A Lesson In Poe's Law - An Open Letter To Wannabe Satirists

Today, I learned that the Smithsonian was planning an exhibit on atheism in America.  Unfortunately, I learned this from an article announcing its cancellation.  When some Christians learned about it, they launched a campaign to stop it.  A campaign that included death threats.  Except, not really.  The article was not real.  It was (an attempt at) satire.

This is an all too common thing I've been encountering.  Websites with fake news like are often mistaken as real.  Part of this is because people, including otherwise good skeptics, fail to vet these sites before sharing them.  But I think the bigger problem is these sites themselves.  The goal of these sites seems to be satire.  The result is them simply making shit up.

This Smithsonian story is believable because it's plausible.  It sounds a lot like something that could actually happen.  That's not good satire.  Good satire is readily recognizable as satire.  You don't succeed in lampooning anyone but yourself when you successfully trick your reader into thinking what you wrote was true.

Poe's Law states:

Without a blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of extremism or fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.

It's based on the premise that we're so used to extremists doing the unbelievable, that we're likely to believe they've done just about anything.  In other words, the point they want to make (that these people are extremists) is already understood by just about everyone.  Or as Jamie Kilstein put it at the Reason Rally, "Everyone already knows Pat Robertson is an asshole!"

If the goal of these sites is to bring to light the shitty things that extremists are doing, they're missing the mark.  By repeatedly misleading people for their own attention, all they accomplish is damage to the credibility of the real reports.  The more people learn they'd been tricked by reports that appeared real, the harder it becomes to get attention to incidents of actual extremism.

For both things you could be attempted, you're bad at it.  If you write for one of these sites, and it's not The Onion, please just stop.  You're not helping.  You're making a mess of things.  We have enough bullshit flowing around the Internet.  We don't need you adding to it.

Leave the satire and parody to The Onion and Stephen Colbert.  Leave the bullshit to people like Fox News.  And leave the outing of the assholes to places like Media Matters and Right Wing Watch.

Did You See That Atheism Super Bowl Commercial?

My Facebook news feed had a lot of shares of a video purporting to be a commercial for atheism that aired during the Super Bowl. It seemed out of place to me, as spending that much money isn't typical for atheist organizations.

This is the video that was being shared, mostly without much comment, seemingly under the impression it was the commercial that had aired.

But some did make reference to the fact that it wasn't the original:

It makes sense that some people confused Cult of Dusty's edit of the video as the original.  It makes way more sense as a commercial for atheism.  As a commercial for Scientology, it makes no fucking sense.  Nonconformity?  Thinking for yourself?  These things do not fit at all within my understanding of what happens within cults, including Scientology.  I guess I'll just take it as at least a partial win that the things the commercial promoted were what they were, even it was meant to promote a group that doesn't actually value.

One more way the original makes no sense is the last line.

Because in the eternal debate for answers, the one thing that's true is what's true for you.

Horseshit.  What's true is true regardless of what's "true for you".  Our perception of the truth has absolutely no bearing what the truth is.  Someone should tell the Church of Scientology to not take Stephen Colbert so seriously.

(Thanks to Atheism Resource & Confronting Ignorance In Religion)