Hoax! Couple behind Birth or Not abortion voting website are internet fraudsters

Daily Mail ^ | 11/23/10 | Daily Mail Reporter

[CharlieOK1]

The Minneapolis couple behind the website birthornot.com have been revealed as internet fraudsters.

Pete and Alisha Arnold, both 30, set up a website claiming they were torn about aborting or keeping their healthy baby boy and asked the public to vote online and help them decide.

But the alternative weekly City Pages revealed Pete is a pro-life activist who posts his beliefs on the internet under the alias Zeeboid.

[CharlieOK1]

Your thoughts? First of all I am relieved.

[ButThreeLeftsDo]

FR sniffed this out the day it happened.....

[rarestia]

I couldn’t care less if it’s a fraud, these two should be publicly shamed for being so calloused. We need to bring back the old iron and wood head/wrist restraints used in public squares and allow children to chuck rotten fruit at the punished.

[OneWingedShark]

Why? Was the “fraud” actually monetary? Was there anything that was lost, by you or another? Did they do anything illegal?
What, if any, difference is there between what these two did and the telling of a parable*?

{*Parable: a realistic story that may or may not have happened, told in order to present a [usu. moral] point.}

[MNDude]

seems like their plan worked to get thousands of abortion supporting people to look at the image of a fetus, before saying saying they agree with its destruction.

[Mr. Lucky]

Agreed. This was an incredibly dumb idea which inflicts serious damage on the pro-life movement.

[Mobile Vulgus]

Yeah, it was somewhat obvious that it was all an Internet joke/hoax.

[UCANSEE2]

Or it may have affected the anti-life movement, more than you know.

[momtothree]

I am relieved as well. I don’t know if the intent of the couple was to show the sonogram, talk about the heart, growth rate and then make the voters really question if they would abort the baby. If in some weird sense they were trying to get pro-abortion advocates to see the difference between what some describe as “tissue” and others describe as a baby? Either way (even if the intent was thought of as good) this stunt was sick. IMHO.

[UCANSEE2]

Those who are maddest about it, are those who fell for it.

IMHO, The Internet was always known as CAVEAT EMPTOR.

[MN_Rightside]

Her hoax has consequences. She was fired from her employer.
http://kstp.com/news/stories/S1851233.shtml?cat=1

[stuartcr]

Make sure when you happily hand out the fruit to the kids, there aren’t any pits or dangerous stuff in them.

[rarestia]

fraud
–noun
1. deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage.
2. a particular instance of such deceit or trickery: mail fraud; election frauds.
3. any deception, trickery, or humbug: That diet book is a fraud and a waste of time.
4. a person who makes deceitful pretenses; sham; poseur.

Pick a dictionary definition and it applies. They may not have gained financially, but putting something out there that's entirely untrue and seemingly only for personal amusement is at least definition 4. They're poseurs and shams. They played on the highly emotional strings of the abortion debate and debased the issue altogether.

A parable's intent is to teach something. Like you said, it's intended to be a moral lesson. There's nothing morally righteous or otherwise proper about what they've done.

[Balding_Eagle]

I couldn’t care less if it’s a fraud, these two should be publicly shamed for being so calloused.

I'm missing the calloused part.

Can anyone explain what was so callous about thier postings?

[rarestia]

cal·lous
–adjective
1. made hard; hardened.
2. insensitive; indifferent; unsympathetic: They have a callous attitude toward the sufferings of others.
3. having a callus; indurated, as parts of the skin exposed to friction.

[freekitty]

I agree. Fraud is fraud.

[OneWingedShark]

So then, because you believe fraud to have occurred, why are you not [personally] filing a lawsuit?

[Balding_Eagle]

Huh?

So what do you think of the pictures, posters, moving billboards featuring dead fetuses (babies really)?

Are they not even more callous, as the casual viewer cannot avoid them?

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Gee, never saw THAT coming.

[OneWingedShark]

>cal·lous
>–adjective
>1. made hard; hardened.
>2. insensitive; indifferent; unsympathetic: They have a callous attitude toward the sufferings of others.
>3. having a callus; indurated, as parts of the skin exposed to friction.

Hm, then you would surely object to my border-security plan, no?
Here it is: deploy the military along the border with orders to USE DEADLY FORCE ON ALL ILLEGAL ENTRANTS, *AND* allow all private citizens to do the same [actually Constitutionally justified as a legitimate function of the militia].

I predict that after the stories of “HEARTLESS” Americans killing “poor undocumented workers & their families” are wide-spread south of our national border that there will be a sharp decrease in the volume of illegal immigration from that area. I believe that anything short of a violent response will be compromised.