#anti pseudoscience

[wisegirl25]

“Well Mercury is in retrograde so-” SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Explain retrograde motion right now, I bet you can’t.

Have you ever even seen Mercury in the sky enough to observe its retrograde?

Can you explain it without googling it? Oh my god

[crazycatsiren]

No parent deserves having to bury their own children, so for fucks sakes vaccinate them!

[sxnshxnxxnddxxsxxs]

i really feel like we don’t discuss enough just how deep jkr’s white supremacy goes

like it’s way more than just:

cho chang’s name

almost every black character being tall and sporty

kingley’s name

the goblins

the house elves

the only south asian thing about the patil twins being their names

there’s way more but those are the talking points that are usually discussed in the white supremacy context of jkr’s bigotry.

but there’s something else that i find to be particularly insidious which i don’t see that many conversations about.

so for context when i did my a level i had had to research late 19th century pseudoscience because i was studying gothic literature. and i came across things like phrenology and the criminal mind and honestly it feels like jkr discovered these theories and just ran with them.

as a quick explanation phrenology is the theory that by studying the shape of someone’s skull you can see if they’re predisposed to criminality and lombroso’s criminal mind is the theory that criminality is hereditary and you can tell by observing someone’s physical features. it’s also the general consensus in both these theories that someone with physical ‘defects’ or deformities’ will be predisposed to criminality which also makes them incredibly ableist.

both are incredibly eugenicist and white supremacist theories because they’re essentially saying that you can tell if someone is inherently good or bad and thereby whether they deserve to be alive/within society/treated as equals by looking at their physical features.

they are both complete bullshit pseudoscience with no real basis in fact.

now where this comes into hp and jkr is that the antagonists and the villains of the series are disproportionately described as having these very negative physical characteristics.

like the very obvious one is voldemort with no nose and being snakelike.

but also the way peter pettigrew is described.

“His thin, colourless hair was unkempt and there was a large bald patch on top. He had the shrunken appearance of a plump man who had lost a lot of weight in a short time. His skin looked grubby, almost like Scabbers’s fur, and something of the rat lingered around his pointed nose, his very small, watery eyes.” (poa ch 19)

like the man is literally being compared to an animal (yes i know it’s implied in the lore that the longer one stays in their animagus form the more traits they take on but the point still stands).

then there’s marcus flint who as far as i remember is literally just a minor antagonist.

“Marcus Flint was even larger than Wood. He had a look of trollish cunning on his face as he replied” (cos ch 7)

like she really has a thing for comparing people to animals which is a very common tool in white supremacy for dehumanising people.

and then there’s greyback

“a big, rangy man with matted grey hair and whiskers, whose black Death Eater’s robes looked uncomfortably tight. He had a voice like none that Harry had ever heard: a rasping bark of a voice. Harry could smell a powerful mixture of dirt, sweat and, unmistakeably, of blood coming from him. His filthy hands had long yellowish nails.” (hbp ch 27)

now admittedly it’s slightly different with greyback since jkr is very openly saying in the narrative that he’s less than human and too dangerous for society because jkr only believes in equality for muggleborns and no one else.

but as is stands there are so many examples some big some small of the physical descriptions of villains and antagonists having negative connotations. the reason that it’s so insidious is because this is a children’s book series. and children soak up information like sponges including the implication that the further you are from the beauty standards the worse of a person you are (something that is reinforced by society). then when you place that in the context of the west where hp is most popular then it becomes the further away you are from whiteness (the western beauty standard) the worse of a person you are.

it seems like a really small thing which is why i don’t think it gets discussed nearly as much as the more overt things but even the small pebbles can have large ripple effects. besides i think think it’s incredibly important to discuss every aspect of jkr’s bigotry.

[gwydionmisha]

The Republican War on Science Continues. This anti-vaxxer bullshit is thoroughly debunked but we are wasting time money and resources on this instead of trying to get people vaccinated for measles while people are dying.

[girl-of-ink]

Fighting with chiropractors on Facebook isn't enough; I need to start killing them

