Twenty-one year old with no pre-existing conditions dies from Coronavirus

Re:Twenty-one year old with no pre-existing conditions dies ... by tarr11 on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @10:49AM (#22685034)

When was this “golden age of truth” era that we are now after? There have always been conspiracies, mystics, cults and anti science sentiments.

Do you have any evidence to show it’s worse than it ever was?

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Re:Twenty-one year old with no pre-existing conditions dies ... by blaser-waffle on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @02:30PM (#22687158)

Right? Does no one remember the era of William Randolph Hearst and "yellow journalism"? Or all of the horrible BS surrounding Fatty Arbuckle?

One of the primary causes of the Spanish-American War was Hearst's newspapers putting outrageous headlines on papers to drive sales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

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Re:Twenty-one year old with no pre-existing conditions dies ... by magduf on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @10:53AM (#22685074)

Several decades ago, it wasn't nearly this bad or widespread. Sure, there's always been conspiracies and anti-science sentiments, but the mass adoption made all that crap much more easily accessible to the masses, so it spread like a disease. Instead of everyone getting their news from Walter Cronkite, now they get it from Alex Jones.

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Re:Twenty-one year old with no pre-existing conditions dies ... by magduf on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @03:04PM (#22687439)

Whoops, I left out a phrase. This should read: "...but the mass adoption of the internet made all that crap much more easily accessible to the masses..."

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Re:Twenty-one year old with no pre-existing conditions dies ... by thu2111 on Thursday March 26, 2020 @09:11AM (#22693184)

Do you have any evidence to show it’s worse than it ever was?

I guess you can't measure truth in an absolute sense, but you can measure people's perception of it, and trust in institutions - especially the press - is at all time lows.

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Re:Twenty-one year old with no pre-existing conditions dies ... by macintux on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @10:53AM (#22685080)

At what previous point in time could a conspiracy theory reach 25% of the world’s population within a day? When was the last time the U.S. president was espousing conspiracy theories to a global audience?

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Re:Twenty-one year old with no pre-existing conditions dies ... by tarr11 on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @11:10AM (#22685269)

It has always been this way.

“Americans love conspiracy theories. Conspiratorial rhetoric in presidential campaigns and its distracting impact on the body politic have been a fixture in American elections from the beginning, but conspiracies flourished in the 1820s and 1830s, when modern-day American political parties developed, and the expansion of white male suffrage increased the nation’s voting base. “

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/conspiracy-theories-a...

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Re:Twenty-one year old with no pre-existing conditions dies ... by macintux on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @11:17AM (#22685360)

The speed is categorically different, as is the reach.

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Re:Twenty-one year old with no pre-existing conditions dies ... by Kaiyou on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @11:30AM (#22685510)

Before the internet, when it was easily controlled through the media what everyone had to think. It was a golden age where one entity decided on the truth and pretty much nobody disagreed to any noticeable effect.

Now more and more people get exposed to more than one viewpoint of reality and are beginning to not blindly trust the media. This leads to people actually having to discuss points that previously only had to be stated, for everyone to believe them or at least to not have lots of people disagreeing showing up and having the opportunity to talk with other disagreeing people.

So we get amusing situations like holocaust deniers getting told it's illegal to do so, which of course only strengthens their belief. But rarely is there somebody showing up refuting, since that takes effort.

That leaves us in a post-truth world, where nobody simply can state something and have everyone believe it. Instead everything that gets questioned needs to be discussed, like "Do vaccines cause autism?" or "Are there more than two sexes?". Kind of like the difference between having a King and having democracy.

Personally, I blame the media for being verified liars for the loss of trust in them. Everyone can be wrong on occasion, but it takes a liar to stick to their guns after being proven wrong. I mean, did anyone ever actually believe that a "magic" bullet killed Kennedy?

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