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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3506 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 6, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How did Astrology become a Thing again? Since 2020, I've encountered it more and more IRL among the general population, even in people with undergrad degrees. I checked Tinder the other week before re-un-installing, and at least 1/3rd of the profiles had birth sign front-and-center. I honestly thought this was a slain beast.

Someone talking about capricorns really riles up my inner fedora.

Probably because people are too squeamish to examine sheep livers.

My future ex-wife got really into it around the same time she got into white-wellbeing / no-whiteguilt. Previously she hadn't even really read her horoscope in the newspaper paper but then suddenly paying for subscriptions and doing hers and Elon Musk's chart.

She is a Cancer.

She is a Cancer.

Pretty harsh judgement.

Something, something a crab crushed by Hercules.

Well, capricorns are the worst.

I'll just throw it out there that while I've looked into the actual data on astrology, which consistently seems to show no significant correlation with personality etc., I can't help but wonder if the right questions aren't being asked. At the very least I'd expect natal sunlight exposure, outdoor activity, etc. to correlate with something.

Then there's my personal experience which is that actually most people do behave as I'd expect based on their star signs. Confirmation bias? Very likely. Still uncanny though.

Oh yeah and then there was the time I happened to encounter an actual professional astrologer in a public place (let's say we were waiting in line for coffee) and struck up a conversation. After a few minutes of chatting I couldn't help but ask what she thought my sign was. She responded accurately and without hesitation, as though she'd made up her mind well before I asked and was sort of remembering it as an afterthought.

Epistemic status: Man, I don't know anything anymore.

If astrology was merely a "birth month as personality test" I'd have a lot less scorn for its practitioners. As you said, it makes sense that there'd be environmental factors that cause birth month to weakly correlate with certain personality traits. Ironically enough, people who are into astrology look down on that as fake newspaper horoscope astrology, and insist that you can only gain true insight by doing complicated star charts and whatnot. They tend to broadly reject the one element of astrology that might actually contain a hint of reality.

I can't help but wonder if the right questions aren't being asked. At the very least I'd expect natal sunlight exposure, outdoor activity, etc. to correlate with something.

Relative ages amonst school grade cohorts? I'd imagine people used to being several months older than their direct peers might show some correlation with something, for instance.

This is definitely a thing I remember reading about. I don't remember the details, but I'm pretty sure they do better academically and socially, which I think persists into adulthood and higher earning levels.

Hasn't hit Japan yet as far as I know, but here there are already enough charms, amulets, bracelets, talismans, and assorted other apotropaic tchotchkes spread about the shops, stalls, shrines, and genkans that people probably don't have much mental space to add in the heavens. Oh and blood type, can't forget that. Blood type interest seems much more female coded but the general vibe toward what I'd (as someone raised Christian) see as animistic superstition is general. Of course I recently heard of a Japanese woman mocking Catholicism as a bizarrely morbid cult that has the gall to hang its god's body out in the middle of the place of worship, so there's that.

Yes, among conservative Catholics- who tend to believe in galenic temperaments- women are much more into them than men. These have thé added bonus that you can just make up which one is yours to fluff yourself up, of course.

Catholicism as a bizarrely morbid cult

Reminds me of a joke about an unruly Jewish boy.

Reminds me of a joke about the pope in a lifeboat with Raquel Welch (Those aren't buoys...)

She has a point, Christianity is a spooky religion; you drink blood and the priests wear black and especially holy people bleed from their palms

CS Lewis made a point of discussing this in one of his works.

Paging @FlyingLionWithABook

Could be this bit, from a talk he gave on apologetics:

We may salva reverentia divide religions, as we do soups, into "thick" and "clear." By thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of thick religions. By clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical, and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are clear religions. Now if there is a true religion, it must be both thick and clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. And the only two religions that fulfill this condition are Hinduism and Christianity. But Hinduism fulfills it imperfectly. The clear religion of the Brahman hermit in the jungle and the thick religion of the neighboring temple go on side by side. The Brahman hermit doesn't bother about the temple prostitution nor the worshiper in the temple about the hermit's metaphysics. But Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from Central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. The savage convert has to be clear: I have to be thick. That is how one knows one has come to the real religion.

