Facebook updates from people who don't know The Onion is a humor site

"Literally Unbelievable" reposts Facebook updates from people who think Onion stories are real ("Government Official Who Makes Perfectly Valid, Well-Reasoned Point Against Israel Forced to Resign" "disgusting! and you call it land of freedom and democracy!").

"Literally Unbelievable"

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Anonymous

This story in the Daily Rash about a man killing his Facebook friend for his “mundane, day in the life comments” is hilarious! http://www.thedailyrash.com/?p=2492
irksome

If you never underestimate people’s capacity for idiocy, you’ll never be disappointed.
- Papa Dejon
  
  I frequently underestimate peoples capacity for idiocy and as a result I’m frequently entertained by it.
Mister44

I love the Onion. I don’t know why I stopped reading it…

Some of their stories really are believable enough to be real. Those are usually the best. I remember the one they did for 9/11. Classic.
websorcerer

nauseous – Causing nausea; sickening

nauseated – Having a feeling of nausea
- arikol
  
  nauseous |ËˆnÃ´ sh É™s; – zh É™s; -Ä“É™s|
  adjective
  1 affected with nausea; inclined to vomit : a rancid, cloying odor that made him nauseous.
  2 causing nausea; offensive to the taste or smell : the smell was nauseous.
  â€¢ disgusting, repellent, or offensive : this nauseous account of a court case.
  
  sorry
richardpaulhall

I am not that surprised. I do not find the articles in “The Onion” funny. A few make me smile but the rest have no humor.

If the article did not make the reader laugh, then it would be easy to expect the article to be serious.

Rick
Anonymous

Oh my.

This ought to have been funny, but the stupid…it burns.

-catty-
taj1f

This underscores the fact that some folks a) have no sense of humor and can neither recognize nor cope with satire and b) rarely read past the headline, especially if the subject matter opposes their personal views. These are the people who profess to know all they need to know about everything, which is to say, practically nothing about anything. In other words, Fox News fans.
d913

Fantastic. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard.

Favorite comment:

“Check this. While U get Ur ABORTION, U can dorp off the “KIDS” (that U did’nt KILL), and then go adopt a Dog, well, They are Family too…Right ?”
- Sam125
  
  That’s hilarious!
EeyoreX

Not that I want to defend stupidity or bigotry in any way, but we all know that one of the main reasons that less tech-savvy people often think the Onion articles are real, is because a lot of the time the Onion articles simply aren’t actually FUNNY in any way. Seems to me they prefer volume over quality when they churn out their humor product.
- buddy66
  
  So you have to be tech savvy to spot satire? What about a good liberal arts education?
  - blueelm
    
    Yeah, I think satire (even bad satire) is something that tends to be more apparent to literate people with average to high intelligence who are not autistic.
irksome

The line “Ppl just litarally kill me” just might literally kill me.
- PaulR
  
  “I was literally dead…” is one of my favourites.
  
  To which I always reply: “You literally don’t know the meaning of the word ‘literally’.”
RSFSmee

What I find most perplexing — or egregious, depending on mood — is NOT that some people, sometimes, mistake satire for seriousness; this, as a prior poster pointed out, happens to nearly everyone who travels the Internets. What only happens to people whom I would term not “idiots” but rather “overly righteous” is that their emotional state leaps directly from calm to UTTERLY INDIGNANT HOLY ZEUS. Unless you, personally, witness a baby being impaled on a spike, there is vanishingly little justification for this sort of emotion-jump; instead, the correct answer is “distress, followed by moves to confirm or deny the facts which have generated your distraught state.”
jetsetsc

It’s even funnier that most of their friends are equally clueless.
- Anonymous
  
  there is one where someone points out that it is fake and the original poster still argues that even if it is fake it’s wrong.
kyrrith

To probably misquote Albert Einstein “Both the Universe and human stupidity appear to be infinite, but I’m not entirely sure about the Universe”.
JustaddH3o

“Just go to the plex.” hahahaha
libraryboi

In the nearby city of London, Ontario, there was a debate several years ago about homophobic violence and bullying in the high schools and what to do about it. A public forum was held and a religious group opposed to anything gay handed out an information package about the dangers of homosexuality. It included a reprint of an article from The Onion which showed a teacher instructing students how to be gay as clear evidence of a gay conspiracy. Much ridicule followed.
- bob d
  
