If I know already that a person is prone to exaggeration, I can live with it but if they seemed to always be truthful and then change, it would be very difficult to accept.

it is unusual that a person could admit they were lying so easily as to just spill out the unadorned story without a flinch on request.

i would interrupt every sentence they started to say with "the unadorned version thanks".

if that works, then it would be fun to hear the adorned version after.

people embellish stories to get "mileage" out of their boring tales.

but it is not true, and so it is like "belief" theft if i believe it.

i do not like my belief to be stolen.

an example may be someone who comes back from an international holiday and reports that he was detained by suspicious security guards at the airport, and taken aside and strip searched and bashed and detained for 8 hours before being allowed to go because they could not find anything.

when the real story was that he was selected in a random way for a thorough luggage search that held him up for 10 mins, and that was all that happened.

story 1 is interesting if true, and story 2 is not worth mentioning.

in order to mention it as their contribution to discussion, they have to hang baubles all over it.

story 1 <> story 2, so it is a lie.

i never cared for fiction.
when i was at school, it was torture to have to read fiction books. like "grey text specked asians"

to have to absorb and remember and recite lies.

they were not deceitful lies, because the author presents them as fiction, but it is still fiction and not real, so it is a lie.

why waste my mind on unreality?

i have no theory of mind much, so i guess i am not able to go to the world of anothers imagination.

if it is not true, then i can not imagine it, no matter how well they say it.

i refuse to imagine what i know did not happen.

there are some funny kinds of liars though.
psychopathic liars sometimes are funny.

it is obvious to everyone that they are a complsive liar, and the stories they come up with are so grotesquely improbable that they make me laugh.

others pretend they beleive the person so they are also liars, but i just crack up when i hear some of their stories.

i knew one and he was a little man who came into the tavern and spoke with his associates every night.
one example of his stories was that he bought a 1966 chev with a 327cid motor, and he tuned it very well. he said his friend forgot to put the accelerator return spring back on.

when he was test driving it, he said the accelerator pedal got stuck to the floor because of the missing return spring.

so he said the car did a burnout and pelted away at full speed and he had to negotiate peak hour traffic like a race car driver.

he said that police became aware of him, and before long he had 22 squad cars chasing him with sirens blaring.

a number of these police apparently crashed into traffic because they could not drive that fast.

then he saw police helicopters chasing him.

then he apparently "threw it back to 2nd gear at 170 mph", and the cars rear wheels span out of control and slewed the car sideways, and he saw his chance, and slid off the main road and into a tunnel
and escaped.

i was breathless at the end of that story.
it was so funny that i was helpless to not laugh to exhaustion at every step of his unfolding tale.

the funniest thing was that he said it with a straight face and expected people to believe him

that is just one example of hundreds from that person.

the stupidity of his forethought into the factual and scientific incredulity of his reported scenario was the funniest bit.
(like that if there was no return spring, he would have redlined from the moment he started his car and he could not select any gear at red line)

but there are some dangerous kinds of lying too.
i heard of a man that played a prank on april fools day some year recently.

he must have had some serious psychiatric flaws.

he was friends with a family that consisted of a man and wife and 3 kids.

on april fools day, he rang the wife, and, knowing her husband takes the kids to sport at a certain time, he told her that her husband and 2 of her children had been killed in a car crash at some road intersection, and that paramedics and police rescue were using the jaws of life to cut out her youngest daughter who was screaming "mommy", and was close to death.

he told her the location of the "tragedy"

she got in her car and drove so fast to get to her daughter that she truly was killed in a crash of her own.

so, there are liars on every level, from the insanely irresponsible, to just the boring story havers, or shady people who do bad things in secrecy.

the more obvious forms of dishonesty are easy for me to detect, so i do not fear and hate them as much, even though they may cause more damage to the world at large.

a classic case of simple dishonesty happened for me today.
i had to go into one of the offices (i usually work from home) to set up a system there, and in a break, people were telling jokes.

i said that i did not know any jokes.

they were saying jokes that must have been recently made up (i deduce due to their current contextuality).

they were also saying some dirty jokes that they thought were funny.

so i made up a joke so i could at least contribute a bit to my alien friends and my joke was

Q: why does keith urban not eat or drink on saturday from now on?

A: because he does not want to have to go to the toilet on sunday.


i thought they liked it because there seemed to be laughter.

but i heard later from my boss, that they all were outraged by my "sick homour".

if i had not heard that they thought it was really bad, then i would have remained with the idea that they thought it was good, and so i would make more of them up.

they dig my grave by pretending to like what they secretly deplore.

i will be even more uncommunicative now, because they lied to me when they laughed at my joke.

they did not really think it was funny.
they lied.
they complained about me behind my back.

i never trusted them anyway, and now i know i was correct.


they said much ruder jokes than the one i said.
mine did not even have any swear words in it.

well, i am home now and my animal friends do not judge me with any hypothetical absurdities like "imagination".

that is all i have to say about how i see "trust"

As you no longer want to talk about trust, I will finish off my own with a few of comments.