It provides a sense of certainty (and mastery) in an uncertain and chaotic world. This is psychologically palliative for women using dating apps, which involves much uncertainty and chaos. There is something to blame and learn in each encounter: his or my sign meant x or y; it didn’t work out so now I know not to talk to any Broncos born on this particular moon sign etc.

Also: it’s fun to read and do, it’s social, it’s low-stress.

A few factors imo, it's resurging for largely the same reasons leftism in general is popular.

People have a desperate, deep seated need to stand out from the crowd, to be exceptional or above average in some way. For those who don't have any obvious areas of talent or excellence, they have to get inventive. This is why people turn to ideology or controversial ideas. It is very, very alluring to claim that this thing which the majority of people (rightly!) dismiss is actually true and has value, and everyone else are idiots for not seeing it. It's an extremely easy way to set oneself apart and claim to have secret knowledge. This is as true for your traditional anti-vax moms as it is for astrology adherents as it is for reflexive leftists who argue that mass immigration is great, actually, as it is for Jehovah's who think they're part of the chosen few going to be saved. Everyone wants to be part of an exclusive crowd that are just better than the plebs. Believing and defending unpopular things is a low-to-no-cost way of achieving that. Your little clubhouse gets to shore up their egos by circlejerking and looking down on those "sheeple" who don't follow your chosen ideology.

Believing and defending unpopular things

But not really unpopular things, just low-risk things. You don't get fired from your job for talking about capricorns - though you could be if you talk about mass immigration in a wrong way.

Right, yes. "Safe edgy" but applied to political and personal opinions.

Isn't astrology fundamentally opposed to leftism because it denies the Blank Slate and asserts that the most important aspects of one's character are determined (dare I say "assigned") at birth?

Race is one of the most important aspects of one's character, according to the Left, and it is unchangeable, just ask Nkechi Amare Diallo. The logic is as much the subject to the ideology as anything else on the Left. That's how doublethink works.

No? “Fundamentally opposed” is the kind of framing you’d use for a doctrinal debate, and approximately nobody is trying to debate the proper role of astrology in politics. If you had a contingent of wine aunts trying to recognize the ascendance of Mercury in a DNC plank, then yeah, you’d see antiracists bring the knives out.

People like to measure every “leftist” against a central authority. Every category, really: I think this is an instance of Isolated Demands for Rigor. But most people don’t make every decision in alignment with their broader political lean. You’re better off thinking of astrology (or entertainment, or whatever social ritual…) as a separate magisterium from the question of how society ought to be organized.

Concepts are only sacred so far as they are useful; if it is more convenient to believe something else over blank slatism, then something else will be believed, at least for as long as it remains convenient to do so.

That would be approaching from a rational, or at least reasoned, perspective, whereas those who seem to embrace astrology also seem very much emotional and intuitive. The rational trappings about celestial positioning and whatnot are just embroidery, in my view. Like a Grimoire page 257 suggesting you need exactly three drops of virgin blood to cast the spell, or whatever. The exactitude is the sleight of hand to get you to buy into it as real, though fundamentally it's hookum. When confronted with your point here it isn't hard to imagine a bit of handwaving and scoffing that "that's not how it works," followed by a topic change.

Leftists aren't opposed to selectively applying their precious Blank Slate. Their favored groups are very much blank slates. Their disfavored, not so much.

Someone linked an article, "We Are Repaganising" in the culture war thread. I think this is another facet of this. With Christian condemnation of astrology neutered in broader society, pagan customs return.

Something needs to fill that God-shaped hole.

Makes sense to me. Without the larger structures, people pick and choose whatever idiosyncratic beliefs are most convenient. Reminds me of something a lapsed catholic atheist friend once said to me: "I may not believe in God, but you bet your ass I believe in Saint Anthony." Said in jest, but he was pathologically bad about losing his keys and other small items, and he really did say a prayer to St Anthony to help him find things. He was no longer Catholic, but he subconsciously held onto some seemingly random little things that remained instrumentallly useful to him.

I think the de Christianization of the west has made a lot of that stuff more acceptable to the general public. Although I don’t think I’d call our current zeitgeist repaganizing simply because I think our age at current is more nihilistic than pagan. Pagans while they were a bunch of vaguely indo European religious cults had some define beliefs about the world and definite notions of morality, anthropology, ecology, and metaphysics. Norse pagans had definite ideas about what being a good heathen meant. Romans had different, but equally strong ideas about the universe, the gods, morality, and so on. We have no ideas like that. We don’t have much of a conception about metaphysics, and the answers to most questions about morality tend to be “eh, believe whatever you want. The only universal evil is calling what someone wants to believe or do evil..”

