Public trust

Best interaction with an antimasker:

Them: masks don't work

Me: We'll I'm going to wear one anyway

Them: Well then you're just traping the germs against your face

Me: so you're saying they block germs?

They even stated the correct reason to wear a mask: to trap the germs against my face, so others don't get infected
It's like they don't compute the idea behind it, it stops at me me me
- My favorite reply to them is that it's America and I can do whatever I want, I'll call them snowflakes too whenever appropriate. They get pissed when you insinuate they're anti American lul.
- Someone once told me that the box in which masks came in says "doesn't protect from viruses", as if it was hidden-in-plain-sight proof that masks don't work.
  Yeah, they don't protect the user from viruses, they protect other people. The box is technically correct, Patricia, there is no conspiracy here.
- I think they actually do understand but don't have enough empathy with other people to see it as their responsibility to protect other people from their viruses.
  Not that someone as perfect as them would ever sick enough to potentially infect others...
- Claims are not evaluated, in the loyalist worldview. They're not arguments. They're slogans. You shuffle your cards and say whatever might justify the ingroup being fundamentally superior to the outgroup. Because of course, it is impossible for someone to simply be wrong. That would require evaluating claims. No: truth is dictated by people above you. They must be right and smart and handsome, or they wouldn't be above you. Any challenge, any criticism, any disagreement, is a personal attack. You are calling someone lesser.
  And I say "you" because these people think this is all we're doing. They think that's all there is. It's reality as a team sport.
- Or, more likely, they're selfish jerks who don't care about anyone else. "The greater good? What's that?"
Please stop you’re going to break them! 😂
While it is fun to tweak their titties with this, it will make zero difference on their position because their position wasn't arrived at by rational thought.
- Their actual position is that they don't give a fuck about anyone other than themself. Everything they claim to believe is just a rationalization they think will sound good to someone else. All they care about is what they can convince others.
My favorite interactions was going into Walmart.
It was mid/early spring, right as things were starting to lockdown. I wasn’t wearing a jacket cuz it was glorious out.
Some old boomer lady started harassing me over not wearing a jacket and blah blah blah.
She wouldn’t shut up, and was blocking me from walking in, so I faked a sneeze. The look of horror on her face as she fled.
(And I’m pretty sure that was also the fastest time in and out of a Walmart…)
- Why did she have a problem with you not wearing a jacket? What am I missing here?
- You are truly evil... and this story was glorious, thanks for sharing it!:-P

You're assuming these people believe we even send things to space. I had a serious ass conversation recently with my father's roommate. Typical conspiracy theorist ding dong. Full on flat earther and everything. I asked him how he thinks GPS works if the earth was flat. He admitted he didn't know but then when I started to explain how it works by pinging satellites we put up in space he cut me off and said space isn't real. Like legitimately thinks space isn't real. He on a separate occasion also complained that we didn't need to wear masks during covid because we apparently make our own viruses in our bodies and viruses don't spread between people.

These people don't even understand how logic works. Let alone that people could be smarter than they are.

Well, if you reject all knowledge you cannot obtain through direct observation, you can kinda start to understand how they ended up where they are.
They're intimidated by the scientific method.
- Many of them are religious and believe plenty of things they didn't directly observe. It's more that they have been trained through religious thinking that if someone confidently claims something it must be more true than someone who honestly admits that "it is the best we can know right now and we will update our understanding as we obtain more evidence." These people need the answer now and that answer can't change because changing your opinion based on new evidence is seen as weakness and opinions should be handed down from on high and never change.
There's always been crazy and stupid people. And then we gave them the internet to connect and to have a voice. Now they feed of each other's crazynies and believe they run the world.
Only way to fight this is education. Give people the ability to see through crazy. You're not born with common sense. It's taught and learned.
- Not a solution but it is fun to put a flat-earther with a hollow-earther and say Earth is a ball. Then you grab some popcorn.
We should just start jettisoning these people into space
Tbh, it's really your fault for choosing to interact with this person more than once.
- yeah, god forbid you try to break down the echo chamber existing between parties for the benefit of public good.
  Fuck you, be a good robot for the party and STICK ONLY WITH THE PEOPLE I DEMAND YOU TO STAY WITH.

I just want affordable healthcare

Unfortunately, the answer to that doesn't lie in science but in politics.
- But I took a course in college Called political Science. So what about that mister science man?
Ask the military industrial complex. Too much good applicable science and tech comes from space exploration.

