Correcting someone who's repeating an urban legend as something that "really happened": c or d?

hahahahaha President Bush

i love that "yes, we are living in end times" is like a high-five thing to say

thats why i used to watch jack van impe

My company once employed a lead IT guy who would pass along e-mails about impossibly lethal viruses whose existence Snopes debunked ages ago. IT IS ONE THING WHEN GRANDMA DOES THIS BUT I EXPECT A LITTLE SAVVY FROM YOU, MR. IT GUY.

hey as somebody who worked at the wtc can you tell me if you ever happened upon any of the guys who loaded it with explosives before 9/11 while making coffee or something

A Gentile's View of Today's Germany by William E. Grim
>
>- William E. Grim is a writer who lives in
>Germany and is a native of Columbus, Ohio. -
>
>I'm not Jewish. No one in my family died in the Holocaust. For me,
>anti-Semitism has always been one of those phenomena that doesn't really
>register on my radar, like tribal genocide in Rwanda, a horrible thing that
>happens to someone else. But I live in a small town outside of Munich on a
>street that until May of 1945 was named Adolf Hitler Strasse. I work in
>Munich, a pleasant metropolitan city of a little over a million inhabitants
>whose Bavarian charm tends to obscure the fact that this city was the
>birthplace and capital of the Nazi movement.
>
>Every day when I go to work I pass by the sites of apartments Hitler lived
>in, extant buildings in which decisions were made to murder millions of
>innocent people, and plazas in which book burnings took place, SS troops
>paraded and people were executed. The proximity to evil has a way of
>concentrating one's attention, of putting a physical reality to the
>textbook narratives of the horrors perpetrated by the Germans.
>
>Then the little things start to happen that over a period of time add up to
>something very sinister. I'm on a bus and a high school boy passes around
>Grandpa's red leather-bound copy of Mein Kampf to his friends who respond
>by saying "coooool!" He then takes out a VCR tape (produced in Switzerland)
>of "The Great Speeches of Joseph Goebbels." A few weeks later I'm at a
>business meeting with four young highly educated Germans who are polite,
>charming and soft-spoken to say the least. When the subject matter changes
>to a business deal with a man in New York named Rubinstein, their nostrils
>flair, their demeanor attain a threatening mien and one of them actually
>says, and I'm quoting verbatim here: "The problem with America < BR> is
>that the Jews have all the money." They start laughing and another one
>says, "Yeah, all the Jews care about is money."
>
>I found that this type of anti-Semitic reference in my professional
>dealings with Germans soon became a leitmotif (to borrow a term made famous
>by Richard Wagner, another notorious German anti-Semite). In my private
>meetings with Germans it often happens that they will loosen up after a
>while and reveal personal opinions and political leanings that were thought
>to have ceased to exist in a Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945. Maybe it's
>because I have blond hair and my last name is of German origin that the
>Germans feel that I am, or could potentially be, "one of them." It shows
>how much they understand what it means to be an American.
>
>Whatever the reason, the conversations generally have one or more of these
>components:
>
> (1) It was unfortunate that America and Germany fought each other in
>World War I I because the real enemy was Russia.
> (2) Yes, the Nazis were excessive, but terrible things happen during
>wars, and anyway, the scope of the Holocaust has been greatly exaggerated
>by the American media, which is dominated by Jews.
> (3) CNN is controlled by American Jews and is anti-Palestinian. (Yes,
>I know it sounds incredible, but even among the most highly intelligent
>Germans, even those with a near-native fluency in English, there is the
>widespread belief that the news network founded by Fidel Castro's friend
>Ted Turner, who was married to Hanoi Jane Fonda, is a hotbed of pro-Israeli
>propaganda.)
> (4) Almost all Germans were opposed to the Third Reich and nobody in
>Germany knew anything about the murder of the Jews, but the Jews themselves
>were really responsible for the Holocaust.
> (5) Ariel Sharon was worse than Hitler and the Israelis are Nazis.
>America supports Israel only because Jews control the American government
>and media
>
>For the first time in my life, then, I became conscious of anti-Semitism.
>Sure, anti-Semitism exists elsewhere in the world, but nowhere have the
>consequences been as devastating as in Germany. Looking at it as
>objectively as possible, 2002 was a banner year for anti-Semitism in
>Germany. Synagogues were firebombed, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, the No.
>1 best-selling novel, Martin Walser's Death of a Critic, was a
>thinly-veiled roman a clef containing a vicious anti-Semitic attack on
>Germany's best-known literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki (who was a
>survivor of both the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz); the Free Democrat Party
>unofficially adopted anti-Semitism as a campaign tactic to attract
>Germany's sizeable Muslim minority; and German revisionist historians began
>to define German perpetration of World War II and the Holocaust not as
>crimes against humanity, but as early battles (with regrettable but
>understandable excesses) in the Cold War against communism.
>
>The situation is so bad that German Jews are advised not to wear anything
>in public that would identify them as Jewish because their safety cannot be
>guaranteed. How can this be? Isn't this the "New Germany" that's gone 60
>years without a Holocaust or even a pogrom, where truth, justice and the
>German way prevail amidst economic wealth, a high standard of living that
>is the envy of their European neighbors, and a constitution guaranteeing
>freedom for everyone regardless of race, creed or national origin?
>
>What's changed? The answer is: absolutely nothing. My thesis is quite
