SheilaNaGig : Can I wonder whether you're encountering an
unusually high number/proportion of conspiracy theorists?
Online or in your shop or both?
The opinions that you cite are -- I speculate -- shared by quite a low number of normally-brainwired people, surely?
Maybe I'm sheltered, because I've encountered
very few people talking CT-bollocks, even when we in Glastonbury the other weekend!
And any CTs I encounter online are filtered through sane spots of the net, mainly here
I honestly don’t know William. It seems high to me, but maybe it’s just the way I made engaging with the phenomenon.
I live and work in Brixton, which is busy, and has a particular demographic which differs from most of the rest of the country, so it might just be a small percentage of a larger number of very local encounters.
The shop where I work has a high footfall, it’s very rarely quiet. because we are limiting numbers of people inside the shop there is always a queue outside the door. people arrive exactly as we open the shutters at 9:30 in the morning, and they’re banging on the door as we are pulling the shutters down at the end of the day asking if they can buy “one more thing just one thing“.
So it might just be a high number of encounters, of the kind of people who shop in a wholefood shop.
I’m reluctant to make any statements or conclusions about the types of people or the demographic involved . Because there’s bound to be confirmation bias going on with that. It’s impossible for me to make any qualitative or quantitative conclusions. Having said that, my impression is that most of the people I encounter who hold these views and who say so out loud are Afro-Caribbean. There are some white people, and they broadly seem to be exclusively liberal hippy types. The Afro-Caribbeans who are talking about the conspiracies seem to be all ages up to about mid 50s or early 60s: the Windrush Generation seem to be on board with wearing masks and believing the government. African black people don’t seem to be conspiracists, it does seem to be Black British from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds.
Of course this observation is to som extent an artefact of working in the health food shop, because they make up a large proportion of the clientele.
I wonder what the correlation is here. Is it because British Black people feel particularly ostracised and persecuted by the government and society and these feelings are now manifesting as a sense of being tricked and coerced and lied to? I don’t know, that’s purely speculative, but I am struck by the possible correlation between the BLM uprising and the increasingly vocal assertions that the government, Bill Gates etc are all lying tricksters.
But that’s just because I’m seeing a correlation here in Brixton, not because it’s real (although I do wonder if it’s a contributory factor in some way).
One of my bosses said that when she was working at the shop, she was shouted at and accused of racism by several people specifically when she asked them to wear a mask. (I was also accused of racism a couple of weeks ago, by a woman who refuses to wear a mask. It’s the only time in my life anyone has said this to me, so obviously it feels significant to me that it was from a Covid conspiracist).
It’s not just Black people though. Plenty of white people are also talking about the conspiracy theories.
And it’s not just here in Brixton, is it. America is maggoty with it, although it seems to be largely coming from the Trumpian right over there.
And it’s happening elsewhere too:
‘Sovereign citizens’, anti-vaxxers, mask refuseniks and far-right extremists see all their wildly disparate beliefs confirmed by coronavirus restrictions
www.theguardian.com
As the infodemic captures the world, old and new conspiracy theories find a way to take over the public debate. Thanks to our monitoring of independently fact-checked disinformation from France, Italy, and Spain, we have noticed that similar patterns are emerging regarding the types of...
www.disinfo.eu
News on Japan, Business News, Opinion, Sports, Entertainment and More
www.japantimes.co.jp
Any attack on a cell phone tower because of 5G conspiracy theories will be dealt with "very firmly," Police Commissioner Andrew Coster said.
www.businessinsider.com
Et cetera
Just google
conspiracy theories and any country or region or
covid conspiracy theories world and you get loads of hits. Although Sweden doesn’t seem to have any reported stuff.
I dunno. As I said up thread, it feels like it’s symptomaic of something else, something larger or deeper.