COVID conspiracy stuff

[LarsMac]

So, came across this on the Facebook page "Political Chatterbox" today
Covid anti-vaxxers: 'Shut down fake news sites,' begs daughter

One of the more bizarre things to have crossed my path today.
Several of my family are tipping the edge of the anti-vaxx world. I find it a tad disturbing.
The daughter has for years been a bit of one. But now she claims she has seen proof that the COVID Vax causes dimentia, or is it ADHD, or maybe it's Obesity, I dunno. I can't keep up.

From the article:
"Fake news websites about the pandemic need to be shut down, according to a woman who says her parents have been sucked into conspiracy theories.

She said her parents initially thought Covid-19 was no worse than the flu, but they soon moved on to more extreme theories.

The woman from Cardiff, who is worried about her parents' mental health, has spoken to Newyddion S4C anonymously.

One Welsh GP said the anti-vaccination movement was a "big problem".
media caption'We need to talk about misleading anti-vax claims'

The woman said her parents had found a "huge community on Twitter and all sorts of other different websites" to feed their belief in conspiracy theories.

The theories include those "about why Covid exists... that it's either here to control the population or that it's completely fake," she said.

'I was a huge believer in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories'
What is the anti-vaccination movement?

"One of the conspiracy theories is that the blue disposable masks that people wear has asbestos in them.

"They have theories on every aspect of what's been going on over the past year... and that wasn't part of their life before.""

[tude dog]

Thanx Lars.

Now I can sleep peacefully tonight knowing there is yet another conspiracy.

[spot]

A conspiracy requires a secret. A group of people conspire together.

A "conspiracy theory" is "a belief that some covert but influential agency (typically political in motivation and oppressive in intent) is responsible for an unexplained event" - the words are from the Oxford English Dictionary.

So "I have a theory that the government knows X is true but won't say so in public" is a bit remote from the concept, I think. Is the "refusal to say so in public" a conspiracy, or is it merely a government secret? I think you need three components for a conspiracy theory: A secret part of the government did it, it was bad, and the government won't admit that it happened.

So I'm not sure I see either the conspiracy aspect or the theory aspect in "One of the conspiracy theories is that the blue disposable masks that people wear has asbestos in them", for example. There's a real word for "the blue disposable masks that people wear has asbestos in them", it's a hypothesis. It's a very easily testable hypothesis. It would be impossible to test if it said "Some blue disposable masks exist which have asbestos in them". A theory is a hypothesis with testable evidence to back it up. To promote it to conspiracy theory you have to assert a secret group of ne'er-do-wells with the ability to introduce the asbestos and suppress the public reporting functions of governmental and commercial quality control tests across the entire planet. And, of course, you also have to demonstrate the presence of the asbestos. It's a big ask either way.

Ditto 5G and all conspiracies to cover up inconvenient truths like viral lab leaks.

An example of something which isn't a conspiracy theory would be the content of Edward Snowden's data dump about UK/US data theft.

[LarsMac]

I believe that even an Hypothesis requires a certain amount of observable phenomena to base said Hypothesis upon.

These days, however, someone just gets a wild hair up their backside, and starts running their mouth at the local pub, and BOOM! suddenly it becomes a "Theory" about a "conspiracy" that the gummint is doing something that we should get our panties in a twist about.

[spot]

All I require of an hypothesis is that it's testable, it's not much to ask.

[LarsMac]

All I require of an hypothesis is that it's testable, it's not much to ask.

Even that is far too much to expect from many of the "conspiracy " notions floating around.