Another way to argue badly

[womzilla]

John Cole's "The Fact That I Am Completely Wrong Is Just More Proof How Right I Am". Great observation of a pattern I have seen in the wild elsewhere: someone passes along a false story as proof of an important point, and then, when it is pointed out that ten seconds on Snopes would have shown it to be false, defends it.

The particular piece of bunkum was a right-winger telling a story about a person wrecking a recreational vehicle by putting it on cruise control and stepping into the back to fix a drink, then suing the manufacturer, thus proving that lawsuits have gotten out of control. When many people told the right-winger that this is a well-known urban legend, he doesn't apologize, but says,

Thirty, 40 or 50 years ago, no one in their right mind would have believed the Merv Grazinski urban legend possible, but not so today.

Besides the fact that this is a great calling-out of a terrible behavior (even if on a small scale), I'm posting about this because I know I heard this 30 years ago. I was in high school, and it was told about "an Iranian Prince" driving his new American luxury car. I know I was in high school because I heard the joke from my Iranian friend Ali, with whom I lost touch after he left for college. (He was a year ahead of me, so I heard this no later than 1981.) So, yes, this urban legend has been around at least that long.

(Postscript: Cole solicits suggestions for naming this pattern. I liked, from the comments, both "gullibullshit" for the attitude and "bunk/debunk/rebunk" for the process.)

Via.

Comments

[avram]

I heard it too, around that same time, about a rich Arab sheik. And it wasn't told to me as a joke, it was told as something that had actually happened.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I heard it some time ago, but I think less than thirty years. The person with the RV was American, and the point seemed to be mostly "people are stupid". There might have been a hint of "RVs are amazingly house-like".

Actually, if the point a person is trying to make is "no one is taking responsibility" and then they refuse to take responsibility for passing along something false, they have rather proved that point, even if they can't legitimately blame it on the legal system.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

At the time I first heard it, part of the humor was that cruise control was really, really new. But mostly it was a "aren't aristocrats bumpkins?" joke.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Even if it were true that the joke couldn't have been told 30 years ago but could be told now, one must still ask: why has it become current? Is it really because circumstances have changed, or is it because people made stuff up and got others to believe it?