Snopes Endorsement Unwelcome, Call Us False or We Will Sue

Fuck these clowns. They hit us where it hurts, and validated our claim, an endorsement that would be great from anyone but them.

December 12, 2018 JAG Cyrus the Stray, Featured, Humor, In Brief, Independent Press, JAG

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

Ahhhh, the Snopes Clowns are at it again. They hit us where it hurts, and validated us. Validation is usually a good thing, provided it’s good company, but you see, Snopes are hit and run mercenaries of slander.

Worse, for “fact checkers” they are  never close to the truth because their model is designed only to attack it. They cannot move beyond Schopenhauer’s first step in reaching truth’s acceptance, because they are stuck on ridiculing truth or even facts (e.g. mockery like throwing around personal attacks such as conspiracy theorist in step one) on what is too often later accepted as self-evident truth. Examples of this imbecility are too numerous to list herein, their attempts to abort the birth of truth or the dissemination of facts would require a Wikipedia of Fails (that will be a separate article featuring Snopes deceptions).

The issue is not not that they’re biased alone, that is bad enough, but again, that their “fact checking” model is innately false because it is based on a well-known logical fallacy, the Appeal to Authority in which they are the supreme authority. Logical fallacies make finding any truth impossible, and are therefore dangerous.

An appeal to authority is a fallacy in which someone seeks to persuade not by evidence but by appealing to often irrelevant experts or expertise. Snopes can’t claim expertise on anything but hubris, and brainwashing or bullshitting people.

Thus, to be correctly fact checked by Snopes is a dubious honor, like an honorary trophy from the American Society for Stupid People, and we kindly but firmly refuse any such validation whenever offered. It gives credence to the fatally flawed Snopes model itself. We aren’t ingrates, we just think it is imperative that we don’t contribute to information models that are literally dangerous, and harmful to an audience’s ability to think critically. Snopes doesn’t even do any journalism itself, by the way, they are low-class Yelp reviewers paid to attack businesses they never visited. They don’t send teams of private investigators or reporters to interview scientists, doctors, celebrities, news figures, et al. They do not answer to a peer review of professionals they attack.

In the real world, there is an actual likelihood that anything that is “fact checked” and approved by Snopes will literally backfire with about half of Americans, who were introduced to their pro-Democrat bias that helped discredit Republicans and gloss over stories critical of the Democrat Party. Yet Facebook calls them an authority, the last word in fact checking, but Mark Zuckerberg can go fuck himself with a rusty chainsaw. (We’ll see why in a bit, and you may agree.)

It’s True, Snopes. We Are Conspiracy Theorists, and It’s Proudly Displayed on Our Front Page!

Good job, geniuses, you found our Badge of Honor, and you’ve proved your literacy!

Snopes sucked up to us and correctly called us Conspiracy Theorists, a great badge of honor, albeit we are more correctly termed Conspiracy Analysts, Pattern Recognition Analysts, satirists, writers, poets and citizen journos. Our Editor-in-Chief, William “Conspiracy Theory” Shakespeare, is most delighted indeed.
Damn, Snopes! Even Deadpool needs eye protection when you shine!
Here, the Impious Digest editorial staff see group of Snopes fact checkers cross the street, compelling us to don our atomic goggles to protect our eyes from their almighty brilliance. We call this moment, most humbly, The Event. Days later our foreign affairs editor, his hair since turned white, said sadly “It may never be safe to remove these goggles again, for behold, even now, days later, I’m still blinded by the light!”

Our foreign affairs editor.

In fact, because we know through Snopes’ own history they are hit and run defamation mercenaries for sale to the highest bidder, we couldn’t do anything but distance ourselves from these professional slanderers as a matter of conscience. We not only reject their endorsement, our legal team will ensure they never try to do it again.

It was decided that our best option was to demand they call anything we publish correctly as “false,” even retroactively, lest a “true” rating from these evil clowns suggest we are a willing part of their three-ring shit show; where ethical, professional journos are shot out of cannons into shark tanks and child molesters are fanned and held aloft obsequiously by a cheering Snopes caravan.

Here’s an example of Facebook  using Snopes to discourage the act of thinking for yourself.

If we publish an article on how the sun is hot, and Snopes cites us as true, we demand under threat of immediate litigation that they call our story false even if it is self-evidently true. Why? That is what their reputation means to us, and to any journalist or researcher with a modicum of integrity. We don’t need their seal of approval. We print it out, in fact, wipe our asses with it, and mail it back.

Oh Snopes, you ill-conceived, lice-infected pube sweaters, how long must the world suffer your unwholesome pestilence?

You lie-breathing retinue of cut-and-paste illiterate dumb asses and trolls, your perdition is most assuredly arranged with military precision. Come this way, won’t you? we’ve been expecting you. Please be seated… Now, tell us all you know about Zuckerberg, Schmidt, and Soros, and your little search engine suppression schemes, if you wouldn’t mind…

These unqualified miscreants at Snopes will decide the fate of your hard work, and its ability to be shared and publicized on Google and Facebook, which hits you right in the pocketbook and makes them ripe for an anti-trust body blow. Let them be scattered to the four winds of the earth. They are professional character assassins, but they come in handy when truth embarrasses the tech giants.

