goddamn am i tired of people thinking some manmade system can tell you shit about people or the world around you.
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Astrology is a cope just like xtianity and new age and islam and buddhism. Life is shit, people need something to cling to.
I don’t know if astrology is really. What I do know is, if I was god and I had to make new soles every day I would automate that shit. The easiest way to do that would be to plug in date and time you were born to some sole making algorithm. The algorithm would probably be complexes, but the humans might figure out some common trends for sole made around the same time.
Provide literally any evidence a god or souls exist
You’re pushing the issue back. Astrology isn’t bullshit because you think it’s reasonable for a god to create souls that way. But how do we know that god exists, and that he actually does create souls in this manner.
Astrology is predicated on the idea of higher powers existing. Astrology was created at a time when people thought the planet Jupiter was a literal god in the sky.
Astrology is predicated on the idea of higher powers existing.
That doesn’t make it not bullshit. If anything that makes it sound more bullshit to me. If you’re saying it’s not bullshit, why? What reason do you have?
If Astrology = True Then Higher Power = True Therefore Lazy higher power would make astrology
In don’t know how to make my position any simpler for you
If Astrology = True Then Higher Power = True
Okay. How do you know astrology is true?
Therefore Lazy higher power would make astrology
You have one premise and two conclusions. I’d argue a higher power existing should also be a premise and not a conclusion, given that it sounds like its necessary for astrology to work.
Thank you for clarifying, because when you say a lazy higher power could have used astrology it sounds like you are basing the reason for why you believe in astrology because you think there’s a lazy higher power.
I feel like the easiest would just be to assign newborns one of 12 (or however many) archetypes and just rotate through the list constantly. So a baby born gets archetype 1, then the next born wherever in the world gets 2, then 3, then so on until 12 when we restart at 1.
Humans would never be able to trace it because so many babies are born and the data and infrastructure doesn’t exist worldwide to track births to the second. It’d be functionally random but divided exactly.
It feels pointless to say this and not say all religion is bullshit, even though not all religion is right wing in the same way.
Astrology is counterrevolutionary and I am only being a little hyperbolic / facetious when I say that. It actively encourages and reinforces nonmaterialist analysis and magical thinking while encouraging hyperindividualism. These are all ingredients that are part of the “crunchy to fascist” pipeline that has led many people who were new age hippies 20 years ago to go full MAHA eugenicist today.
Let me be clear
, astrology is not itself fascist, but it is part of a proto-fascist millieu. But worse than that, I fear it undermines people’s ability to grapple with reality. I do not mean astrology makes people too stupid to understand reality, which is a 
STEM-lordist perspective, because I do not believe there is any such thing as a “stupid” person. Rather, I mean that the act of clinging to a belief in astrology encourages a toxic emotional orientation toward the world and fragility when it comes to inconvenient truthsIn order to believe in astrology, one must fundamentally reject an ironclad commitment to material analysis in favor of a more woo-woo vibes-based approach which centers their feelings and psychological biases as the arbiters of reality. This is why astrology fanatics do not respond to any science about it. Talk about gravity, and they come up with some excuse. Talk about the many psychological studies done that show the Barnum Effect’s relation to astrology, and they wave it away. The rule they’re operating on is that what they feel is true is more important than what is actually true.
This is a liability, a fragility, and there is also a sort of liberalism about it. When I say something incorrect about, say, black holes, my response when someone corrects me and tells me the facts is a simple and excited “oh thanks for correcting me, that’s so cool!” and follow-up questions about it because I’m excited to learn and secure enough in my own sense of worth that I can handle being wrong sometimes. It’s not even “Oh no, I was wrong, gotta feel terrible about myself”, it’s “Yay I get to learn!”. I don’t say “well maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle and what I said isn’t actually completely untrue? (because I desperately need to feel like I was right)” But responses to my critiques of astrology have tended to be more annoyed and personal, shifting the goalposts, feigned half-agreement to offer compromise (“well newspaper astrology is an oversimplification but if we throw on more parameters then it works”) because the social contract demands that compromise be met with compromise. That latter thrust is a liberalism, an attempt to “compromise” in the middle between “astrology is false” and “astrology is true”. But truth and falsehood are binary states, and if you compromise the truth you get a falsehood by definition.
