Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> LawPundit

Legal Commentary

: LawPundit

April Fool's Trick at New York Personal Injury Law Blog Fools Some and Shows How False Stories Become Mainstream -- as in Ancient History, Egyptology and Biblical Studies

By Andis Kaulins

This was such an obvious April Fool's posting yesterday that we suspected a law-made "fun" conspiracy.

New York Personal Injury Law Blog: About That White House Blogger Post from Yesterday....(NYT Gets Punked) writes in that vein:

"Welcome to April 2nd. And that means a deconstruction of what happened on April Fool's Day when I announced that I was going to become the official White House law blogger.

The basic idea was this: A bunch of law bloggers would try to punk the political bloggers, whose reputation is to grab any old rumor and run with it. Fact checking hasn't always been the strong suit of this community."

One of the reasons that people fall for this kind of a thing time and time again, as the New York Times apparently did, is that people do not ask the simple question - can this be true? Is it likely to be true?

Obviously, it was not very likely that the story was true. The White House is not going to hire a "White House blogger" outside of its own ranks - just consider the ramifications for domestic and foreign policy if such a blogger actually existed - and the story was thus so openly a farce that we paid no attention to it. Some people however fell into the trap.

Regrettably, much of mainstream science -- especially in the humanities -- is founded on the basis of equally farcical tales that the authors of such stories, often professors who are "authorities" in their fields, however, think to be true -- and which the rest of the clueless world then follows. See our postings as linked here or Law and Science and also e.g. Where was Troy? or even more poignantly Moses and Exodus and Kings of Egypt and Judah or recently EVIDENCE? The DNA Evidence is Clear: Tutankhamun was the Son of Akhenaten (Echnaton) : The Cause of Tut's Death Is Speculative as a Matter of Science.

Full post as published by LawPundit on April 03, 2010 (boomark / email).