the alt-right

Yang's platform seemed alright to me. Maybe someone itt can explain to me what's wrong with him.

i feel like the very nature of the republican party in 2019 is going to naturally be attractive to lysenkoists and other pseudoscientists of all stripes - they are fundamentally the "alternative facts" party

I like booker’s idea for savings accounts for children

Wait i thought this was the 2020 thread bc ppl were talking abt yang

Cory Booker is not alt right—for all his faults

people want to turn over a new leaf, i think that's great, but he has every reason to be insincere and i have no reason to trust him or give him the time of day

― Jaki Liebowitz (rushomancy), Wednesday, March 27, 2019 11:14 PM (ten hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

don't trust a purportedly reformed Nazi doing a press tour

ike i'm frustrated that the republican party has become the anti-vaxxer party because there should be no anti-vaxxers, but if anybody is going to be an anti-vaxxer it might as well be a republican because at least then people aren't going to push you to accommodate them, you know?

― Jaki Liebowitz (rushomancy), Thursday, March 28, 2019 8:57 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

don’t think anti-vaxxers being primarily republicans is remotely true tbh

No, they’re libertarians and/or claim ‘independence’

All the ones I know are weird selfish arseholes.

lotta hippies in there as well

ike i'm frustrated that the republican party has become the anti-vaxxer party because there should be no anti-vaxxers, but if anybody is going to be an anti-vaxxer it might as well be a republican because at least then people aren't going to push you to accommodate them, you know?

― Jaki Liebowitz (rushomancy), Thursday, March 28, 2019 8:57 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

don’t think anti-vaxxers being primarily republicans is remotely true tbh

― k3vin k., Thursday, March 28, 2019 10:46 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah the venn diagram of people who are hippy dippy liberals/leftists into weed, healing crystals, and alternative medicine and anti-vaxxers has a huuuuuuge overlap

The loudest are split pretty evenly between granola libs and homeschool reactionaries IME. Essential oils being another commonality between those two groups.

From what I remember, though, a significant number of anti-vaxxers are poor and POC, people who may not have the strongest, most positive relationship to our healthcare system.

don't bring weed into this. the third thing you're looking for is pressed vegetable juice xp

Scratch a hippie, find a libertarian - or worse. I sometimes work with a hippie who did not vaccinate her daughter and has a Twitter timeline full of YouTube likes for CT videos about Trump saving us all from secret pedo cults in DC. Also voted for Brexit even though she has three French holidays a year.

xp I saw a video about hippies who were juicing cannabis leaves so they've got that covered too.

xps. hey, i have a weed oil vape sitting on my coffee table but there's a correlation for sure

Essential oils being another commonality between those two groups.

wtf are these. the only encounters i have w/ "essential oils" is that half of the people in line at the post office seem to be mailing them.

what's so essential about them anyhow?

They are the very essence of Nature, from before our Fall into Artifice.

They're like potpourri that cures cancer.

Uggggh I have a couple of really earnest essential oils people in my soc media feed. I figure people's gullibility comes from a few places. 1. Lack of access to medical care/lack of trust in the medical system (milo otm). 2. Lack of trust in commercial cleaning and home and personal products because frankly those industries AREN'T regulated enough to be able to trust them not to put harmful shit in our stuff. 3. The MLM aspect and women who want/need to work from home or need a 2nd job due to declining wages, un/under-employment and all that. Basically society is sick and people are searching for whatever.

I slot nootropics and keto and all the Roganverse supplement shit alongside essential oils (and some anti-vaxxers) as a response to our healthcare system and generally broken society.

For depressed or anxious people who don't have the first clue how to navigate insurance for therapy (if they even have insurance) or can't afford it anyway, getting some magic beans delivered from the Internet is much easier.

And they all feel like exercising agency where they have none (with the depression, or their economic situation or insurance/healthcare).

These people exist in countries with solid free health care systems as well.

Australians are mad for keto & there's a significant anti-vax movement there too but they have a functional healthcare system so I don't think it's just that, I would bet it's more the internet magic bean syndrome. My understanding is that anti-vaxxers tend to skew high income & white but there could easily also be demographic groups that don't fit that

Definitely high income and white in Australia, I can’t be long before Byron bay gets wiped off the map by a measles epidemic.

rich people getting wiped out of Byron is a plague I can get behind

don’t think anti-vaxxers being primarily republicans is remotely true tbh

― k3vin k.

not historically, but the republican party are making a concerted play for them, whether it be in kentucky or in oregon. give it a couple decades!

Everyone loves keto because it seems cooler/manlier than saying you are dieting or on atkins.

A lot of those anti-vaxxer / anti-medicine natural remedy / supplement /self-reliant types are the descendents of the "survivalist" movement of the late 70s / early 80s. Which in turn begot the "patriot" / anti-government movement. Like the paranoid people who used to be on the old Donahue show.

It's just another example of paranoid / reactionary politics that repeats old anti-Semitic tropes but they people espousing those views don't realize the ideology's lineage.