  @libraryboi: Yeah, a lot of Christian fundamentalists have used Onion articles as “proof” of their positions in the past. I recollect that there were so many fundamentalists organizations linking to one particular article about “gay recruiting” that the Onion replaced it with one making fun of fundamentalists.
  Given the nature of the outrage documented in this site, I’m guessing Christian organizations must have linked to the abortion article to get so many clueless, outraged readers.
Anonymous

There’s one born every minute.
Anonymous

Teaching critical thinking skills at school just gets in the way of standardized test preparation.
JoshP

1. “Making fun of Born Again Christians is like hunting dairy cattle with a high powered rifle and scope.” P.J. Rourke (i think??)
2. sigh, kansas is in the midwest, the bible belt is everything and including south of tennessee but not or perhaps including florida and in some cases virginia. The true test is to leave any sufficiently massive object alone in public view for a sufficient time. If it has spontaneously generated a non-demoninational protestant christian church then it is probably in the bible belt. Objects may include cars, boxes, old comic book shops, abandoned military bases, empty walmarts, mailboxes, etc.
- Anonymous
  
  Dude you are funny. Any comment on roadside memorials? I don’t have the skills. Cheers!
- Felton / Moderator
  
  The abandoned gas station across the street from my apartment hasn’t become a church yet, but that’s probably only because every wing of Christianity anyone has ever heard of already has one or two churches within a few blocks of here.
- irksome
  
  “Shooting fish in a barrel” has always seemed sufficient.
Gilbert Wham

‘Blog posts that don’t realise that ‘Literally Unbelievable’ is a site full of fake facebook posts’
It’s Hudson Hongo who writes for McSweeney’s, among other things. I’m of the opinion that it’s an elaborate recursive joke, and the posts are no more real than your average Failbook post. Doesn’t mean there aren’t people that stupid, but I don’t thing any of those are legit.
- bob d
  
  “I don’t thing any of those are legit.”
  Hmmm, that would be… rather pointless. Since there are people who think Onion articles are real (and get upset about them), if this was fake, it could have been a lot more interesting than it is.
  - Gilbert Wham
    
    Oh, as I said, there’s no doubt that there ARE people that gullible (my mother, easily. She believes David Icke, for a start), but it just strikes me that, given his other work, it’s more likely to be made up, in order to trick people into going, ‘Hah! Look how stupid THEY are!’ Which is considerably funnier than laughing at people who think the Onion is real, even.
    However, if it is a fake, it’s Poe’s Law in full effect, so it’s elegantly done. And if it’s real, look! Idiots! Hah!
    Win win, innit?
Nadreck

Humour is Truth; only faster.
- Anonymous
  
  Nadreck-
  
  Sometimes the humor arrives before the truth.
  
  -simp
graphicsman

What if it’s a “webpage inception” where we don’t realize it is mocking sites that are literally unbelievable?
Cydonia

From the Onion. Seems relevant.
Study: All American Problems Could Be Solved By Just Stopping And Thinking For Two Seconds
http://www.theonion.com/articles/study-all-american-problems-could-be-solved-by-jus,20515/
SeattleAlan

That is one of my #1 grammar peeves. It seems to have become a norm, though. I see that Arikol found that it has oozed into the dictionary. Pretty sad that language gets “dumbed down” to the common usage.
- GlenBlank
  
  jere7my@28 is correct about nauseous vs. nauseated.
  
  You can read the Merriam-Webster DEU entry for yourself here.
  
  Be sure to note their conclusion.
- jere7my
  
  I see that Arikol found that it has oozed into the dictionary. Pretty sad that language gets “dumbed down” to the common usage.
  
  The use of “nauseous” to mean “afflicted with nausea” as well as “inducing nausea” dates to the 17th century. The single-usage argument dates only to 1949, in a letter to the editor of the Saturday Review. (â€”Mirriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1994.) If anything, that usage has oozed out of the dictionary.
arikol

not dumbed down, language changes, evolves. Languages that do not change are referred to as dead languages (Latin, ancient Sumerian, etc.)