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

News is emerging that the Department of Health and Human Services is preparing to release a review of transgender care intentionally slanted to oppose it. The review is expected to follow the same playbook as Governor DeSantis’ Florida Board of Medicine review and the Cass Review in England—both of which excluded gender-affirming care experts and were engineered to justify crackdowns on care. According to anti-trans organizations, the report is expected by April 28, and could be used to undermine not just youth care, but adult care as well. The foundation for the new review was laid out in Trump’s executive order issued on January 28, which instructed the Department of Health and Human Services to “publish a review of the existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion” within 90 days. The language of the order already set the tone for what many expect to be a deeply biased and predetermined report. Notably, “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” is a disputed and scientifically unsupported term frequently used by anti-trans advocates to cast doubt on the legitimacy of trans youth identities. The inclusion of this terminology in the mandate signals that the forthcoming report may be more about ideology than medicine. Adding to concerns, then-acting NIH director Matthew Memoli recently sent out an internal email directing the National Institutes of Health to fund research focused on the “chemical and surgical mutilation of children and adults”—a phrase rooted in anti-trans rhetoric. The email, obtained by Nature, outlined the two main areas of focus for the review: “regret and detransition following social transition,” and outcomes in youth who have undergone what the administration terms “chemical and surgical mutilation.” Given this highly charged language and the apparent lack of participation from experts in gender-affirming care, the review is expected to follow the model used by the DeSantis administration in Florida and the Cass Review in the UK—both of which have faced strong backlash for misrepresenting evidence in order to justify restrictions on care. If released as expected by April 28, this review could become a cornerstone document used to justify sweeping restrictions on gender-affirming care for both youth and adults across the country. This has been tried and weaponized successfully before. In Florida, a similar review was created to justify bans on trans care in the state—a process criticized as politically motivated by the Human Rights Campaign. Patrick Hunter, a member of the anti-trans Catholic Medical Association, played a significant role in the development of the Florida Review and Standards of Care under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. Patrick Hunter was chosen specifically by the governor, who has exhibited fierce opposition towards LGBTQ+ and especially transgender people, and then immediately got to work on targeting transgender care. [...] This report will mark another escalation in the dismantling of science within the Department of Health and Human Services under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man whose war on vaccines and water fluoridation has already reopened the door to once-eradicated diseases. When the report drops, it won’t be a scientific review—it will be a political weapon. Researchers, physicians, and advocates must be ready not only to debunk the coming wave of disinformation, but to meet it with unrelenting truth. The future of transgender healthcare in the United States may depend on it.

The Trump Regime is set to release a Cass Review-esque study filled with anti-trans animus to justify bans on gender-affirming care for minors and adults.

The “report”, should it be released, is expected to contradict scientific rigor and evidence to push for gender-affirming care bans.

[thatweirdtranny]

remembering that time i made a post saying that european honey bees in the US are invasive and that it’s important to focus more on native bees and other pollinators for conservation purposes since very little attention goes towards them in comparison

and then when it got notes all the anti-honey vegans came out of the woodwork like i was saying beekeeping is evil, chomping at the bit to scream about how agave somehow doesn’t kill wildlife in the current system of cultivation and how even the thought of keeping bees for honey and for pollination of crops is a grave sin

[straynoahide]

queer humanity

just a reminder to LGBTIQ/queer, progressive christians:

queer erasure discourses from "ex-gays"/ex-lgbtiq, pseudo-compassionate discourses, etc, are not christlike

human beings have psychosexual diversity but are of one humanity. every human being is called to a free and fulfilled life in which your love and erotism are not reduced by the constraints of others' shortcomings, much less projective issues - religious or not.

traditional mores, gender roles, social expectations, etc, are not His word. His word is never hateful; and if it is- it is not the last word. your Conscience matters. your love matters. your passion matters.

queer erasure is always a previous stage of queer lynchings, although then won't call people queer when doing that. the people who are the most vehemently anti-gay always do so from a place of personal queerphobia; all personal bigotry, as opposed to political bigotry, is projective.

so just to be perfectly clear: conversion therapy is a crime against humanity, and one of the most grievous sins that can even be conceived of: pseudo-scientific, politically motivated torturing children, teenagers and at-risk youth to change who they are and result in measurable clinical illness from psychological and sexual repression. there is nothing remotely compassionate, kind or godly in it. abuse is not love.

it has to be condemned always, in every community, univocally and in no ambiguous terms by all authorities, religious and secular.

if you are Catholic, know that it is also against our doctrines. the queer spirit will never be daunted again after Stonewall. we are not 'urges', 'clothes', 'behaviors', 'ideas', 'ideologies', 'mannerisms', 'same-sex attractions', etc... we are full human beings, period.

please, stay away from those people until you are far enough in your own healing as a queer religious person - and pray for them to heal from those who have led them to that low point.

[crazycatsiren]

Vaccines do not cause autism.

Even if they do (which they don't), I'd still rather have an autistic child than a dead child. And vaccines do not cause autism.

[athenadarling21]

So I found this in the library and I thought I'd take a moment to give my two cents here.

