the alt-right

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.

in other words he'll probably be the GOP nominee for president in 2028

as a very smart and wise person I know I'm a catastrophic idiot

it pains me that shapiro will never realize what a tedious idiot he is. he will go to his grave thinking he is a brain genious.

how old is he anyway? 30? i've never seen or heard an "adult" who sounded so much like the most miserably dull and close-minded rising freshman.

jesus christ he's 35.

he gave a talk at my university last year (and is now suing them lol), it was held at a building roughly 100 yards away from my office so I passed through the crowd lined up outside on my way home that night (I didn't find out what was going on until a little later—they had the street barricaded and cops around etc). the people lined up were indeed (at least visually) some of the more miserably dull and closed minded folks on our campus.

i mean i mention college b/c shapiro definitely seems like someone who has got certain undergrad poses down and also like someone whose actual college education, in terms of critical thinking and understanding how to make an argument etc., left absolutely no impression on him whatsoever.

it's also possible he knows all this stuff and just perfected a grift that has now taken over his mind.

he also reminds me of some of the jews who thought the nazis would except them b/c of their obseqiousness and enthusiasm in toadying the fascist line but the nazis were only too pleased to send them to the death camps. but shapiro is not alone in this.

a good demonstration of the very limited utility of a term like “alt-right” is it DOESN’T encompass people whose public output is littered with openly racist and white supremacist ideas and tropes

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) March 28, 2019

I just read on wiki B Shapiro actually played the violin and piano. Ha!

Yeah, I guess he's not the best example of the "noob" phenomenon I'm talking about, but there are all these alt-right dudes who will talk about "the greatness of western civilization" and then just list off all the classical music and paintings referenced in bugs bunny cartoons.

jbouie otm

steve king fits into that. he's a dunce who can barely form a sentence and he spews endlessly about the superiority of western culture.

i'm pretty sure ben shapiro is a philistine too.

xpost

i mean this is all textbook irony i guess.

the followup tweet about his insanely racist novel is worth a look too.

all the classical music and paintings referenced in bugs bunny cartoons.

the followup tweet about his insanely racist novel is worth a look too.

― JoeStork, Friday, March 29, 2019 10:43 AM (thirty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

true allegiance!

he is an absolutely shit writer, speaking of western civ. Don't know about his violin playing.

I mean none of this is any surprise, since smart people with smart ideas do not tend to gravitate to the right. Being "the thinking man's conservative" is akin to being the funniest guy on MadTV.

i dunno, there's been some funny folks on madtv

lol isn't madtv beloved on ilx?

Alex Jones' video deposition from the Sandy Hook case:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7siWJ86g40

xp
Key and Peele were both on MadTV iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyM09DhoLeQ