It is a liability I keep in mind when evaluating how much to trust and rely on which comrades in what ways. I see belief in astrology being more comorbid with people who will make consensus-based and vibes-based assessments rather than looking at the world as it actually is. This is a liability because they have demonstrated that when they are forced to choose between inconvenient reality and convenient fiction, they will take the path that’s emotionally easier for them even if it’s wrong. Without getting into details, I’ve seen that play out badly. It wasn’t astrology that misled them, but the tendencies that led them to cling to astrology. I dodged harms that others did not because I was willing to acknowledge inconvenient realities and go against the denialistic consensus, choosing the harder path forward, while they did not and chose the easier and more socially-acceptable path, to their detriment.
And speaking of the social dynamics, from the outside it looks like some people got into astrology because it’s The Thing to be doing. I knew a guy who did it because it helped him get laid but then since he was dating people who believed in astrology, he had to keep believing in astrology. It’s a social thing to do to be social with other people. If my one-cuttlefish war against astrology won tomorrow and suddenly the majority of people in queer leftish-adjacent circles here decided that astrology is cringe, would most people still stick with it because they’re True Believers? Or would they quietly drop it because they were using it as a social gimmick in the first place? I don’t know.
Denial is an emotional protective mechanism. Astrology is protecting something for these people. It’s providing something, like maybe a way to express their feelings or describe their personality. But wouldn’t it be better to learn how to express these things directly without resorting to a framework that requires you and the listener to believe in complete lies? There’s a lot of harm that comes from ineffective and indirect communication, and this fosters that. Don’t tell me your Mars is in Gemini and it’s a retrograde week so that’s why you’re insufferable today (idk if any of those words made sense because I don’t know astrology and if I did it still wouldn’t make sense because astrology isn’t real). Take some goddamned personal accountability for your actions and tell me you have an anger problem because of some traumatic stuff you don’t want to get into the details about that you’re trying to get some help for in therapy, and I’ll be way more willing to grant you patience and work around the big feelings with you than if you say “I’m just like that because of the stars and there’s no changing it, haha, isn’t it quirky”. Unless perhaps gaslighting yourself into believing that bad behaviors are innate parts of ourselves is your way of avoiding trying to be better and grow up?
In summary: Astrology is bullshit, and it’s worth struggle-sessioning over and discouraging it. I think coddling it holds people back from becoming more resilient and competent people, which are what we need for a revolutionary cadre. However, more important is to use this example to engage with people who are caught up in it and help them patch out the underlying vulnerabilities that leave them open to falling into this trap in the first place. Because if we just debunk astrology or socially pressure them out of it, the liabilities will not be fixed to prevent future harm, and they’ll fall for some other bullshit instead. I sometimes try to cook up an effort post about those underlying liabilities, but it’s a lot of work to articulate and then condense it into something readable, and thus far I have not been able to.
Why do I not say the same about religion at large? Because established religions constitute a much different cultural force than new age belief systems and can provide a set of moral ethics that lead people to leftism — after all, it was my religious upbringing that laid the ethical foundations which led me to Communism. But Astrology provides no ethics save for hyper individualism, which too often lead to reactionary or at the very least really harmful behavior.
It is impossible to ignore the twin facts that astrology gets disproportionate condemnation and that this is also true for anything else seen as “for women”. There are many problems with astrology, chiefly that it is made up, and everything else stemming from that. It has a hefty ideological baggage that connects it to all sorts of other bad stuff, and granola fascists obviously like it.
However. You could say the exact same shit about something like religion, and you dont have the same eagerness to call that silly shit for the terminally stupid.