I'm sure most of you instantly know this book is clickbait and you're right but I still think this is worth talking about. So basically the study they use to back up that vegans have smaller brains is this,

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1301816110

This study however is about vitamin B12 supplementation in alzheimers and has nothing about vegans. Vegans of course have multiple ways of getting their needed vitamins though fortified cereals, plant based milks and nutritional yeasts.

The book in general is full of pseudoscience and agenda driven stuff like this but really I feel this book can be debunked on its surface. Like I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover but that title is just well... Dogshit.

"why vegans have smaller brains and how cows reverse climate change." One does not simply put their most extraordinary claims in a title especially so tactlessly. It's just contrarian clickbait plain and simple. Btw fun fact cows are like Uber bad for the environment. Like they take up a bunch of space and they produce so much methane.

Also saying all this I am going to admit I eat beef and meat and despise veggies. Yet still it's fucked up that vegans who have their diet by choice or not get bullied like this. To my vegans besties I salute you and you should know you're brains are very wrinkly and full of wisdom.

Anyways these are just my two cents please feel free to add extra information if ya can.

[xenon-noble]

AI and Crypto tech bros are to computer science what electric universe charlatans are to physics, and what alt-health con men are to biology and chemistry.

[no-passaran]

a few years ago, someone in university told me she didn't want to be friends (we had met up for coffee once) because I'm *xyz sign* and her experience has been that *xyz sign* tend to be emotional master manipulators, they like to play the victim in situations where they caused the drama. Obviously every person is entitled to whatever boundaries they want to have for friendship and dating but it's not ok to just accuse me of being a certain way on grounds of... the date I was born lol.

Like I used to think this stuff was ok as long as people didn't take it seriously, and as long as it's just "oh I'm a *xyz* that is why I'm artsy :-)" but now I honestly just want nothing at all to do with it, and I don't want to know anything about it either.

Wow, I'm so sorry you were told that. Thank you for sharing your experience.

Astrology is a form of bigotry, after all. Assuming that a whole demographic (people born in x time) share a series of personality traits, assigning those personality traits to people you've never even met because of this aprioristic belief about their demographic. It's the definition of bigotry.

In Western society, astrology is less of a problem than other discriminatory systems (racism, sexism, homotransphobia, classism, etc) because it's not as widely believed and hasn't become entrenched in the societal organization to be a systemic issue present in the social, cultural, and legal spheres and interpersonal relations that affect us everyday. (That is not the case in other places like, for example, India, where astrology might dictate who you can and cannot marry and where the victim's astrological sign has been used in court to refuse justice to women who have been raped, justifying the man who raped them because women born under certain star positions are believed to be astrologically "bringers of bad luck" and even bringers of death, so they're free game to abuse!)

So I'm not comparing it when it comes to the effects it has, but on a personal belief level it's just as discriminatory. It's as stupid to say "I don't want to be friends with this person because they were born at X time so I assume Y bad things about them" than it would be to make the judgement based on someone's gender, ethnicity, class, etc. There have already been people (in Western countries where we don't traditionally have an astrology-based oppression system) reporting discrimination for their astrological sign: I've heard experiences similar to you with that "friend", but some have even explained how they were not believed about their pain when they could have found out earlier about their illnesses and refused renting a room because the flat bans people of certain astrological signs!

It can seem like it's harmless fun, but this is what the belief is promoting. It's only a logical continuation of believing in horoscopes to start making these generalizations. It also contributes to normalizing these patterns of thought according to which it's "normal" and "truthful" to consider that whole demographic groups share the same traits (that is: bigotry; lowering our guard in front of more serious ones like racism, sexism, etc).

I don't think we should go around shaming people who talk about it, but I am certain that it is a responsibility not to contribute to spreading this form of bigotry, especially now that it's on the rise and becoming more popular among young people. For example, it goes against our interests as queer community to make space for astrology in our events (making people introduce themselves with their name and their sign, or painting astrology as some kind of radical queer thing somehow just because it's trendy??), I think we should stop promoting these beliefs in magazines, and start challenging our friends who believe in it to think of how it works (and how it prepares them for other forms of discrimination).

Idk sorry for answering with such a long text but I'm tired of seeing it rise too and I had a friend who went though that, she got really into astrology because her other friends were into it, and once that anti-scientific proof door was open she got into moon landing denialism and now she believes in conspiracy theories and it's very annoying to talk with her lol.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

==

"Thank goodness the Gender Studies majors have arrived," said no climatologist ever. When you have a degree in hammering, you need to convince the world that everything is a nail.

Scientific American has been captured by an anti-science cult.

