And lefties don’t see themselves as the more intelligent group?
No lefty party is complete without a spirited discussion about the qualities of their bowel movements.
Happiness is a clean colon.:eek:
Well, thats better than right wing parties discussing the proper table settings for human sacrifice to thier Dark Lord.
Have you ever seen a Commie drink water?
That’s because they’re trying to corrupt my precious bodily fluids!
Don’t forget that many of the kooky things are shared phenomena between the two major American political wings.
Here’s a humorous example to illustrate my point, which can regrettably be tested only on the previously uninformed:
Reagan or Carter?
So, kids, how’d ya do?
I’m with you on this one. I’m from the Bay Area, which is overrun with hippie wannabes who come from all over the country. I always felt like they were suspicious of me, although my political convictions are probably more sincere than theirs, since I didn’t just find mine last year. I’ve had to choose between hanging out with people whose values conflict with mine and people who annoy me. I don’t dress like a bum - I even wear high heels and make-up sometimes. I like to eat meat. I prefer alcohol to pot. I don’t happen to enjoy hiking and camping much. New age crap makes my skin crawl. Yoga seems cool, but not for political reasons.
Luckily, things are a little better in the world I now inhabit. There are more leftist people than hippies in New York City.
I’m with you on this one. I’m from the Bay Area, which is overrun with hippie wannabes who come from all over the country. I always felt like they were suspicious of me, although my political convictions are probably more sincere than theirs, since I didn’t just find mine last year. I’ve had to choose between hanging out with people whose values conflict with mine and people who annoy me. I don’t dress like a bum - I even wear high heels and make-up sometimes. I like to eat meat. I prefer alcohol to pot. I don’t happen to enjoy hiking and camping much. New age crap makes my skin crawl. Yoga seems cool, but not for political reasons.
Luckily, things are a little better in the world I now inhabit. There are more leftist people than hippies in New York City.
I work at a modern hospital that has bought into a lot of this crap. We offer classes Feng Shui, aroma therapy, chakras, etc. Thursday there will be a lecture by a medical “intuitive” who will offer personal consultations afterward for a hundred bucks a pop. I can only hope we’re doing this to separate the neurotic upper-middle-class from their money, and not as serious treatment.
We have a department called "Complimentary Medicine "devoted to this stuff. I was talking to the its manager the other day, who was going to a meeting that evening. There’s a whole office biulding in town filled with yoga instructors, “alternative” healers, and “energy workers”.
“Hmm”, I thought to myself, “that’s one appealing target!”
Not that I would ever do ill toawrd anyone of course. But I agree, somehow the political left has become associated with all this New Age crap, and it REALLY irks me.
Of course, reporting a UFO sighting is not the same thing as saying that you saw a flying saucer… all you’re saying is that you saw something in the sky and you didn’t know what it was. That there are UFOs is indisputable; people have seen things in the sky that are, as yet, unidentified. This does not mean that they’re all kooks who think they’ve been visited by aliens.
Preach it, Lego. I’m a hybrid lefty (liberal with pragmatic touches of libertarianism) who is currently reading Gardner’s skeptical classic Fads & Fallacies. I hate, hate, that my political leanings tend to associate me with past-life-regression types and believers in homeopathic medicine and their dumbass ilk.
But as others have noted, the other side of the spectrum has its yabbos as well. “Pray real hard and God will remove your tumor!” What-the-hell-ever, ya freak.
…So we’re not talking about the political affiliation of my pots and pans?
[sub]Because I’m pretty sure they’re organising against me…[/sub]
I don’t think us libertarians go in for this stuff too much. We mostly read magazines like Reason, which doesn’t have much tolerance for quackery. And as a regular reader of Skeptical Inquirer, I think most libertarians would fit in really well with the folks at CSICOP busting up the kooks.
The hippie generation of the 60’s abandoned their parents’ religion. As they age, I think they’re looking for something “deeper” than political ideals, and so they gravitate to these pseudo-science hodge-podge mysticist ideas to fill that void. They seem to buy into anything occidental in origin, from the superficial (like feng shui or acupuncture) to the outright spiritual (Buddhism, other Eastern religions.) They probably are the sole reason chiropractors are still in business, so we know they fall for quackery in medicine.
Of course, it could just be the general reason. They’re used to being on the fringe of politics, so now they’re gravitating to the fringes of pseudo-science and to anything that differs from the norm.
C’mon Scylla, do you know when flouridation began? 1946. Nineteen hundred and forty-six. How’s that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracies? It’s all too obvious. A foreign substance is introduced into our bodies without the knowledge of the individual. Why did you know there are even studies underway to flouridate ice cream? Children’s ice cream, Scylla!
(Ok, I had to get in one more Strangelove reference, I know the whole movie by heart and never get to show it off.)
You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!
Well, how do you think I feel, Dimitri?
It think I was about 16. Living on an air base. (No, it was not shown at the base theatre) Until that point, I hadn’t realized it was possible to laugh your ass off and be scared out of your wits at the same instant. It was a revelation.
I spend at least an hour a week rearranging my Feng Shui books.
This is the first time I’ve seen a thread that needed to be moved out of the Pit. If people are going to insist on being civil, we’ll have to move this to another forum.
There are intelligent individuals, there are stupid individuals, there are kooky individuals. No political group can claim a monopoly on any of them.
[sub]well, maybe the Monster Raving Looney Party can[/sub]
According to the cite, it was Nancy Reagan who had an astrologist travel consultant, rather than Ronald Reagan.
Maybe we need a thread on Women and Kookery. 
Just kidding…
You’re right, grendel72. They are organising against you. It’s all that bad feng shui of yours… 
I don’t know why, but that made me laugh out loud.
pfft.
I think you’ll more often see people exploring non-western culture, medicine, and spirituality when they’re young.
By the time people, yes even some in the “hippie generation of the 60’s”, reach middle age they’ve had enough brushes with cancer, death, and disease to know that western medicine is the way to go, at least for the real bad stuff.
Cartman, muttering in his sleep: “Hippies! Hippies all around me!”
If I were a woman, I’d be insulted by the fact that every publication aimed at the female half of the population seems to have an astrology column. (Usually focusing on relationships.)
My local free weekly left-wing paper, Creative Loafing, has lots of New Age crap, including a particularly annoying astrology column. This one really bugs me because the guy makes a big deal about giving positions of planets, and he’s always wrong. I can only assume he’s going by 2000-year-old charts, rather than opening a current almanac, using astronomical software or just going outside and looking at the stars. I’ve written this nimrod to try and help, by telling him the actual locations of the planets in the sky (for a given time period); but I don’t think he wants to be helped.