Interesting in this context is completely divorced from morally good/bad. Could be any group from any area at any time in history. I’ll start with a few, followers of the cult of pythagoras, contemporary black Hebrew Israelites, antiracist skinheads and the Amish (neo-luddites in general). Don’t be racist or a prick to other people discussing.
The Luddites were a labour movement with really admirable goals. They were only anti technology because it was being used to screw over textile workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
They weren’t even really anti technology - breaking the tech was the means available to them that worked. Protesting and petitioning didn’t get them anywhere, so they decided on direct action to make it hurt the capitalists in the only place they care about. That meant smashing looms and carders and everything else, because those were incredibly expensive.
That meant smashing looms and carders and everything else, because those were incredibly expensive.
Like data centers and ram are
Oh that’s interesting! I had a different internal definition of the term. Thanks for sharing!
Here’s an excellent recent book on the topic. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/
Margaret Killjoy did a great couple of episodes on them as well
Yea, they were an example of early anti-capitalist organization. Their biggest weakness was identifying the means of production as their enemy, not the owners of capital themselves, which became a valuable lesson for future organizers.
antiracist skinheads
I’ve read about these guys. Their take on it is that the skins started as a working class solidarity movement (the short hair is for safety while working on factory machinery) that got corrupted by nationalism and they have more in common with immigrant workers than with their own country’s capitalists.
Non-racist skinheads pre-date the racist ones.
Ska is a Jamacain music style that white working class British youth got into due to working and living alongside Jamaican immigrants, leading to mixing with punk to create 2 Tone.
The racists started to co-opt and taint the movement later on.
I am a bald white guy, I have this patch on both of my battle vests.
And fuck white power skinheads, and fuck nazi punks.
Nazi punks FUCK OFF!
I learned about them after using “skinhead” in a derogatory way to a music buff. That was the same conversation where I learned that ska is actually older than reggae, which is still wild to me.
I’ve looked into them too a while ago and the skinhead subculture is pretty interesting. I’m going off of memory but I’m pretty sure the subculture started in London in the 1960s. There were three big subcultures at the time in London, the posh upper class were “mods”, the lower class “rude boys” got their influences and style from Jamaican immigrants, and finally the “skinheads” were the middle class had their shaved heads and Doc Martens. The second wave of skinheads in the 70s and 80s in the UK and US were basically anti-punks. They were the punks who were mad about the commercialization of their culture and they shaved their mohawks, traded their battle jackets for flannels, and moved from punk music towards ska. And finally the third wave in the 80s and 90s were the racists who were getting tired of getting their teeth kicked in at punk shows. And since hating people for no reason doesn’t have a style or culture of its own, those shitbags (I would argue very successfully) stole the working class style of the skinheads
Similar is just actual punk culture in general
It’s not too interesting but there is a subreddit full of people who apply LLMs to do physics research. The place itself can be rather unhinged, but every week or so someone posts about how they have uncovered a groundbreaking theory of the universe. Such posts are so abstracted as to be disagreeable to the rest of this community. They are the writings of a mind turned in upon itself, an idea several reflections deep in a fun house mirror.
I (LLM hater, non-physicist) use this community to find cool science-ish sounding words for my sci-fi worldbuilding.
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Appears to be https://www.reddit.com/r/LLMPhysics/
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You can’t just say this and not drop the name
I follow paranormal/UFO/ghost/Milab/conspiracy literature. I collect books by these authors and I like to follow individuals on their career trajectory though the subject matter. I’m more interested in the people and the amount and rate that they deviate from the mainstream.
I’ve noticed that their views and books tend to get more fringe and extreme the further they go on their career, which isn’t too surprising, but what surprised me more was that there was less infighting than I expected, and a surprising groupthink product where all their ideas come together.
How do you reconcile aliens and bigfoot, witches, ghosts, and automatic writing, loch Ness monster, time slips and self-mummifying monks, tulpas, poltergeists and UFOs, cattle abduction and missing persons, Jewish space lasers and fae folk, changelings and vaccine mind control? It seemed like many of these were exclusive OR concepts?