Amusingly enough, the biggest keto advocate I know is doggedly anti-anti-vaxxer

i drop droplets of lavendar oil in my shower because it smells good, like showering in a produce market, smells are nice

Qanon is becoming an ominous version of The Chive.

I've been covering Qanon for a year, and the amount of pro-Q people in this video from yesterday's Trump rally line in Grand Rapids is absolutely shocking. This is just a portion of it. pic.twitter.com/hTDGEnPsEi

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) March 29, 2019

Bob's Burgers had a great essential oils episode recently. My sister sells them; she definitely fits into #3 on in orbit's rubric, as far as I can tell it's just another MLM hustle to her, having already cycled in and out of Rodan + Fields, Norwex, Mary Kay, and seemingly a million other empires in the last several years.

xp wtf

if only George Soros would take his evil heeb fortune and finance the comparably abstruse fiction w/ even shittier aesthetic that would peel off some of these idiots

Z'ANON, with, like, a parrot with headband on or something who exposes the cabal that doesn't want ppl to have reasonable gun laws or coverage for preexisting conditions

i mean it's a big topic and my sweeping generalizations are just that, but boy there's definitely a sense, for a certain set of people, in which "alternative health" is "alternative facts" avant la lettre.

i don't think there's any one driver of people's love of quackery, and i don't think it's a specifically american thing. some of the factors, in addition to many of those already mentioned, that seem to influence it to me are:

1. people who have experienced perceived or real indifference when dealing with medical doctors. i don't think it's too shocking to say that medical doctors can sometimes be arrogant and/or lacking in empathy. i kind of assume that everyone here has at least once gone to a doctor who hasn't even listened to them at all and that's definitely a frustrating experience. the alternative care providers i've known all put a high premium on empathy and listening to the patient.

2. stigmatization of mental health. there are still plenty of people who have this internalized idea of mental health issues as not being "real" or being "all in their head" and they need some external diagnosis to validate why they feel bad.

3. just the way our damn brains work! i mean it's pretty well established at this point that we are not always rational actors and just because we know about the "placebo effect" doesn't mean we aren't going to fall prey to it. if something appears to make sense, especially if it's through analogy, we're more likely to accept that. so the idea of taking trace amounts of a substance to inoculate one against that substance seems sensible enough, particularly for anybody who learned in school about smallpox. there's a tendency, apparently simply because of how the human brain works, to want to take a superficial approximation of a thing for the thing itself. that people can go so far as to embrace homeopathy while rejecting vaccines (which involves another endemic human fallacy: overestimating risks with low probability, like having a negative reaction to a vaccine, underestimating risks with higher probability, like getting a disease as a result of not being vaccinated for it) is weird and perverse and very, very human.

i know i'm being really tangential to the supposed purpose of the thread. sorry!

Z'ANON, with, like, a parrot with headband on or something who exposes the cabal that doesn't want ppl to have reasonable gun laws or coverage for preexisting conditions

― d'ILM for Murder (Hadrian VIII)

again, these are not people i would want or trust to "support" the things i believe in. i don't think we need to be sensible or rational all the time, but man, we have fully automated luxury queer space communism, i don't see the benefit from having a shadowy billionaire trumpeting shadowy conspiracy theories as the basis of our politics

i'll need to suffer a smattering of idiots in the bleachers this year but they are helping pay for baseball's best bullpen abt which I am v excited

(but nah I don't really want this either just smdh)

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/55485973_10161478709150304_7080727240744370176_n.jpg?_nc_cat=111&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=2e7fa911cee4db95f75271bd180e8d95&oe=5D0266FE

This might have been posted upthread, but I find it fascinating that the biggest "defenders" of "western civilization" are such fucking noobs about it.

"I'm reading this guy William Shakespeare you probably haven't heard of him"

He should moonlight as an alt-lite rapper called Yupi Saidit

He should moonlight as the cool substitute teacher where he just shows Amadeus in class and rehabilitates all the urban youth.

like i hate to keep harping on this but it seems like there's a lot of skepticism and cynicism about what i'm about to say: facts exist and have material consequences. if worst comes to worst and there's a war on, i'd rather be on the side that doesn't mandate their field medics only treat wounds with homeopathy.

i am fucking sick of fascists who love classical music, it's the goddamn worst thing about liking classical music

It's because they are mad they didn't have asian parents that made them play the piano or violin and are stuck being sad weeaboos.

i am fucking sick of fascists who love classical music, it's the goddamn worst thing about liking classical music

Vaaaaargner, Max

Reading the Odyssey. That some people read my tweets rather than Homer is objective proof that my followers are stupid.

In other words, if you label me alt-right, f*** you and f*** the horse you rode in on.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) March 28, 2019

sorry Ben, I label you the way you are, not as what you identify as

facts don't care about your feelings, ben

the gulf b/t how smart shapiro thinks he is and how abjectly boringly stupid he is, is so remarkably wide, you could pass a solar system through it.