I recently caught my chud family member watching some dumb youtube video about “experts lying about COVID” (yes, chuds are still malding), and like, what’s the fucking point anymore?
You can be as gracious, understanding and in good faith as possible, but people will believe whatever nonsense some idiot influencer says is the truth. It makes me so mad, and unable to argue with these people, because their irrationality makes me irrational. Fuck.
Anyway, how are y’all doing? 
I don’t think most people really believe this stuff. It’s more like a social signalling thing and a sort of reality TV fix.
Most of the dangers in our lives (speaking as a westerner in a wealthy and politically stable country) are systemic, like climate change for example. If shit really starts to happen in these people’s own lives and they need to personally fight to survive I think most of them will snap out of it pretty quickly.
lol
they absolutely do… i mean most of all people have started believing COVID denialism on some level, stopped masking, etc. because their govt told them to in the name of continued economic growth.
Covid denialism is a low stakes luxury for most people. I bet you anything that these people would lock themselves away if they were dropped into an Ebola outbreak.
Yeah they would, but because power has the ability to redefine reality it would only take a few months of Ebola halfway lockdown for people to beg to go back to Applebee’s. The state would just tell them the virus is not as bad anymore, stop gathering statistics to make that real, and stop promoting precautions. That’s exactly what happened with COVID: check https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/COVID19-nationaltrend.html and compare the current year to previous years. It’s pretty much the same! But even in one of the only places where you can get access to the data that shows that COVID has not gone away at all, the CDC still arbitrarily puts categories of “low,” “moderate,” “high,” and “very high.” These categories suggest that if the chart is currently in a low point, there’s not much to worry about. The catch is, though, that the lowest it’s ever been since 2022 is still higher than corresponding points in 2021, when everyone could readily recognize that — vaccinated or not — it would be insane to throw caution to the wind and go back to normal. This entire abandonment of COVID precautions has been a top-down process, a full display of power inventing reality in front of our eyes.