A good friend of mine whom I have known for many years and worked with for many more is a member of the Army Reserve and is preparing for his second deployment to Afghanistan. I gave him my e-mail address so that I could know that all is well when he has the time to send something out. So he puts me on the mailing list, all well and good…
…except that he sends the typical uber-patriotic e-mail spams to everybody and their sister. Today’s example:
Typical fare as e-mail campaigns go, but I have yet to show you the last two lines. Here they are:
I guess it was only a matter of time until something like this happened. How do you debunk this once they have taken the truth out of your hands and turned it around to support themselves? Here’s what Snopes really has to say on the matter:
That is a perfectly valid reason. The military teaches that when you are overseas you should not wear anything that identifies you as an American. Why, exactly, does that not apply to others? If I were a reporter I would fall all over myself trying to blend in as much as possible while still doing the job.
So, now I face another year of this, blended in with more relevant updates. I can’t put him on ignore and I can’t debunk it because to debunk it I would be more or less making their point for them.
Why couldn’t the spammers have stayed stupid? It was much easier when you could shoot them down with ease. Now it takes a lot of effort with an uncertain outcome. It hardly seems worth it except that bullshit perpetuates itself if you don’t stop it.
If you need a more-or-less impartial explanation, listen to last Friday’s On the Media. There was a lengthy segment on the CIA’s presence at a convention for minority journalists. Some of the attendees took issue with the agency’s participation, citing the need for American reporters not to appear to be tools of the government.
It’s tough enough to be a foreign correspondent. It’s that much harder when you’re hated and mistrusted by the local citizenry. Why make yourself obvious, just to make some idiot in a uniform feel better?
I totally agree with you, but I’m curious on a couple of points. You must mean that you shouldn’t dress to identify yourself as an American when you’re off duty, right? Otherwise, well, the uniform is sort of a giveaway isn’t it?
Also, is ABC implementing this policy only for its overseas correspondents, or for its reporters at home too? Either way, the lapel pins could give the impression of government control of the media, but your point seems to argue that it’s only important for the ones overseas.
Actually it reminds me of the Doonesbury spoof of Dan Rather, where Roland Hedley is dressed in “native garb” while doing a report from a Middle Eastern trouble zone, but of course very few natives drag a camera crew around with them. IIRC, the sound guy was wearing an Ohio State T-shirt.
Two weeks ago I received a breathless chain email about a purported dangerous computer virus making the rounds in electronic greeting cards, complete with a link to a snopes article ostensibly to prove the virus really exists and there is no known fix. The linked article calmly described the virus and said it was not a threat.
This incident made me stop, once again, and consider: What is this sort of person we are dealing with who forwards chain emails? I give the actual purveyors of spam the benefit of the doubt they are probably slyly working toward some evil agenda while not being overly concerned about merely looking stupid in the process. But I really question the intelligence of the forwarder, the spammer’s dupe, the person so enamored of every latest foolishness that they proactively spam their entire addressbook numerous times per week. And without bothering to BCC – that in itself tells me they are near computer illiterates.
They sink even further, if that’s possible, when the emails include a link to snopes that turns out to undermine the email’s whole premise. Here’s a snippet from wikipedia:
This is why I have a gmail accout-to give to the relatives I don’t trust with a modem. My spam/mail ratio on my real email account is about 1/100-and that’s how I keep it that way! Yes, please, give my personal email to every one you’ve ever met, so they can give it to everyone they ever met, etc etc.
Yes, I’m referring to off-duty personnel. They don’t want a repeat of the General James L. Dozier or Seaman Robert Stethem incidents, so it is imperative that you are as inconspicuous as possible.
The people at home may one day be overseas, so it is important for everybody.
I went to Snopes for rebuttal and found it to be true. However, it further goes on to say that the flag symbol was removed from the plane because it was a trademark of North American Airlines! There is still an American flag on the plane.
Over several years, I’ve frequently tried to steer people away from forwarding these things. Now, either instead of them going to Snopes themselves, they forward me the message, asking “What does Snopes say about this?”; or I get them with comments attached like “I don’t care what Snopes says, it’s a good story.”
So I’ve given up. Now I mostly just delete the damn things without comment. Occasionally I’l write back, saying something like a) please please please, in the name of all that’s holy, stop sending me these fucking things, and/or b) they’re always wrong. Always. Every one of them. I can live with the microscopically tiny chance that I might ever miss out on accurate or useful information.
Yeah, unfortunately, you’re only going to see more and more of that as time goes by. One of the many Obama-related forwards I got from my grandfather had a tagline that said something like “I checked this out on Snopes - it’s true!”
It wasn’t, and the entry on Snopes said so. But somebody knew their target audience wasn’t very computer literate or discerning and relied on other people to tell them that Snopes says something isn’t true.
I’m probably partly to blame for this. Because everytime I would get one of these shitty emails, I would snopes it out and hit REPLY ALL and send it back with the snopes link. Sorry guys, i guess they got the message. It worked a little because the amount of shit I got has dwindled.
I’m like diggleblop. Whenever I receive a chain letter, I hit “Reply All” and invariably make the sender look like an ignorant fool. Fortunately, I have the kinds of friends that we can do this to each other and still be friends. Friends who have stopped spamming each other with chain letters
Then see what she says when you tell her that makes her partially a liar.
I delete these types of emails without bothering to read them anymore. They end up being glurgerific tales of hope and woe or lies and always seem to be badly, badly written (The Obama example above made my head Asplode trying to figure out what they were trying to say.)
