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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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I'm not saying anything more than we know about the facts of the case, but I continue to be flabbergasted by the way the "look at how weird this guy is, he could possibly not be a far-righter!" argument is used! It's perfectly plausible these days (typical? No, but plausible) that one might have a guy going from hippie new age Green Party type to far-right within a short period - I've witnessed numerous similar types doing the same thing because of Covid here in Finland, and there's an entire microparty - "Kristallipuolue", "Crystal Party" - which consists of alternative medicine / new age hippie types who went hardcore antivaxx and anti-measures during the pandemic, started picking up things like anti-immigration thought, and are now in an electoral alliance with a couple of far right parties.

The pipelines from new age to right-wing are often quite clear. Left-wing conspiracy theory gives way to right-wing conspiracy thinking (QAnon and so on). Localist preference to local products can be expanded to general anti-internationalist thinking (opposition to UN and EU, and so on). "Get your vaccines out of my body!" is expanded to more generic libertarianish thinking. "Male and female energies" earth-mother-type thinking can become advocation for traditional gender roles. And so on.

There are plenty of right-wingers who are generally able to conceptualize the fact that left-wingers can take sharp turns to the right, even suddenly, who have done the same themselves, but who then instantly start feigning ignorance of such potential mechanisms when it looks like one of those recent converts might have done something, you know, crazy. Something with bad optics. Then you can only be counted among the right wing if you've been a stable and solid normie law-abiding middle-class whitebread person for your entire life.

Woo always drifts right. And in the American context(not sure about Finland) there are reasons for that.

Would you mind elaborating on that thought? It’s not immediately obvious to me why that should be the case.

Not OP, but considering the educational polarization happening in America (where the less educated are more likely to be on the right), it seems reasonable to think that superstitious beliefs will cluster on the right.

This is of course not universally true. There are plenty of nonscientific beliefs cherished by the left. But in my anecdotal experience living in red states, you're going to see a lot more distrust of "mainstream" science and medicine on the right. These people love their CBD oils and naturopaths.

Lmao, I know half a dozen Reed graduates who run the local homeopathy ring. Education doesn't have much effect on believing silly things, only ensuring that people believe the correct high status silly things.

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