Sorry i posted an edit with a link. I just can’t stand people using fallacies to invalidate other people’s arguments. A logical fallacy is an example of where to begin to look for logical errors or assumptions in an argument, it doesn’t mean that if you can fit parts of an opponent’s argument into one of the categories in this list that it is insta-invalid. Doing this shows a compulsion to win rather than understand, and we are talking about a situation where maybe 12000 people have already died. Nobody wins, but further losses might yet be avoided.

It was a long comment telling you to get serious. If youre not serious then why should anybody who does know, even bother with you, if youre making no effort to appear as somebody who actually cares about anything that actually matters

You make an extremely abstract and general statement. Then you give very specific cases as to why your abstraction is correct, with absolutely nothing connecting the abstraction to the specific. You take a huge system of oppression like the prison industrial complex, all of the horror and injustice that it creates, and then justify its existence because of two specific cases. Interesting how both those cases were white men when BIPOC people are much more likely to be victimized by police and carcerial punishment.

Those cases to point to a very thin segment of the population, so it too is an abstraction. No discussion about if society somehow produces killers, like for instance school shooters in the USA.

Even though there are problems with your argument, I admit there are problems with the demand “abolish police and prisons”. Because often there isnt discussion as to how exactly we can practically do it. Like what if we could abolish 50% of police and prisons, then more, then more? The word “abolish” does have many of the problems that maximal and radical demands often have. But then, you need to consider why people are totally uncompromising on their commitment to abolition.

The abolitionists before and during the civil war were a very slim minority of people, and they could not conceive of how slavery would actually end. Lincoln and the North did not want to end slavery, they wanted to preserve the union. It wasnt until the slaves freed themselves and went over to the northern armies to heroically fight for their freedom, that the process of abolishing slavery was inevitable and irreversible.

But then prison labor was used to subsidize parts of the economy where paying free workers was still unprofitable. As such, the tradition continues to this day.

So if you would like to argue that institutionalized state-slavery is justified because of the presence of a few serial killers, then it shows how little will you have to even think about it, and that you would rather just not think about the suffering of all the people victimized by the police and prison.

And that is your right, to stay ignorant on this issue. I’m sure there are many domains in which you are exceedingly knowledgeable. But many people are and have been directly and severely harmed by the prison industrial complex and the police, and when you mak such substanceless, abstract arguments, then it appears to those people you are on the side of the system that victimizes and exploits.

You might ask yourself which group you have more in common with. You dont have to want to free serial killers, you just have to want to free people who deserve to be free. Instead of ignorance, ask yourself, could this system that affects millions of people, more than anyone else in the world, often by orders of magnitude, could this system be made more just? Could the number of people incarcerated be decreased? And then either get to work making that happen, or get out of the damn way

No, you are the person who is being unreasonable by your own admission. You re asserting it is a way to make scientific predictions, it is not a way to do that. That is exactly my point. You are the one saying the toaster is for making predictions, when it clearly isnt for people who actually use toasters. Do you get it? You are asserting astrology is a way to make scientific predictions. It isnt that, it doesnt serve that function. So it is ridiculous to assert it does something that it doesnt.

If people want to believe something and you dont care for it or understand it, then why make it your business? You are just closing yourself off from a whole bunch of people for no reason. You’re not above it, I guarantee you have a ton of beliefs that can be disproven scientifically. If people want to take that and use it to tell themselves a narrative, we all do that in different ways. We believe stuff all the time that isn’t based on science!

Most of the time i see virulent anti astrology its not coming from very good people. A lot of white dudes with very objective views. Low key authoritarians, using a kind og hegemony of academia to puff themselves up, maybe tell some ladies they are stupid. So that’s what I see when I read your comments

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Is there anything in your life that has a use, that is not useful for making predictions?

I really think your “broader picture” is context specific. In the US, right wingers go to church and mostly hate astrology. Ive never met a vaguely right wing practitioner of mysticism. Most people I meet who are into astrology are women, lgbtq+, and minorities, people who are more likely to have their opinions silenced by white men questioning their logic and reason. One of the most popular astrologers right now is Chani Nicholas, who is left wing, and discusses social justice and organizing in her content. Our mystics often call themselves “witches” and can be persecuted for their beliefs by our most prominent persecutors, the christian right. We have periodic “satanic panics” that lead to the arrest of queer people and minorities, who are imprisoned for decades in some cases, while the actual satanists never get caught.

