Ambulocetus @ambulocetus@social.cleverlibre.org

@qurlyjoe @tofugolem @StillIRise1963 I like how they keep telling you how patriotic they are. That's the sign of a true patriot, and not all like they were hiding something.

@Sheril I remember watching a documentary about Canine intelligence. They gave a maze test to some domestic dogs and a wolf hybrid. Memories a little hazy but it went something like this. The border collie made it through the maze in record time, and everyone thought he would be the clear winner. But the wolf hybrid used a diffent kind of intelligence and got out even quicker by digging under the fence. I guess we could say that "cunning" is a kind of intelligence, but it's different than being smart.

@PallasRiot @e_urq There is a cave with a bunch of snakes. The snakes come out of the cave to attack innocent people. The snakes have names like Racism, Homophobia, Intolerance, Bigotry, and Hatred. The men who built the cave of snakes hope to keep us so busy fighting the individual snakes that we don't have time or energy to stop them from building more snake caves. Many of us are fighting the snakes, but maybe if we destroy the snake cave, we can finally beat all the snakes. The worst part of it all is that the snake caves are being built with our money. www.UnFoxMyCableBox.com

We were in the neighborhood, so we stopped by the vacant lot that once held The Demon House in Gary, Indiana. Legend has it that there is a portal to Hell under this tree. We didn't see any portals, but perhaps it wasn't business hours. https://skepticalinquirer.org/2014/05/the-200-demons-house-a-skeptical-demonologists-report/

@idoubtit I wish the Bloop was a cryptid. That would be less scary than what it really is.

@rato@todon.eu There are 3 things that could help you get them on your side:
1. #StreetEpistemology
2. #DeepCanvassing
3. #AttitudeInoculation
It's important to make allies, and these are modern ways of doing it.

@idoubtit Joe Scott has a new video about "the Bloop". Seems like something you'd be interested in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNCNnAouQOE

There is an old joke from the 20th Century that goes:

Q. What do you call the table where ten ordinary people sit with one Nazi?
A. It's called "the Nazi Table."

Not LOL funny perhaps, but let's see if we can update this joke for modern times:

Q. What do you call the television network that is watched by ten ordinary people and one Nazi?
A. Fox News

Feel free to share this joke and/or make improvements to it.

If there is a cave of snakes, and the snakes are coming out of the cave and attacking you, perhaps it would be a more effective use of your time to do something about the cave instead of constantly fighting one snake after another. The snakes will just keep coming, and while you are busy fighting them, the snake-cave builder is building another snake cave.

@Remittancegirl @khoji Dr Steven Novella has a hypothesis that when you take away a persons belief in one form of woo or crack-pottery, it leaves a void, and another form of woo will take it's place if the void isn't filled by something else.

@khoji @Remittancegirl That's what I thought at first, but after observing and pondering, I changed my mind. If anything, a worse pandemic would make the conspiracy theorists dig in their heels and be even more intractable. They would see it as even stronger evidence that they were correct all along, and it was created in a lab for nefarious purposes.
The conspiracy type thinking is contagious like a computer virus, and like a virus, it takes over the entire central processor. This not only has the immediate effects like pandemic denial or climate change denial, but it also has long term detrimental effects like voting for the Leopards-Eat-Your-Face Party.
So if we consider the conspiracy thinking as a form of memetic contagion, we can see that logic and reason won't have any more effect than they would on an actual pathogen. So to follow the analogy, what we need is to "vaccinate" the vulnerable against conspiracy theeories, and cure those already infected by constructing a contagious, self-replicating counter- meme.
#AttitudeInoculation #DeepCanvassing
#StreeEpistemology
https://cognitiveimmunology.net/