>simple. While Germany no longer has the military power to enforce the
>racist ideology of the Nazis and while all extreme manifestations of Nazism
>are officially outlawed, the internal conditions -- that is, the
>attitudes,world view and cultural assumptions - that led to the rise of
>Nazism in Germany are still present because they constitute the basic
>components of German identity. Nazism was not an aberration; it was the
>distillation of the German psyche into its essential elements. External
>Nazism may have been utterly defeated in May of 1945; internal Nazism,
>however, remains, and will always remain, a potential threat as long as
>there exists a political and/or cultural entity known as Germany.
>
>Now hold on a second, I hear many people saying. You can't possibly claim
>that Germans are as anti-Semitic today as they were during the years
>1933-1945. It is true that Germany today is much different than during the
>Third Reich. What is different is that due to its total defeat by the
>allies, Germany today is a client state of America and must do its bidding.
>That means repression of overt anti-Semitism. It's bad for business. The
>other thing that has changed is that, even though Hitler lost World War II,
>he was phenomenally successful in carrying out his ideological agenda.
>Germany, indeed virtually all of Europe, is essentially Judenfrei (free of
>Jews) today due to the efficiency and zeal of the Germans as they
>perpetrated the Holocaust during the Third Reich. In fact, a very
>convincing case can be made that Nazism is one of the most successful
>political programs of all time. It accomplished more of its goals in a
>shorter amount of time than any other comparable political movement and
>permanently changed the face and political structure of several continents.
>
>Germany is wealthy, stable, relentlessly bourgeois, and for all intents and
>purposes, free of Jews. Yes, there is a tiny minority of Jews, mostly
>centered in Berlin, and yes, there have been a number of Jews from the
>former Soviet Union who have emigrated to Germany, but most of the
>immigrants from Russia are not practicing Jews and do little if anything to
>promote a unique Jewish-German identity. The result of all this is that
>Germans today are able to reap the benefits of Hitler's anti-Semitic
>policies while paying lip service to the "need to remember." Young Fritz
>doesn't have to be overtly anti-Semitic today because his grandfather's
>generation did such a bang-up job of the Holocaust. There just aren't that
>many Jews left to hate any more, and besides, the Germans have their old
>buddies, the Arabs, to do their hating for them. You might call the
>overwhelming German support for the Palestinians to be a form of
>anti-Semitism-by-proxy. The German government has made cash payments to the
>State of Israel, as well as to individual Jews, to settle claims of murder,
>torture, false imprisonment, slave labor and genocide. Talk to most Germans
>and you'll soon discover that they think that the score has been settled
>between Germany and the Jews, that somehow the return of just a portion of
>what the Germans stole from the Jews is fair recompense for the deliberate
>murder of millions of people. If you think the Germans are truly sorry for
>what they did to the Jews, think again. There's never been an official "tut
>mir leid" offered by the Germans to the victims of the Holocaust and their
>descendants because that would admit culpability. Germany has paid off all
>claims against it without acknowledging responsibility in the same way that
>the Ford Motor Company engages in recalls of automobiles. It's all done to
>avoid liability.
>
>I have previously mentioned that Germans overwhelmingly support the
>Palestinians as opposed to the Israelis, and that this overwhelming support
>represents a form of anti-Semitism-by-proxy. Germans may claim to be
>supporting the Palestinians because they think they are an "oppressed
>people," but let's be honest - they are supporting the Palestinians and
>their Arab handlers because the Palestinians and Arabs share the same
>ideals as the Nazis. There's a long-standing history of German co-operation
>with the Arabs. In 1942 Hitler personally assured the Grand Mufti of
>Jerusalem that as soon as German forces conquered Great Britain, the Jews
>in Palestine (which was then under control of the British Mandate) would be
>exterminated.
>
>We should also keep in mind that the Arab terrorists who perpetrated the
>9/11 atrocities did their planning in Germany. There are several reasons
>for this. The first is the well-known bungling and de-centralized chaos of
>the German federal bureaucracy where literally the "linke" hand doesn't
>know what the "rechte" hand is doing. The second is that Arab terrorists
>can count on a substantial number of Germans who share their anti-American
>and anti-Semitic views. The former members of the SS and Hitler's
>praetorian guards, along with their neo-Nazi supporters, who gather weekly
>in Munich beer halls, made Osama bin Laden an "honorary Aryan" after the
>9/11 attack. Mein Kampf is also a best seller in the Arab world, especially
>in Saudi Arabia, America's putative "friend." Indeed, there is very little
>difference between the anti-Semitic rantings of Hitler and those of the
>so-called "spiritual leaders" of al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Fatah. The Arabs also
>owe Hitler and the Germans big time. Hitler killed off the Jews, and Konrad
>Adenauer and his "democratic" descendants replaced them with the Turks.
>Yes, the Turks aren't Arabs, but they are Muslim, and although Turkey is a
>member of NATO and has relations with Israel, many Turks identify and
>support their radical Arab co-religionists. Turkey remains as fragile a
>democracy as Weimar Germany during the 1920s. It wouldn't take much for
>Turkey to fall into the dark side of Muslim extremism. The end result of
>Muslim immigration into Germany has been twofold:
> (1) It allows the Germans to feign liberalism and being open
>to freedom and diversity; and
