To ask why people are so utterly bonkers?

It amounted to cyber bullying given the number of times it was posted and the number of views (tens of thousands for some of the posts) and of course because it was wholly untrue. The main perpetrator was a 51 year-old french woman - who also claims to be a medium - who was given a six-month custodial sentence.

I worked with a cancer faker and she did it for the money - people fundraised so she could take her little children to Disneyland for a final family holiday. After she got busted, she left that particular job and popped up a few months later, in a different job, claiming to have terminal heart failure - and yes, you've guessed it, she wanted to take her DC on one final family holiday before she died. This was all more than a decade ago and she's still alive and well, though God knows what fatal illness she is currently pretending to have.

Why is it bonkers? We have potato with pasta all the time.

Except she had already cooked the potatoes even although she was prepping the meal only. Then they didn't know how to warm them up in the pan as they were cold and they would burn? Of course it wasn't real .....

That's even more bonkers. Why would you have potatoes on the side of a pasta dish? At least she solved her own problem (no lasagne sheets). She can use potatoes instead.

Well, I imagine she cares…

I put cheese in my bechamel so it becomes a cheese sauce. Just because I like it better than putting the cheese on top of the bechamel sauce. I don’t do it with potatoes though we have garlic bread. All goes down the same way I don’t see what difference it makes.

Think there have always been bs artists but you'd only come across them on a bus or in a pub where you would try to be polite and then move elsewhere. Now they have a platform and can broadcast their nonsense far and wide. They should be called out where possible and charged if being malicious. In particular, trolls who target bereaved families should be charged immediately and have their phones/laptops taken away.

Just to say, Italians (who know a thing or two about lasagna) love potatoes in it. Here’s the first hit: https://blog.giallozafferano.it/apparecchiatelatavola/ricetta-lasagne-con-patate-e-speck/

of course, it would taste differently than what she was proposing, but still.

Social media. It's the curse of modern life. And I'm replying to you on it.

Yeah, these are people that are allowed to vote too - that’s scary.

Exactly - that's what the Colosseums were all about - social media is just the modern / digital version.

Nothing has changed - it’s just that with the advent of the internet we now get to see a much bigger demographic of nutters, charlatans and con men and the crazy stuff they do.

It used to just be the odd story in Take A Break or the Sun 😂

I went away and thought about that-is it different to garlic bread? Bread with pasta or potatoes with pasta?

I just read that thread - your comment to this one did make me chuckle 🤭

There has always bern odd people, and strange things apparantly happening in their lives.

The difference now is that they can throw it all over the internet. 🤷‍♀️

Sorry for the chatGPT bumpf but this is how cognitive dissonance works - it's why when you argue with someone and have clear evidence they're wrong, they find a way to make your argument consistent with their existing beliefs, and end up just getting more extreme (and more bonkers!) With so many people arguing on the Internet this encourages a lot of extreme viewpoints:

In Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), the authors focus less on why someone says “I did it” and more on how an innocent person can come to genuinely believe they are guilty.
How cognitive dissonance works in their explanation:
The person starts out believing “I’m innocent.”
Authorities insist there is strong evidence and treat guilt as certain.
This creates dissonance: “I believe I’m innocent, but everyone with power says I’m guilty and they say they have proof I did it"
To reduce that discomfort, the mind may change the belief:
“If they’re so sure, maybe I did do it.”
Once that belief shifts, a confession feels logical and consistent. It's easier to resolve the dissonance in this way than to maintain an innocence claim. To fully resolve the dissonance the person must come to completely believe in their own guilt.
Key point from the book:
The most dangerous false confessions are internalized ones — where people don’t just comply, but rewrite their own memory and self-story to resolve dissonance.

I read about this in "Mistakes were made but not by me" where she goes through step by step how fake confessions happen and how it's all explained by cognitive dissonance (more explicitly the human need to resolve cognitive dissonance at any cost) - it's all behavioural psychology and completely predictable. I think in the Internet age, where everything is more magnified, kids should be taught this stuff in school.

…why people are so utterly bonkers?

It’s a design fault and we’re not going to get an upgrade.

There have always been liars. They just used to get away with it more. The main reasons behind it are likely that they seek attention, praise, admiration.

Agree 100%

Yes, it's an interesting question because, actually, it's possible for someone who isn't currently a rear admiral to become one at some point, in theory at least, but it's never possible for someone to change sex. So the fake rear admiral's claims are actually much less outlandish than the person who claims to be the opposite sex.

A previous poster has mentioned upthread about humans changing sex. Where do you draw the line between a man saying he’s a woman, and a man saying he was a rear admiral. Why is one seen as okay, and the other seen as being an imposter? At what point are some fantasies treated with ‘be kind’ and others treated as a crime?

I think people have always been weird... But in the multimedia, instant access world we live in now, it's much harder for the odd-bods to go under the radar and just stay as the "local town weirdo".

The fake rear admiral is a perfect example. Pre-internet, most likely no one would have ever known. And if some locals had worked it out, he'd have been quietly ostracised from the community, chalked up as a common or garden loony and forgotten about.

It is very interesting. There is definitely something strange going on. The president of France asking the president of America to have a word with Candace. 🤐