this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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Conspiracy theories are popular because people often prefer easy answers to reality. And "gays womens disableds bad" is a very easy answer, as it absolves [thanks maccentric] people that are not in those groups from blame.
Same with religion
I'm bad because I don't love the people belonging to your group? Sounds like you're a bigot. And a troll.
Some actual conspiracies being true, the world burning and governments doing shit like dragnet surveillance doesn't help either.
We need to restore trust in governments, but for that, we need to get governments we can trust.
Which isn't going to happen if enough people vote along the lines of completely insane conspiracy theories. The candidate who says "I'm going to turn off the Jewish space lasers!!!" is almost certainly not going to be the one who makes the lives of normal people better through empathetic listening.
*absolves
This sounds weird to me. What is easier than just trusting the official information? This is exactly what conspiracy theorists are complaining about actually. That ordinary people just trust the information they are given by credible sources.
If anything, people who believe the standard information are the laziest, no?
So the "easy answers" part sounds a bit weird. The easy answers are right there on TV and the internet on the first search hit.
It's more that those answers don't make sense to conspiracy theorists. I guess you can tell them to get a degree in science and then it will make sense to them, but that won't happen.
But it's interesting how others can appearently explain how things work to conspiracy theorists in a way so they feel they understand and don't doubt the information. Because it makes intuitive sense to them.
Maybe too much of science is hidden behind complicated layers that normal people just don't understand and can't understand.
"Easy answers" in that they're simple, fit into their existing worldview, and don't require them to change anything. Not easy as in the easiest to find. That's why it's a conspiracy, the simple answers that they want to be correct are being hidden from them.
Conspiracy theories are easy answers because they lack the nuance of reality and they present an attractive narrative. There's good guys, bad guys, underdogs, secrets, etc. In contrast reality is full of grey areas, requires a lot of thought, will make you empathize with those you thought you'd blame and vice versa. Facing facts is hard work.
I don't know if it's contradicting anything. Bad guys with power get together and plan things all the time.
It really isn't very hard to keep things under cover either. A lot of coverups goes unnoticed for many years until some whistleblower steps forward and gets punished severely. Specially the US strikes down on whistleblowers very, very hard.
How many are ongoing right now? I'm guessing a lot. Because people are no longer even looking for it. That worries me. I think people are fooling themselves that there are no big plans carried out, and events are just random. Nobody intends to do anything, and things just happen. Makes no sense to me at all.
.
It's easier to say "This doesn't make sense, so it must be wrong" than it is to say "This doesn't make sense, so I must learn more to figure out how it could make sense."
It's easier to say "I know more than everyone else because I ~~am critical thinker~~ watch YouTube videos that express views that go against mainstream knowledge" than it is to actually have the skills to engage in critical thinking, and to have the knowledge to be able to determine a good source of information from a bad one.
See, the problem here is that I actually DID do that, and it's explicitly because I did that, that I know for a fact that the "official" sources are completely (and seemingly deliberately) wrong. Like how the initial imperial college model used to predict a 7% covid death rate was wildly irresponsible, or how "social distancing" and plexiglass barriers and cloth masks do not actually do what the "credible official sources" were insisting they do, or how literally changing the definition of vaccine so they could call a novel genetic therapy a vaccine is simply wildly unethical.
The problem is that official sources can be every bit as corrupt as any other human organization, and our society USED TOO have a sober recognition of that fact, which is why modern western society was founded on the idea that government officials are public servants rather than rulers.
And then random idiots online tell me to go get the education I already have, because they're simply parroting what people they've never even met told them, and they believe it so strongly that they assert the existence of a world they know nothing about.
I thought everyone knew that limited plexiglass barriers and stickers on the floor did nothing.
I do remember arguing with people on the internet that most of the studies about masks were flawed because they tended to include people who didn't wear them properly in the "mask-wearing" category. Personally, I went with higher-spec masks like KF94, and they're likely to be something I use regularly during flu season commutes.
The outrage about the vaccines were fascinating though. The goalposts kept getting moved when the conspiracy theories were wrong. I remember people saying that after a year, everyone who took the vaccines will have dropped dead...lmao
Plenty of places still have them.
Masks aren't even intended to prevent airborne disease spread. They're designed specifically to prevent spittle and skin flakes/hair from falling on whatever is directly in front of you, which is why they were called "surgical" masks not so very long ago, because it protected the open wounds a surgeon was working on.
Lastly, once again, they literally just changed the official definition of vaccine so they could associate their novel genetic therapy with a completely different established medicine. If there's a more open example of corruption I've never seen it.