> (2) By replacing the Jews they murdered with Muslims, who for
>the most part are as viciously anti-Semitic as were the Nazis, the Germans
>have cynically assured that those few Jews who remain in Germany will be
>unable to reassert political power even in a minority role.
>
>A final point I would like to make concerning the reasons for the a
>resurgence of anti-Semitism in Germany is one that many will find at odds
>with the prima-facie evidence, or even appear to stretch the boundaries of
>common sense. Yet, I ask you to consider carefully my line of reasoning. In
>many respects Germany got away with the Holocaust without paying much of a
>price. Yes, many Germans died as a result of German perpetration of World
>War II and the Holocaust, and yes, there was much physical destruction in
>the country, but the situation is like the little boy who steals a cookie
>from the tray when it is cooling on the kitchen table. For his efforts he
>may have gotten his hand slapped by his mother, but the stolen cookie
>remains eaten nonetheless.
>
>After having committed the worst crimes in the history of humankind, the
>Germans were allowed to regain their sovereignty after only ten years;
>their infrastructure was completely rebuilt thanks to the generosity of the
>American people; and relatively few Germans were brought to trial for their
>monstrous crimes. Even those who were tried and convicted received
>relatively short sentences or had those reduced or commuted in general
>amnesties. For example, some members of the Einsatzkommandos, those Germans
>who, before the construction of the death camps, hunted and murdered Jews
>by the hundreds of thousands, received sentences of as little as five years
>imprisonment. If there were true justice in the world, Germany would no
>longer exist as a separate country, but would have long ago had its
>territory divided up and dispersed among the Allies.
>
>It was an unfortunate historical coincidence that the Cold War began just
>as Germany was at last being brought to task for its many crimes and
>atrocities extending back to the First World War. The new threat of the
>Soviet Union took precedence over a just settling of accounts with Germany.
>The tragic result is that many of the countries raped and despoiled by
>Germany, such as the Czech Republic and Poland, are just now coming out of
>decades of economic decline, while Germany - fat, sassy, arrogant,
>self-satisfied, and essentially Judenfrei- has enjoyed four decades of
>undeserved economic prosperity. We can't turn back the clock to redress all
>of the historical wrongs that have been committed by the Germans, but there
>are a number of things that can be done to assure that Germany can never
>again be in a position to threaten the rest of the civilized world.
>
>First and foremost is the realizat ion that, while not all Germans are
>anti-Semitic, there is an anti-Semitic tendency within German culture that
>extends back to the time of Martin Luther. Germans are instinctively
>anti-Semitic in the same way that Americans are instinctively freedom
>loving. Anti-Semitism has been and unfortunately remains the default
>ideology of the German people. All things being equal, Germans will
>instinctively support the enemies of the State of Israel. Therefore,
>America will need to monitor closely and be ready and politically willing
>to intervene at a moment's notice in German affairs when it appears that
>Germany is back-sliding into anti-Semitism. Additionally, it should be a
>goal of American foreign policy to oppose and to accelerate the
>dismemberment of the European Union. We must not allow German domination of
>the EU to accomplish through parliamentary maneuvering and brokered deals
>what Hitler and the Germans were unable to accomplish during the Third
>Reich.
>
>Given Germany's resurgent anti-Semitism (and that of France as well), a
>strong, German-dominated EU that tolerates and even benignly encourages
>anti-Semitism, and is diplomatically allied with the Arab world, is
>potentially the greatest threat to Judaism since Nazi Germany and a major
>threat to the United States as well. The enemies of Israel are the enemies
>of the United States. Let all Jews and Americans stand united as we
>proclaim never again to both the Holocaust and 9/11.
>
>_________________
>
>* This is the very first post-Holocaust picture of Germany that i have ever
>seen published that depicted the post-Holocaust country of the nazis
>with absolute accuracy in every detail. Over the years I have often written
>about the reunification of the two Germanys and described it as one of the
>greatest mistakes ever made in history, and wrote that instead naziland
>should have been divided into the four historical parts that is its nature,
>never to rise to brutalize its neighbors or the world again! A crucial and
>horrible error!
>
>It took only a few minutes during my first visit back to the land of my
>birth for me to realize that the place was clearly no different than when
>my
>parents and I had the good fortune to be among the very last Jews to
>escape, literally "minutes before midnight", when the gates of that
>man-made hell slammed shut with a resounding clang for the final time,
>dooming those of my people left behind, including over 50 of my immediate
>family.
>
>I recall the words of my beloved grandfather as we came to Breslau to say
>our final farewell, knowing that there was no likelihood of ever seeing
>each other again. He ran alongside the slowly rolling departing train we
>were on, knowing he was bidding a final farewell to his only son and his
>family. Even then he optimistically maintained that "no harm will come to
>us. After all, I served my country and my Kaiser as an officer, and have
>always been a good citizen."
>
>I do not know Mr. Grim, but I salute him for his clear view and thank him
>for writing this piece, which, had it been written by a Jew, would never be
>believed nor given its proper credence.
>
>Please do forward this article to your lists and see that it gets the
>widest possible circulation.
>- harry
>