[fashionlandscapeblog]

That's it. I've seen over 100 pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow in the past weeks in all my social media channels. When is this woman ever going to finally get cancelled? It has to STOP. She's a freaking GRIFTER and SCAMMER promoting not only pseudoscience, but stuff hazardous to women's health, regardless if she's a Karen-friendly, blonde sympathetic face, she's not harmless. Carl Sagan wrote The Demon Haunted World extremely concerned about this type of quackery, which is now, to the shame of any rational human being, considered 'popular culture'. But yeah, you go girl, hype her and turn a blind eye on all the harmful things she's doing, just because she's not personally stabbing someone, she smiles and she says 'cute', goofy things, plus she's on fashion campaigns and movies. This is nauseating to someone with the tiniest bit of sensitivity, OK, for someone with none.

Believe it or not, sometimes the smiliest people concerned about everyone liking them and saying good things about them, are the ones with the most to hide. Thing is, that this is not hideable. Unrelated, but the fact that she won an Oscar unable to play anything other than herself, whilst using the trophy as a doorstop is mindblowing.

Let's face it: She gets a free pass on what she's doing because she's a blonde, white, privileged woman and because most people go by appearance (you all need to watch The Elephant Man). If it were a black man doing this, he'd immediately become criminalized.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Carter Sherman at The Guardian:

Dozens of anti-abortion activists streamed into the conference room of a Washington DC hotel. They jostled for seats as speakers, dotted throughout the room, blasted a song about the need to be “a little more like Jesus, a little less like me”. By the time a trio of advocates, assembled on a dais at the front of the room, started to talk about the “Future of Chemical Abortion in America”, the title of one of the first seminars at the National Pro-Life Summit, it was standing room only. When it was Erik Baptist’s turn to address the crowd, he said: “Chemical abortion is the No 1 priority and issue of our time, for the life movement,” using the anti-abortion movement’s lingo for medication abortion, which is performed with pills. Baptist is in a rare position to do something about it. Since July, Baptist has led the Center for Life at the Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), one of the foremost conservative advocacy organizations in the US.

Formed in 1994, the ADF is today the rightwing answer to the American Civil Liberties Union. The legal group’s attorneys are at the forefront of virtually every conservative cause du jour, such as campus free speech, access to gender-affirming care and, of course, abortion. The ADF played a critical role in demolishing Roe v Wade, as it helped craft the model bill that became the Mississippi abortion ban that overturned Roe. But its lawyers have also been a part of recent supreme court cases over access to abortion pills and emergency abortions.

As the Center for Life’s director, these kinds of efforts are now within Baptist’s purview. “We do have a comprehensive approach to lawsuits and what we’re trying to do. We’re obviously trying to win in courts and try to protect as many unborn lives as we can and support mothers who [are] in unplanned pregnancies. And how we execute that manifests itself in multiple ways,” said Baptist, who is also senior counsel at the ADF and served as one of the Environmental Protection Agency’s top lawyers during Donald Trump’s first term. He added: “We have brought cases on behalf of pregnant centers, sidewalk counselors, pro-life doctors, and we’ll continue to do that.” In an interview a few days after the summit, Baptist laid out many of the ADF’s priorities for 2025 – and the organization is poised to have a big year.

In December 2024, a petition by ADF attorneys convinced the supreme court to hear oral arguments in Kerr v Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, a case that could determine whether states can refuse to send Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood. Defunding Planned Parenthood, the anti-abortion movement’s arch-nemesis, has long been one of the movement’s most cherished goals.

Then there’s the fight over the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, known as Emtala, which requires hospitals to stabilize patients who arrive at their doors in emergencies. The Biden administration said that Emtala also covers emergency abortions, but ADF attorneys have joined Idaho – home to one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans – in fighting that interpretation. That case went all the way up to the supreme court last year but, like the abortion pills case, is now continuing in a lower court. The ADF is also involved in at least two other cases over Emtala.

Anti-abortion extremists, emboldened by the Dobbs ruling and Trump’s return to office, are moving on to the next battle: the fight to ban mifepristone and medication abortion.

[shotofstress]

Ppl would do anything, ANYTHING to ignore or seudo cope with their shit in place of reaching for friends, syndicate, dismantle the internalized lies with real education and not tiktok and reels of fake shit and bs "traditional medicine". People wants magic stuff that will solve their individual problems so hard and doing nothing of real work and at the end don't give a fuck about the rest of the world. They want control and lies in place of rights and human dignity. We are worst than a medieval peasant bc at least back then they didn't have the knowledge, but now? Some ppl will spend the little money they have in buying a glass egg to shove into their vaginas, belive in racist/gender star essentialism (aka astrology) or in any other shit they don't need in place of facing their problems, listening to ppl that can really help them and scape the cult of fascism