Oh man. I like to think I’m pretty smart. I’m no rocket scientist or anything, but I can hold my own in many conversations and critical thinking situations. After having been a member of these boards lo these last few years, I’ve picked up a thing or two and have made them part of me. I’ve tried to fight ignorance, really I have. I’m sure I have an ignorance or two of my own, but I’ll bet they’re not obvious. Not. Like. This.
MOM AND SISTER: You goddamn airheads. You people are getting out of control. You aren’t this stupid, and it pains me to admit sometimes that I’m related to you. EVERY goddamn time you send me some link to the latest hysteria involving a computer virus that is going to destroy the world, I dutifully find the snopes link and send it to you. You have spoken of it, you know where it is…yet, you will not use it. What gets me totally bugfuck is that many of our family members think you’re smart. Your friends think you’re smart…so they buy it with no research of their own. Many of these hysterical emails are pretty harmless, but every now and again, they come with instructions that would actually HELP some fool bitch up their own machine…completely unawares that they’re doing it, because some random email from YOU told them to.
Also, I thought I had gotten the message through to you five years ago when you called me before I left for Vegas to tell me to watch myself, for there was a psychopathic monster on the loose stealing kidneys for profit. You had the whole story, right down to the ice in the bathtub. I tried not to laugh, but inform you. I guess it didn’t stick like so many globs of mashed potatoes thrown against a wall.
Sister, you were so excited to tell me that you had bought Sylvia “Who gives a fuck if I’m a charlatan” Browne’s new book the other day, and that was the day that I thought I’d given up on you…you are losing your mind as you get older, both of you. It is painful and embarassing to admit that one of you raised me, and the other grew up with me, and we’re so far apart.
What will it take to get you to put your brains in gear and stop being so mind blowingly gullible?! I HATE this! QUIT IT. QUIT IT! JUST FUCKING CUT IT OUT!!
My sister is graduating with her B.A. in a couple of months. Doesn’t say much for our education system, does it?
Sing it, Sistah (bro?)! My in-laws not only refuse to use Snopes, but my SIL in particular, who sends me only cutsie and/or “cool” things, gets mad at me for telling her they’re not for real. She asks me to just let her live with her head in the clouds. I shit you not. “Don’t burst my bubble!”
Well, yeah, but maybe this time it’s TRUE!!! I mean, everybody expects these things to be hoaxes nowadays, so maybe Bill Gates really is going to contributed 25 cents to the Save a Porpoise foundation for every time this email gets forwarded! It could happen…
It has nothing to do with education, as far as I can tell. My mom has a frickin’ PhD, for God’s sake, and she passes along the fake e-mails ALL THE TIME. My sister has made it her mission to look the stuff up on Snopes and debunk them for mom’s benefit, but I just delete…it’s not worth it.
Urrgh. It makes me sad, is what it does. A PHD?! I mean, I know I’m not alone here…of all places. I’ve read different flavors of this same rant a million times. How can it be that we’re not even making a tiny dent in stupidity? Is it getting worse, or am I just getting old?
I’m fine with letting people have their fantasies. Fantasies harm nothing and noone if you keep them to yourself. I have them, too. But foisting them upon humanity when you KNOW they are not true takes a variety of willful ignorance that I cannot comprehend. “Let me live with my head in the clouds?” That would be fine if we were talking about, say, daydreaming about winning the lottery, but purposely disseminating a lie is…something else entirely. What ever will we do?
My policy to counter glurge and urban legend stuff via the inbox with some detailed Snopesing has led to a marked decrease in said glurge etc. over the years. Mainly because those who don’t like me telling them (politely) the emails are BS just don’t send me the crap anymore.
But I do have some friends who have become wonderful students of the Philosophy of Snopes, and in turn passed on a Snopes link to their own circle of friends. I felt so proud!
Keep fighting the fight, brothers and sisters. One day, we shall overcome …
One of my co-workers is a snopes convert. After I sent her links a few time debunking the spam de jour, she started asking me to look up the info on some email she got, then not long after she started looking them up herself and replying to people with the link! I’m so proud.
Ditto to this, although I’ve had some people get mad at me for doing the Reply-To-All bit. The problem I’ve found is that when I just replied to the person who originated it, they wouldn’t bother correcting themselves to everyone else they distributed it to, and so THOSE people go on passing the lies to everyone THEY know.
Honest to pete, my mom really does have a PhD, and generally I consider her to be really, really smart…one of the smartest people I know, in fact. But she is frighteningly unquestioning of anything she hears via e-mail. We can’t figure it out. Her BA is in Journalism from Northwestern University, one of the most well-regarded Journalism schools in the country. We ask her all the time, “Mom, didn’t they teach you to question your sources at that fancy school?” She just laughs. I have never noticed such complete gullibility from her with information coming from any other source. It’s weird, the hold the internet has over people.
My grandpa is one of the hoax/glurge senders. I usually ignored it until the day he started sending messages that basically talked smack about Muslims and they’re all terrorists, etc.
Knowing full well that one of my roommates is Muslim. I responded angrily and tried to set him straight, told him never to sent that tripe to me again. I then attached a snippet from wikipedia about terrorist attacks perpetrated by Christians over the last couple hundred years.
Still makes me mad when I think about it though. I always thought he was so smart.
Ya know, the Snopes website is all the more impressive, in my opinion, because it’s just some married couple – the Mikkelsons, I believe – running the whole show. Truly impressive.
I’ve gotten some scathing emails back to me by doing that. That’s always fun!
My sister sends boatloads of Jesus glurge because I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m a heathen (I’m still spiritual, we just don’t have a church we like right now). That’s always fun. I’ve always wanted to send one back to her about how Jesus bought some kid some shoes on Christmas, but he fell on the ice and broke his ass because of the shoes, so he converted to Judaism.
But she really is a nice person, so I’ve refrained.
I’ve done the Reply to All thing. It works well with computer and internet noobs. But then they figure out how to Bcc.
My best and dearest friend in the whole world I like to think I personally nurtured, encouraged and eventually drug-pushered into computers and the internet and now she’s an addict like I am. I also like to think I taught her to react critically and cynically to the “You guys know I don’t normally send emails like this, but…” emails. The last time I gave her a Snope-link reply she got mad!
This happened to me at work when someone from another office sent an email to three offices (1000+ people) about some virus hoax. I ‘replied to all’ that it was a hoax and the e-mail should be ignored and people should take no action. I was taken to task by the sender because she didn’t think it was my department’s responsibility to report on viruses.
She was right, it’s not my department’s responsibility, but it wasn’t hers either. I told her that and that what was my department’s responsibility was responding to calls from those 1000+ users when they decide they must have the virus.
She never emailed me back after that. I’m pretty sure she’s not with the company anymore.
I hear ya. I still can’t convince my family that love bugs were NOT invented at the University of Florida to combat Florida’s mosquito problem :rolleyes:
“Oh, it’s true! I remember reading about it in an article in the 70s. The were engineered in a lab to kill mosquitos, but the population got out of control so now theirs billions of them all over the place. Stupid University…”
