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Bringing social justice to the stars

“I’m basically an angry feminist who just happens to be into astrology and healing.”

Nicholas, 42, is transforming horoscopes from generalizations about finding true love and stumbling into financial good fortune to pointed calls to action with a left-leaning, social-justice agenda. Based in Los Angeles, she has more than 100,000 followers on Instagram and a blog with as many as one million monthly readers. She weaves activism into the majority of her writing, appealing to a generation particularly interested in issues like racism, sexism and gun control.
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Nicholas’s popularity owes as much to the Internet’s ability to foster communities around niche interests as it does to the current political and social landscape. And for those who’ve tapped into this unique convergence, it’s good business. The psychic services industry, which includes astrology and palmistry, among other services, is worth $2 billion annually, per data from industry analysis firm IBIS World. It grew by two percent between 2011 and 2016, but Nicholas, who offers astrology workshops through her website for $38 to $48 a pop, says she’s seen demand for her classes increase by more than half in the last year alone. Things are becoming so busy that Nicholas recently posted a job listing for a personal assistant on her Instagram story. The annual salary for a six-hour, 5-day work week is $60,000.
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Le sigh. Clearly this is pretty lucrative if she can afford to pay for a $60,000 personal assistant.
 
theprestige said:
Can someone explain succinctly what's she's doing, that's so interesting?
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Not really. It doesn't appeal to me all, but that's kinda why I'm a member of this forum and not some other one for people who are into this sort of stuff.

Astrology appeals to a certain set of people.
"Social justice" activism appeals to a certain set of people.

She's going for that niche in the Venn diagram where these two sets overlap. Is that a good enough explanation?
 
Puppycow said:
Not really. It doesn't appeal to me all, but that's kinda why I'm a member of this forum and not some other one for people who are into this sort of stuff.

Astrology appeals to a certain set of people.
"Social justice" activism appeals to a certain set of people.

She's going for that niche in the Venn diagram where these two sets overlap. Is that a good enough explanation?
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It's likely to be a bigger overlap than many people expect. Neopaganism is rife with all kinds of woo, and Wicca is built on a pretty solid foundation of female empowerment. You'd be hard pressed to find a neopagan who wasn't also a feminist. It was while I was going through my neopagan phase that I studied astrology, along with tarot and runes.
 
The woman's just another neoliberal capitalist who has found success being a scam artist just like many others. The new American Dream, apparently.
 
theprestige said:
I asked for succinct, not cryptic.
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She's an astrologer with a quite large social media presence who's really into progressive causes in an almost comically stereotypical manner. There's a line about how she doesn't like the painting the hotel lobby because its just a bunch of old white men.

The story I read comes across as, "Here's this really important cause I care deeply about, so I'm going to pile a bunch of ******** in top of it!" followed by "You should all get out there and protest because mercury is rising!"

If I were a progressive, it would drive me nuts.

It kind of reminds of environmentalist who are really into organic or bio-dynamic farming.
 
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theprestige said:
I asked for succinct, not cryptic.
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While I can't say what she's doing is interesting, it appears she's claiming to explain the current socio-political BadStuffs via astrology. Vague bits like :

Nicholas used last November’s mercury retrograde to urge her followers to contact the FCC prior to its vote on net neutrality. She wrote about the new moon in Scorpio representing the need to heal during the initial wave of sexual assault accusations in Hollywood.
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They also compare her to others :

There’s Barry Perlman, who’s written about Mars in the context of queer politics, and the AstroTwins, who write regularly for Refinery29, ELLE and their own website, Astrostyle. Following the 2016 presidential election, the AstroTwins, Ophira and Tali Edut, wrote a piece suggesting that the outcome of the vote could be attributed to the fact that the month before “aggressive Mars and powermonger Pluto were both in Capricorn, the sign that rules the patriarchy.”
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So rather than the traditional astrology claims like "you should consider a career change because the moon is in the seventh house" it's "we live in a rape culture because Jupiter is rising" or other such rubbish.

There were a whole lot of words in that article for an exceedingly small amount of information, and what little there was was the expected ********.
 
Social media in general doesn't seem to foster much in the way of critical thinking, so I wouldn't be surprised if the trend took off. Seems like it's easy for stupid concepts to get taken up and given some life thanks to the internet (e.g. 'free bleeding' which got started as a joke).

Personally I'd get a kick out of it if people were to start using astrology to deflect criticisms of their WrongThink.

"My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's Tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am a tone-policing, hetero-normative gender essentialist."
 
For you kids out there, it was a minor scandal in the Reagan years when we found out that Nancy listened to astrologer Jean Dixon. From what I recall it would occasionally result Reagan's schedule being altered to accommodate the stars. This was of course denied by the white house and taken to mean that Jean Dixon was determining US foreign policy by the left.
 
ahhell said:
For you kids out there, it was a minor scandal in the Reagan years when we found out that Nancy listened to astrologer Jean Dixon. From what I recall it would occasionally result Reagan's schedule being altered to accommodate the stars. This was of course denied by the white house and taken to mean that Jean Dixon was determining US foreign policy by the left.
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There's also the time Orange County, CA went bankrupt because the treasurer was using astrologers and psychics for interest rate predictions . I'm sure the reason the predictions were faulty was the particular style of astrology used wasn't sufficiently intersectional.
 
Joe Random said:
"My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's Tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am a tone-policing, hetero-normative gender essentialist."
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The synergism of intersectionality and astrology can compound the number of possible gender expressions beyond what we had previously thought possible.

Q: "Are you a man or a woman?"

A: "I am Mercury retrograde, Venus ascending."
 
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