Snopes Beclowns Itself

DuvalHMFIC said:
I certainly see your point, and I have no real issue with Snopes. I'm just having a slow day at work. That being said, in the spirit of continuing the discussion, how can this article about AG Barr visiting Epstein's prison be considered "false" rather than unproven if it's the prison themselves saying he did not visit? That doesn't seem any different than KFC saying the Col. did in fact come up with the recipe himself. The only other evidence they offer that I can see is that Barr has 24/7 FBI detail. It does NOT say anything about members of his FBI detail saying he didn't visit the prison.

FWIW I only picked this story because it was the only one fitting the narrative. Most of the false claims seem to have rock-solid evidence of them actually being false (such as a photoshopped picture). I do not think Barr visited the prison and I'm not looking for a derail.

http://www.snopes.com/fact-check/epstein-barr-visit/
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Snopes is correct in saying that there is no evidence that this rumor about AG Barr visiting Epstein in jail is actually true. However, a history does exist of wealthy Jews appealing to people in a position of authority to get themselves or their coreligionists out of trouble. So rather than declaring this rumor "false" it should be said to be "unproven" because it alludes to a deeper truth. I don't see how anybody could object to spinning the story that way.
 
Dr. Keith said:
To me the difference between "False" and "Unproven" is whether additional information would change the determination. If a family showed up with a receipt and a letter from Col Sanders that was authenticated and largely confirmed their story, that would change things.
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Sure, but the idea that a "family" could just sit on such a letter/knowledge for all this time and say nothing doesn't seem even remotely plausible. They'd have been shouting it from the rafters for decades (cf. Henrietta Lacks).

That is not true for fake photos that are labeled as False where they have actually identified at least one of the source photos. There is no possibility of additional information changing the determination. Even if someone sent in negatives and sworn statements it would not be enough to prove the authenticity of the photo. Even if they sent in similar photos it would not change the verdict on that particular photo. They have proven it false.
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Oh, it's OK, Snopes can just claim, " It’s not clear who the woman depicted in the advertisement was or on whom she was modeled, so we cannot rule out the possibility that she was the “Miss Childress” described in the KFC memes." Actually, that's probably the dumbest assertion in the whole piece.

One of the earliest iterations of this fake story was a 2010 blog post, which states: "Ron Douglas in “America’s Most Wanted Recipes” says that Sanders took his secret recipe from a black woman, one Miss Childress of Kentucky, whose family he paid $1200 when they complained." Even Snopes agrees that that book says no such thing, but the obvious implication is that the "rumour" had been circulating without the fake image long before it was added, apparently fairly recently.

Even if we accepted that "Miss Childress" existed (which I don't), what are the odds on some random meme-forwarder being able to supposedly ID her in an old advert for a completely unconnected product? If someone had added a battered old copy of the original photograph the advert painting was based on, maybe, but just the advert cropped to remove the actual product it was selling? Seriously?
 
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Information Analyst said:
The bottom line:

"Mrs/Miss Childress" - no evidence she existed
Image - fake, from unconnected advertisement
Sanders "stole" (or bought) recipe <=1930 - no evidence

Literally no element of the fake story is supportable, therefore the whole thing is a fabrication, pure and simple.
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I think part of the problem is that we're talking about different levels of "proof". Were this a case in a courtroom, with the legal standards of "beyond a reasonable doubt" or "a preponderance of evidence", it's clear that KFC would win. But it's not a court case, it's a matter of public opinion, where we have no obligation to come to a firm conclusion for or against, and so we're allowed to apply whatever higher standards we chose.

Snopes generally applies such a higher standard, in that they allow themselves the "unproven" conclusion. And they seem to apply that higher standard fairly uniformly.

As for the Barr visiting Epstein example, it's worth pointing out that there's a major difference between investigating a decades-old case and a contemporary one. Not only do we expect some evidence to disappear over time, we also expect there to have been less evidence to begin with. With cameras being much more common these days, lack of photo evidence is much more concrete than it would have been before. Add in things like GPS enabled phone tracking, computerized record keeping and off-site data storage, and the general trend towards having more access control points that require things like swiping an ID card these days, and there should be an over abundance of evidence to find. So a complete lack of evidence today is actually a far stronger argument than it has ever been.
 
Information Analyst said:
Sure, but the idea that a "family" could just sit on such a letter/knowledge for all this time and say nothing doesn't seem even remotely plausible. They'd have been shouting it from the rafters for decades (cf. Henrietta Lacks).
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And the very idea of any black person cooking fried chicken is totally racist in the first place, so he couldn't steal a recipe from a black who would never cook the chicken.

But yes odds are it doesn't exist but then again lots of records get destroyed, if you can't find records of your ancestors does that mean they didn't exist?
 
ponderingturtle said:
And the very idea of any black person cooking fried chicken is totally racist in the first place, so he couldn't steal a recipe from a black who would never cook the chicken.

But yes odds are it doesn't exist but then again lots of records get destroyed, if you can't find records of your ancestors does that mean they didn't exist?
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How deficient are US records? I can order up scans of the English birth registrations (not just copy certificates, but the actual registers) of my ancestors going back to the early 1800s.
 
