This chain letter was forwarded to me out of frustration at having received the letter rather than because the sender agreed with the contents. Nonetheless, it was in my inbox, and that meant a debunking was called for. It’s long, and I had time on my hands, so it’s a bit involved, but it’s a valuable exercise in the actual anatomy of a chain letter.
For the brave among you, read on!
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Well I’m happy to say America is progressing. I’m exceedingly sad to report that it is progressing from handwringing about socialism to handwringing about militant Islam spreading across the Western world and infecting the governments of the countries they inhabit like so many blankets spreading smallpox.
In keeping with this new tradition, a friend of mine recently sent me one of the first emails I’ve gotten from him that doesn’t mention the nascent socialist takeover of the United States at all. No, this one was all Islam, all the time. Actually it was just a link to a YouTube video. Have a watch, and then read my lengthy response below the jump.
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This is the latest email forward I’ve received, and they don’t get much more full of bad data and mis-attributed scholars than this. This has been covered in other places, notably at Snopes; this particular link actually points to the original 2000 version of the email. Factcheck.org also deals with the 2008 version.
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Here is one of the most obnoxious emails I’ve seen; apart from just being generally designed to divide people, it’s also clearly false.
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This Craigslist post from 2005 is cropping up again. I could have sworn it actually originated months prior as a chain email before it was posted to Craigslist because I remember it (or something like it) being thrust at me soon after the 2004 election. It’s making the rounds as a chain email again, and wound up in my mailbox, sent to me by a loved one. My response after the jump. Read more…
I’m not quite certain how to post the original forwarded messages; unfortunately, a nontrivial number of them actually contain large numbers of images, some pertinent, some just annoying. For now, we’ll skip the images, and consider the most recent forward I’ve received, which features misquoted Founding Fathers, inaccurate statistics, and religion… Read more…