Last Week Tonight with John Oliver takes on Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories

[1lovelysunday]

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some highlights:

• an Adele song about terraplanism
• shirtless John Cena
• an adult person with no object permanence (if i can't see the patients, they don't exist!)

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Comments

[scriptedending]

I liked this segment. Conspiracy theorists are so fucking frustrating exactly because of what he said about the theories being "self-sealing" - any attempt to delegitimize them just makes the person double down on how everyone's in on the coverup.

I do think his approaches of nudging people toward thinking more critically and pointing out how tough it is for even a few people to keep secrets are some of the only ways to productively have a conversation with a conspiracy theorist, but there are certainly no guarantees from those approaches, either.

Ultimately, conspiracy theories are more satisfying than life being full of unpredictable, shitty events. :/

[anna_drenxavier]

Yeah, and the advice to encourage conspiracy theorists to fact-check against trusted sources is just not going to work. They don't believe in anything that is supported by a majority of the scientific community, because in their minds, the scientific community is the enemy.

[xtinkerbellax]

Yea they've all been paid off by big pharma.

[epicdonald]

Nitpicky but I noticed they mistakenly called the Tuskegee experiments "experimenting on the Tuskegee airmen" which irked me a bit

Also I've seen people tweeting and getting lots of likes for just saying with no sources "for every real covid case there are 2 false positives"

Generally I don't see any wild stuff on twitter unless I click to see the replies to posts by my local news. Reveals how misinformed some of my townspeople are.

[xtinkerbellax]

Oh yea they're obsessed with false positives right now.

[mzgrottesca]

I keep seeing ppl on Facebook reposting screencaps of this random facebook post that's like "My aunt is a nurse and she said when she tested a clean q-tip that hadn't been swabbed yet, it still came back positive!!! It's rigged!!!" lmao

[psychsike]

I'm so sick and tired of seeing this one.

[justice4harambe]

I saw a tweet saying hospitals in the US are banned from reporting cases to the CDC, and have to report to a private company managed by Trump, is that true?

I can’t find the tweet again to read the article and I don’t want to assume anything. If true, that is fucking horrifying

[tifag]

Somewhat true, Trump admin set it up that instead of reporting to the CDC it goes to Health and Human Services (I think). So its still a government agency just no longer the CDC.

[justice4harambe]

Thank you for the info!! It’s hard to trust any actions by the Tr*mp administration, but I’m glad it’s still government and not private

[sfarfallio]

yes that's true, thankfully hospitals still report to their local public health departments and John Hopkins pulls data from them so they will continue to be a reliable source for covid numbers

[_twenty]

I've quit getting on FB the last couple of weeks because everyone is "woke" about Covid, child sex rings, etc. Open your eyes, mainstream media and so on.

[lumosofmylife]

The woman I mentioned in a comment below said she learned about Pizzagate in 2012. When I questioned its existence in 2012, she changed it to "I knew about it during 9/11, it just might not have been called that." She was like 10 during 9/11, I just doubt she was reading up on child sex rings...

[kriskross]

I had to get off of Facebook forever when I saw people saying Sandy Hook was a hoax all those years ago. One of my coworkers just told me about the Wayfair sex ring conspiracy that's going around right now and I just can't.

[chibi]

if i have to read any more qanon posts from my barely literate cousins, i might pluck my eyes right out my skull. these dumb sons of bitches have the critical thinking skills of a methed up bonobo but somehow think they stumbled upon a ~seekrit~ via poorly spelled instagram posts and shittily edited youtube videos.

[xtinkerbellax]

I feel like most intelligent people know when they need to listen to someone who is smarter and/or more knowledgable in a certain field than they are. Stupid people think everyone is dumber than them or that they know more than anyone.

[anagramofbrat]

"these dumb sons of bitches have the critical thinking skills of a methed up bonobo"

This bonobo defamation. *steals*

[toddies]

i miss the obvious idiots talking about qanon. everyone i know who posts about it now is semi literate and social media savvy so what they say is INCREDIBLY stupid but nobody notices it bc there are no syntax errors. they're more dangerous & frustrating to me, esp bc they neutralize dissenting opinions by pointing out grammar & spelling errors (even when it's deliberate, e.g. my comment being all lowercase) instead of engaging the argument (which they can't do bc the shit they believe isn't defensible).