They all seem to come together under one porous, unifying theory of everything supernatural. There’s no real guidelines, the whole raft of authors are just continually “yes, and”-ing each other into this vast soupy mass of theories which, if I had to put a label on it, boils down to transdimensional demonology.
It’s like they all sort of figured out that infighting is not so profitable, and so they are practicing academic radical acceptance without any real guiding force.
That’s my take-away, anyway.
Subcultures among subcultures have existed for as long as humans in their infinite creativity existed.
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Babyfurs and Diaper Lover Furries-They focus on regression. And they really love diapers.
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Densha Otaku - They love photographing trains. They also get extremely violent when you ruin their shot of trains.
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Cyberdeck Builders- They build retro computers with 80s SciFi aesthetic and take things too far… Using or even building hardware to mimic timigs exactly like they behaved in 70s.
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Grandmacore - People obsessed with grandma aesthetics. Very. Very. Obsessed.
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Swedish Raggare - American 1950s greaser culture filtered through rural Sweden and dialled to 11.
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Sapeurs - Rural Kinshasa men spend 1000s of dollars, sometimes sacrificing rent and food, to buy high end designer shit from Europe. They walk through dirt roads dressed like 19th century French dandies.
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Otherkin & Therians - They think they aren’t humans or at least partially non humans.
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Birds aren’t real- They think birds aren’t real. And that they are all robots, drones sent by CIA or other secretive gangs.
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Chronological Revisionists - Popularised by a German historian named Heribert Illig, followers of the Phantom Time Hypothesis believe that the Early Middle Ages (specifically 614–911 AD) never actually happened. They claim that Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II completely fabricated three centuries of history, including the entire existence of Emperor Charlemagne, just so Otto could rule during the monumental year 1000 AD. According to them, we are actually living in the early 1700s.
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The Tartaria - They believe that a technologically advanced, global utopian empire called Tartaria existed until the late 1800s. This empire supposedly used the domes and spires on old buildings (like world’s fair pavilions or old European castles) to pull free, wireless electromagnetic energy straight from the ether. They believe a massive, worldwide “Mud Flood” wiped them out, and modern history was rewritten to hide the existence of free energy.
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Deros Believers - Shaver claimed that humanity used to share Earth with an ancient, advanced race. When the sun started emitting toxic radiation, the advanced race fled the planet, leaving behind their underground cities. According to Shaver, these caves are now inhabited by Deros (Detrimental Robots)—degenerate, sadistic humanoids who use the abandoned ancient “ray technology” to project voices into the minds of surface-dwellers, cause freak accidents, and steal our thoughts.
There are a few more… But I’m too bored to type them here.
Birds aren’t real is another joke that people starting taking seriously like flat Earth.
I remember when both were joke subreddits. Then it turns out that if you have enough people pretending ridiculous shit some of them will take it seriously.
The KKK has a similar origin story.
Ultimately, this is how Scientology started.
A pub bet, to a running joke, to a mass delusion we allow to continue because not doing so would subject the old world power structures (“religion”) that are still operating today to the same scrutiny.
As a psych nurse stealing thoughts is a symptom I’ve always struggled to comprehend. It happens at the right frequency that I’m sure it’s real (often enough in different people, but not often enough that they would have met to copy each other). But it’s also such a bizarre concept that I can’t imagine perceiving it happen. I can picture being so scared you think you’re being watched all the time and plotted against, and I can imagine seeing, hearing, or even feeling and smelling things that aren’t there. But thought stealing has to be a completely surreal sensation that I am entirely unfamiliar with.
The delusion that always baffles me is gang-stalking. For the ones who don’t know, there is a fairly common delusion where someone believes that they are being gang-stalked. They think random people going about their day-to-day lives are actually secretly working together to stalk the one person specifically. They think people band together and form massive gangs for various surveillance/stalking reasons. For fun/gossip, for government tracking, for secret shadow cabals keeping tabs on people, etc.
