Bad news guys (or maybe good news?) The story is starting to look kinda shaky. It is not debunked, but people have been trying to confirm it without any success.
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Fuck that. I hope that santa remains vigilant about not releasing the details of the event.
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I felt heart-gouged reading that and I’m not even a parent.
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I’ve been reflecting on this. It’s immensely tragic, and so sad. But the boy died, I deeply hope, believing Santa was directly with him, he was right there and having the truest Santa experience - totally absorbed into a world and heaven of Santa-ness.
If only all terminally ill kids could pass away in those circumstances.
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You remember that item from NPR last month, where they interviewed one of the craven jokers who propagated a lot of fake news stories to the run-up to the election?
When we were coming up with headlines it’s always kind of about the red meat. Trump really got into the red meat. He knew who his base was. He knew how to feed them a constant diet of this red meat. We’ve tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You’ll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.
I think we may have an example of a fake news story that works on everyone.
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That is an amazing quote. So much to unpack there, including the metaphorical allusions.
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She’s so excellent.
After my dad died, one of the songs that really helped deal with it was her song Firewood:
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When my grandmother died, we had a pretty death story given to us by his caregivers that started unraveling after the fact. i think the caregivers really wanted us to believe that Grandma left this world with dignity and her humanity intact even though she’d had Altzheimers and we know nothing fabulous really happened. In the days immediately afterward, the beautiful fiction was nice for the family, but over time it really bothered my mother and her brothers that they didn’t know what really happened to her at the end.
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Death is often undignified, painful, complicated, etc. and most people don’t get the luxury of passing peacefully or of sound mind. It is a part of life but i don’t think anyone is ever ready to experience someone else passing away, and i wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Must be hard for caretakers and healthcare professionals, i sort of understand why they’d want to soften the blow in making up a dignified death but i would want to know the truth.
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Vindicated!
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Sorry, apparently this shit is fake because 2016.
sigh.
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Guys, what the hell. We can’t very well kill gullible people for believing fake news when we instantly buy something that is right out of a Hallmark Hall of Fame very special episode because we see it in print.
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Is it good or bad that it’s fake? I guess good? Feels wrong to say, but the alternative is to be glad a kid’s dead.
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If it was fake…fuck, just shoot me now…
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Of course it’s fake. It’s about Santa, not Jesus.
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The story is being called fake because the news cannot track down a hospital that will verify the story to the press. Did you really need veracious journalism with multiple sources from a story that is about a man’s claimed experience from being santa? Do you need the family of the dead child to step forward and come on camera to watch this? How many other personal accounts and stories have you watched that are just as unverifiable?
Whatever. People shitting on this story makes perfect sense in 2016, I can’t wait for this guy to be hammered with death threats.
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I’m sorry for loses. It must make this time of year so hard. I hope you have love and support in your life. Please don’t hesitate to ask for help when you need it. If you aren’t sure you need it, ask for it anyway.
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But… but… grandma Betsy in Keokuk could just as easily get her news from Der Spiegel rather than fake news, right? I mean, all the unbiased sources are out there for the reading, and it’s totally not super confusing to tell the legitimate ones from the fake ones 
This is something Snopes would call glurge. In fact, I think they literally called this glurge. It’s soppy maudlin stuff for getting people’s feels up. I can’t really explain how it works or even (to me) what it does, but it’s psychically a lot to unpack.
Not only did he not name the hospital, he changed his story as to what part of Tennessee the hospital was in and how he got there. Had he not done that, nobody would have raised an eyebrow. From the looks of it, people needed this story to be true, so they wouldn’t have questioned it had red flags bit been raised.
Nothing happens outside the view of the cameras anymore. Surely someone would have come forward and said “yeah, Santa did this, he’s a really cool guy”, especially seeing how much publicity this is getting. Hospital staff, parents, anyone. Even though the parents presumably would have been grieving, they would have wound up in the story eventually, because of their closeness to it. They surely would be able to confirm or deny.
Speaking of which, what are their names? What is the kid’s name? The lack of a name for the kid is what led me to believe that this kid was just Nameless Faceless Plot Device #799A, cooked up solely to deliver a metaphorical crescent wrench to the feels. If the kid was real, then it would indeed be exploitative to not mention him and his life and instead focus on what a cool guy Santa was. Now that we know this story is probably fake, I feel a little better.
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I was going to say more, but fuck it.
I’m honestly glad you feel better.
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