{"id":81,"date":"2014-02-28T14:43:30","date_gmt":"2014-02-28T19:43:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/?p=81"},"modified":"2014-02-28T15:24:24","modified_gmt":"2014-02-28T20:24:24","slug":"truth-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/2014\/02\/28\/truth-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Truth Matters."},"content":{"rendered":"

Our former Vice-President from the term of George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle, is not remembered as an intelligent or well-spoken man. One of his more infamous verbal gaffes is this one:<\/p>\n

I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn’t study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, the main thing to know about this line is that Quayle never said it. The idea that he ever said anything like this has been thoroughly<\/a>\u00a0debunked<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no shortage of dumb things he really did say or do. He really did misspell \u201cpotato\u201d in front of a roomful of school kids. He did lose an argument with a fictional character<\/a>. Many of his bigger howlers can be found at the Snopes link above.<\/p>\n

Why am I bringing up Dan Quayle, and specifically the \u201cLatin\u201d misquote? Because it was debunked contemporaneously, within months after it began appearing, but I know people who repeated it anyway, knowing it wasn\u2019t true, because (I paraphrase), \u201cQuayle is so dumb, it\u2019s something he could have said.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zoom ahead to a few days ago. A Facebook friend of mine posted, for purposes of ridicule, the following image of a tweet:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Pretty outrageous, isn\u2019t it? A little too<\/em> outrageous, I thought, so I suspected it might be an example of Poe\u2019s Law<\/a>. I set to investigating.<\/p>\n

That Twitter account, @GodsWordIsLaw, was suspended or banned a couple of years ago. Its apparent successor, @GodsWordIsLaws<\/a>, hasn\u2019t been used since late 2012, and based on some of the tweets there, was either always a parody site or was hacked early on and never brought home.<\/p>\n

But regardless, when I brought up the idea that the tweet might<\/em>\u00a0be satire or parody, my friend said that doesn\u2019t \u00a0matter, because \u201cthere really are Christians who think that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe so, but it\u2019s being a bad skeptic to say as much \u00a0(and to act accordingly). Mocking politicians for things they didn\u2019t actually say is easy, and lazy. I could string together random words, claim that Dan Quayle (or George W. Bush, or Joe Biden, or anyone else) said them, and then ridicule him for being stupid.<\/p>\n

Similarly, I could project the reductio ad absurdum<\/em> of something a fundamentalist Christian (or Muslim, or Orthodox Jew) might say, and then bash him or her for probably having such a ridiculous belief.<\/p>\n

How much would either of those be worth?<\/p>\n

Truth matters. I hope that\u2019s an obvious point, but it seems to bear repeating. There is a plethora of satire and parody out there; I\u2019d be outraged all the time if I took it all seriously, and I don\u2019t ever want to be so cynical that I will assume the worst of humanity without verifying it first.<\/p>\n

Truth matters. We should never forget that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our former Vice-President from the term of George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle, is not remembered as an intelligent or well-spoken…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}