Do you all ever refute urban-legend e-mails at work?

[XanaDUer]

Although I work in a hospital, we have staff (non doctors and non nurses) who constantly send spam chain mail emails through the work email system all about the stupidest things on earth. These are immediately believed by my coworker, who fancies herself the smartest trick in shoe leather on all aspects of Life from A-Z.

Usually, I ignore and delete. However, the last one was so egregiously stupid and disgusting, I had to Snopes it:


WARNING - DISGUSTING AND GRAPHIC IMAGE, ALTHOUGH PHOTOSHOPPED AND STUPID

http://www.snopes.com/photos/medical/breastrash.asp

It is the story of anthropologist Susan McKinley and how her breast was eaten by a parasite b/c she did not boil her underwear before wearing it. Of course, it was FOREIGN underwear and, as Americans, we know that anything foreign cannot be trusted near our neat, tidy and holy bodies, esp. the naughty bits.

There is a real condition called myiasis of the breast. And we wonder why people fall for Republican BS.

[semillama]

1. My mom and brother used to send me those

About after the 100th time I sent them a Snopes article debunking it, they caught on...

[Orrex]

2. "And we wonder why people fall for Republican BS."

Really, that's the essence of it. Whenever somebody posts some bullshit about the cancer-killing power of vitamin C or the need to send Reiki vibes to Obama, I find myself unable to keep silent in the face of such stupidity.

Invariably, some Woo eventually says "Why are you denying me the right to choose?" as if that's the issue at play. The other formulation is "What's the harm?" and Woos argue that, if I claim that green tea doesn't cure psoriasis, then why am I so worked up about it?

The answer is that magical, lazy thinking of that sort ultimately trains the mind to question nothing.

Blind religious faith does exactly the same thing, of course, but on a much larger scale.

That is why skepticism is important, because without it we train ourselves to be zombies.

[lizerdbits]

5. Try this next time

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=247x19899#19964

[beam me up scottie]

6. "...lazy thinking of that sort ultimately trains the mind to question nothing."

It's more than that, I think we need to add another rule to the Woo Woo list:

Do not question the woo of others, no matter how ridiculous, doing so may expose your own woo to scrutiny.


I mean, COME ON, how is it possible that all woos believe in every single idiotic cure, magic, invisible force, etc? They must be aware of at least some of the scams that have been exposed over the years, how the hell can they believe everything they read about orgone muffins, sylphs and Crystal children?



Meh, maybe I'm just cranky because I'm in the wrong business, there are millions of uber-gullible sheep out there just begging to be fleeced...

[Orrex]

7. I like it--it implies a more active, conscious role in refusing to question

Rather than simply developing as a side-effect of woo-thinking, "non-questioning" of others' woo becomes necessary in order to maintain one's own.

[uriel1972]

3. great, now I can't get that image out of my head :( nt

[lizerdbits]

4. Me too

One of my boobs itched as I was falling asleep last night and all I could think about was larvae, even knowing it was BS. At least I didn't get up and check for them.

[dropkickpa]

8. I know which one you are talking about

and I refuse to look, because that image will burn itself onto my retinas yet again.

I always hit reply-all and send the debunking stuff. Makes the person who sent it to me look very stupid, and may stop the idiocy if only for a day or two.

[XanaDUer]

9. I stopped the idiocy for two whole days.

Coca-Cola can dissolve a t-bone steak and do all sorts of other magical things. Cure cancer, too, I think.

[TZ]

10. Actually Coca-Cola has a ph of about 3.3

Pretty acidic so it CAN do some of the stuff that people claim..just not all of it (I know this because a safety officer at one of my jobs measured it..)

[onager]

11. And Coke can dissolve your teef!

I remember reading this somewhere a long time ago, so I guess I'm contributing to rumor-and-scare mongering. :-)

Allegedly, some lab did a test where they left rat teeth in a container of Coca-Cola for a long time and the teeth eventually dissolved.

Well, as usual, this led to a lot of people worrying that they might wake up in the morning indentured. (Sorry, lousy pun but I couldn't help myself.)

One worried person called or wrote Coca-Cola, and got hold of a PR person who had answered this question too many times.

The corporate response was something like this: "If you're stupid enough to constantly soak your teeth in our product, you deserve to lose them."

I don't know if that story is true or not, but I sure hope so.

Snopes has a version of it:

http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tooth.asp

[onager]

12. I work in Egypt, but get barraged by these stupid things.

My mother gave my email address to some of her friends. They seem to have put me on the email lists of every religious/woo-woo crackpot in South Carolina, a not inconsiderable part of the population. (e.g., McCain is 20 points ahead in S.C.)

Most of the time I just delete the stupid things. But I finally snapped when I got the one about "atheists want to ban religious programming." That old wowser predates the internet. It was circulating as chain snail-mail back in the 1970's.

I sent the Snopes link to everyone on the list, and asked them to kindly check before they hit the "Send To All" button.

The very next day I got ANOTHER piece of religious glurge. At the top the sender had edited it to say: "I checked with Snopes and this is REAL!!!"

(It was also HUGH and no doubt SERIES1111)

She couldn't have checked very closely, since I went to Snopes and found it debunked.

So, back to just deleting them. Dorothy Parker's wisecrack about horticulture comes to mind...

What amazes me is the sheer number of these things that are nothing but chain email. With some kind of implied threat if I don't "pass it on to (3 or 5 or 10) other people."

Most of these threats involve my relationship with Jesus, which is at least funny since I'm a Fundamentalist Atheist. I may start repsponding by saying if Jesus tries to have a relationship with me, I'll get a restraining order.

[realisticphish]

13. they use "i checked snopes" a LOT

i guess they count on people being too damn lazy to, you know, check it themselves