That person you pass during your walk, who politely nods as they pass you? They were an agent, and now everyone knows where you are.
That girl you see walking her dog past your house three times every day? She’s making a thrice-daily report on you.
That utility worker, doing maintenance on the power lines? They secretly installed an antenna to track when you’re at home.
That dude who edges past you in the grocery store, because you took up the entire goddamned aisle with your cart sitting in the very middle of the row while you stopped for three fucking minutes to look at three different brands of pickles? (Just pick one and get the fuck out of the way already!) Obviously he was trying to plant nanite tracking robots on your groceries, so the group can listen to your thoughts after you eat them.I think it’s due to the (extremely common) “I’m being watched” paranoia, without having a specific target to pin the blame on. Instead of that breaking the delusion and realizing that nobody specific is watching them, they simply pin the blame on everyone around them.
The even worse part is that if you simply search up “Gang stalking”, you’ll find the wiki article on it… But you’ll also find a bunch of websites made by deluded people, who legitimately believe they (and thousands of others around the world) are being gangstalked. They call themselves “targeted individuals” and it very quickly becomes a self-perpetuating delusion. Any attempts to break them out of it only serve to reinforce the delusion, because obviously you’re a gang-stalker sent to try and trick them.
well the interesting thing is that it actually CAN happen, it’s just extremely rare and is almost always related to prejudice in some way (somebody non-white or a gay couple move to a conservative rural community) or domestic violence on the part of someone powerful enough to have lackeys (or peers, like a cop and their coworkers). The church of scientology has also been known to use gangstalking against people who speak out. But no the goverment isn’t stalking random people because they’re telepathic (my brother-in-law’s delusion).
Lol as if we need to watch you get groceries to plant our nanobots on them. They self-replicate and were present on all groceries 3 days after one waa casually dropped in your grocery store, which would have happened sometime during 2018/2019 timeframe, depending on how close our nearest gang members were to that store. We only supplant half their living expenses in return for spying on people who seem otherwise boring, so they need to work at least part time jobs (turns out that helps with the spying, so a bit of a bonus!) and also obviously need to spend a certain portion of their time spying, so it took about 7 months to deploy the nanobots to every grocery store and food market worldwide even with our extensive network.
And we don’t just listen to our targets’ thoughts. We steal them, or at least credit for them. Ever had a thought that you know came from somewhere but you can’t remember where it came from? It came from you but we steal the credit, or if we can’t (because too many people know about it already), we turn it into a new Mendella effect and make those people look crazy while we set up the credit for the replacement to go to us.
Bearenstein bears used to be known for the pun but we Mendella effected it so hard that everyone only talks about the ending being different and don’t even remember the pun while we rake in all that Barenstain bears money and street cred (which is surprisingly a lot for a children’s storybook multiverse where we haven’t even split the timeline yet with Brother Bear’s evil twin saga).
By the way, can you tell me where it was that a girl walked her dog by a location three times in one day? That’s sloppy and whoever it was requires additional training in avoiding raising suspicion. Or maybe it wasn’t one of our agents, though odds of that are pretty low, considering our gang makes up about 84% of the world’s population. Actually, nm, I’ll just do a quick search of our database for anyone who has walked their dog past the same house more than twice in one day… Oh nm, it was Sally Spyson, a member of the “we’re 84% of the world population, why do we still need to be so secretive instead of rubbing it in?” faction that deliberately leaves hints and opposes the evil “the secrecy is 84% of the fun in spying (other than the sex, drugs, and cool spy tools, of course)” faction.
I have a nephew whom I love very much, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. Whenever he has an episode I try to explain that nobody’s talking about him behind his back because people in general don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves and if they talk about anyone it’s only about themselves.
In other words of course, but still. We are not that important to others. So much so it is a real societal concern.