My buddy, the embellisher, will happily tell me before a story that it is a story, to be followed by the reality, and this is good for us both; as it satisfies his need to embellish, and mine for the truth.

Some fiction can be useful, as in the cases of made up scenarios for instructing trainees. Others can lighten the mood of readers or listeners, but you are right, they are still lies, no matter what the justification used or names assigned to them.

The lie that was told that caused the lady to kill herself in an accident goes beyond simple lying, and is into the 'practical joke' stage. Rather than just wanted to elicit a laugh, it wanted to do harm in what is disguised as 'fun'. I despise practical jokes and explain to any newcomers in my life that they had better not play any practical jokes on me because I take them as being an assault, and will react very unpleasantly towards them, not to mention writing them out of my life after that.

I don't like "white lies" which is what those people did in reaction to your poor excuse for a joke. There are honest ways to say one doesn't like something that don't hurt the person being told (at least, not too much), and there is no need to lie about it. By the way, I didn't understand your joke at all and also didn't find it offensive, probably because I don't understand it and the references in it mean nothing to me. (Do not explain it.)

I can sort of get that joke about Keith Urban not eating on Saturday. It's not the funniest joke I've ever heard but I'd laugh at it.

The friend I had on another forum sort of said he was sorry about believing the other woman's lies and putting them in front of his friendship with me and some other people on the forum. She managed to convince him that she had all sorts of problems and that we were mean and cruel to her whenever we called her on her lies.

Her usual tactic was to fulsomely praise any person on the other forum who would espouse views that most of us disagreed with and even found offensive. If we told the people that we found their comments unwelcome and incorrect, she would tell us we were picking on them.

Because he agreed with one of her comments against me, our friendship started to crumble. He complained to me and some others that this woman was stalking him but when we said he should block her from PM and MSN, he said he felt obligated to answer every comment from her because it would be rude not to.

After several impassioned apologies and many fancy pictures, I gave up on the friendship. She finally got banned from the other forum; something that most of us thought should have happened at least 12 months before.

Her worst trick was to convince a young fellow to phone a woman who she kept accusing of being a man who was "stalking her". The poor woman who got the call was terrified and the young man got banned for calling her.

It just proves that a person who lies, manipulates, and flatters can cause immense amounts of damage to friendships. True friends aren't afraid to say what is on their minds even if it isn't flattery all the time.

i did not say i did not want to talk about it any more.

i just said that what i had already said.... was all i had to say.

i can not talk further than what i can think, and i have limited ability to think about things to do with other people.

also, i say "that is all i have to say", when i get to the end of my sentence in real life.

my spoken sentences go on for so long, that i usually interrupt the people i am talking to, and say that i will finish my sentence in about 30 seconds.

some people look at their watches, and when they are getting up to go, i say "and that is all i have to say".

i guess in a post, it is not needed to say that, because it is obvious due to the lack of further words, that it was all i had to say.



it would be interesting to hear an example of his stories.

if the embellished version comes first (and i knew it was the first story), i would drum my fingers on the table and be bored.

maybe i would create a game in my head where i had to weed out the truthful bits by deduction, and then present him with what i thought really happened.. before he gave me the truthful version.

that is the only way i could enjoy it.

he maybe should write novels for the many who may wish to dissolve their attention into his imagination.

are his embellished versions worth the time to listen?
if they are creatively funny, then i guess it would be entertaining.

but if it is just wild exaggeration, then it is a corruption of quantities, and i can become confused to imagine it.


hypothetical situations are not in any way lies.

i mostly use hypothesis in my thoughts.

you have to "hypothesize" to explore where you may sometime be.

like "what if an asteroid or comet was to impact the earth"
you choose the variables (comets are faster than asteroids by far, but asteroids are more dense than comets by far).

what can be learned to deflect threats can only be found with hypothesis.

an hypothesis is only a "pseudo" fictitious scenario, in that it is not yet happening, but COULD happen.

it is also not presented as an actuality (which makes all the difference).


yes. that is true i think as well.



what he did was a psychopathically sinister prank.

first of all, even if the woman survived the trip, she was subjected to a heart murdering experience for a while.

i love my possums and kookaburras and mice etc, and if someone rang me when i was away from home at the other side of sydney, and said people were hunting and shooting and killing my darlings, i would possibly die in my effort to get home.

