This is ignorant paranoia. Passive media (e.g. jpg, png, gif, txt) cannot hurt your computer, no matter how incompetent your antivirus software may be.
That's not even close to true. For example, someone may discover a buffer overrun in whatever code Chrome uses to render jpeg files, leading to a .jpg file that executes arbitrary code when viewed.
But even if you were right, that doesn't mean that loading content from an infected site is safe. Maybe you request a .jpg, and its response is carefully crafted to exploit a bug in the HTTP client library you use; or maybe f.ds loads images in a way that allows them to be executed as javascript if the right Content-Type header is sent.
All of these are rather unlikely, but not impossible;
You're right. My original statement was both inaccurate and overly glib. All of the vulnerabilities you name (and many others) are technically possible and get discovered regularly.
On the other hand, they tend to get fixed really quickly too. With
policies like this in place, it's gotten rather difficult to actually get exploited by such vulnerabilities, at least if you're not so silly as to run IE or similar nonsense.
Personally, I've been ignoring warnings like the memegenerator thing without incident for years. IMO, the easiest and increasingly common way to pick up mal/adware these days is to install free software whose installation process tries to con you into adding browser toolbars and install a bunch of unrelated or malicious crap software.
I certainly wouldn't skip my browser's AV warning just to view some crummy image macros.
I suppose I wouldn't object so strongly if I were given the option of viewing the f.ds thread and just not loading the images from the offending site.
