To know what I am talking about, let me give you an example. I have this friend who went crazy over the vaccine issue. She's done so much research into it that I feel like I can't talk to her about her vaccine skepticism. Whenever I start to talk about something, she would drown me with a ton of articles and youtube videos and most of the times from the actual websites of UN health and stuff. It would have taken me a day to just go through that stuff. So I gave up on convincing her about vaccines. Might seem cruel but even I lost my certainty about vaccines after I met her. There's just too much to know and I don't completely trust the institutions either, but I do trust the institutions enough to vaccinate myself and my kids but not enough to you know, hold a debate about it with someone who has spent days researching this stuff.
You can take any topic which is divisive, which basically looms over the media all day and you can find a ton of articles to either support it or "debunk" it. I think 9/11 wasn't caused by Bush, I am almost certain, but I won't bet my house on it. I mean, this is almost a certainty, but yeah.
On other issues which are not this much of a certainty I fail to see how to convince a person who thinks something that they are wrong.
Stuff like earth is round or not, I can prove. But was the virus from Chinese market or from a lab, I can't.
Have aliens visited earth? I don't know. It would be wicked if we make first contact, but as awesome as this is, I am not motivated to search about this on the internet. I don't think I would search anything about the not so cool topics of life. I don't know enough to hold an informed debate about capitalism vs socialism or any other hot button issue for that moment.
What do you do in these situations?
I can sense that this is poorly written, but I hope you get the gist of what I am trying to say.
What's the situation like for you? Is it a common belief where you are?
Climate change denial is too common here. Our third (nearly second) largest political party is neofascist and "sceptical" of climate change. Lot's of conspiracy theories and "alternative truths" floating around in that demographic.
Well I should tell you that I meet plenty of people who think like that, but I just can't take it seriously. Plenty of people are simply nuts.
There's also lots of people who aren't crazy but just haven't learned to think critically. For example my neighbor makes mixed statements about climate change. It is clear he hasn't talked with anybody about it or thought about it deeply on his own, but just parrots the sensational news he comes across. For example he states that when he was young he was virtually a vegetarian, and that everyone was back then, and that people eat more meat now. At the same time he states that the nr of cows hasn't increased in the nl since 1950. Clearly something makes no sense but he just hasn't spent time on it.
Personally I feel the best approach in such situations is to focus on solidarity, rather than on the actual issue.
So sure, it's controversial in a certain sense, but I meant more like that it isn't genuinely controversial.