i would mount footpaths and run most red lights.
i would possibly have sirens chasing me but i would not stop until i got home and .....found out it was a hoax.

well the man who said that to the woman would have to be a psycho not to know she would hate him forever for subjecting her to that horrifying experience (if she survived).

maybe that man wanted to murder the woman, and tried out a way to do it.
it seems like that to me.

maybe he sensed by her devotion to her family, that she may injure or kill herself on her way to be with them if they were in peril.

that is the worst type of dishonesty.
it is malicious dishonesty.

malice is the ugliest thing.



hat is a "white lie" ?.

it does not matter what color (i know white is not a color) or shape a lie comes in, it is an attempt to deceive another person from seeing the truth.

i think a "white" lie is a lie designed to make a person feel "better".

that is why the NT world calls it "white".

but saying false flattery leads people into false senses of security.

reality is brutal, and will lay open all falsehoods in the long run.

brittle identities weather rapidly.

they erode with little encouragement from mild dissent.

i think that to falsely cheer people on when they are in a pathetic way, is to restore their confidence so it can be smashed by reality in a more savage way when they rejoin the world.

it is proper for me to say what is displeasurable (in a subjective way for me) to those i am not impressed with.

little do they listen to me when they have mindless support from many "feel good" applauders.

i really do not care for the logical turmoil of the wider emotional world, so i retreat from it easily.

they are torn by forces i do not understand.




yes i heard the people at work talking, and they said that nicole kidman and keith urban named their daughter "sunday".

it is such a simple and obvious joke to me, but it does not make it when you contribute it to a line of people who are all telling professional jokes that they remember.

do not make up jokes on the spot to fake your turn is the moral.

"over and out"
(same as "that is all i have to say")

Well some fiction is more than a hypothetical occurance.

Take George Orwell (a suspected Aspie)'s novella "Animal Farm". It is not literal, but it is historical. It is a gentle satire towards Stalinist Russia. Whatever one's thoughts towards Stalin, however, he was not a Berkshire boar. The Russian peasantry were not Shire horses, and the Jewish populace were not donkeys. It was fiction, and yet not-fiction. It can be learnt from, and the genius of the way it is written is such that if you know your history, you can pick up the subtle points that are made throughout the story, while still learning from it even if you don't know your history at all.

Also, remember our brief debate over art versus no art, "lore versus "law" a few months ago?

Let's move from satire to fairy tales. Hans Christian Anderson (yet another suspected Aspie) wrote of the Emperor's new clothes, to explore the honesty of a child in the face of adult pretence... but it was still not a true story.

He also wrote "The Emperor and the Nightingale": Emperor loves the song of a nightingale; emperor gets a machanical windup one that he thinks sings just as well; real nightingale flees in sadness; machanical nightingale eventually breaks; emperor grows sick; real nightingale returns to sing for him provided she is never caged; emepror agrees, and they all live happily ever after.

The significance of a story telling of the natural world versus the technological world is more significant than perhaps Anderson- writing in 19th century Denmark- was aware himself at the time of writing it.

But it is still not a true story.

And why, if we can learn something from fiction- even if it is the philosophies of something bizarre like Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" or Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"- should we dismiss it as a lie and just not read it- or if it's satire, dismiss it as exaggeration?

And a part of me agrees with what you are all saying about lies, and whether a white lie should be treated differently, for what it's worth. Maybe it's my religious background with "thou shalt not give false testimony" drumming away in the back of my head.

But still, I see a world of difference between someone telling me I look good when they later confess they didn't think that at all (and perhaps waiting until years later, so that I have built my confidence up to such an extent that telling me the truth won't hurt me by that time), and someone else telling me I look dreadful or am pathetic when the reality is they have no opinion on it but just want to injure.

(Not that I particularly care what people think of me one way or another, but since we're talking about hypotheses...)

nothing i read that is a string of untruthful words, no matter how thoughtful, can compare with the memories i have of true things.

i never read any fiction that i accidentally believed.
there are flaws galore in fiction.

any way i have to go to sleep as it is late.
i am not absorbed by stories.

i am absorbed by dreams when i am asleep (which i will be in a few minutes), and sterile analysis while awake.

the dreams of others are foreign to my heart.

it is sad in some way.

So are dreams 'true' or 'lies'?

Dreams are lies that our mind tells us while we're asleep.

However, some people have been able to predict their future from their dreams (thus making the dreams eseentially "truth"). But, if the above is true, then the lies predict the future.

I confuse myself

At any rate, as a person who has studied literature and come to understand metaphors, I know that literature does not whether it is truth or lies. It instead is based on emotions through symbols and metaphors.

- Serenity