conspiracy theories are consistently just objectively cooler and more awesome than reality, like when conservatives start shouting about luxury gay space communism as if that’s supposed to be bad.
I wish i lived in the world where we could inject people with something that turns their DNA into RNA and somehow they continue living, that’s rad as hell.
We live in a boring dystopia
That’s the thing that gets me about conspiracy theories, they’re always way too interesting to be real. There are real conspiracies out there but they’re almost always boring because the last thing they want is to draw attention.
But honestly, how do you talk to those people? They’re so caught up in their us-versus-them mentality and think they have the monopoly on truth, that I don’t see any way of convincing them that they’re not only making a potentially fatal mistake but are a danger to those around them.
You don’t. Ignore em and walk away.
In my experience, telling them I got an organ transplant and got every vaccination available just makes them do the “well I’m just not sure about it is all” like they dont want to commit to it to my face.
I just don’t bother TBH. Same with all these alt-right type people who keep trying to start pointless arguments online, I just ignore them. You can’t combat nonsense with facts, they’re not going to learn anything or change their views, I’m certainly not going to come around to whatever they’re peddling, all they want to do is get their little dopamine hit by blasting bullshit at me until I give up because they think that’s what winning is. It’s a waste of time and energy as far as I’m concerned.
There are times when it’s useful to engage these people, though never for the purpose of convincing them. Sometimes, there’s an opportunity to provide a counterpoint for anyone else “listening” who hasn’t yet been sucked into crazy-town, to help keep them away from that path.
I like to put it that “science education isn’t a cure, it’s a vaccine”; you can’t realistically change the mind of someone (especially of a stranger) who’s already bought in to a mindset like this; but in some cases, you can help prevent it from spreading.
That said, if you’re not particularly good at e.g. public speaking, or science outreach, or whatever, you can end up playing into a troll’s hands (assuming you’re interacting with an intentional troll and not just a deluded person). So it can be tricky, and personally I’m not very good at it.
While I mostly agree on the topic of fascists, with anti-vaxers just ignoring them basically means leaving them to die and potentially take a bunch of people with them, which seems rather cruel.
Even with fascists it boils down to hoping that whoever else they encounter is sufficiently immunised to not fall for their bullshit. Also less than ideal.what’s the alternative? if somebody can’t be reasoned with should we just force-vaccinate them? then you’re just providing them with much needed conspiracy confirmation from their perspective. if they’re so far down the antivaccine rabbit hole, best thing to do is distance yourself (physically, too) and let nature play out. no sense trying to save them who don’t want to be saved.
propaganda (where I am including fascists now) is also tricky due to the built in failsafe that ‘if they disagree with us, we are right, there’s the proof’. how do you even combat that? with vaccines, fence-sitters might be swayed by the potential risk to health if they don’t take it and some survival instinct may kick in, but propaganda is free to take up with almost no risk to immediate survival.
We may not be allowed to forcibly vaccinate people, but I’d argue we could quarantine them. If someone has a history of attacking people we lock them away to protect the majority.
If someone refuses to get vaccinated without compelling medical reason, thus deliberately increasing their risk of an infection, and don’t wear PPE, thus deliberately increasing the risk they pose to those around them, that is a very similar situation, albeit with less violence.The failsafe in fascist reasoning only works if you have no understanding of logic, which obviously they don’t. But yeah, it’s like playing chess with a pigeon.
It has been a couple of years since the worst of the COVID pandemic happened.
Shouldn’t there be literally millions upon millions of people dropping dead from the vaccines by now if the anti-vaxx predictions were even remotely accurate??
I’d love to see some news story about this. Go back and dig up all the outlandish claims these morons said would happen and then follow that up with reality. I know no reporter would touch this story because that might involve doing some actual work and fact-checking of people. Can’t have that.
they will, be patient, it just takes [life expectancy] years for it to happen. then they’ll be proven right! just you wait 70-90 years and see!
They just make up vaccine deaths. If anyone dies for any reason, heart attack, stroke, hit by a bus, they blame the vaccine.
They just make up vaccine deaths instead. If anyone dies for any reason, heart attack, stroke, hit by a bus, and they, like the majority of the population, happen to be vaccinated (or even if they’re not), they just call it a vaccine death.
Hell I took the j&j vaccine right around when it was released to the public and I’m still kicking. Doctor says I’m healthy and everything.
But I’m also a paid actor and I’m lying and I actually grew a third arm that only reacts to the soundtrack from the Scott Pilgrim movie so take this with a grain of salt.
You no longer have DNA
Bitch, it’s a vaccine, not a letal dose of radiation
People like this can’t be talked with, since they missed their lessons about what DNA even is.
Yeah this is a hard thing to broach on people because the whole DNA, how it is transcribed into mRNA, how that’s dealt with inside the ribosomes with tRNA, and so forth. That’s a good month worth of ninth grade science. That’s a month’s worth of Monday through Friday, one hour each day, for one month.
And even then, there’s a bit of background that works into all of that. Like the various organelles and what their purpose is inside the cells. The various parts of the human immune system and how they work together to fight infections. So there’s a lot of people who have a very flawed understanding of ninth grade science and you cannot just simply overcome that lack of knowledge in a single conversation. It’s not a single conversation kind of knowledge, it’s something that a good part of one’s secondary education is devoted to and if you missed it then, it’s really hard to go back and regain it.
The wild ramblings that sprung from this pandemic really shows that the education system has failed a lot of people. The why it has failed so spectacularly is a much, much bigger conversation. But all of this craziness that has been created in the wake of the pandemic is a complete failure of very basic science. And I think it’s a sobering moment for all of us to soak in.
It’s a good month of science teaching for ninth graders to get it, for these people it’s probably far longer
If you could trust they took you at your word you could give a decent explanation of RNA transcription in a few minutes with something like:
“DNA has two copies of all the instructions for making the proteins a cell needs, but it’s locked inside the nucleus at the center. Thankfully there’s something that makes a new copy, which is sent out of the nucleus to tell other parts what to do. It’s like making a copy of a recipe in a cookbook and mailing it to someone so they know how to make it.”
You don’t need a month of ninth grade science to grok that, you just need to be open to learning new information.
For the OOP, all they need to know to avoid the thought presented is two things: 1) you need to make proteins continually and 2) DNA serves as a template for making proteins. That’s all they literally need to know to realize being without DNA is deadly.
The problem is if they knew that then they’d make better conspiracies rather than accept reality, it’s not about knowledge it’s about finding an excuse to reject sensible solutions to real problems so they can play the victim and do whatever they feel like
Yes i have become a virus, destroyer of cells
You were the Chosen One! It was said that you would destroy the virus, not join them!
OMNOMNOM CELL MEAT