I once stopped a woman halfway through telling a story about something
crazy that happened to her sister. I finished the story for her, and told
her it was an urban legend.
She still insisted that it happened to her sister.
(It was the Eddie Murphy in an elevator story, I think.)

My brother tried to pull the "we found a dead scuba diver in the burnt out forest" story on me (he's a volunteer CFA during summer) years ago and I bought it! I now know it is a load though.

Ditto captain pugwash, I felt like such a tool when I found out that wasn't true :(

tell us the lobster dildo story!

The...whaaaa?!

im totally cool with the gross/funny urban legends (tell em myself! lobster dildo 4eva)

-- and what (an...), September 26th, 2006.

you don't want to know. it involves too many dank caverns, smelly bogs, and snatch cesspools.

I once got banned from the work bulletin board for pointing out that an urban myth wasn't true (can't remember exactly which one it was, I think it was "slasher under the car") after they posted it there with a TELL EVRY1!!!!!! PASS THIS TOO ALL UR FRENDS!!!!!11!!!! warning. I was "belittling them" when they were "only trying to help".

derailing the thread i know but whoa @ ethan having a real login

Come on people, we're talking about JASON'S DELI here!!!!!

People, please stop sending me pictures of "Tiger's wife".

At least stop sending them to my work address.

Now there are myspace bulletins for just this purpose.

I'm a hard-core reply to all with the snopes link person. I can't stand it when people refuse to demonstrate even the slightest bit of critical thinking skills.

Have we mentioned the one that ends up :

he woke up in a bath that was filled with crushed ice, and his kidneys had been removed

No, I didn't even bother!

Yeah someone was swearing the validity of that one on another board I post on

also, remember that the more exclamation points your email has, the truthier it has to be. you need at least 2-3 per sentence, otherwise i won't take it seriously.

Nobody has ever, EVER been in their room masturbating with their eyes closed and headphones on playing loud music only to then open eyes and see hot cup of tea on the table that wasn't there before.

I like charming, un-politically motivated ones and ones you have to wait for ages before being able to prove their falsity. For example, the one I was told a couple of years ago that goes: young couple having energetic buttsex on parents' bed > parents arrive home early > bed full of poop as result of alarmed withdrawl > dog hurriedly stuffed into bedroom to take blame > angry father takes dog outside and shoots it.

geez. .. imagine what might have happened if they hadn't thought of making the dog a patsy.

xpost

Personally, I first encounted the "cup of tea" one in an NME interview, attributed to either Stretch or Vern of Stretch & Vern fame

this thread is brilliant. we fired the guy who used to do the shit ethan's reposting from our program because he got busted surfing porn and jerking off in one of the cubicles at 5:15am

so basically I assume everyone who forwards these to be a bald white Promise Keeper and Navy reserve enlisted man who can't jerk off at home with his family around so he gets to work extra early when nobody else is around and yanks it in the office to old lady and preggers internet pr0n

that's the logic at work here so fight fire with fire!

hahaha

did you leave a cup of tea on his desk tom?