What do you mean “stealing”? I have never heard this before.
Patients say the government, their ex, etc are “stealing their thoughts.” Idk if it’s a disorganized way of saying they’re reading their thoughts. I do know thought blocking is a thing so maybe they’re attributing that to the process of having their mind read? Idk but thought withdrawal is a common enough delusion that it’s an option on some assessment forms. Idk either man the mere concept of the sensation is almost entirely alien to me as well.
Again, I have never heard those terms and I have a psych degree. Where did you hear that? It’s not established lingo afaik…
It’s ok like half the techs I’ve worked with have bachelor’s in Psych and still barely know what schizophrenia is. The academic degree apparently translates very poorly to clinical work. I’ve got a fucking associates but apparently nursing school is just way more rigorous for less years.
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The Free Zone folks.
Basically, they’re Scientologist Lutherans. They love the teachings of Scientology and the works of L. Ron Hubbard. They’re fully onboard with all the wacky Scientologist beliefs and practices. But they think the church itself is hopelessly corrupt and shouldn’t be followed. They believe everyone should be able to read about Xenu without having to pay the church a bunch of money.
Boyfriend took me to see The Seventh Seal over the weekend, and in that I learned that Flagellantism rose out of the Black Death. As in, they couldn’t psychologically handle the Black Death so much that they turned to whipping themselves to pray for the plague to end. They would travel through towns, performatively whip themselves, and scream at people to repent.
Think about how awful covid was, even for a lot of people who didn’t get seriously ill. Now imagine if we knew nothing about where it came from or how to prevent or heal it, and nobody, absolutely nobody could reliably give any insight.
Then it lasts for seven years, nearly halving the population, before coming back seven years after that. In a place where seven is a religiously significant number.
I would have gone fucking nuts too.
Yeah they’ve inspired some really cool fictional characters.
Rojava, an socialist autonomous region in northern Syria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava_Revolution
And the Zapatistas, another successful socialist insurgency in mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation
Rojava coverage by famed bagel chucking weirdo Robert Evans.
Do you happen to have a link about the bagel chucking though?
First couple of years of the show, pre covid. He would hurl said baked goods at the ceiling with a shout near the end of shows iirc.
Very interesting.
Zapatistas mentioned, nice. They’re really interesting to read about, including how Mexico stopped trying to kill them.
The Weather Underground were a leftist militant group in the US who did a bunch of bombings and riots in the 1970: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground
There’s a decent documentary about them: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0343168/
when did they chill out and start serving public apis
Fun fact. Both started at the University of Michigan and the latter was named as an homage to the leftist group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground_(weather_service)
I’m not typically in favor of bombing things. You know, like in general. That said, blowing up a statue, waiting for it to be rebuilt and then blowing it up again is pretty funny.
Yeah. Also AFAIK, they bombed a bunch of buildings, but only at times they knew no one would be in them, and never killed or injured anyone.
Then they blew it up a third time.
Juggalos are pretty out there. Huffing nitrous, and drinking shitty beer and root beer? And they are super proud of it. I’m pretty sure there’s meth involved. I don’t think they do much harm to anybody but themselves, and maybe anybody they influence into becoming a juggalo. But man, what a weird group of people.
I’ve known a handful of juggalos. I can’t claim that the ones I’ve met are necessarily representative of them as a whole.
But I will say that overall the ones I’ve met have been really solid people. Not the brightest bulbs out there, but also very aware of that fact.
I think the best way to think of them is they’re the weird kids you went to school with who weren’t smart enough to be nerds. They’re a pretty welcoming and friendly group as long as you give them some basic respect, and they really look out for each other. There have been two occasions where one has literally offered the shirt off his back.
Some of them definitely have some drug issues, but the ones I’ve met are mostly just regular stoners in clown makeup, most of them haven’t even been big drinkers.