People act like their mamas never told 'em to cover their damned mouths when they cough or sneeze. It's the same damned thing, only masks work much better at keeping your filthy germs from infecting other people.

Common sense ain't common, they say, and this anti-mask nonsense is just proof that it's true.

But don't you know? Having symptoms like "drier mouth," "fogged glasses," and "smelling your own breath" are much more dangerous than a virus that killed a million Americans at least.
What it really tells me it that the mouth breathers are crazier than we gave them credit for.
People act like their mamas never told 'em to cover their damned mouths when they cough or sneeze
Nor to wash their hands before eating (or even after going to the toilet.)
- I tried explaining universal precautions to a pastor of a church I was attending, and pointed out that there is a Christian commandment to love one's neighbor that overrides one's personal desires. He could not dispute my points, but he also didn't do anything to implement safety procedures.
  Guess who left the church after the unsurprising COVID outbreak?
  I realize a lot of people here aren't believers, but my point is that even within the context of religion or common wisdom, masks make sense.
  There's been a lot of talk lately about how decades of lead in gasoline, pipes, and in other places likely damaged generations of people's ability to reason. I'm sincerely beginning to think this is a bigger problem than we'll ever truly know.
- You learn that most people are disgusting the first time you use a crowded public bathroom.
- Or lick their hands when handling money

But surely you must understand how someone, having failed all of their classes and then dropped out of school altogether, understands complex matters better than the people who are brilliant, have international acclaim, and devoted like 5 decades of their lives to study that same thing?

Or you know, at least watched this 11-minute video?

And if you do, can you explain it to me? :-P So far all I have is "Might Makes Right", but somehow that seems to be lacking something...

They failed because they’re obviously smarter than science and not the other way around.
- Also, are we not going to discuss the conspiracy theory that many of the people espousing this ideology were mysteriously killed!? And their families too! In fact, anyone even so much as near them had a chance to be affected, possibly some still here but with permanent brain damage!
  Sounds pretty sus if you ask me...
- Well, I was going to argue against that, but then I remembered that he is rich - which I guess is the same thing as smart? - so... okay! :-P
🤓

I mean a lot of them also don't believe we landed unmanned units on mars, or humans on the moon, for that matter, so...

So they just deny space exploration. Easy.

While using a smartphone with nano chips and GPS, based on satellites and Einstein's General Relativity.
Flat earthers and moon landing deniers have entered the chat...
I recently had some guy rattle off 10 stupid reasons why we never landed on the moon in a row. I have never heard a more clear example of the fallacy of verbosity. One of them was "We didn't have automatic windshield wipers for cars in the 60's so there is no way we had the technology to go to the moon. "
I swear to god his reasons were that stupid and he had a ton of them.
- The Saturn V moon rocket first flew in 1967, first carried a crew in 1968 and flew the first moon landing in 1969.
  Bernard Sadow patented the first suitcase with wheels in 1972.
- That sounds like some pure uncut Dunning-Kruger there!
Fossils, also fake

I am reasonably sure that a fair many conservatives feel that they are entitled to their biases and fallacies and the world must bend to these biases.

It's deeper than that, they literally believe they can change objective reality by believing hard enough.
That's why they excuse all of their bad acts, if they ignore it, it doesn't exist to them.
Negative object permanence.
- I think you are right. I believe it is somehow related their obsessive belief in their religion.
  I am not saying that all religious people are bad. But, somehow, these people excuse their bad behaviour by quoting scriptures. There has to a correlation too.
- Too bad they can't make tulpas with that power
Behold: what religion does to a person's mind.

Fauci is to blame. The path of evil is paved in good intention.

The fucker told everyone that they didn't need masks.

What he was intending to do was make sure doctors and emergency personnel had masks. instead, it became an inflection point of publicly dividing the nation.

This is also misinformation. Fauci, et al, were going based on the current NIH guidance at the time, taken from the original SARS virus, which was that improper mask use was potentially more dangerous due to the risk of cross contamination. In this case there was actually strong evidence that a significant number of cases in healthcare settings were coming from contaminated PPE.
At the time, it was thought that it was primarily surface contact which spread the virus, or at least that this was a major source of spread. Now imagine that your average idiot with one improperly fitted mask was told to use masks. They would touch contamination surfaces, touch their mask, and then bring that mask into their car and their house, contaminating those surfaces as well. Given what we knew at the time, this was considered a very serious risk.
Once we understood that airborne spread was a bigger threat, they updated the science. If they are guilty of anything, it was failing to properly explain the nuance of the above reasoning, though in their defense, there was a giant orange idiot taking up most of the oxygen in the room.
Fauci is a human being who gave advice, then changed his mind when more information became available. He did not invent the virus.
The worst part is it was very clearly worded. People had to purposely, disingenuously misinterpret it. So of course they did.
Well, then there was the intent to let it run its course, as it was only hitting blue states at that time… it was a bit of a cluster…
Do you recall the people hoarding and trying to profit off of toilet paper, alcohol sanitizer, Clorox wipes?

