Monday, 30 April 2007
Iain Dale suckered by urban legend
Iain Dale - The Best Comeback Line Ever: This is one of the best comeback lines of all time. It is a portion of anABC interview between a female broadcaster and GeneralCosgrove who was about to sponsor a Boy Scout Troop visiting his military headquarters.
No it's not... it's a recent incarnation of a well-known urban legend.
Judging by the lack of link-credit and the nature of the intermittent appearances of this new version before Iain picked it up (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) it's a fair bet that Iain was infected with this nonsense via email before doing his bit to propagate it.
(Psst! Iain! We have a fantastic money-making opportunity for you. Discretion is required and details are available via our banking office in Nigeria.)
The misinformation quickly spread from Iain's site to Tim Worstall's site, Sinclair's Musings, the MotorcycleAddicts.org forum and - via Andrew Falloon - to Silent Running.
Iain didn't even bother to correct or withdraw the entry when it was rumbled as nonsense under comments less than an hour after it was posted and all of the people linked in the above paragraph swallowed it whole, despite there being a prominent entry under comments at Iain's site that showed it to be an urban legend. Bless them all... they just so want it to be true.
And while Iain busies himself with this nonsense, these questions remain unanswered, there's been no reply regarding this charming exchange on his website and this post has yet to draw a response.
Way to boost the credibility of British political blogging, Iain.
*applause*
UPDATE - Take a look at Iain's post and the words in the intro that are mashed together roughly 70-75 characters apart (the standard word-wrapping default for most email programmes). You can also try putting any section of this text into Google, and it will come up with hundreds of word-for-word matches involving both the old and new versions of this urban legend (an example can be seen here). I think we can take it as a given that Iain did receive this via email... and then posted it verbatim, intro and all, with a little formatting but no fact-checking. How often does this happen, I wonder?
Posted by Tim @ | Permalink
2 Comments:
- Justin said...
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I think we can take it as a given that Iain did receive this via email... and then posted it verbatim, intro and all, with a little formatting but no fact-checking. How often does this happen, I wonder?
1:54 PM, April 30, 2007
Well that's Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's prejudices confirmed, then. Nice one.
Maybe she could have a word in Iain's shell-like when she's next at 18 Doughty Street. - SPL said...
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And it's a pretty sick urban legend at that.
2:13 PM, April 30, 2007