Juggalos get a bad rap, but I think it’s mostly a handful of loud assholes making all the rest of them look bad, I’ve never had a bad interaction with one and I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
I’d back this up entirely, I know none of them well, but I’ve met a bunch and none that I’ve met land outside your characterization.
In fact the awareness, like you said, of being both permanently “off the beaten path”, but not usefully so and basically involuntarily - that’s such a common thread, and yep I’ve seen those folks be super generous, too.
Idk I’m ready to start treating juggalos almost as a protected class of some kind lmao, juggalo hate seems to come exclusively in the “I’ve never really met one but they seem gross” variety.
Maybe a fun way to think about it - give me a choice between dinner with any random juggalo vs dinner with any random American voter, if I really think about it, rolling those dice, I’m picking the rando juggalo every time…
So I sorta see this with subcultures that get negative attention. Back when being gay was looked at as bad generally in society every gay man I met (so uncloseted) was generaly very nice and like you describe with juggalos. As it became more accepted more and more where willing to come out of the closet and now I would not say the typical gay man I meet (I say man because I have not met a whole lot of gay women) is just typical of anyone. Most nice enough, some jerks. I have seen that in furry interactions now a days. Generally nice if you accept them as they are.
Interesting observation! To rephrase, sounds like you’re saying that for a persecuted subculture, the vocally “out” members behave almost like polite ambassadors for the rest of the group lol
Kinda. My theory is its kinda a combination of people who are out have to be strong and kind while jerks just won’t come out till its safe. I by no means am saying people who come out later are jerks just that as a percentage they will be larger than earlier on.
Yeah, makes sense and sounds like the kinda thing sociologists have a word for probably lol
probably. I mean im just a rando making observations with no method so maybe I just have to small a pool of experience and im all wrong.
One of my former best mates is a juggalo, and let me tell you, if you e got a problem they’re absolutely the guys you want at your back. Every single one I’ve ever met has been a stand up sort.
Honestly that doesn’t seem that weird. People hanging out and having a good time together with the use of drugs?
Wall Street finance bros do the same thing and I find that way more problematic
I like Faygo red pop tho. I’m glad the brand hasn’t been dragged with the cult.
Nobody talks about or looks at Faygo without thinking of juggalos. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Fair enough. I meant that the Faygo company isn’t as deep in the ax-wielders as Timbs are in the rap community. They produce their full range still & sometimes make new flavors.
They’re still a good brand, is what I’m saying.
Space deniers.
They are a sub-set of flat earthers. Not all flat earthers are space deniers, but every space denier I’ve seen is a flat earther.
Some of the more prominent ones like Level Earth Observer spend innumerable hours picking apart International Space Station live footage as “fake”. Things like space rocket launches need to be picked apart to absurd degrees as well. Every camera glitch, every stutter, every little movement is hyper-analyzed and declared to be a fraud.
I find it all fascinating. Some of these deniers put forth their own lay theories, which are usually very Biblical in bent, but many of them like LEO will twist themselves into incoherent knots refusing to admit they have a viewpoint and that they are “just asking questions” despite pushing back in a very particular way to all the answers they get.
Some of them like “CC from New York, Westchester County” are just totally off the deep end, not even playing word games, just conspiratorially ranting without even internal consistency.
I’ve only ever interacted with a space denier directly once and it was as equally interesting as it was frustrating.
There’s a big flat earth/space denier overlap with other fringe ideas like young earth creationism which gets you into Kent Hovind territory. That’s interesting in its own way but also full of slime.
I once did some research on flat earthers for a project. I was trying to assemble the most consistent interpretation I could in order to play the devil’s advocate in a fun debate. It turns out that space denial is quite helpful at preserving coherent physics if you assume the Earth is flat. The Earth can be accelerating upwards to create gravity, which violates special relativity but that’s nbd at this scale. Other planets can also be flat, which makes things easy too. The sun can’t set, but there’s no way around that one.
