Ask Lemmy

The benedryl abusers. https://www.reddit.com/r/DPH/

I can only assume these people can't get their hands on any other kind of high and are desperate. After a certain amount you start seeing spiders.

The Gadget Cult worships a 90s cartoon mouse

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.

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.

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.

online, stumbled upon chronic lyme community at least on 2 different forums(i believed i had lyme one time as i had encountered with a tick but wasnt bitten years before, until i realized most of them had some sort mental issue going on) because i was suffering from some unusual neurological conditions, which lyme may cause.

they believe lyme isnt curable according to them and can explain any range of symptoms, even if its not related to lyme. plus they believe it is endemic in other countries where lyme doesnt occur. and any tick species can carry it. like they believed every skin rash that may look like a bullyesys as a sign of lyme.

they also ended up harassing and issuing death threat against the ACTUAL infectious disease specialist who discovered lyme, because he was contradicting chronic lyme believers. and mostly its midwestern white women who believes this stuff. now to that end, theres a whole industry apparently furthering the delusions. now draws in all sorts of people.

Lyme doctors, naturopaths will try to prey on people by convincing them to take a lyme specific test from a well known questionable company that makes these blood tests. and then they have the LYME mds prescribe them actual Long term antibiotics, months or years on it. they believe the side effects is causing is treating the "chronic lyme" symptoms. at the same time they also take supplements "extraction from plants" as supplemental treatment, again it causes unknown side effects, so they think its treating it. they are getting constant thrush infections, from the ANTIBIOTICS. and the lyme mds, also dont take insurance, red flag here. thier family members have reported, some of them suffered some permanent neurological damage from taking antibiotics for too long, or some wierd plant supplement. and guess which politics they side with.(and this was pre trumps 1st term). very dangerous as it involves MDs preying on people, prescribing them actual meds to things they may not have. and furthering the delusions of "chronic lyme" people.

also any attempt to confront or question chronic lyme will draw thier ire.

basically health conspiracy.

In the early days of the Internet - mid-90s or so - my buddy happened upon a community of "gainers" online. They are apparently gay men into feeding each other and being obese. Also typically opposed to body hair.

Interesting that one of the more popular weather forecasting sites is named after a terrorist group

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

Just an fyi the black Hebrew Israelites have a history of some pretty problematic beliefs and history. The Southern poverty law center (they keep track of hate groups in the U.S.) have a write up on them.

The word interesting is doing a lot of work here.

On one hand flat earthers are very interesting. Stupid the stupidest but interesting.

On the other hand it'd be better if there were no flat earthers at all for them to be interesting in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A4ger_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.