Genuine question: Is the issue you take that I criticized astrology, that I gave a throwaway carveout for religion, or both?
the twin facts that astrology gets disproportionate condemnation
Does it though? I don’t know if that’s a fact. It gets more criticism than other pseudoscientific bullshit, but that could be because people encounter it more. It’s a durable fad that’s easier to bring up than, say, crystal healing. I criticize astrology because it is a common ideological malady I run into in leftist organizing spaces. I took the “well it’s not harming anyone so I’ll just politely say ‘I don’t fuck with it, leave me out and I’ll keep my mouth shut about it’” approach for a long time, but the practice of magical thinking turned out to not just be siloed to this one field and that’s a problem.
If the most common ideological malady I ran into in leftist organizing spaces were radlib NATOist brainworms I’d criticize that more. Oh wait, I do, far more than I criticize astrology. If the most common ideological malady in these spaces were encroaching evangelical christianity, I’d be criticizing that more too. There is a whole host of shit I hold myself back on bashing because it’s less common or because people don’t get it up in my face the way they do with astrology so I don’t perceive it as prevalent. There’s a whole host of shit outside the realm of leftist spaces that are problems, but they’re outside my scope. What good is it for me to say “hey those Baptists? Terrible, the lot of them” here where the only Baptists reading this are probably the feds spying on us?" Audience and scope matter. We already know that the christian nationalists are terrible.
and that this is also true for anything else seen as “for women”
It’s skirting dangerously close to sexism to call astrology “for women”, but I think the “seen as” part saves it. I think the meme that astrology is “for women” is problematic though, as well as untrue (I know too many men who are into it too), and it should be pushed back on because there’s something sexist about it. Is the implication that astrology gets criticized because of misogyny? I’m not criticizing astrology because people see it as “feminine” (I don’t). I’m not going around bashing nail lacquer which has a much more established feminine coding than astrology does. If MRA bros are going around criticizing astrology while believing that sigma males are a thing, then sure, I’d buy that they’re being misogynistic because they clearly don’t mind magical thinking and pseudoscience, they just see it as something “for women” (another way they’re being sexist) and that’s why it’s bad. Right answer (astrology is bad), wrong reasons (at least 2 layers of misogyny).
You could say the exact same shit about something like religion, and you dont have the same eagerness to call that silly shit for the terminally stupid.
I’m just going to respond to this and your other comment here: I had a very hard anti-religion phase years ago, but I’ve since noticed that there’s more depth to religion as a cultural practice. Some of it is still horrible. Some of it looks helpful to people. I find it harder to talk about religion coherently because there are so many wildly different ones.
People marched to do genocide under the sign of the cross, cultures were destroyed in the name of the Lord, God, whatever name he has been called, has been invoked to justify every possible crime, every possible prejudice, every possible irrationality, and you deliberately ignore
Religion is a powerful tool for social control. It is not the material reason for social control. You’re talking about atrocities committed for land, resources, and power that were and are done under the banner of religion. But at the same time, there were peasant uprisings in the name of religion as well that boiled down to “a saint visited me and told me that since class war is violent, we should kill the barons” (before Marx was around. They used the language of Christianity to express class war sentiments). These wars are political and material in nature and root causes even when done under the banner and rationalization of religion. The various wars between Protestants and Catholics after they split were not about religious ideology and blind hatred of those bastards who believe in a different god, they were about politics, land, and money.
