Thank you, I’ll be fine.
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Is Santa running for public office? Is there something on the line here: lives, taxes, race relations, public policy?
Yes, all we basically have is this guy’s word that the family doesn’t want to go public. Personally I’m skeptical. But I don’t buy the equivalence of this probably fake news to obviously fake news that has real political consequences.
Ah, who am I kidding… All you people who had a brief moment of hope before it was stoically snatched away by the adults in the room, you’re all terrible terrible people. Just awful. The worst. /s
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Taking a deep breath, and forcing a smile on his face, Santa entered the room, bellowing a hearty, “Ho, ho, ho!” “Santa!” shrieked little Sarah weakly, as she tried to escape her bed to run to him, IV tubes intact. Santa rushed to her side and gave her a warm hug. A child the tender age of his own son — 9 years old — gazed up at him with wonder and excitement.
Her skin was pale and her short tresses bore telltale bald patches from the effects of chemotherapy. But all he saw when he looked at her was a pair of huge, blue eyes. His heart melted, and he ad to force himself to choke back tears. Though his eyes were riveted upon Sarah’s face, he could hear the gasps and quiet sobbing of the women in the room.
As he and Sarah began talking, the family crept quietly to the bedside one by one, squeezing Santa’s shoulder or his hand gratefully, whispering " thank you" as they gazed sincerely at him with shining eyes.
Santa and Sarah talked and talked, and she told him excitedly all the toys she wanted for Christmas, assuring him she’d been a very good girl that year.
Awww man so this was fake after all?
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Didn’t your parents already tell you? You’re kind of old to just be finding out…
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It can’t be verfied, and it matches a pattern of cloying stories about sick kids.
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It doesn’t matter if it’s literally true. Like the myths of Santa Claus and Jesus Christ, it exists to tell us stories about ourselves, stories that hopefully encourage our best impulses to resist the inexorable tides of venality and shittiness. That’s what myths are for. Maybe Li’l George Washington didn’t chop down a cherry tree, or maybe he did lie about it. Maybe the first Thanksgiving wasn’t a hippie love fest of cooperation. We tell ourselves how we want to be, not how we are.
We’re depressingly familiar with how we are, there’s no reinforcement necessary.
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We–the handful of skeptical people in this thread–are depressingly familiar with how we are. But we–the larger society that uncritically believes fake stories and just elected a Breitbart comments section to the Oval Office–could use a few more lessons, frankly.
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Like I said
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Well spotted.
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True, but stories about dying kids should be about dying kids.
More accurately, it matches a pattern of cloying stories where the death of a child is used as a plot device, and the actual child is sometimes not even a character in the story about their own death.
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Fake stories for feeling good and fake stories for inciting rage are two sides of the same coin. Sometimes it even feels good to be angry.
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Is Santa running for public office? Is there something on the line here: lives, taxes, race relations, public policy?
No, but doesn’t it make sense to think about the sources in all news regardless of subject? Why would you approach news with or without anything on the line any differently?
Personally I’m skeptical.
Me too!
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That’s an interesting question. Personally, I don’t. But that said, I think there’s a difference between, on the one hand, someone who’s less critical of a human-interest fluff piece than something with concrete impact like political, economic or climate reporting, and, on the other hand, someone who’s uncritical of all reporting. All I’m saying, and I admit it got a little lost in my snark, is that it’s not fair to equate the two groups. The mind is capable of calibrating it’s skepticism to the significance of the subject material. This despite people such as you and I who choose a broad-spectrum skepticism. The only danger comes from broad-spectrum credulity, not from those who’s level of skepticism depends on the impact.
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But Santa wouldn’t lie!
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There is a reason he is tracked on radar whenever he leaves his polar compound. His petrochemical reseves, in the form of coal, make him a global player. I wouldn’t trust that guy, he has a whole other persona in Russia! What a chameleon, not to mention his shelf elf informant network!
If I could throw him I wouldn’t even trust him that far.
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I think that when something is presented as news it tends to convey a weight, a patina of respectability, for a lot of people. This story was always “Santa impersonator tells reporter kid died in his arms”. Would it have gone viral if it were Santa impersonator’s blog post, written in first person, instead? I doubt it.
What’s interesting to me is my getting called something unkind upthread for doubting the story. That seems like a pretty extreme response, doesn’t it? Maybe whoever made it is invested enough in their worldview that they don’t like their news stories being questioned. You get someone with the wrong worldview, and I bet that makes them very susceptible to uncritically consuming all that fake news that is in the news these days.
now everyone repeat after me…
hey, you believed he was santa didnt you? sooo… dead kid, alive kid, no kid, meh whats the difference no one got hurt did they? 
But what to do when the propagandists notice this, and start wrapping their political messages in human interest glurge?
See, for example, the Reader’s Digest.
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Agreed. Although the pedant in my wants to point out that since Santa is a fictional character, an impersonator is at least as much Santa as anyone can be.
Yes, a little. I skimmed the thread and missed that.
If I had to guess, they probably just thought it was gratuitously Grinchy. Less that it’s part of their worldview than that they saw it as a harmless bit of suspension of their skepticism (which I agree with), and whatever insult they called you (a response I don’t agree with) was a reaction to being called to account over something that’s ultimately unimportant, not necessarily for impugning their worldview.
This is where I think your making an unfair assumption, that because they weren’t vigilant about this feel-good fluff piece, that it’s a slippery slope to an uncritical worldview. I think you’re probably underestimating your fellow BB readers. YMMV.
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