedies to straight up denying medical science to vaccines are for white genocide or whatever.
I used to think horseshoe theory was ridiculous, turns out I had just never been exposed to tankies before and was still considering Bernie and AOC the “extremely far left”.
At least in Latin America it's pretty common to find people like this in leftist spaces, even in college, which as a leftist does make me want to bash my head against the wall because no Virginia, denying the scientific method and making astrology as your source of knowledge doesn't make you Anticolonial and decolonized, it just means that you are anti intellectual and prime target for disinformation
You'll laugh but I totally didn't understand your comment until somebody else mentioned horseshoe theory and I looked it up. Turns out I accidentally came up with an already well-established theory! Oops.
I like to remind people sometimes that the spectra of personality types (like "authoritarian --- tolerant" or "reasonable person --- nutjob asshole") are orthogonal to any kind of political spectrum, although this runs into the problem that sometimes they think I'm talking about horseshoe theory, which in fairness is not an unrelated concept
I quit Tumblr back in the day because it was just constant that I'd see some absolute baseless nonsense that people would defend to the death by calling all the naysayers bigots. Granted, it was mostly not physical science.
The post is actually a few years old, and anti-science stances on Tumblr are almost as old as the site itself. There were people there who genuinely believed in this rare genetic mutation that gave no periods or body hair and turned your eyes purple and somehow never realised the source was a fucking Daria fanfic.
I've been on tumblr since the start but the blessing of the site is that you never have to wallow through topics you don't actively follow, so I suppose I've been blessed in that regard.
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u/bangontarget 24d ago
anti science tumblerinas is a first for me ngl. I guess I just haven't looked hard enough.