I love him to death, I really do. He and his family have been very good to us for about 10 years.
But my landlord is a major conspiracy-theorist. It was cute (albeit stupid) when it was stuff like “ancient aliens”, but now it’s The Big Lie, anti-vaxxing, alternate theories about who was responsible for January 6, and origins of the coronavirus.
He said the other day that Dr. Fauci bears responsibility for 4 million people losing their lives from the coronavirus, and should be executed.
His conspiracy theories aren’t cute anymore. People are dying out there, every day! These conspiracy-theories have gone mainstream. The Republican Party doesn’t have the slightest grasp on reality. And as we speak, he and his wife are at a three-hour meeting on election fraud, which is another way of saying, “Wah wah wah, Trump got cheated out of the election; how do we prevent it from happening again! I know! By giving ourselves the power to overturn any election results we don’t like!”
We are in serious danger of losing our democracy, and it hurts me deeply to see two good people caught up in the middle of believing all this bullshit.
The cognitive dissonance is staggering. COVID is hoax, not real, an attack by Chy NA, no worse than the flu and Fauci’s fault for 4 million dead (because even if you die from a hangnail they call it covid for the money.)
I was going to say that Luke Willson, former tight end for the Seattle Seahawks, was a great and fun CT guy. At least the stuff he said out loud (in radio interviews) was pretty harmless. He’s sure that the moon landing was faked and has some weird ideas about the sun, but nothing that was dangerous.
Covid conspiracies, anti-vaxxers, election fraud folks, these people are currently and explicitly dangerous. Not because of their beliefs or words but their actions. Running around unmasked, refusing to get the shot, and storming the capitol. And they get nutjobs like MJT elected. Not to mention the racism and other bigotry baked into their CTs.
I would argue that it is dangerous if he actually believes it (or people believe that he does), because it validates the practice of ignoring mountains of evidence and believing in nonsense. If it’s clear to everyone that he is treating these things as a joke then that limits the damage, but it doesn’t sound like he was doing that from your description.
Honestly it’s hard to tell. He claimed to be serious but he is such a goofball, who knows? And the hosts always had a good time with it. Nobody was taking it seriously.
We seriously need to consider whether or not a substance or viral entity is causing widespread brain damage. Maybe it’s something in Cheese Whiz or in the clear coating on Crocs. Perhaps it’s transmitted by radio waves or spread by incestuous sex. Something sinister is going on and we need to act before it consumes us all.
My sister still blames Covid on the Governor for the state of Washington. She thinks he had it brought to the US to help his bid for president. Her proof is the first US citizen to die from Covid was a Washington resident. The fact that Jay Inslee ended his short run for president months before Covid hit the US means nothing.
I spent many years arguing against CTs, for this exact reason. I knew that wide-spread belief in CTs would eventually lead to the erosion of democracy. How can you have a real election when a significant fraction of the population bases their votes on utterly wrong information?
Too bad the anti-CT crowd seems to have lost this argument. 15+ years of effort on my part alone, and the problem has only gotten worse.
Right.
I mean, on the one hand I know the problem is that people don’t know how we know things and have no idea of skeptical reasoning. They believe things based on their gut and the (wrong) people they trust.
But still, many of the claims are pure lunacy on their face; I still can’t fathom how they get a critical mass of people believing this shit. Not to mention, as Ranch_Dip points out, that it’s often completely inconsistent with something they believed previously or even at the same time.
We haven’t lost the argument. Yes, the issue has gotten worse, and that sucks. But there is an upside: it is now much more obvious, and more obviously dangerous. There are tons of people and institutions in our society that now see it as something that needs to be fought. And the arguments we build in the trenches are their weapons.
I actually am hopeful that this sort of thing will lead to schools starting to teach critical thinking classes—and using it in the real world, not just schoolwork. It’s currently a national security concern that people stop falling for hoaxes.
It’s like all the talk about how it’s better to have the racists out in the open, and not hiding under the floorboards. Sunlight very well can be the best disinfectant.
Considering the shit show of four years of President Conspiracy Theorist, with the added benefit of a year and a half of significantly elevated death rates tacked on at the end of that, I shudder to think how bad it will have to get before this actually starts to effect enough of them to get them to actually open their eyes. 630,000 dead in the US apparently isn’t enough.
There’s the unnerving possibility that cranks* warning of 5G causing Covid and other serious ailments really are having their thought processes poisoned by EMF. Time to round them up and put them in spectrum-proof camps, uh, I mean clinics.
The SCP known as “Fox News” is currently uncontained. If you encounter Fox News and are alone or with other uninfected individuals immediately change the channel or turn it off. If there are infected individuals nearby then immediately leave the area. Turning off Fox News or changing the channel will enrage infected individuals. Many SCP agents have been infected.
I was recently in a place where Fox News was on, and due to the number of infected individuals (slightly more than half the state), I couldn’t turn it off. It was amazing. I learned about the “Crisis on the Border” and how there are thousands of people just waiting to sneak into the US across the southern border. The ones who do get in suffer extreme hardship and often die in the deserts. We need to stop them, for their own protection. Somebody should build a wall, or something.
If that was my only source of news, I might agree. I mean, the reporting was very much along the line of “we’re stopping them for their own good”. Of course, no mention of other ways to keep people from dying in the desert than just keeping them out.
Ugh, it’s every day now with him with “election fraud” this, and “the vaccine isn’t safe” that. He tried to tune in to The Pillow Guy’s Cyber Shitshow earlier; thankfully he gave up when the feed kept cutting out.
