PANIC!
Okay, it’s rant time. At least once a month, I get email from someone who’s so frantic about something, they had to tell all 3,427 people in their address book, and they want everyone to know that it’s imperative that they warn everyone they know, immediately-by smoke signal, if necessary-about some impending threat or other. Some of them have even followed up with phone calls to make sure that I got the email, and seem genuinely surprised that I deleted it without forwarding it.
This month’s suspect is a lovely missive about how Madeline Murray O’Hare [sic] is trying to get religious broadcasting banned from the airwaves. There’s a petition, we’re told, circulated by James Dobson (that part may well be true; he’s turned indignation into a cottage industry). And CBS even yanked “Touched By An Angel” off the air for repeatedly using the word God! The bastards!
Okay, now let’s break this down rationally: I’m impressed, first of all, that Ms. O’Hair is trying to get much of anything banned anywhere these days. The famed atheist activist, y’see, was kidnapped and murdered in 1995. And “TBAA” was pulled in 2003, having had a healthy nine-year run. Say what you want about CBS, but I don’t think it took them that long to notice. Oh, and the House bill featured so prominently in the email? They’re only 33 years late, the bill having been introduced and failing to pass in 1975.
I know that people are generally well-intentioned. They see something about a computer virus that gives your laptop herpes when you check your email, and they want to make sure that you’re “protected.” All well and good. Except that I haven’t gotten a scaregram yet that actually had what’s elsewhere called “actionable intelligence.” Instead, it reads like it came from Fox News Channel, and is about as accurate.
What’s worse is that nobody checks these things before forwarding to the aforementioned 3,427 people. And it’s not like it’s difficult. You pick a phrase from the email (I generally look for one of the more inflammatory bits), Google it, and see what comes up. Usually, it’s something from Snopes or a related site, debunking the email. So if anyone bothered to look, I also wouldn’t have gotten this gem about “In God We Trust” being left off the new run of silver dollars. A check of the search engines (or of the dollars themselves) shows that the phrase is inscribed on the coin’s edge.
What’s sad is that some of these have been making the rounds since the mid- to late-1990’s. You’d think that someone would have gotten the message (albeit belatedly) that there’s no truth to what they’re warning you about.
Then again, there’re still people who think that Iraq had something to do with 9/11.
You’d think that I’d just delete this stuff, unread. I would, but with my luck, the one that I deleted would be the ONE email that actually had something useful in it. I do my due diligence, checking the email to see if it’s genuine, so I can decide whether it’s something I need to do something about. I just wish the person who got the email before me had bothered to do that before clogging my inbox with it.
Tags: atheists, conspiracy, paranoia, Spam
March 17th, 2008 at 7:40 am
Yeah, it’s annoying. I’m pretty amazed these days when I see it’s true on Snopes, but it does happen. For a while, I was replying to all with “This is false” with a link to the relevant Snopes article. I was hoping to do some good, but instead many started relying on me to save them the 15 seconds of fact checking. While I stopped doing that, I noticed other people have taken up the banner, and they’re usually not so polite about it. People are really getting annoyed with this, and they seem to relish the virtual flogging of the offenders.
Now I’m starting to see a new trend: scare emails with actual links to Snopes in them. I get the feeling that people are trolling Snopes for things that would cause mild concern, then writing emails using the most histrionic wording they can concoct. It’s all about the attention, methinks.