What stinks as much as getting chain letters, is getting abandoned by people who decide they'd rather write you off as a friend and go on sending junk to other friends who are as easy to fool as they are, or else too timid to speak up and let them know this junk is - well - junk. However nice you might be, forwarders value their stupid chain letters more than real friendship, and that's made abundantly clear when they sulk, pout, and decide not to write you at all if you have the nerve to try to inform them the headlight gang initiation chain letters, and those sick kid hoaxes are just that, hoaxes.
And argh, I've gotten so many faux friendship/Christian forwards from people, tear-jerkers that make me want to punch the drip who originated them in the eye, dreck about how we should always "empower" women with "You are beautiful" flattery, etc.
Well, I've got a heck of a lot to say about all that, but don't want to make this post too long.
Some of the recent, most absurd chain letters that have been circulating are, that fake news site Daily Currant's article claiming Sarah Palin said the casualties of that recent Malaysian plane crash all went to heaven because the plane flew so high. Another was a hoax about the "deadly snow snake" that bites you and freezes your blood. That one wasn't traced back to any specific source.
I just don't get how even newbies could buy some of this stuff. Some hoaxes do manage to look convincing, but the Snow Snake isn't one of them.
But the sick kid hoaxes are what really got me on a mission to tear apart chain letters without mercy. Whoever thought it was cool to make up a fictional sick kid and a bogus story, toss in a big name charity reference, and a bogus claim about donations depending on forwarding/sharing, and blanket-guilt-trip/insult someone as a heartless child-hater etc. for not forwarding this bilge, just - argh, lemme at 'em! And that's not even the lowest trick these hoaxers have up their sleeves. It's not enough to just make up a fictitious kid any more, the recent Facebook chain hoaxes include pictures of real sick/injured kids, who have nothing at all to do with the hoax stories. What kind of sick twist goes looking on the net for pictures of suffering children to put in hoaxes? And to make this even more tasteless, at least some of those images are of children who have been dead before the hoax circulated!
And some of these chain letters have the gall to play the religious card!
*Facepalm*
