this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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Awesome, I didn’t reply yesterday because I had too much to say so here is a simple thank you to avert a common never-reply scenario :-)
Well, just a quick dictation, too. Apparently I forgot that stars were involved with astrology at all, so I slapped my forehead and searched YouTube. And I was hoping to find a skeptic who steel-manned astrology, but that would be pretty odd to spend your time doing such a thing if you were a skeptic. Unless, of course, it was teeing up an explanation for a teardown. But anyway, I listened to some goofball talking super seriously about astrology, and he made a claim about celebrity star charts and said that Iron Man, Robert Downey Juney, had foreseen that he would have a big change in his life. And then, sure enough, Iron Man came out and changed his career. Wow, great job, astrology. You nailed it. Once energy is just about free, and so is compute, it would be pretty easy to disprove that line of thinking by feeding the world's celebrities into a system and analyzing all of their little charts. Anyway, I was only thinking about birth months and the idea of the positions of balls of gas having meaningful impacts on all of our lives is quite the stretch. Please excuse the lack of editing here. Thank you.
LOL.
Astrology, ultimately etymylogically derives from... astron, meaning 'star' in Greek.
It literally means 'study of the stars'.
hahahah!
But uh yeah, it is essentially impossible to 'steel man' astrology, because pretty much every practitioner of it has their own cust version of it, similar to... how one is supposed to use or read Tarot cards.
Then you've got a whole cottage industry of cranks, cranking out either 100% or 90% made up bullshit as their own spin on how astrology 'works'.
Like, historically, you can trace various sort of family trees of actual astrological doctrines, but in the last 50 years, so many people have made up so much nonsense that you basically have to take any particular astrologer and ask them what they believe, because they won't agree with another one, or they'll just tell you that part of astrology is that it is a personal, mystical experience and practice, so there will be 'reasonable variation of opinion' amongst 'experts'.
It is delusional narcissist nonsense that functions as an identity for people who have not otherwise managed to build or acquire one.
There are a lot of similarities between, and sometimes direct crossover with, actual literal cult leaders, and 'very serious' astrologers.