Skepticism Blogs on Non-scientific Topics

Interested in websites that (often) do a good job of fact-checking the claims thrown up in our modern society? Richard Carrier pulled together six websites that do their best on exposing the nonfactual bases of many social claims.

The first one on his list is snopes, which is a really great one to go check whenever you receive an e-mail/see a FB post from "that relative" or "that friend" that really just "smells wrong". (Often, you can just copy-and-paste the factual claim word-for-word into snopes, and up it comes, often with fact-checked sources of rebuttal.) Some of these "facts" have been around for years and years, but rarely does their syntax actually change from when they were first written! For example, this breathless crowing over the duplicity of Obama over the ACA was written in 2009:

"MR. PRESIDENT WILL YOU AND YOUR FAMILY GIVE UP YOUR CURRENT HEALTH CARE PROGRAM AND JOIN THE NEW 'UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE PROGRAM' THAT THE REST OF US WILL BE ON ????" ..... (BET YOU ALREADY KNOW THE ANSWER)....

It goes on from there in its continued caps-locked-ness. Interestingly, I copied this first line and came up with Snopes. After almost four years after it was debunked, this line had been perfectly preserved from the above when it showed up in my Facebook feed. And Snopes does a good job of checking conspiracy theories of all stripes.

I haven't really checked any of the other sites, but at first glance, they look interesting. I might well check through some of them on a lunch break.