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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

> The global lunacy community — anti-vaxxers, science-deniers, Russian agents — has spread so many conspiracy theories regarding Gates that misinformation about him is now among the most widespread of all coronavirus falsehoods.

This is true, but I think this minimizes the size of "the global lunacy community". It is truly baffling to me how Gates has now become a huge boogeyman when it comes to the pandemic, right up there with George Soros.

I don't know how to fix this - crazy is crazy. But the sheer size of this crazy shouldn't be underestimated.

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> This is true, but I think this minimizes the size of "the global lunacy community"

I have a friend who's a member of said community, and I don't think she's a lunatic at all. I think she's just struggling to make sense of things, and is a bit susceptible to manipulation. For example, one of the reasons she apparently found the "Plandemic" video convincing was because it was "calm", "rational" and "science based". I guess it superficially matched some heuristics for "reliability" and that was good enough for her. Honestly I think these are the same heuristics most of us use, most of the time. Fact-checking is hard and not many people do it.

That is one of the tactics used. Anger, even righteous, is an "argument lost" if the other person just "wants a rational discussion" even if they are flooding it with falsehoods, misrepresented information, logical fallacies, etc.

It reminds me of this trope: https://www.mumsnet.com/uploads/talk/201802/large-457127-lar...

Don't forget about Psychological Projection...

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

It’s terrifying. What I find fascinating about the whole conspiracy theory phenomenon is once you make the leap that “they” are that good at covering up information, it’s easy to then believe all the other conspiracy theories.

While there are many far-out anti-vaxers criticising Gates, it shouldn't serve as an excuse to discount legitimate criticism[0][1][2].

[0]: https://m.soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-45-the-not-...

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...

[2]: https://pontiactribune.com/2015/03/bill-gates-could-end-worl...

rich people have immense concentrated power and frankly it is not so obvious that they can wield it correctly, even if they are well-intentioned.

doing too much for the right reasons, unexpected consequences and outcomes abound.

The George Soros thing is equally baffling. People really seem to think he’s running a shadow world government or something. Although in his case obviously anti-semitism is a major factor.

The Rothschilds and Rockefellers fell out of favour as the conspiracy target I guess.

they are still in the running, just no the current flavour of the month. Like fashions that keep coming back around, so do conspiracy's.

> It is truly baffling to me how Gates has now become a huge boogeyman when it comes to the pandemic

For the same reasons why many don't like Donald Trump. Power. People tend to be suspicious of those who have power over them; those who can influence their lives, autonomy, & health.

Plenty of people don’t like Trump but did like Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, etc. on down the line.

“X has power, you don’t like x” is a demonstrably poor hypothesis.

Let me restate, "X has influence to change things & many people don't like the change". Trump & Gates both change things. Plenty of people also do/did not like Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush. Plenty of people also like (& don't like) Trump & Gates...One only needs to look at the approval rating. If any one of these people were universally liked, wouldn't their approval ratings be 90%+?

Anecdotally, I find folks tend to inversely feel for Trump as they do for Gates.

Two sides of the same coin?

Unlikely. 4 more options exist

What's baffling about it? He's the largest funder of the CDC, funded Event 201, and is also supporting projects like ID 2020 at the same time.

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