To ask why people are so utterly bonkers?

[veryannoyedtbh]

Reading about the man who faked being a naval officer to attend memorial events. The lengths he went to, getting a suit altered and buying medals of the internet. Was a professional teacher as well. Madness.

Then the ten people prosecuted for saying Brigitte Macron was born a man. Again, the efforts involved and they mostly appear professional people with full lives. Just mad.

Then you get the people on here pretending with fake stories or just trying to troll people. It’s just bizarre. It’s like validating you are indeed the saddest person ever.

I don’t get it. Is it the internet age? It’s like a boundary has been removed and people in freefall.

Was on a train the other day. Not many people on it. A woman got on with a big suitcase, found an empty table for 4 and put her suitcase on one of the seats. Not really the done thing, but as I said, the train was pretty empty. She then opened the suitcase and got out a tupperware box containing some smelly fish and various bits of fruit. She cut up the fish and the fruit on the table (juice everywhere) and then put the small pieces of fish and fruit into smaller tupperware pots. Then she got her laptop out, looked vaguely normal for a while as if doing some work EXCEPT she was nibbling on bits of fruit/fish from her various pots. Then she got out a big plastic wallet full of loads of crumpled bits of paper, and a flask which I assume contained tea or coffee, AND a plastic bottle of milk AND a nice mug, and proceeded to prepare her beverage. I can kind of understand not wanting to buy a cup of tea in a disposable cup, but why not add the milk to the flask beforehand and drink out of the flask lid like you're meant to? She was clearly enjoying her picnic - of which I would say she was definitely a few sandwiches short.
I've had quite a few weird train encounters in my life. There are so many bonkers but (hopefully) harmless people out there.

If you believe in one batshit conspiracy theory it's understandable of de rigeur to believe them all.

When I was growing up there was a bonkers old lady in the town who wrote mad letters in green ink and sellotaped them to her front door, in an attempt to communicate them to the rest of the world. If she were alive today she'd have ths internet to connect her to like-minded souls and spread her batty conspiracies.

There will always be a proportion of the population who are hardwired to believe Covid was a hoax or the work of all the world leaders acting in cahoots to introduce a new world order or an evil spell cast by the devil or some such.

Mostly, it's people who lack the mental wherewithal to process the random and brutal nature of life and who take comfort in denialism or attributing random catastrophes to the agency of bad actors.

There will always have been fantasists parading about in medals they didn't earn.

The Macron/Michelle Obama are really men stuff is a way to punish/take down women who have taken an uppity stance in life -Macron for having a much younger husband and Obama for being a black woman First Lady.

I think the world seems more bonkers because all the bonkers people are in contact with each other and their voices are louder than they would have been when isolated in the past.

I'd say the Internet has just highlighted the bonkers people!

😂

I don’t think it’s new. I’ve been a Samaritans listening volunteer in the past and plenty of people are clearly just making up stuff when they call. It’s like they need the sympathy or attention so it seems reasonable to them to create a pretext for the call?

Aaaaargh!

*new

Too late to edit.

That reminded me of the Ellie Williams, that woman who beat herself up and then lied about being trafficked and raped by an Asian grooming gang. Very interesting BBC documentary on her:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vfd7

I mean. why, WTF?

A friend of mine, on a long waiting list for hospital treatment, has been told (by Reform?) that a third of all NHS appointments are reserved for illegal immigrants. She is very depressed as a result but will not accept that this is complete BS.

It isn't all about being "bonkers" though. A lot of people make up things to scam money. And I'm surprised no-one is mentioning the fact that a lot of people are currently demanding that everyone else accepts them as being the opposite of their actual sex, or as being neither male nor female, and our governments in England, Scotland and Wales are strongly supportive of those people and their claims.

🥔 Bolognese, not today.

But it isn’t Béchamel sauce if you put cheese in, putting cheese in it makes it cheese sauce Though to be honest, I can’t think why you would use Béchamel sauce on its own, except as a base for another flavouring, as otherwise it’s extremely bland, to my mind.

You must have read a different thread. The OP has no idea how you would warm up potatoes (even though she has cooked them hours in advance of the meal), doesn't understand what "leafy greens" are and thinks that pasta and potato is weird when she was actually planning to make a pasta and potato dish herself. It's definitely a goady thread, but it is very funny at the same time.

