Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Telling the Truth From A Lie

Reading the "best of craigslist" can provide hours of entertainment. It can also provide lessons in how to tell the truth from a lie.

Just as an example, this one is quite possibly real. The content is real, the tone isn't excessive, and there are no glaring errors.

This one, however, is clearly made-up. The tone is hysterical, there author provides no details to cause us to believe she or her husband is in the military, and she sounds too much like a Moveon.org fool. Additionally, she made a serious factual error, one no military person would make--she said she's a Marine, but her post title says she's a soldier. No Marine would call himself or herself a soldier; it would be like an infantryman calling an armored personnel carrier, a Bradley, or a self-propelled artillery piece a "tank". Not gonna happen.

The loser who wrote the 2nd piece is clearly trying to play on emotions to make his or her point, because fact and logic has obviously failed him or her. As Bugs Bunny would say, "What a maroon." Or as the rest of us would say, "What a loser."

1 comment:

Ellen K said...

Moveon.org and other groups have been placing such articles on message boards for quite awhile now. The Communists used to call this method The Big Lie. The theory is that if you say something loud enough and long enough, people will accept it as truth, even when there's not a shred of truth in the whole thing. It's Gossip Girl Government at its finest.