On the truth of our own home-grown winterval nonesense, this is well worth a read: http://virtualstoa.net/2008/11/25/winterval-2/

You’ve even managed to work Melanie Phillips into this article.

I think you guys must really like her as you mention her so often.

‘The facebook application amused me. Much in the way of the age old question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?”’

Erm…*furrows brows*…what?

@3

try it this way round:

“have you ever been caught beating your wife?”

“certainly not!”

“ah, you must be very good at it then”

etc

Very tasteful…thanks for that…

Happy multi-cultural non-denominational Winterval!

Remember, making up stories about Political Correctness Gone Mad is the True Meaning Of Christmas(tm).

@3:

The informal fallacy of plurium interrogationum, or in layman’s terms, a loaded question.

Yes – I fully understand the end result but why use such a sexist loaded question to get there?

@8:

“When did you stop beating your wife” is the canonical loaded question. I’m surprised you’ve never heard it before. I’m also not sure why you consider it sexist.

Cos it’s a well known sexist loaded example?

“Why is it that people find this rubbish so easy to believe? ”

Because it feeds into a predefined narrative of white/Christian victimhood.

Amusingly enough as church attendances slide and the cult of dawkins grows, this bullshit is one of the few traditions there is at Christmas.

I think you may have forgotten the outcome of the clip that you posted.

While I agree with your thoughts on the crowd’s mentality, they are actually proved correct in the end………

This doesn’t seem to prove your point very well.

The only thing worse than people making this up is those who, having believed such nonsense, then try to defend it.

Nice to see Kojak missing the point…again.

Remember, making up stories about Political Correctness Gone Mad is the True Meaning Of Christmas(tm).

For most right-wingers that certainly seems to be true.

@15:

I’m a right winger, and I know that the True Meaning of Christmas is the Doctor Who special. So there.

Christmas is a thriving commercial festival in Japan, a country in which the Christian churches have little popular influence.

It may be worth recalling here that there is no historical evidence linking the birth of Christ to the 25 December but that date is conveniently near the locus for several separate traditions of pre-Christian pagan festivals relating to the winter solstice and the Roman feast of Saturnalia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnalia

My guess is that the early Christian church latched on to the date of 25 December as a piece of astute marketing.

When I lived and worked in Scotland in the early 1960s, Christmas day, by tradition, was a full working day. The seasonal holiday was Hogmanay. Nowadays, the Scots make holidays of both Christmas and Hogmanay.

I think the reason people find this easy to believe is that they have not been taught to be critical thinking enough. If you oppose Obama, and haven’t got enough amunition from his various policies, misteps and appaent blunders (i.e. his actually being human) you will believe anything, because you are told it and want to believe it. If something suits our prejudices and we aren’t taught to think critically enough, we won’t question it.

On the same basis, nice men in Nigeria offer to give us lots of money if we give them our bank details. People want to believe this, despite the fact it is clearly untrue.

@22 – while I think there’s an element to that, there are also powerful forces in society that work against erudition, intelligence and critical thinking. Which complement the work of the media, from pseudo-scientists to right wing hatemongery, in stirring the pot.

I think things like this are so believable because when absurd logic is readily demonstrated on certain political issues (like when a politician, now President, says that he cannot comment upon when life begins because it is “above (his) pay grade”) then I think this throws a grave doubt upon one’s intelligence and logic. Skirting around objective truth can make a person’s intelligence and logic suspect and can cause grave mistrust. There are millions of Americans who live with this daily mistrust of our current President. To what lengths can faulty logic go??? Much too far… even so far as the possibility of messing with the name of a historically set, Christian holiday.