*sigh*
Probably once a week I get email trumpeting this, that or t’other conspiracy theory of the week, or whatever. Usually, these come from people who are easily smart enough to either know better or be able to find out “better” with a couple of simple clicks. Here’s the most recent from the tinfoil hat population, although it’s actually been around for three or four years in some form or another and its ancestry goes all the way back to conspiracy theories and hoax petitions circulated in the 60s and 70s, at least.
The text of the hoax/tinfoil hat conspiracy theory is this:
REFUSE NEW COINS
This simple action will make a strong statement.
Please help do this.. Refuse to accept these when they are handed to you.
I received one from the Post Office as change and I asked for a dollar bill instead.
The lady just smiled and said ‘way to go’ , so she had read this e -mail.
Please help out..our world is in enough trouble without this too!!!!!
U.S.Government to Release New Dollar Coins
You guessed it ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’ IS GONE!!!
If ever there was a reason to boycott something, THIS IS IT!!!!
DO NOT ACCEPT THE NEW DOLLAR COINS AS CHANGE
Together we can force them out of circulation…
The email included one picture of the obverse of the 2007 issue (so much for the contrafactual “U.S.Government to Release New Dollar Coins “) of the George Washington dollar coin and went on to “argue” that this supposed elimination of the motto was a part of a conspiracy to remove God from the public forum, yada-yada.
Here’s a picture of the obverse side of the coin:
Sure enough, “In God We Trust” isn’t there. How about the reverse side of the coin?
*huh* Not there either. So, at least the “missing motto” part of this nutso email is right, right?
Nope. If you buy the thing with only this much information, you’re the sucker.
That’s right, the “edge-incused inscriptions” include “In God We Trust,” “E Pluribus Unum,” and the date and mint marking. But since this idiot-attractor conspiracy theory/hoax gained so much traction a few years ago, dumbasses in Congress felt it necessary to assuage their dumbass conspiracy theory-hoaxed constituents who were up in arms over the “missing motto” and ordered the mint to redesign future American President coins with the motto where even idiots could find it (if they could manage to puzzle out the letters well enough to know what it said), and so in 2009 the motto was moved to the obverse of the coins with the minting of the Harrison and all future Presidential series coins.
So, although the first eight Presidential series coins had the motto, “In God We Trust” on the edge, where it was subject to less wear than on the coins’ faces and even served a sort of symbolic purpose, to my mind (a part of “binding” the two sides together, eh? ;-)), all eight coins already circulated in the years 2009 and 2010 had the motto plainly on their faces where even the stupidest sheeple might eventually find them.
But has that stopped this dumbass hoax/conspiracy theory from circulating? Nope. Not any more than the facts have stopped the “Madeline Murry O’Hare/FCC” hoax petition that’s been around in one form or another for 40-some-odd years.
Dumbasses come in all sizes, shapes and IQ measurements.
Yes, I suppose I could be more charitable in correcting this sort of thing, and I was with the person who sent me the email. As Jerry Pournelle put it when someone corrected him about a factual error he made,
One of the neat things about the Internet is that if you get something wrong you’re not stuck with being an uncorrected idiot. There will be someone out there who knows, and will offer the correction. My thanks.
Classy, Dr. Pournelle. But then, the error he made wasn’t so glaring as the ones in the email, nor was he hyperventilating about some vast conspiracy. Indeed, his error was a simple lack of information in a specific field of endeavor in which he has never claimed expertise, and the person correcting his lack of knowledge understood that.
The chief differences between Dr. Pournelle’s error and the ones in the email are several:
1. The email called for widespread social action based on grossly inaccurate and quite likely deliberately deceptive (as it originated) information. Dr. Pornelle’s inaccurate comment fit neither of those criteria.
2. ANYONE–literally, anyone with literacy skills above that of a typical kindergärtner–could readily verify the falsity of the claims made by the email simply by looking at one of the coins. Not so with the information a reader corrected in Dr. Pournelle’s offhand comment.
Still, I recognize that “smart” people say and do as many stupid things as anyone else, and so calling people who fall for things like this hoax “dumbasses” may be a bit harsh.
But it’s still true, IMO.