The spittle can contain things that cause the spread of disease, which (as you said) masks help with. And masks with higher specs block smaller particles. So if everyone's wearing properly-fitted good quality masks in a room, there's far fewer particles being ejected into the air of that room than if nobody were wearing any masks.
Regarding vaccines, the definitions of things change all the time as technology progresses, so even if it were true that the definition changed, it doesn't concern me. mRNA vaccines were being researched well before the covid vaccines, but there wasn't a big push until the pandemic. Without the big push, it can be hard to get funding and such...which can be common in science.
I did the same. Covid was the year where the official flu disappeared as a reason for deaths, and everything became covid deaths.
Also if you died for any reason and was found to have covid inside, it was classified as a covid death anyway.
So I saw them drive up the statistics enormously to ridiculous levels. People here on Lemmy don't agree though and gets upset about this point of view.
To them covid was a global killer, very dangerous, just like the media and the government said. But when I look at statistics, I hardly see any deaths in people younger than 50. This is official statistics for my country at least.
But yeah, the US has/had so many incredibly unhealthy people so of course they got hit hard. Italy also for the same reasons.
How is what you're imagining any better than simply "gays womens diableds good" as a lazy and simple answer, so you can put the blame for society's problems on other people, and take no responsibility for learning and growing as people yourselves?
But this is more case of "gays women disabled people exist"
Assholes: "how could you!? All stories should be about me, and only me!"
When they are rarely or never the bad guys, they are saying more than just that they exist.
It's impossible to regularly be the bad guy if you are not regularly an acting participant of the story, or even in a position of power.
Do you actually believe Princess Peach is "women are better" propaganda? Nice stats you got...
On the one hand, having representation limited to villainous roles is bad. (See early depictions of black people and think about "Cowboys vs. Indians")
On the other hand...there are plenty of women in villainous roles. I can also think of a few notable gay and disables villains.
Hell, Breaking Bad is a great example of having all of them, and even though it aired before "woke" became a bad word to some people, nobody ever complained about it being too progressive or anything.
Basically every Disney animated movie? Sure the villains weren't boning other dudes or anything, but there was a lot of "queer coding" going on.
The trick is to not imply that someone is a villain because of their gender, gayness, ethnicity, etc. Villain that happens to be gay, whatever. Villain that's gay and really creepy about it and seemingly motivated by their gayness to be evil... yeah that's really bad.
But I think things have improved a lot. Giancarlo Esposito is the villain in basically everything now, and I don't think anyone is complaining. The dude is just really good at playing villains, so why not? It's not his ethnicity that makes him a villain, it's just that he's really good at playing a cold and calculating sociopath and people enjoy his performance.
How is what you're doing not a lazy, oversimplified excuse to avoid having to actually look at others as real people?
Threads like this are really helpful for identifying unreachable people (yes, I mean you)
Why is it wrong to say women, gay people, and people with disabilities are good?
In media, there are villains who are women, gay, or who have disabilities, so it's not like they're exclusively "good guys"...
It's bad because, exactly as you have displayed, people will hyper focus on trigger words, while ignoring everything else that gets said.
Ok, but your original comment was pretty much a non-sequitor.
Saying that it's bad to say that those groups of people are bad doesn't mean that anyone is saying that those groups of people are good as a simple answer. But frankly, saying those groups are good is probably a better answer than saying they're bad.
We have homophobes, misogynists, and ableists, so there are definitely people who explicitly think those groups are bad.
Meanwhile, the people advocating for the rights of those groups are not saying that all people in those groups are virtuous and can do no wrong... they're advocating for equal rights and opportunities.
Besides. I'm fine with "women are good" being the starting point rather than "women are bad"...lol
It's only a non-sequitur if you hyperfixate on the part inside quotes while ignoring the central thrust: That attempting to reduce large populations down to simple catch phrases will never end well in the long run. Too many people argue fervently over how we should label broad segments of society, to the point that they attack anyone suggesting that they shouldn't be doing that by assuming those people must just want the opposite, but equally reductive, perspective to be true.
As I recall, the comment you replied to said that we shouldn't label broad segments of the population in a certain way. Then you said we shouldn't label broad segments of the population in a different way.
As I mentioned, homophobia, misogyny, and ableism are all well-documented phenomenon. The original comment suggested those things are bad. Since they involve labeling broad strokes of the population as bad (specifically, gay people, women, and people with disabilities), I take it you're opposed to those things?