I'll admit it. I started out as a cranky technophobe, but I've come to really like the Internet. Netflix and Amazon alone are worth the price of a computer, as far as I'm concerned.
I also love the opportunity to read newspaper articles from across the world. Unfortunately, the Internet is also a great source of misinformation.
Actually, "misinformation" is too mild a term for what I have in mind. I doubt my editors would let me get away with writing it, but I'm thinking about something that bulls produce.
In particular, I get really irritated with the practice of forwarding anonymous e-mails full of inaccurate information, which recipients accept as absolute truth and forward in turn. All too often, that serves as political discourse these days.
One of my favorite Websites is www.snopes.com, devoted to examinating the veracity of "urban myths," including those propagated by e-mail.
Recently, I received one of those forwarded e-mail rants that I found particularly objectionable. It deals with the presidential election results of 2000. Unsurprisingly, a recent version of the same text "updates" the statistics by simply replacing the names of Gore and Bush with, respectively, Obama and McCain.
Like so much of this crap, I'm sure it will be around for some time to come.
I see no reason to reproduce the whole thing here. If you check out this link on Snopes.com, you can read the original e-mail and the reasons why it's untrue.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/athenian.asp
I get a lot of those stupid e-mails in my inbox, but this one particulary irritated me for several reasons. First of all, I find the (inaccurate) citing of scholarly sources in an apparent attempt to give it some degree of intellectual legitimacy to be pretty pathetic. Especially in light of its ignorant and bigoted contents.
It concludes with the following:
"Square miles of land won by:
Gore=580,000
Bush=22,427,000
States won by:
Gore=19
Bush=29
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by:
Gore=13.2
Bush=2.1
Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the great country. Gore's territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off government welfare"
As you've seen if you checked out the Snopes link, the listing of murder rates is inaccurate. Apparently the one involving square miles of land is true, but I don't see why it's in any way relevant unless you believe that rocks and trees should have voting rights.
This "Professor Olson" apparently never said any of that, so I assume the final paragraph reflects the beliefs of the piece's anonymous author. And that's what I find so repulsive, yet so queasily fascinating, about the whole thing.
The implication is that the votes of people living in poorer areas are somehow less legitimate than those from "land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the great country."
What fascinates me is the way it hearkens back to an argument from the Founding Fathers' era: Should every citizen have a vote, or should voting be the sole privilege of property owners? The argument for the latter premise was that the common rabble were simply too low-born, too uneducated, too scuzzy to get a vote.
Fortunately, the ones making that argument lost out, and democracy prevailed -- albeit in a limited form. Blacks and women were still denied their full rights as citizens. But at least the idea that the right to vote shouldn't be dependent on wealth and land ownership set a good precedent.
Now if only some of these pinheads on the Internet could wrap their brains around the concept.
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