I don’t disagree that religion is also immaterial, irrational, the supernatural components are demonstrably false, and the institutionalized parts of it are harmful. Perhaps I should be more critical of it as well. But there’s more to it than that. It becomes an important part of people’s cultures and families, generationally. I don’t know how to cover that competently, because it’s incredibly varied and thereby so much more complicated to address. Superficial-level discussions that I saw from the cesspool of /r/atheism over a decade ago tended toward just finding ways to be racist toward populations of Muslims, and/or taking people’s traumas about evangelical christianity out on Muslims, so I’ve gotten allergic to that level of discussion. To delve into the problem with Religions as a whole immediately requires distinguishing between myriad different sects. The problems with Baptism are not the same as the problems with Catholicism are not the same as the problems with Hinduism are not the same as the problems with mainstream Sunnism are not the same as the problems with mainstream Shiism are not the same as the problems with Salafism are not the same as the problems with Reform Judaism are not the same as the problems with Orthodox Judaism are not the same as the problems with Zoroastrianism are not the same as the problems with Buddhism are not the same as the problems with Yazidism. That is all so far outside my realm of expertise that I dare not even attempt it. I feel I have to leave it at this: I find it hard to say “all religion is bad” when there are whole strains that use the language and framework of their religions to actively push for social, racial, and economic justice (Liberation Theology). I find it hard to say “all religion is bad” when I see how the Palestinian resistance — and by that I mean especially the noncombatants who are being genocided for settler-colonialism and empire — turn to it for strength and solace during the darkest times.
I’ll concede that there’s a struggle to be had about religion, but it is a different struggle, or maybe a bunch of different struggles. I think that struggle is better had within the religious communities. I’m willing to discuss problems with Islam with Muslims and ex-Muslims; I don’t feel like discussing it with people who haven’t been part of the religious umbrella. If I saw some strain of evangelical christianity evangelizing and spreading within leftist circles like I see happening with astrology then I would be much more passionate about arguing against it as well. None of that detracts from my criticisms of astrology. Perhaps I just shouldn’t have mentioned religion at all.
Genuine question: Is the issue you take that I criticized astrology, that I gave a throwaway carveout for religion, or both?
Both.
Does it though?
Yes, you are literally doing it right now.
It’s skirting dangerously close to sexism to call astrology “for women”, but I think the “seen as” part saves it.
It is absolutely not sexist to point out that things associated with women get more scrutiny and more criticism than things associated with men. Look inwards on this one. Astrology is a soft target for easy rationalism points and is criticised frequently by men as such.
Religion is a powerful tool for social control. It is not the material reason for social control. You’re talking about atrocities committed for land, resources, and power that were and are done under the banner of religion.
In which religion bears blame. Yes. You cannot pretend that the religious and their institutions did not participate in these crimes, and that they did not justify what they did using religion.
But at the same time, there were peasant uprisings in the name of religion as well that boiled down to “a saint visited me and told me that since class war is violent, we should kill the barons” (before Marx was around. They used the language of Christianity to express class war sentiments).
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of jacqueries. They were not class warfare in the traditional marxist sense. As Marx noted about a more literate and more aware peasantry closer to his own time, peasatry as it existed could not form a mass movement aware of its nature as a class, by coming together they do not form a unit distinct from the individual but become simply more of the individual thing, just as you cannot put enough potatoes in a sack to change their nature into anything but a sack of potatoes. Even during the Bundschuh movement and the subsequent peasant wars, the peasants did not at any point call for the overthrow or murder of the aristocracy, or in any way oppose them as a class. But sought a direct readressment of specific grievances, which included the Catholic church refusing to provide local priests to read the bible to the peasantry and leaving smaller churches empty to focus on the wealthy cities. They begged for proper aristocrats and a return to existing aristocratic feudal law, and a withdrawal of the excesses of the aristocrats to that of a mere generation ago. Because they had a belief, codified and passed down for centuries by the catholic church, that their subservient role was a part of the natural order that could not be changed and trying to was tantamount to blasphemy.
