Kicked off by the Rufus Hound nonsense I mentioned a couple of evenings ago
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/26/manchester-attack-theresa-
Summed up by these couple of paragraphs, which I think captures the thoughts perfectly:
Social media is littered with amateur “truthers” who once watched a YouTube video about Noam Chomsky’s theory of false flags, and now see conspiracies lurking under every bed. Just ask the staff of the Washington pizza restaurant where a gunman opened fire, having read some online imaginings about it being part of a child sex ring linked to Hillary Clinton. Ask Leonard Pozner, whose six-year-old son died in the Sandy Hook school shooting and who has been persistently harassed by truthers arguing that the whole thing was a hoax; that nobody died really, and that the grieving parents should stop “pretending”.
The only real way forward is surely to reverse the burden of proof somehow; to create a new social norm that it’s for conspiracists to prove their nonsense, not for the reality-based community to waste time dismantling it. You don’t get to demand that a man whose six-year-old died at school should exhume the corpse, just to prove it happened. Your delusion is your problem, not his. [Post edited 26 May 2017 12:52]
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