Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious
I ranted about one of these on facebook yesterday.  Attached to a stock photo of an Amish lumber worker:<p>> I had a conversation with an Amish gentleman yesterday while I was loading at a mill, and at the end of the conversation he asked me one question that should really get one thinking.  He asked "Do you know why this virus hasn't affected us yet?" no "well because we don't have television"<p>The good friend who posted this was like, "this really got me thinking!"<p>(I presumed the subtext was that this virus is just blown out of proportion.)<p>My response was -- WHY?  Why do we even assume this quote is TRUE?  And why would you let fake things like this give you something to think about?<p>These are no better than the junk faxes people used to pass around claiming Proctor & Gamble worshiped the devil.  I was kind of glad I stopped getting them in email from relatives because they moved to facebook instead, but ... so much of our society's ... gestalt? mindset? ... is formed by these junk memes being passed around as truth. (And this isn't unique to one political persuasion.)<p>The best evidence that Facebook and Twitter are drugs I think is that for some reason brains turn off when consuming media on them.<p>Where has our critical thinking gone?  We’re hopeless as a society without it.