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Blog Administration
Tuesday, August 17. 2004
Fawghourne on SPIM
This interview took place at the cyber cafe in beautiful, downtown Rock Crossing, Montana, about five miles south east of Plentywood. The waitress and tech consultant there, Mabel, a woman some might think has been "rode hard and put in the barn wet", but in reality, the waitressing job merely allowed time for her two true passions, loop invariance of object oriented parsination routines and ice fishing.
This article is brought to you courtesy of a kind grant from the Mosquito Defamation League, whose motto is, "Blood Suckers deserve respect also."
| WegoWeb | Hi, Senator. What's on your mind? |
| Sen. Fawghourne: | I want to get after that bogus website thing. |
| WegoWeb | SPIM, Specious Political Internet Myths. Write up something cute and clever... include many things with which nobody disagrees... then put a zinger on, something that damns a political opponent with a bumper sticker line. Then ship it to 30 friends who ship it to thirty more. The whole thing is done under the radar, without anybody fact checking, without a chance for rebuttal, and without any shame. Plausible but false... it too quickly enters the "common knowledge." |
| Sen. Fawghourne: | The important question is "How do you tell what is dependable then?" I mean... I was reading this item today, and found it hard to believe.
Is this for real? |
| WegoWeb | Actually, there is a good clue in the URL on that one. The "dot gov" means that it is an official government website. Literally, this is an officially attributed press release from an authentic member of congress. |
| Sen. Fawghourne: | So they changed the Congressional Record. |
| WegoWeb | I'm used to the idea that the Congressional Record is not what the representatives actually say. On CSpan, they always do that "revise and extend" thing to let them put in a more polished and longer version of their comments. one that adds stuff that they intend to say. This is talking about subtracting stuff they actually did say. |
| Sen. Fawghourne: | Yes, revise and extend is common but this is unusual. I now see the URL as a good clue. Is there anything else a person can do to check up on these things? |
| WegoWeb | I always do a quick google search. In this case I would search on "request the United Nations to assess the validity of elections in the United States" This is an unlikely phrase. This yields sites like http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/072304Ramares/072304ramares.html and http://shapeofdays.typepad.com/the_shape_of_days/2004/08/un_observers_on.html which then make the item more believable. |
| Sen. Fawghourne: | I see... and if somebody thought it was a fraud, that might be listed also. |
| WegoWeb | Yes. It is also good to check the debunking sites like http://www.snopes.com/info/search/ which is notoriously fair about researching items picked up on the internet. Since one of your interests is politics, you also might like http://www.factcheck.org/ . |
| Sen. Fawghourne: | I think I'll let you go... I have some fact checking of my own to do now. |
| WegoWeb | Have a good day, Senator. |