Political discussions in the workplace - Part Two

[saveau]

The next thing that went around after the Ireland thing below was the letter about how Obama supposedly "snubbed the troops" for a photo-op while in Afghanistan. It was written by a reserve officer stationed over there who, contrary to his claims, was NOT present at Obama's arrival and so was in no position to give his claimed first-hand account

Comments

[g33kgoddess]

Ain't snopes.com grand? I just WISH that people would check it before forwarding crap. Of course, people only forward the crap they want to believe that justifies their world view. Can't have THAT questioned.

I especially like the junk emails in this category that note, "I checked it out on Snope and it's TRUE!"

Ugh. The masses are asses.

[saveau]

Hey, what happened to your blog? I've been getting a server error for days now.

[avindair]

I have, too!

What annoys me about the original topic is that the NeoCons have learned that truth is nowhere near as important as the perception of truth. All it takes to derail real talent is a whisper of the right rumors in the wrong ears, and a career is torpedoed.

There's no reasoning with this, sadly enough. Worse, I have no idea how to get around it. In a world where people have snopes.com but ignore it because "it's biased" (yes, I've heard that) what can you do?

[davidkingsley]

Reality has a liberal bias.

[lonely_doll]

Sometimes when I've gotten one of those "OMG, the sky is falling, quick, everyone, forward this to everyone in your address book!" emails, and I direct the sender to snopes.com I feel kind of like a smart-ass know-it-all - but in the case of debunking political lies, I wouldn't.

The sad thing is that, even after seeing the debunking, the sender still probably thinks, well, maybe this isn't exactly true but, you know, where there's smoke, there's fire! That Obama's got something against America, dammit!