@Bigearringsbigsmile You've beaten me to it with the flannel derailment comment. Good work!

Yes, you add cheese to the béchemal to make cheese sause.

My dad has potatoes with lasagne. He has potatoes with everything 😂

hes a good person for it

are you rolling your eyes at them or me :-)

Actually I just remembered a guy I worked with would tell people he was a rally driver at the weekends and had a team around him and sponsorship etc. one day he said he didn't have a co driver for the weekend, one of the other guys said he'd do it, which should have flagged given the skills you need, but they agreed... strangely it was called off on Friday night. Monday someone asked the driver how they got on. He said they came 3rd
He went on to steal lots of important valuable documents and computers from the office and was only caught when he sold a stolen motorbike...using his own name. The police found his flat filled with the documents and computers. He'd clearly never sold them or stolen them for any reason.

There have always been people who fake military service, Walts they are usually called, as in Walter Mitty.
It's usually easy enough to weed out the fakers, just ask for their forces number, any genuine ex/serviceman/woman never needs to pause to think about it 😁😁

I did once meet a proper Walter Mitty character and his background was rather sad. He came from a fairly well-off family but was clearly considered the runt of the litter, the family failure. He was very convincing about all the spectacularly unusual/impressive jobs he'd had in his lifetime, so much so that I never really paused to consider how unlikely it all was (I am quite gullible). Among his friends he was known for this, but he did once move in a partner and she invited everyone round for dinner despite his protestations. She'd been living with him for a few weeks by then, and her face was a picture when it became very apparent during the course of the meal that everyone except her knew he was making everything up. I really feel for her, because I believe everything I'm told and have been in similar weird relationships. We all just wished he could let go of these delusions/aspirations, because then you'd just be left with a nice guy who hadn't done much with his life, but it was too deeply ingrained in him to let go of.

Having had some crazy relationships with oddballs over the years, if I could go back in time the advice I'd give to my younger self would be: People are much, much madder than you can even begin to imagine. Assume they are bonkers and let them gain your trust, rather than starting from a place of trust and then working backwards...

The first give-away with the Walt in my department was that he could "not remember" the three-word regimental motto... (My husband's regiment had amalgamated with another, so he asked me to ask the Walt whether the regimental motto had survived post-amalgamation. It had.)

Every village had it's idiot in the past, but no one outside that village really heard of them. Now the idiots are beamed around the world.

Our Walt actually blu-tacked a photo of himself and his 'comrades-in-arms' onto the corner of his computer screen.

Upon closer inspection, I realised that he'd printed out and cut out the regimental crest and had glued it onto a photo of him and his mates dressed up for paintballing.

Did you see the mum rage one -" I can't serve you actually I will" ? Major melt down at the pizza counter. That did my head in yesterday.

My favourite bonkers conspiracy theory is the one that says Australia doesn't exist. I mean, where do you even start with that one?

People do seem to have become madder in recent years though. Less pleasant, more paranoid, more fearful...its not a good combination.

I haven't read the whole thread because people seem to be talking about lasagne

I have nothing against lasagne, but it's not really a discussion point for me 😂

@veryannoyedtbh yeah I am increasingly weirded out by how weird people are. And the strange things that they genuinely believe. And it's not long ago that I was considered a conspiracy theorist on here.

I agree with the theory that the Internet has made it easier for people to back up their crazy theories. In real life, the main people I've heard saying crazy stuff are men who spend a lot of time online. The only exception to this that I've known was a lady who had a very full life, but then dropped doing a lot of things so she could go home after work and be online straight away. Then she got in trouble at work for constantly browsing on her phone.... I lost touch with her but it's entirely possible that she's worse now. Which is a scary thought.

I think it's really unfortunate that Brigitte Macron felt she had to indulge any of this crazy!

I remember in the 2010s, I was on a bus and two women maybe in their 20s or 30s were talking about a boy band member whose wife had just had a baby and they thought the baby wasn't real. I think there's probably a few actors and singers who have had this experience.

is it just that people are so bored they have to invent more and more outrageous theories? It's creepy.

I find myself thinking that they must be trolling their real life contacts - but again, the question there would be - why?