Poindexter... not hard slang to get correct. Dumbasses.

Step on Mars but not on snek.

What is the thesis of this meme, that people are just stupid and there is no underlying problem or system that can be improved?

Science is often communicated to the public via either companies, politics, or the media. Which al have their own interests and issues in representing “scientific facts”. To give some examples of the “science” people have been exposed to: These new pain killers are perfectly save and absolutely not addictive. Making health care accessible is actually bad for the economy and will be more expensive in the end. Or the numerous articles on outlier papers published in the media that conclude that it’s actually healthy to [insert obviously unhealthy habit here (sponsored by some industry group)].

Science has a communication problem, and the communication conduits have a huge credibility problem. The results of which made an already bad pandemic even worse.

The thesis is that you should listen to experts when you don't know what you're talking about. No one is saying experts are never wrong, but they're more likely to be right than just some guy. There's a whole lot of 'just some guys' who claim to appreciate science until it tells them something they don't want to hear. That's what the meme is against.
- Okay, what about when there is a lack of consensus? When you have scientists who, for example, argue that the virus came from the Wuhan lab whereas the narrative being told is that that's crazy. This is the problem I have with people in this thread assuming that everyone who isn't immediately on board is dumb, delusional, conspiratorial, etc. We're not talking about flat Earth theory here; it's not that simple.
Holy shit, a reasonable comment that doesn't just assume the other half of the country are idiots.
People don't know what to believe and are skeptical for good reason (some historical, some present). Time and time again we've seen our institutions fails us. We see blatant corruption that the elites don't even bother to hide (e.g. corporate capture). And we see freedoms eroded in times of crisis (e.g. Patriot Act). I'm not saying we should be conspiratorial about doctors or science. But reasonable people on both sides of the aisle see what's happening to our institutions and this has knock on effects.
Science is often communicated to the public via either companies, politics, or the media. Which al have their own interests and issues in representing “scientific facts”.
Science is communicated using whatever means has an audience.
Science is also communicated much more precisely and accurately in scientific journals, but those generally aren't easily accessible to the wider public.
Do you have a suggestion to how we might solve those 2 overlapping problems?

Ship no go. Can you make it go?

And yet social distancing was "obvious" because scientists said it u til they admitted they pretty much just made that distance up.

That's why there's an Appeal from Authority fallacy... But you just keep on trusting what ever they say with out questioning it.

You do realize that social distancing does have a body of work around it and was used to mitigate the 1918 pandemic...
They "made up" the arbitrary distance of 6 feet, not the entire concept of distance making it harder for germs to spread... What the hell failure of logic is that?! Some viruses can stay potent in air much better than others and they weren't CONFIDANT that 6 feet would be adequate or overkill. It was an educated guess for COVID specifically, not an ass pulling.
So you don't think masks work?
- Did I say that? Because I didn't, but if you want to put words in my mouth you're more than welcome to have a conversation with yourself at that rate.
99% of medicine is throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.
Social distancing was an easy way to make it less likely to spread based on similar viruses. Until they had more verifiable ways it was a quick and cheap answer to a complex problem. Sometimes those are necessary, especially when millions of lives are on the line.
- No, no that is not medicine.
  Go take a biochem class and educate yourself on how fucking stupid that comment sounded. You're basically saying modern chemisty is equivalent to ancient alchemy, which ... is hilariously moronic.
- 99% of medicine is throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.
  Social distancing was an easy way to make it less likely to spread
  I'm just going to keep copy and pasting in this thread: This was not communicated to the public in the beginning. Recommendations were stated definitively (i.e., without the qualification that we don't really know what to do yet) and then latter revised. This erodes public trust.

white hoods covering the whole head are ruined too

Sheeple stop wearing masks and social distancing because they believe it doesn't work. Sheeple get sick. Sheeple: "See! I told you!"
You know the important thing was to slow the spread right? So that not everyone has it at the same time completely overcrowding hospitals. Which still happened in some areas due to idiots
- I think it would have been healthier for society to get it over with asap. We are still dealing with the fallout of shutting half of society down.