ThreadSpotting: “You’re gonna make it after all!”

Some new blood flows into the HalifaxTalk message board and gets caught up in two trainwrecks within a month. Yep, he’s going to fit in just fine. Giant thanks go out to the three people who sent this in as a ThreadSpotting potential!

sppaint is the newest addition to the HalifaxTalk members list, and they were welcomed to the messageboard by being called a cult member thanks to their Mormon faith. You have to give sppaint bonus points for his challenge response of “Bring it on, slappy.” on the next page. Hilarity continued to ensue in that thread as everybody ended up learning that their eventual fate would be burning in hell because they didn’t believe in the correct religion, but we digress. Could the newest member of the board really fit in with the rest of the shiny happy people there? You bet your sweet bippy!

HalifaxTalk: Cap and trade bill

Yeah! We’ve got a cut and paste from a forwarded email that’s total horsecrap. The lovely Ms. ras comes in as the voice of reason and calls rose-colored bullshit on it by linking to the well-researched Snopes.com article. That should be the end of it, right? Wrongo! It gets better! We’ve got Tom McFriendly chiming in 90 minutes later repeating the bullshit claim and the court jester of Clan Talbott actually gets a good snarky reply shot in at him. This would be a good place to let this thread-o-fun die a happy death, but nooooo… there’s more!

Our good copy-and-horsecrap-pasting friend drops this bomb into the thread…

Based on what? Is this snopes thing reliable? This story may very well have been elaborated upon, however, it is based in fact. Read the bill.

Whatever, just go ahead and discount this and go along blindly, just don’t complain about it later.

Hoo boy. Now in non-snarky fairness to the sweet squirrelgirl55 who asked a fair question about the methodology of Snopes.com, here’s the methodology that they use…

We don’t expect anyone to accept us as the ultimate authority on any topic. Unlike the plethora of anonymous individuals who create and send the unsigned, unsourced e-mail messages that are forwarded all over the Internet, we show our work. The research materials we’ve used in the preparation of any particular page are listed in the bibliography displayed at the bottom of that page so that readers who wish to verify the validity of our information may check those sources for themselves.

The bottom line is they’re good at what they do and I can’t ever remember a time that they were wrong. It’s a safe assumption that whatever the Snopes crew says, it’s well-researched, cited and correct. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s resume our look into Bizarro World. Ms. ras tries to play nice by not yelling “This is bullshit!” but I don’t play that way.

Dear sppaint: Your cut-and-pasted email is total bullshit. Take the time to carefully read it and cross-reference it with a small degree of common sense. You should come to the rational (oops, there’s that word) conclusion that there is absolutely no chance that the government would install such a program and even if they attempted to do such a thing, it would never even come close to becoming law. The defense strategy of “BUT IT REALLY MIGHT COULD HAPPEN!” only goes so far. The sky isn’t falling. I’m not a doctor nor have I played one on TV, but I’ve got a prescription for you. Common sense and Snopes. Take multiple times per day as needed. Welcome to HalifaxTalk. You’ll fit in quite well.