Snopes pages predicted 7/21 London attacks - said FALSE!

[annabanana]

I was noodling around snopes for amusement and found this page!

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/tube.asp

Claim: London police are warning against using the Underground, citing the threat of an imminent terrorist attack.

Status: False.

Origins: This advisory began appearing in inboxes everywhere on 15 July 2005. Rest assured that it did not originate with the Metropolitan Police.

Likewise, there are no mentions in the British press either of police issuing a warning about further possible terrorist activity involving that nation's transit system or of a controlled explosion being performed in the Piccadilly Circus & Leicester Square area on or around 15 July 2005. (Controlled explosions were carried out in other places around the nation during the week between the four suicide bombings of 7 July and the emergence of this hoax on 15 July:


(maybe it wasn't a good idea to poo-poo the warnings?!?)

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Sometimes the wiseacres are just a little too wise

There is such a push to be The Authority on things like "urban legends" and "pseudoscience" that there's a whole lot of premature and spurious debunkery that goes on. It's a form of intellectual machismo, and has a lot of the same problems as regular machismo.

"Skeptic" blogs tend to be the worst, though several deserve honorable mention, like Jim Lippard's various pages. The anti-Environmentalist websites (which also usually abuse the word "skeptical") are pretty, and glitzy, and full of shit. And it's wall-to-wall complaining about the Hockey Stick Graph fallacy, the debunking of which has itself been debunked!

Websites like Snopes serve an excellent and worthwhile purpose, but there needs to be better control of the machismo.

--p!

[bryant69]

2. I don't know

I can understand their frusteration - later on that same morning you saw people speculating here about how the Bush Administration planned these attacks, and it's depressing how soon random guesses turn into interesting theories and then dogma (we aren't there yet, I don't think, but eventually I assume).

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com