You probably heard it. Even believed it. Perhaps told a joke about it, or laughed at a joke based on it that you may have heard from a friend or in a movie.

Chinese restaurants serve their customers cats. For years, this was a practice, the thinking is either to save money (strays as free meat), or because they eat felines themselves, or for a malevolent reasons because they think it’s funny to watch Americans eat something they consider a pet.

The problem is, this is bullshit.

It’s always been bullshit. There’s no documented instance of a Chinese restaurant serving cat. This has been disproven by Snopes.

No matter. Like another line of bullshit, “weather forecasts are always wrong,” this became sort of a sacred belief. Challenging it will sometimes get you anger and a statement like “Well my brother’s girlfriend’s uncle’s barber’s son’s teacher’s aunt’s hairdresser said she heard differently.”

When this kind of stuff is allowed to establish itself and become widely believed despite all evidence to the contrary, you get a sort of societal delusion. And this delusion creates the environment to believe other delusional things. Such as the idea that in a small city in Ohio, Haitian immigrants are eating pets.

The parallels are obvious, just shifted to another immigrant group. Perhaps the saddest aspect of this is one of the major political parties is driving this narrative, including their presidential nominee. Because of this, Haitians are the ones facing violence and threats of violence.

People want to believe that urban legends are harmless, that people “have a right to their opinion,” etc. And in some cases, that is certainly true. But not enough is talked about the harm they cause.

There are other examples. One is the “vaccines cause autism” myth. This absolute nonsense has been debunked over and over again, but it never died. Then COVID hit, and because of this silly urban legend, the online infrastructure was there for people who “do their own research” to get the impression that all vaccines are dangerous. This, combined with another myth that people will defend to their death despite there being no evidence, that the flu shot gives you the flu, created a sadly huge anti-vax movement. The result of this was somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 preventable deaths during the pandemic.

That’s a lot of deaths due to bullshit.

Another example is the number of people who believe that in every town and near every park, a pervert in a van is lurking to snatch your child. However, less than one percent of child abductions are not by strangers but by people they know, a family member, an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend of their parent, a divorced spouse, and so on. The Stranger Danger moral panic resulted in some not-so-great societal effects. However, this particular moral panic also primed the pump for the QAnon movement.

The QAnon movement has spawned violence and torn apart families as family members fall down its awful rabbit hole. And key figures in the movement are not exactly model citizens. 

I could go on, but I have limited space to list them all. The belief that weather forecasts are “always wrong” results in people ignoring storm warnings and putting themselves and first responders in peril. The Satanic Panic, the ridiculous idea that satanic cults and satan worship that was sparked by a book full of lies, resulted in people’s lives being ruined and rock stars being blamed for troubled teen suicides. The idea that somehow schools are grooming children to become LGBTQ+ people has led to the Republican presidential candidate making a ridiculous claim that schools are doing gender surgeries without parental consent, which is not exactly the best thing to say when your supporters have shown clear tendencies towards violence. And so on.

I will close by saying that if you hold any of the beliefs I listed above, please reconsider. Please look to facts presented by reliable, trustworthy sources. Please be more informed, and don’t fall victim to myths based on emotions. Whether you like to hear this or not, these society-level lies have caused a lot of harm to a lot of people, including the people who believe the myths. It is up to all of us to nicely, with kindness and with facts, tell our friends, family members, coworkers, etc. who espouse these beliefs that no, that’s just not true. The evidence points to the importance of doing this. It’s more than just “another opinion,” it’s beliefs that are plain dangerous, full stop.

Be like John McCain, in one famous example of how you firmly and politely dispel a myth.

The last word goes to Nick Jonas and the Administration.