In my experience, the most irrefutably evidence that the Earth is round is the simple stuff like astronomy. Simple things like the path the sun and stars take from two points on the globe basically ends all debate. Flat Earthers always have crackpot ideas for things you can’t easily observe yourself, but you can really catch them with proof they can see with their naked eyes.
Of course, the easiest simplest killshot on flat earth is the sun setting below the horizon. Flat earth and space deniers tend to say the sun is well, something that’s not a star, but more importantly that it stays in the sky and circles further away from a given location on earth until we can’t see it from a given location anymore while it stays overhead. To think that is to deny easily observed reality of it setting below the horizon. They just wordsalad about perspective until the conversation ends.
One aspect of flat earth/space denial that keeps me engaged is learning from the responses that educated people give to their questions. Details of space programs and astronomy that wouldn’t come up often except to answer flat earth/space denial.
Interesting that one of the more popular weather forecasting sites is named after a terrorist group
I’ve been using WU for probably 15 years. It’s been one of the most consistent weather sites and apps as far as decent quantity and quality of data. I had completely forgotten about the terrorist group with the same name. Now I’ll never be able to unsee it.
Owned by IBM now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jäger_Movement was a Finnish political movement whose aim was to liberate the Grand Duchy of Finland from the Russian Empire. It grew into a trained military battalion and formed a core of the White army in the Finnish Civil War.
One of the biggest reasons why Finland has been an independent country for 109 years.
I’ve always found puritanical groups quite interesting. They seem to evolve out of any subculture be it religious or not. Take the ‘straight edge’ culture, a group of hardcore punk kids who rebelled against the excesses of the punk underground and swear an oath against drinking, drugs and casual sex.
On the religious front you have groups like the shakers. An offshoot of the quakers whose utopian vision prohibited all sex. As a consequence the movement all but died out as they couldn’t reproduce to create new members!
I think the Bruderhof people are the most authentic Christians in the modern world. They are communist (live in community without personal property) and are a cult of Christ.
I’ve changed my mind - I just remembered The ‘Zizians’ cult. They are absolutely the strangest group I’ve ever heard about.
Oh hey I just finished part 2 of the BtB episodes about them
EDIT: lol that’s part 1 you linked to, I assumed it was Strange Aeons
My dad was part of a masonic lodge later on in life and, what I got from meeting a couple of his colleagues and talking to him about it, it really wasn’t that interesting. It’s basically a social space for older men with some connections/money and a lot of rituals (which my dad described very giddily, lol, the superficial fool). Most likely influential in some way (as any group of uhh “funny” old men with reach can be) but kinda meh… it didn’t seem like he learned anything transcendental or important from his time there.
The free masons originally grew as a support and trust network.
It used to be that traveling was FAR less common. Consequently, travellers were seen as suspect. One of the major exceptions was masons. They would have to relocate to big projects e.g. a castle. They would stay long enough that the lack of trust was a problem, but not long enough to properly overcome it.
End result, they started vouching for each other. A local groups would vouch for the newcomers. They would introduce them and stop them getting ripped off.
Furthermore, stonemasonry was a dangerous trade. It was easy for a mason to be killed far from home. They clubbed together to support the families of members, as well as the disabled.
Wrap this up in Christianity based traditions and you have the masonic free masons. An early cooperative support and social networking group.
yeah it’s also my impression. i’ve never been with the freemasons but from my impression as an outsider, it’s a very outdated structure. not sure whether they still don’t allow women in. yeah, it’s basically a socializing circle for rich folks. lots of rituals, but no deeper spirituality as far as i can tell. you can probably learn more from 6 months at a 3-person philosophy circle than from a decade at the freemasons.
No idea what your dad’s like, but I reckon we in the secular west are write off rituals way too easily. They can have lots of value - silly fun not least of all, but also community building and meaning-making.
Uh, it’s very interesting if you’re into allegorical reinterpretations of universal deism and some esoteric rituals. But, yeah, the dinners are pretty much the highlight.
Yeah lots of meh in that kind of thing in my experience.