There is objectively a fascism problem everywhere. To criticize astrology as if academic science doesnt have such a problem, is just a different flavor of gullibility. But I admit, the first time I ever met a like a hardcore white supremacist neo-nazi, although i didn’t know it at the time, we got high and he told me all about gnostic mysticism. It took me years to untangle the horrible logic that underpinned the spirituality he was peddling. But that Nazi was so nice and cool. Not once did he take one of my ideas and try to invalidate them. When in mentioned I liked jazz he put on (all white but very good) Mahavishnu Orchestra. We discussed philosophy and metaphysics, and he tried to plant little seeds that, if believed, could absolutely lead to belief in far right extremist ideas, similar to some of the descriptions in the article you shared, like the creation of a new authority, etc.,

But I think if people with liberal or left sensibilities took the effort to really try to connect with people, rather than hegemonically eradicate competing ontologies, then maybe the fash wouldnt be able to gain purchase in these communities. The principal error of idealism is that ideas create society, and to some extent it is true, however ideas are created by society. If educated people are going to shun and humiliate someone who sees a mystic or looks up star charts, then the politics, my friend, will be determined by the social forces that are active in those communities.

I am a materialist, but I also dont believe that spirituality and materialism are totally at odds. The history of why they are at odds is very interesting, and socioeconomic, rather than purely philosophical. Isaac Newton was a mystic, Hegel studied mysticism to formulate his dialectics. I know scientists who are deeply religious and I know people who grew up studying Wicca and then became rational, methodical scientists.

So on the one hand there may be some cultural difference, but also judging the way the German government has treated pro-palestine protesters, There seems to be more political willingness to force people to adhere to certain beliefs. I’m not sure how much the history of Nazi esotericism is in effect in your country, I bet it cuts a lot of different ways.

The fash are winning the culture war, by engaging with culture. Meanwhile liberals, who dont really know why they believe what they believe, continue to ridicule others for their beliefs, because once upon a time rich landlords and the emergent capitalist class wanted to take land away from the church, and they did it by supporting kinds of scientific inquiry that would discredit the church. Granted the history of the church vs scientific inquiry up to that point was pretty terrifying, but these things have a way coming back around. You know, first as tragedy, again as farce.

The emergent right isnt the fault of mysticism and superstition, it is a protracted campaign carried out by our ruling classes and kept alive by extractive social relations. The more divided we are against ourselves, the more ground they gain. Instead of thinking of beliefs as personal failings, think of them as social movements made up of people.

I’m not a mystic but I will fight for witches, especially against smug objectivists. Not saying that you come off as smug, but there is no shortage of smugness among the scientific rational atheist contingent

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Using a scientific study to disprove human experience is completely missing the point. It’s the same urge to say that, “Love is just a bunch of chemicals.” What exactly are you trying to achieve, when insisting to other people that the reality or unreality of their experience depends on whether they compare those experiences to scientific studies that 1. Were not written for them and 2. Wasn’t written by/for you?

Sometimes people act as though they are better able to ascertain truth in every domain because they have a purely scientific and objective view of cosmology. Yet often, people who have a more scientific view will also sit in mysterious wonder about their place in the cosmos. “I’m so small and insignificant,” or sometimes, "nothing I ever do will matter, because of entropy and time scales measured in eons rather than years. But that feeling can also carry with it a feeling of wonder and awe, it can feel peaceful and part of something unfathomably larger than ourselves. That feeling however, and what it means to us is unaccounted for in scientific experimentation. Does that make the feeling illegitimate? What if I have an urge to try and explain the sense of wonder to myself in a way that was not bounded by science.

Have you ever wondered whether or not a practical method for uncovering truth about our natural world, may not be the absolute measure of all phenomena? And that asserting of one ontology as absolute over others is the literal definition of hegemony?

I know you aren’t trying to oppress anyone but the negative reaction to a pretty harmless observation comes off to me as superstitious.

I’m not crying you’re crying

Nah probably not. There will be suffering and shocks but they’re like restructuring the economy here. They can’t like go back to feudalism, they don’t know how, and it isn’t possible. I just can never buy the apocalyptic framing, its not really evidence based, just Hollywood based.

I do think you’re right about more prisons though, idk about debtors prisons yet but they are loving making people “illegal” and then doing horrible shit to them. If they can’t get enough people out of work to suppress wages how they want, then I bet you will see states arguing for their right to put debtors in jail. Although the expansion of online gambling into every part of our lives is kind of insane though, it could shift some dynamics.

I think its more like the billionaires want this or they don’t care because they all know they’re gonna make the money. And we are gonna get screwed

You can’t take over what you done already own