Words that are commonly used tend to change their meaning.
- Anonymous
  
  Words change their meanings because ignorant people, who don’t know what they mean, use them incorrectly, then their dumb friends use them, and finally word nerds give up on correcting them, and add them new meaning to the dictionary.
JayByrd

If they weren’t gullible, they wouldn’t be conservatives in the first place.
Anonymous

Irony is watching a thread whose point is to laugh at idiots as it quickly crumbles into an idiotic argument.
Tony Moore

pretty great. I’ve enjoyed coming across these types of links with comments for years, and now they’re all in one place for easy perusal!

as they say, “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”
Tony Moore

Those big chains always move in and run the Mom & Pops out of business. There goes my livelihood, taking my vegan mcnugget outlet down the pipes with it.
Scatterfingers

Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality.

Thankfully, these days, sufficiently advanced politics is indistinguishable from satire.
Chuck

I should have known better than to make a joke about this very thing the other day.
gwailo_joe

Look. . .I wasn’t born yesterday, but I get tricked by ‘net ‘/sarcasm}’ on occasion

goes with the territory.

but thanks to social networking and various reasons for the huddled masses yearning for TMZ

suckers get sucked in. Educate the overly credible. . .and let us move on, shall we?
- emmdeeaych
  
  It is not that they are tricked, not at all. It is the reflexive righteous indignation that’s so awesomely funny. It is like what you just did there, but turned up to eleven.
Amphigorey

So Cory, who pointed you to the Tumblr blog?
Anonymous

The best Onion piece ever was a teaser on page 1:

Headline: “Cat shits outside the box”…with a photo of a cat, litter box and stray turd laying on the floor.

damn cats need to be responsible!!!
Mr. Winka

Weak-minded Faux News viewers are conditioned to discontinue critical thinking as they become brainwashed to support the agenda. You can spot them in a crowd. Simply ring a bell and watch for the drool.
Rosiemoto

K – I’m busting out Minecraft to make the Abortionplex.
noen

How is a baby formed? How girl get pregnant?
FlenGord

Rather similar to your own comment stream on the story about dancing at the Jefferson Monument.
Rob Cruickshank

Of course, while we’re being all smug, it’s not just the Onion- note the comments from folk who didn’t get the joke behind Rob Beschizza being nauseated by the Panasonic Lumix.
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/05/26/leica-v-lux-30.html
Sam125

That first outraged poster sounded pretty mad at first but then seemed to offer a recommendation to “go to the plex”. So is she mad as hell or making a cool one-liner for a fictitious baby terminating mall? I’m confused.
SB-129

as we speak, somewhere there’s a cavalcade of winnebagos, signs ready, desperately trying to find the abortionplex.
ScottTFrazer

The left wing version of this would be people who think Landover Baptist is real, and rail against fundamentalists based on stories that show up there. Landover hides their satire warning a bit further into their site than the Onion does.
- freshacconci
  
  The big difference is that when I’ve read left-wingers/liberals/progressives who thought Landover Baptist was real, it wasn’t moral outrage they expressed but a shocked disbelief that fundies could be ”that” stupid.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Sometimes it’s hard to tell. When there are actual flat-earthers out there, you really have to write well to distinguish your satire from the real thing.
Anonymous

Even if you think nauseous is different than nauseated, the facebook comment works. After reading this, she became so insufferable that she caused nausea in others!
petsounds

Frankly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the one about the government official speaking out against Israel getting fired was real. Sounds about right.

I have a feeling these are all faked responses to fake stories, though I don’t doubt many idiots out there would be fooled.
Anonymous

Years ago would print out the onion and convince people that it was real news. Pretty easy back then. Folks belive crazy things.
Anonymous

@GilbertWham I just checked the first entry shown on Openbook. The entries are quite real.
- Gilbert Wham
  
  Really? Fuck. Now I’m depressed. Ah, well. LOOK! Idiots!
Anonymous

Dr Zaius (the greatest Simian thinker of all-time) said it best: ” His (Man’s) wisdom must walk hand-in-hand with his idiocy.”