Information Analyst said:
How deficient are US records? I can order up scans of the English birth registrations (not just copy certificates, but the actual registers) of my ancestors going back to the early 1800s.
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Yea and they came from the aether before that clearly. No records proves they didn't exist. And the very idea of prehistory is a lie.
 
This thread has become a bit silly. First it is such a trivial issue on which to argue a claim of bias: false versus not proven are hardly such differing conclusions as to establish bias in Snopes interpretation of a small speck of largely oral history. Second, the unproven characterization is pretty clearly the more accurate conclusion given the information available. The question under consideration is is Sanders stole his recipe from a poor black woman named Childress. What clearly is false is the photo claimed to be of Childress: it is not. However the falseness of the photo does not address whether an unphotographed Childress existed: there is no evidence that Childress existed, but equally no evidence she didn't; given the record keeping at the time such a person could have existed, or someone with a slightly different spelling of their name. Impossible to rule out the claim on this basis.

Clearly the best conclusion is "no evidence."
 
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Information Analyst said:
How deficient are US records? I can order up scans of the English birth registrations (not just copy certificates, but the actual registers) of my ancestors going back to the early 1800s.
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Registration of black people were often not very organized in the USA and i do not believe that there was a federal registry of any kind. Most lists of people were done at local or state levels. A compresensive search of all of these lists
would be impossible. The absence of a name certainly did not mean the absence of the actual person.
 
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Information Analyst said:
How deficient are US records? I can order up scans of the English birth registrations (not just copy certificates, but the actual registers) of my ancestors going back to the early 1800s.
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Please tell me how to do this. The one Grandparent whose paternal lineage I cannot trace earlier than 1803 is a Daniel Wheeler, who, according to Marriage records in the state of Alabama, was born somewhere in England in 1803. A list of the births of Daniel Wheelers born in that year would certainly give me some ground to work from.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Yea and they came from the aether before that clearly. No records proves they didn't exist. And the very idea of prehistory is a lie.
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No, much earlier records exist, but the ones going back to the early-1800s can be easily ordered online as a PDF (England & Wales takes a few days; Scotland is "instant"). Older stuff takes a bit longer.
 
quadraginta said:
Please tell me how to do this. The one Grandparent whose paternal lineage I cannot trace earlier than 1803 is a Daniel Wheeler, who, according to Marriage records in the state of Alabama, was born somewhere in England in 1803. A list of the births of Daniel Wheelers born in that year would certainly give me some ground to work from.
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Pre-1837 you would have to go to parish and/or local records, so you'd need more to go on than just a name.
 
CaptainHowdy said:
Snopes is correct in saying that there is no evidence that this rumor about AG Barr visiting Epstein in jail is actually true. However, a history does exist of wealthy Jews appealing to people in a position of authority to get themselves or their coreligionists out of trouble. So rather than declaring this rumor "false" it should be said to be "unproven" because it alludes to a deeper truth. I don't see how anybody could object to spinning the story that way.
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:confused: :boggled:
 
Wudang said:
I think he’s parodying the argument to show it can lead to a bad conclusion.
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I am certain it is not a parody. If you've read CaptainHowdy's other posts in this Forum his views on Jews are pretty clear. His post here is off topic of course but I guess it is hard to keep your true feelings bottled up whatever the nominal topic.
 
Giordano said:
I am certain it is not a parody. If you've read CaptainHowdy's other posts in this Forum his views on Jews are pretty clear. His post here is off topic of course but I guess it is hard to keep your true feelings bottled up whatever the nominal topic.
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Yeah, I've honestly never seen a post from CH where he didn't bring the Jews up out of nowhere. Granted, I haven't seen that many of his posts, but I really doubt it was a parody. Unless they're all parodies, which is possible.

Point being, though - the very fact that we are all discussing this evidence demonstrates that Snopes provided it. That's why I truly don't understand the people who are faulting Snopes. They hid nothing. You (general you) have all the facts - why does it matter if you like the label?

This is stupid.
 
I can't remember if I mentioned it in my original post about Barr, but I had to scour through the false claims for quite awhile before I could even find anything to play devil's advocate with. I'd say from the cursory searching that I did, Snopes seems pretty consistent when claiming stories false. Most are concrete "this was proven to be photoshopped" or "the date in question passed and the story in question did not occur", that sort of thing. They do seem to have a fairly high bar for claiming proven or false.
 
isissxn said:
Point being, though - the very fact that we are all discussing this evidence demonstrates that Snopes provided it. That's why I truly don't understand the people who are faulting Snopes. They hid nothing. You (general you) have all the facts - why does it matter if you like the label?
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Snopes didn't hide the fact that they can find no proof for any element of the claim. They couldn't find "Miss Childress." They couldn't find any evidence that Sanders "stole"/bought her recipe. The correctly identified the supposed image of "Miss Childress" as being cropped from an advert for a different product.

They then resorted to a load of "Hey, but it could be true" nonsense.
 
Information Analyst said:
No, much earlier records exist, but the ones going back to the early-1800s can be easily ordered online as a PDF (England & Wales takes a few days; Scotland is "instant"). Older stuff takes a bit longer.
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Sure there are records, and there are also lots of people who just kind of show up or vanish from them too. So it isn't weird to run across people who you can't be sure exactly where or when they were born, so clearly they must not have been born but popped up full grown. Without a clear birth record associated we must assume they were never born.
 
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