[FruityCoconut]

There's a clever little meme floating about showing a perfectly normal, happy, healthy, unmasked family with the caption "conspiracy theorists" and then in the adjacent panel a visibly paranoid person with a mask and face shield captioned "normal person".

Cheap, but clever.

[notRobot]

Uh, this is probably a cultural thing, but I don't get it? Can you please explain it to me? As in, what's "cheap but clever" about it?

[itronitron]

Back in the day, pre-2020, conspiracy theorists were characterized as tending to avoid human contact and social interactions because they couldn't trust who was in on the conspiracy and happy families were characterized as normal people because there were a lot of them.

The meme highlights the big change in 2020 in which most people have accepted the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic and seek to reduce transmission risk by wearing a mask, avoiding close human contact and socially interactions. People that are not taking these precautions are justifying their actions to not wear masks by claiming that there is a conspiracy and that Covid-19 is all made up. Because they are not socially distancing or wearing masks they look like pre-2020 normal people, at least until they end up in the ICU.

[FruityCoconut]

The stereotypical conspiracy theorist hides away at home with tin foil head-coverings to keep the mysterious airborne pathogens away.

Now, that's "normal people", while "conspiracy theorists" are those carrying on unfazed.

[Shared404]

No. Note: The "No." here applies to your implied message, not your literal wording.

Conspiracy theorists are the ones who deny science.

Conspiracy theorists are the ones who refuse vaccines without reason.

Conspiracy theorists are the ones who believe in large scale fraud with no evidence.

Conspiracy theorists are the ones who think "This virus is a hoax".

I guess any of the above could also qualify for straight up stupidity, not just conspiracy theories.

Normal, sane, people follow science and act with compassion for their fellow man.

Wear a mask. It's not hard, I do it 8 hours a day.

I apologize for the rant.

[FruityCoconut]

Being on the periphery of groups you'd likely describe as "conspiracy theorists", practically all of this is strawmanning.

This has become more of a political issue than a scientific issue. I saw a video of a doctor(?) streaming a video alone in his own home in Germany, when armed police stormed his home and arrested him for objecting to the narrative. That's not science. Anyway, can we really blame the common man for distrusting "science" when so much of it has become a shallow tool for political/social activism in recent years?

Nobody is refusing vaccines without reason. That you think it is without reason is either disingenuous or uninformed. And I'd add that the idea that people should accept an injection simply because they can't present a satisfactory reason for refusal is pernicious. The burden is not on them.

There are some who believe in wide scale fraud without evidence, I suppose, but that's a small minority. Most are simply unsatisfied by the evidence in favour, and sensibly don't take the prospect of a mysterious injection lightly. Regardless, I would argue there are far more people who believe in large scale competent benevolence with no evidence (or even evidence to the contrary).

[rualca]

> Being on the periphery of groups you'd likely describe as "conspiracy theorists" (...)

There's no need for so many weasel words.

You are talking about a group which insists in spreading theories about how a phenomenon is supposed to be the result of a major conspiracy, and thus insist that the phenomenon does not exist at all.

[AndrewBissell]

Amazing to see you get so many downvotes for this post. The modern conception of "conspiracy theory" really is just nothing more than a cudgel, a rhetorical trick to deflect sensible questions posed of official narratives and procedures by putting them in a bucket with off-the-wall absurdities.