Of course things like astrology would come back in those circumstances.

our age at current is more nihilistic than pagan

Yes, spot on. David Bentley Hart writes this up well here if one doesn't find his prose to squash one like a bug.

It’s a bit wordy, but I agree with the main thrust of his arguments. It’s just that I don’t think it’s just morality though. The idea of any kind of Truth as something that you are supposed to believe even in circles where it absolutely matters is pretty much gone. You don’t have to take any certain position on the origin of the universe, even in fairly conservative Christian circles. Creeds and formularies are barely taught. There are essentially maybe 3 groups that still insist on fundamental principles and creeds and concepts as a fundamental for belief: Islam, TLM Catholics, and Orthodox Christians. Other than that, it’s kind of a free market of ideas. If you read back into history, when the culture was still Christian at its root, you’d have all kinds of arguments about the right way to be a Christian. Not the preferred way. I remember reading a book called “The Great controversy” in which the author— who was Adventist, I believe — spent the entire book arguing that all other Christians were wrong and in danger of hell for not keeping the Sabbath. This wasn’t a statement of “well, I think, but im not going to say everyone else is. Wrong.” It was YOU ARE WRONG AND IF YOU DON’T CHANGE YOU ARE OUTSIDE OF THE FAITH. you can find other similar arguments made in the late Christian Western world where belief in evolution or denial of the Trinity or infant baptism were major, important beliefs that were required of the flock more or less.

I agree with the Benedict Option author. Most of the people who consider themselves Christian are Theraputic Deists, and they would have been considered heretics in most earlier eras. It’s denial by not caring in some sense. The reason you don’t care about the truth claims in many cases is that you don’t really believe in the exclusivity of the religion you claim.

It's interesting how different Russia and the US are, because it never went away here. Everyone knows their star sign (and often their Chinese animal as well, I am Sagittarius/Ox btw), most newspapers and magazines (other than explicitly business-oriented ones) have a horoscope section and every December the shops are flooded with the upcoming Chinese zodiac animal-themed calendars and knick-knacks.

However, interest in astrology, tarology and related crap has been dropping since 2024, likely because more people use LLMs instead of professional esoteric services.

I feel Russia got a bit tamer since 1990s with Alan Chumak, Kashpirovsky, and so on. At least now it's more mainstream, cross-cultural superstitions, not something on the verge (and sometimes over it) of mass hysteria.

Everybody here knows their star sign, but usually not their Chinese animal- although if you're male you probably don't know what it's supposed to mean. Interest in astrology doesn't seem to have ever gone away, either, although admitting to it might have been unfashionable in elite circles. Tarot and psychics and related crap is still for a) hardcore nuts and b) divorced women, though.

usually not their Chinese animal

Do chinese restaurants not have placemats with their zodiac on them in your locale? Every one-horse town in Canada has had such a place for a hundred years; sometimes the only decent restaurant around. It's something to talk about while waiting for your food, reading practice for kids, etc -- so I'd say most people here would know their Chinese animal. (which is bits I'm not going to release about myself)

A surprising amount don't, and just have gigantic menus you order off of by number. I've certainly seen them, but 'Chinese' is not the default restaurant meal in large parts of America either(Tex-Mex is), and lots of them are buffets or fast-casual places that don't have menus in that sense, and even sit down Chinese restaurants often skip it.

Monkey here. But I didn't know that pre Japan. I used to read a lot of Camille Paglia and I find her takes fascinating but her attachment to astrology was always weird. In your categories she's probably more hardcore nut, though she's also separated from her lady friend. To listen to her talk about starsigns with the same straight faced dogmatism and tachyphemic eloquence that she does with most everything else was an experience.

Women love those kinds of categorization things and take them way too seriously.

As compared to men and MBTI?

Do women actually take them seriously in the sense of believing them? All the women I've known that are into astrology/tarot/etc only take them seriously in the way "gamers" take video games seriously--they put in effort to do them well, but recognize it's just a form of social entertainment.

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