No, that was the 9/11 puppy.

Prior to his fatal shooting :(

One morning, around 5am, 22-year old Susan DaLucci of Kittery Maine, woke up with a painful need to urinate. At first she thought she had diarrhea, but when she stood up out of bed, she realized that it was urinary pain. It was very similar to the feeling of having diarrhea, just out the wrong hole.

She wobbled to the toilet and upon sitting on it, her vagina erupted into the most horrific messy farting noise anyone has ever heard. In paralyzing pain, Ms. DeLucci for the next few minutes continued to push and squirt out of her vagina a burning tide of wretch and filth while she gripped the sides of the toilet, white-knuckled. She was screaming wildly, and the neighbors called the police.

When medics arrived they found Ms. DeNucci unconscious lying on the floor of her bathroom wearing nothing but her bath robe. Running down her leg, was a stream of brown and green syrup. The medic had to transfer her to a stretcher, so he grabbed her left leg which was bent crossing her other leg, to straighten her out. She was lying there all twisted up. When he lifted her left leg to straighten her body out, he exposed her vagina at which point a creature, no larger than the tip of a finger wormed its way out of her genitals and landed on the floor with a wet popping sound. Shocked, the medic stared at the creature that was lying on the tile bathroom floor in a casing of mucous. It was a tiny mud shrimp and it sat there on the cold floor gasping for water while flipping itself back and forth. The horrified medic turned to the toilet as he felt the nausea setting in. When he put his face down into the toilet to puke what he saw was so horrific that to this day he cannot look into a toilet without convulsing.

The entire toilet bowl was boiling with baby brown mud shrimp flipping and splashing at a furious pace. If you think that is bad - wait until you hear how it happened:

Ms. DeLucci official death was the result of a combination of shock and severe head trauma. She stood up over the toilet in pain and when she saw what she had done, she went into shock and fell, smashing her head on the toilet and then on the floor. It is believed by medical police that on two nights before the accident she had purchased a live lobster at a fish market. While lying in a tub, she gently inserted the creature's tail into her vagina to derive pleasure. At that point, she held a lighter under the creature's face causing it to flip its tail in a violent snapping motion.

The medics found a lesbian XXX video in the VCR and the TV was positioned on a table in front of the tub. The lobster was found in the kitchen garbage can wrapped in a paper bag. Traces of Ms. DeLucci's DNA were found on the lobster along with pubic hairs that had wedged themselves between the lobster tail joints. The lobster's face was lightly burned with the same fuel used in lighters. The lobster's digestive track and colon were found to be full of mud shrimp egg casings. Doctors believe that the lobster had eaten them (they are common in the water at fish markets and are usually harmlessly boiled to death) and the lobster had crapped them out into Ms. DeLucci's cunt when she was torturing it. Maine mud shrimp only take two days to gestate and Ms. DeLucci was only four days away from getting her period, doctors believe that at that point of her menstrual cycle, her womb was the perfect pH balance to grow these mud shrimp which are a much larger version of the popular "Sea Monkey" pets sold throughout the US. Over night the eggs had hatched and the mud shrimp began doubling in size every ten minutes. You can imagine the pain she was in when she woke up that morning and gave birth to well over 1,000 mud shrimp in her toilet.

Them: I had a friend...and they stole his kidneys!

Me: A friend, huh?

urgh

I had successfully forgotten all about the lobster dildo story until now

urgh

It's like Tubgirl said "Have you met my even more disgusting younger sister?" urgh

The medics found a lesbian XXX video in the VCR and the TV was positioned on a table in front of the tub.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

what's a non-XXX lesbian video?

haha i love these forwards. they're usually the most horrible things in the world, like "al qaeda survives on a diet of aborted fetuses shipped to them by the democratic party" and the out is usually, "makes you think, doesn't it?"

yeah, there's a very specific "moderate" tone to the writing that's really creepy (xp)

not moderate so much as faux-reasonable i guess

this is lol-worthy:

The police think this is the same man who raped a woman last weekend, (school teacher 2 months away from retirement)

if only she'd been retired she wouldn't have been raped!