Posted on 04/22/2003 4:39:33 PM PDT by Jason Kauppinen
"We also have an embargo against Cuban products in this country."
The funny thing about government-sponsored boycotts is that they tend to hurt the people of both nations. American consumers are limited in their choices, and have to pay higher prices on certain items. The people of the boycotted nation are adversely affected by having their market severly limited. The evil dictators who live off the people they subjugate are typically not affected all that much.
Libertarians are, at bottom, liberals who would love to be able to coerce you to act as they believe.
All this talk of "leaving people alone" is just nonsense.
France hit by tourist boycott
French Finally Admit Boycott Hurts
U.S. Boycott Being Felt, French Say
Not bad for a bunch of illiterates.
"Such is the nature of free speech."
Yes, and I will use my freedom of speech to let people know how ridiculous it is.
As long as this list remains as sloppy as it is, I won't know if I'm "buying French" or not.
Look, if you really want to do this, there are better ways. Here's a suggestion, and you can take it or leave it.
Set up a web site, similar to the one that you forwarded out. Have a seperate listing for each of these, explaining, with verified documentation, exactly what the connection with each of the items you listed is. This prevents corruption by people who would add something because they "heard down at the bar it was kinda French, or something."
If you want a good prototype to follow, look at the Urban Legends page. Even if their commentary and personality is kind of obonxious (I emailed them once and got a rude reply), their documentation is nearly flawless. I'm not crazy about their opinions, but I have no doubt about their facts. They do, as you state, "the leg work". That kind of research engenders confidence, and if you created the same confidence, more people would follow your activism.
If you want to take it a step further, you could also setup a categorization system so that levels of severity are recognized. If something is completely owned by the Chirac family, is it in the same category as a gun manufacturer that is .01% French owned, with the other 99.99% owned by Charles Heston? There are gradations here (the same point I was trying to make with the actors list), and different people are going to want to react to them differently based on that information.
There are other things you can add to it, but the above should be an effective enough start, with emphasis on the word "effective". If you or someone started something like that, then I'd be taking these lists more seriously. As it is, this comes off to me, to reference the thread title, as less of a "Boycott" and more of a "Mania".
The idea of identifying "why" is valid though. I thought that this would be good to see on these "Hollywood leftist" lists I see (attribute the quotes and cite references). Even when I see these political quote emails I want to see the bibliography.
I stopped reading at the second sentence because, it's obvious Anderson either doesn't understand the heart of the issue or he's being disingenuous: it wasn't that France was against the war, it's that France actively, stridently and maliciously undermined the US position. Even to the point of threatening/bullying a few Eastern European nations. And none of the behavior was based on principal...it was only to protect legal and illegal business interests.
I have nothing against the nations that sat on the sidelines, or disagreed with the US civilly, but give me a break - China behaved more mature than the French government did.
France can go to hell. I will never visit there again.
Hmmm... OK. I'll keep an eye out for that. They're smugness has always irked me, so I'd definitely welcome seeing what you're saying.
Online Rumor Mill Spins Its Own Myth
Additionally if you look at the quotes rumors, again I charge that some wording "did so and so say this" or just quote appearing, etc. will be used to toggle a listing from TRUE to FALSE or UNDETERMINED or PARTIALLY TRUE (they have 4 status markers).
As to the older rumors (urban legends) everyone else cribs off of Jan Brunvand's work (he has authored a number of compendiums of these legends including the variant versions). He doesn't always receive credit though. His first 5 books were informative reads (every newspaper editor should be required to read them to keep this junk out of the newspapers, the stories are hoaxes).
Wow, that's excellent. Thanks muchly for posting it. That confirms what I had suspected of them. I'll look at the quotes rumors a little more closely as well.
For the record, when I emailed them, I got a response back in minutes. Yet this person emailed them three times with a serious charge and got nothing? Uh-huh.
Anyway, thanks again: 'tis greatly appreciated.
Status: False.
Clear Channel did circulate a list of songs that "should" be avoided from their playlists. Take that as you will.
"The Clear Channel list is apparently not a flat prohibition against these songs by the nation's largest chain of radio stations. They are simply recordings whose appropriateness has been questioned by individual program directors."This one is listed under "news" although I could not find a Snopes "rumor" defending their claims that it is false:
Slights of Military Still Legends (Duluth News Tribune, 6 April 2003) (Snopes: "All talk about military service personnel being dishonored by merchants, or even by residents, in Duluth are best considered urban legends"
There have been several threads on FR that mention specific personnel and cities (in Texas and elsewhere). The word went out to avoid walking in public in uniform. It may not have happened in Duluth but that doesn't mean that the antiBush left isn't spitting on soldiers elsewhere.
Then there this one:
Status: TRUE:
Did a family die because from suffocation because they followed the Homeland Security suggestion to seal up windows and doors with heavy plastic and duct tape?
No, it was an Israeli family that died. The internet rumor was only partially correct (and omitted a key detail). To pin this off on the American Homeland Security advice is more partisan BS.
I also read this one:
Claim: Red Lobster restaurant refuses to donate gift certificate to POW's family.
Status: False.
The explanation reveals that the person who wrote the original email says that details were changed but we never see the original email. When initially asked, Red Lobster did not give a gift certificate; it all depends on your acceptance of their spin. The original email may have been an overreaction (that was then rewritten by some other recipient) but again there is a kernel of truth to the rumor.
We rate an urban legend as "true" when there is sufficient evidence to indicate that the legend began with a real-life event. If the actions described in an urban legend play out in real life after the legend has begun circulating, that is not an example of what we consider a "true" urban legend -- it is a phenomenon known as "ostension" (and when someone deliberately enacts the events described by an urban legend, that is known as "pseudo-ostension").
This reveals that their rankings are BS as the Red Lobster rumor began with a real event (the situation later corrected) and the duct tape rumor circulated before the unrelated Israeli deaths.
Many of the texts we discuss contain a mixture of truth, falsity, and exaggeration which cannot be accurately described by a single "True" or "False" rating. Therefore, our rating may be based upon what we have chosen as the single most important aspect of the text under discussion, which is summarized in the statement made after the "Claim:" heading at the top of the page. It is important to make note of the wording of that claim, since that is the statement to which our truth rating applies.
And thus we agree where the bias factor in their ratings of TRUE or FALSE comes down.
A closing example of editorializing/speculation from the Snopes staff:
Claim: The son of a woman rescued from the World Trade Center decided to join the Taliban.
Status: Undetermined.
This rumor is still "undetermined" but the site operators offered this blase opinion:
It's far from likely any Westerner, no matter how devout a Muslim or how fervent a believer in the cause, would be welcomed with open arms by the Taliban or the al Qaeda network. The possibility that they might be spies is far too great for either entity to risk taking a chance on these men.
Oh for those days of innocence before we captured Taliban Johnny DooDoo Lindh-Walker. An American who reportedly met Osama Bin Laden.
And I close with this FR thread. This was the only specific Snopes/bias thread I found but as with this current thread, Snopes' bias has been discussed at length on some older FR threads (whenever the topic of discussion got around to snopes).
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