Truth, strike two

[ciphergoth]

Thanks for some interesting and surprising responses to the JFK question. At the risk of creating more heat than light, let me try another example, one that I think might be a little less comfortable to be neutral about.

It seems that many people believe that on the morning of September 11, 2001, four thousand or more Israelis who were working at the World Trade Center did not show up for work.

Are those people wrong?

(Update: amended as per ajva's caveat)

Comments

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

I suppose it's a balance between etiquette and preventing harm. One or the other of your original people is likely mistaken, but the harm of believing in someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald is relatively low compared to the harm of believing (and repeating) a concept that Israel was complicit in 9/11.

Much as Americans are thought to be rude, flat out saying, "you're wrong" is unusual in polite company here.

(I consider this unfortunate. But every time I return a forward from one of my dad's friends by linking back to the snopes entry I'm doing something somewhat rude, particularly if I do a reply-to-all, which is required to keep it from propagating. So it becomes a bit of a calculation - no, the shark pictures aren't from a shark that got saved from a net, but does that really matter? But "ZOMG Avoid X product because of Y mistaken awfulness" is something I'm going to correct.)

[adjectivegail]

Yes, I've had this dilemma as well. My boss at a previous workplace sent forwarded an email to all the women in the office, about that old chestnut that tampons contain asbestos to make women bleed more. Now, she was my boss so I really didn't want to show her up and embarrass her. But on the other hand I really didn't want the majority of our large and predominantly female workforce to suddenly worry about a product that presumably a fairly large proportion had been using most months for several years if not decades!

Now that I think about it, it ocurs to me that what I could have done is replied to all and then taken out the boss' email address, and then replied to the boss separately...

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Hm. That could still be somewhat dangerous. Do you mean to reply to everyone except the boss, and separately reply to the boss? Still ends up showing up the boss :( Pehraps responding to the boss in as gentle a manner of possible, but then of course that's trusting that the boss will later correct.

That is a hard situation.

[adjectivegail]

Ah, yes, I did mean that and you've pointed out a rather obvious flaw! I was thinking that in that particular workplace people didn't really talk about their emails, even if they'd just sent/received emails to each other and then met in the kitchen, unless it was about work. So they probably wouldn't have mentioned it to her - except it would've only needed one of them to do so for me to have created a bit of a faux pas.

At the time I did send a global email and restricted my comment to the URL and something like "Snopes is an authoritative source on urban legends and says we don't need to worry". I figured the more words I let myself use, the more likely I was going to say something embarrassing or patronising or something.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've encountered this - including one particularly nasty one about the South African police closing down their rape/child abuse department. Very quickly Snopes-able, turned out to be absolute rubbish and probably actually created originally by child abusers themselves to defame the department in question.

Emailed the person back and told them it was nonsense and to check their facts before forwarding chain mails on, and included all the relevant links to Snopes and the SA police website. She threw a fit, started going on about "I was sent this by a well-respected person, I was forwarding it in good faith" - as if 'in good faith' was the same as being factually correct.