This was in part because the Catholic church existed and continues to exist to perform one function and that function is to maintain an existing social hierarchy for the benefit of the ruling class. Religion has a specific societal function too separate from that of the specific institution, to justify the unjustifiable, to give meaning to the meaningless and to soothe the pains of the souls that cannot otherwise be soothed. It is the opium of the people.And you look at organisations that have murdered millions, kidnapped thousands from their parents and tried to systematically erase their culture, and ask people to believe that humans can speak to the dead, walk on water, and possibly that you can turn wine into literal blood by waving your hand over it and saying the magic words, and a group of people making star charts and say “Well only one of these things is worth condemning for its moral transgressions and irrationality and it ain’t the murderers”
I appreciate your points about religion; thank you for those even though we are arguing. It’s going to take some time to digest those so I don’t have anything productive to add, but I see your point and think there’s something of value to be gleaned there. However, I suspect that the most you’ll get out of me is not that I give pseudoscience a pass (I have far too much negative personal history with such charlatanism; astrology is close to the least of those bugbears, it’s just the one that comes up most often because it is the least niche), it’d be that I don’t give some religions a pass. As I understand your answer to the first question I asked, that will still upset you.
And on that note, gonna be real, the fact it bothers you that I criticized astrology specifically, your missing of the points about proportionality and scope, and your continued insistence that it is misogynistic of me to criticize astrology make me disinterested in trying to have a productive argument with you. I’m going to stop responding to you in this thread on this matter because if I wanted the thrill of a flamewar I’d just go to
and spar with sshitlibss instead of comrades. I don’t fully understand how the disengage rule works, but since I’ve said a couple things in this comment, if you want to respond or rebut, I support you responding to this comment with any final jabs you want to get in. I can’t promise that I’ll read them and I def won’t respond since I’m already riled up, but onlookers can, and I do not think it would be fair for me to get in the last word while also calling for disengagement and stopping you from getting to say your piece.Even though I am ending this exchange in a pretty brash manner I don’t mean it with a ton of fire or vitriol toward you specifically. Peace
I wish i could go after religion in the same way. Unfortunately it way more institutional clout.
Now, some people talk about recovering astrology from whiteness and colonialism. That is still nonmaterial and I suspect it’s still magical thinking, so I question the worth in recovering it. But I will grant that perhaps there’s a whole spiritual framework which I do not know about that makes it ok in the way that religion is ok. So, before I get into criticisms of that, I will grant two carveouts: First, if you are part of a colonized culture and that branch of astrology is part of your people’s efforts to reconnect with spirituality or reclaim something, I’m butting out of it and leaving you to it without criticizing you. Second, if you’re living outside the west and your culture has some astrological beliefs, I’m staying out of it and you can have internal struggles with each other over it. Although in one case I maybe could throw my hat in if I wanted to, I just really don’t want to.
But that’s not who I mostly see talking about it. I see mostly white people (where I live) shifting the goalposts from “ok the complicated western astrology model is kinda bunk, fine, but what about other cultures?” And then they’ll delve into astrology from other cultures in a way that looks gross, culturally appropriative, and fetishistic. The vibe it gives off is: “I still want to feel like I have a spiritual connection to the stars, and also I am grappling with the realization that The West sucks, so if I draw my astrological practice from a non-western culture I’ll be accessing an older, wiser, more enlightened civilization’s knowledge of the magic of the stars and then I can continue to have this nonmaterial belief in the stars.” It’s weird, like they’re invoking other cultures’ beliefs to justify clinging to their own and give theirs an air of legitimacy while also making it seem problematic for anyone to criticize the ideas because then we’re “anti-decolonization” and “enforcing the problematic western hegemonies inherent in Science”.
And that’s some bullshit. That’s just shifting the goalposts and co-opting revolutionary language for ill purposes. How different is it from the syncretic new age shit of the last 100 years? None, it’s just a different iteration
Also gonna just drop this quick exchange from a year ago with someone who has apparently since been banned for downplaying SA:
That person:
Edit: Spoilering that person's comment because it was so sexist it got removed for sexism.
Is astrology bullshit? Yes. However it is women’s bullshit and we never let them have anything nice. It is our job to protect it until they get bored of it and move on.
Me:
This comes across as sexist (the thing that is bullshit is inherently feminine!) and patronizing (protect their frivolous bullshit til they grow out of it?) as well as patently false (why say it’s women’s? men and other non-women are into this shit too!)
