thanks for the link

This is not in any way a justification, just my explanation of why it’s so pervasive and attractive

I see now. I wasn’t sure earlier if you were defending it or not. I think your earlier explanation as to why it appeals to people makes a lot of sense.

I agree with your assessment here about pseudoscience. Magical thinking is a product of alienation and can give people hope and reassurance, but there’s a fine line between self-soothing and denial of reality and necessity.

I think we have to be careful to disentangle our view of pseudoscience and magical thinking from judging the character of their adherents. I don’t think we can always ignore these beliefs as an issue for a later date. Addressing these beliefs now can and should be done with empathy. I think this counterreaction to “reddit atheism” has come about from conflating their belligerence, lack of respect, and laundering science for progressive-washed imperialism, with their ontology being incorrect. We have to make a positive case that confronting life’s problems without magical thinking gives people a more genuine agency and sense of agency, which is emotionally fulfilling too.

as always, Marx put it best:

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.

We shouldn’t be afraid to call on them, we just have to be careful and empathetic.

And thirdly, through the supposed ‘compatibility’ of different star signs, it gives people a guide to who they should try to form a relationship with. Statistically, by far the number one danger to women is their male romantic partners, both in terms of physical violence but also in terms of the possibility of psychic distress. Will he dump me? Will he cheat on me? Will he leave me to do all the house work? He seems like a good guy now, but is he just tricking me until he thinks I’m stuck with him? Does he secretly listen to Andrew Tate? Will he start doing that a year into our relationship and suddenly completely change?

What’s the point of a guide with an irrational basis? It seems deeply dangerous to me to try to answer these questions based on the timing of someone’s birth. Sure, there’s no 100% reliable way to answer these questions, but there have to be better methods than literal mysticism. Like say, investigating what his friends are like.

I understand that people find comfort in beliefs, but the idea that you can trust someone based on the alignments of stars and planets is so wild to me. And that goes for conventional religion too. I don’t think most Christians or Muslims feel these sorts of questions can be answered simply by knowing the other person is also a believer. If they did, I think they would be making a mistake. You can be hurt by people who fit the right “type”, or who share the same beliefs as you. Find comfort in what you want, I suppose, but basing trust in people off of spiritual belief can have catastrophic results. like abuse in cults

These responses describing astrology as just a psychological comfort or even as entertainment, equating it with using the internet or playing a game, seem to ignore that the repeated practice of a belief can instill that belief, and that true belief impels you to act based on that belief. Lots of people treat astrology as just a fun fantasy to discuss, and I really have no problem with that. But truly believing in it and acting on it seems not only not Marxist, but more importantly a risky and misleading way to live life. If we don’t embrace irrational reasons for making political decisions, why should they be embraced for making personal decisions?

China has been unwilling to challenge the dollar with yuan

IMO this is actually a good thing for socialism and potentially signals China’s long-term commitment to it. Of course it would also be great if the dollar were replaced, but replaced with what is very important.

If the yuan were internationalized, China couldn’t impose the kind of strong capital controls which have allowed it to develop the economy toward socialism while retaining markets to a (likely necessary) degree. Further, there would be much greater incentive to export capital internationally rather than use it domestically, which could lead to a kind of social imperialism.

The synthesis of maintaining capital controls and dehegemonizing the dollar IMO is that the dollar is replaced not by another single nation’s currency (which is just a different kind of unipolarity, after all), but instead by an international currency like the Bancor proposal.

(A dual-circuit thing like the USSR under Stalin would be better for transitioning away from money itself ofc, but I have no clue how that would work across borders and it seems impossible that any capitalist countries would accept such a system. If the world got to that point, socialism as a world-system would have practically already won)

Is this supposed to be a surprising secret? I was taught this in American public schools as the core reason.

The real wake-up call isn’t learning about the historical importance of expansion itself, but assigning a different moral value to it. It’s realizing Manifest Destiny is just Lebensraum that won, that there’s nothing morally justified about it.

At a party in a cabin in the woods

Thanks for the source

I’m not trying to be accusatory

What evidence do we have of this?

Every continental boundary is more of a desired boundary than anything real. There are no “real” continents.

I can’t disagree with wanting to delegimitize it

There’s way more tectonic plates than continents and a lot of landmasses we think of as contiguous are on different plates. Itd be very impractical to try to make them the same. Iceland would be a transcontinental country, California would be its own continent, Asia would be several continents, there would be continents that are just patches of the Pacific Ocean or the Caribbean, and so on

I don’t think Europe or the West as a geopolitical force is the same as the continent. There are other areas that are unambiguously in Europe that aren’t part of “Europe” similarly to how Russia isn’t. Are Belarus, Bosnia, Serbia, or Moldova really part of the club the way France and Germany are? Of course not. Greece or Hungary arguably aren’t either.

the names and boundaries of continents are arbitrary and don’t matter. that said, the most common definition, really more of a vibe, of a continent is size. Europe is 3 times larger than India. It’s twice as large as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and Afghanistan combined.

Apparently this lady is from Texas, so it’s not an affectation

Since when is y’all and nothing else AAVE? How do you think they addressed the crowd at Klan rallies?

That line is like the only great part of St. Anger

The corniness rocks actually

True crime as a genre is enough to explain this one

It does win capital’s vote. That’s not just more than enough, it’s preferable. Democracy is wonderful!

Gay and Fr*nch

Bailey’s isn’t a liquor, it’s a liqueur.

Wow, Russia is so much like 1984 that they found an exact copy of that exact book, with no changes, omissions, or alterations, available in Russia for free. This is exactly like what happens in 1984, which we’ve all read, clearly. Their totalitarian lack of editing knows no bounds.