Astrology is bullshit. The apparent positions of stars and planets have no bearing on personalities, sex drives, fears, or anything else like that.

To think otherwise is egocentric and laughable.

Oy, the astrologers. Stars that are so far away from us, from each other, and may possibly not even exist anymore have some sort of influence on human traits.

My dog is a Libra. Going by him, I will never date a Libra as apparently they are extraordinarily resistant to housebreaking. Now I have arbitrarily dismissed 1/12th of the male population. I'm brilliant at this!

No, astrology is all entirely bullshit. A really great reading is not more valid, it is a better performance. Don't let people bully you into reinforcing their bullshit for them Dan. Well, except for me of course.

@4 - Did you read Dan's postscripts? He isn't reinforcing anyone's bs.

Never thought I'd find myself cheering a Savage Love comment (or pair of comments) on statistical significance, but - YAY!!

Crucifix shaped dildo right here:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qbekjp/these-religious-sex-toys-are-disturbing-and-hilarious

Not sure if it glows in the dark. That may depend on how hard you rub it.

@3: I did the same thing with cold reading in elementary school and tarot cards.

I don't get why anyone thinks anecdotes are convincing. I'm glad it's useful for them but there are a great many things that are "true" to someone but have no basis in fact or objective reality.

Why the backpedaling on astrology? I missed the part in that letter where anything resembling evidence was offered. It's all bullshit.

If your dog and cat are both circling the house in the same direction, and you put a go-pro on your dog, it looks like the cat slowly gets closer, then dramatically shoots backwards. That doesn't mean your cat has done something freaky; it means that the dog caught up to and passed the cat. And that's what "retrograde motion" is. The false perception, of the ancients, that a planet was (Holy Batman!) stopping and changing direction! If you only have the "go pro" view, that's an understandable misconception. And it might reasonably be seen as something that must have meaning.

Back when most people didn't read, write, or use much by way of written numbers, only the wisest, most thoughtful people would be looking for answers to this so-called "retrograde motion." Any correlations that they thought they saw were no doubt given outside weight--by other, less learned people.

But once we realized (thank you, Copernicus) that the earth and the (other) planets all circled the sun--once we stopped being tied down to the dog collar, go pro view of the heavens--there was no longer any reason to read meaning into "retrograde" periods (nor any of the other "strange" things that we thought we were seeing, back when we didn't actually know what we were seeing).

@9 read the asterisk at the very bottom of the column.

@10: Thank you, JoySays, for that explanation. I've always heard of Mercury being in retrograde but never knew what that meant.

Did you ever read a book or watch a movie and think "Wow, this is so profoundly speaking to me right now" and you related it to things going on in your life, and it helped you see things a little differently and maybe change your behavior? Obviously the book or movie wasn't made expressly to speak to you, but your perspective and interpretation made it useful to you. That's astrology. It's bullshit to think it was made just for you (or people like you), but that doesn't mean it has zero value.

@9: Politeness.

@13: "but that doesn't mean it has zero value."

People confuse assigned personal value to it being applicable to anything and everything else.