With an additional: I think it’s sexist to call astrology something that is inherently for women. If it is disproportionately taken up by women (I know the meme is that it is, I don’t know if the actual stats reflect that) then that does not make it ok or good, it means we need to look at what the fuck is wrong with our society that women or more broadly non-men feel the need to turn to fake shit to express feelings, emotions, and personality instead of just speaking honestly and directly? There’s a pretty clear answer: the rampant sexist oppressive machinery of the patriarchy has to do with that, punishing women for being straightforward, blunt, honest, gaslighting women into being out of touch with their own feelings because maybe those feelings are proscribed by the system, so that some circuitous other outlet is desperately clung to instead. Well then, is the solution to mislead an oppressed populace into another set of restrictive chains? Or is it to break those chains entirely? That’s a rhetorical question.
astrology is the opium of the women
I really don’t know what to say other than what I said in the comment you responded to.
there’s a whole spiritual framework which I do not know about that makes it ok in the way that religion is ok
If the problem is the historical baggage and the irrationality of the belief, then organised religion is a billion times more guilty than astrology could ever be, and you frankly need to address that. People marched to do genocide under the sign of the cross, cultures were destroyed in the name of the Lord, God, whatever name he has been called, has been invoked to justify every possible crime, every possible prejudice, every possible irrationality, and you deliberately ignore that while condemning being a bit silly.
No shit?
Lmao you’re a Gemini aren’t you
Yes astrology is bullshit, but the hate it gets is disproportionate compared to other kinds of woo, and I believe it is because it is a thing that has historically (In recent history anyway) appealed to women and is culturally associated with women. Unlike basically any other kind of woo, astrology doesn’t have a noteworthy body count, it harms basically no one, and it just sits there being a bit silly.
This is my opinion as well. Sometimes I genuinely feel astrology only gets so much vitriol because it’s seen as a “women’s hobby.”
I said the exact same thing during a struggle session on the topic last year although it was on a different account.
See: everyone ITT calling it fascist, eugenics, etc
your only like this because jupiter is in gatorade
It’s only a matter of time until the French make an official mixed drink out of Jupiler in Gatorade.
its astral phrenology.
youre making a prediction about me based on where stars are in the sky. No different than where the lumps are, on my head.
my lumps are in retrograde
or my ever-changing acne constellation
biology: science about living organism
geology: science about rocks
entomology; science about insects
anthropology: science about human societies/cultures
astrology: magic that says stars influence humans, not in the sense of giving directions, but dictate personality from birth.
wtf is this bullshit.
When these things were named astrology was considered as valid a form of knowledge as any other.
Yall are a bunch of boring nerds
Like who hurt y’all, it was never that serious but the hate gets to serious. Some places it’s more culturally significant than not and others it’s fun to study.
I took one look at my chart and said “This is a load of bull!”
I got Taurus in 5 different places on it, it was a load of bull
It’s not real like Tarot.
Seriously I don’t believe in Astrology or Numerology.
I like Tarot because it’s a fun parlour game to do with friends and it gives me something to do alone when I’m stressed that aids self reflection.
I’ve got to say I’m very skeptical of cis het men with strong opinions about Astrology though. It’s like Reddit atheism, even if it’s correct I find it a personal red flag.
I know what you mean, because a lot of women like astrology, some guys love to use a “don’t you know astrology is bullshit?!” as a means of getting a foot in the door with misogyny.
Real
I only believe in Etsy witches
Edit: This was a Charlie Kirk reference. I know practically nothing about Etsy witches.
I must begrudgingly acknowledge the Etsy witches are onto something, but I’m going to need more data points and some good statistical analysis to swing over to full belief. This is not an incitement to violence, I am simply a sucker for good scientific methodology. Because the fact is if magic is real the science nerds are going to be ALL OVER it trying to understand how it works.