Yes, he actually said that about users on Facebook.
Will he use Snopes to prove his hypothesis? Will you, my fellow Americans, show him who the real dumb fuck is?

As you can see, we prefer an adversarial relationship with Snopes until they reform; until they come clean with their readers about their very premise on fact checking being innately and fatally flawed. They presume themselves a final authority on everything, even knowing the whole truth on ongoing stories before the facts come out completely when criminologists have yet to type up their reports, or the government declassifies.

They need to come clean about their founder being an embezzler who misled supporters and defrauded them of their donations, because frauds are the worst judges of truth, especially professional frauds, which he graduated to. Or better yet, Snopes can give an angel wings somewhere, and redeem themselves with a gas can and self-immolation.

Subjective and Objective Truths: Only Latter is Valid

We checked on the embezzler claim, incidentally, and marked it with an Impious Digest “True dat!” check mark. Our check mark doesn’t mean shit either, it was thrown in to illustrate how silly Snopes sounds. Facts and ongoing events are not subject to Snopes’ approval to merely exist, and Snopes isn’t the Consumer Reports of journalism as much as they diddle themselves to the fantasy. You can give products like cars or washing machines check marks because something either works well or it does not. It is an objective model.

Snopes is a subjective model, no different than the one film or book critics use. That means we have to see the world through the eyes of the reviewer to understand his truth, often a very sad and damning truth. We received a recording of one such “fact checker” on the phone with a friend.

“Police reports, witness reports check out… They’re legit at that site, but I need to impress the bosses at Facebook, so I’m gonna make that dead whistle-blower look really, really bad….  Hmmm, I know! I’ll be original! I’ll call that dead whistleblower a conspiracy theorist, along with anyone who raises questions! Damn, dude, I wish I had a third arm growing out of my ass so I could really pat myself on the back, the way I deserve!”

See the world through Snopes-vision and fairy tales are real again; good is evil, up is down and white is black.

We hope you will dig deep into the true history of Snopes or any controversial matter, especially one-sided, “settled” issues’ no matter how hard it is to use a gamed algorithm that favors Snopes. They are actually now partnered with Google and Facebook in a search engine suppression scheme affecting all search engines now, like Bing, Yahoo, etc. Unless stopped, they will invisibly silence dissent against Snopes critics or critics of tech giants, friendly political parties, et al.

Oh, almost forgot! their founder is an embezzling fraud! Isn’t that neat?

Founder David Mickkelson made international news recently for embezzlement, fraud, lies, and putting prostitutes and his honeymoon on his expenses. This was to the point Snopes almost collapsed, so Snopes isn’t something synonymous with integrity to begin with.

Do they ever talk about this? Because this is “True” and they know it.

David Mikkelson told the Dailymail.com that Snopes… has no set requirements for fact-checkers because the variety of the work ‘would be difficult to encompass in any single blanket set of standards.’

‘Accordingly, our editorial staff is drawn from diverse backgrounds; some of them have degrees and/or professional experience in journalism, and some of them don’t,’ he added.

Source: Facebook ‘fact checker’ who will arbitrate on ‘fake news’ is accused of defrauding website to pay for prostitutes Daily Mail, 21 December 2016

Argumentum Ad Verecundiam

Now for you real journalists and actual scholars out there, how does it feel to know your work will be judged, and possibly censored, by partisan hacks that are not even trained in your field? Kinda makes your Columbia University journalism degree seem useless, no?

The larger  part of the problem is that its entire fact-checking model is false. It relies on the logical fallacy of Appeals to Authority.

Snopes, like the drunk professor at a party, considers itself the ultimate Authority one may appeal to. And like the drunk, they’re full of shit.

The Snopes model means Katy Perry can be cited as an expert on burgers, shoes, and advanced theoretical physics simply because she is more famous than people who have done all that for a living.

Not that the smartest girl in the world isn’t capable of rising to the task of theoretical physics…

A great quote from HNN in article titled Donald Trump Protester Speaks Out: “I Was Paid $3,500 To Protest Trump’s Rally”

David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, a website known for giving biased opinions of stories on the internet in order to generate advertising revenue, told ABC News that he approves of what a story like this is accomplishing.

“You have to understand that when a story like this goes viral, and we spend a minute or two debunking it, we make lots of money. Stories like this have helped put my children through college, buy a new car, a home and even get the surgery my wife Barbara wanted so I didn’t have to use Viagra anymore.” Mikkleson laughs, “We claim ‘to provide evidence for such debunkings and confirmation as well‘, but that’s just ridiculous. Do you know how much time that would take? Instead, we just copy and paste parts of the original article into ours, write a couple sentences, and that’s it.

“I just want to be clear, our website does zero journalism or anything creative, and I’m only telling you this for legal reasons. For example, do you remember that recent article we wrote debunking a story which claimed Scientology lost it’s tax-exempt status? Did you actually read it? What is the name of the person responsible? What is the actual website URL? We claim to know it, since we list the website’s disclaimer in there, but no real information is there.

“We even go as far as saying the site that started the story spreads malware and viruses, but we don’t say what website it is. I think warning people about a website that could potentially destroy their computer is probably a good idea, and I hope one day to do that kind of ethical journalism, but people will click our ads regardless, bottom line; so why do the extra work? To be honest, I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.”

David and Barbara Mikkelson, founders of Snopes “fact checking” site.

snopes