#lying — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #lying, aggregated by home.social.
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TYVM
#Minnesota attorney general sues #Texas Gov #GregAbbott to compel #extradition of #ICE agent for trial
MN’s AG sued the governor of TX Tuesday, seeking to compel the extradition of an ICE agent charged with wounding a man & then #lying to justify the #shooting during the agency’s crackdown in #Minneapolis.
#Trump #law #immigration #Sturmabteilung #UseOfForce #ExcessiveForce #PoliceBrutality #CivilRights #AbuseOfPower #fascism #WhiteSupremacy
https://apnews.com/article/minnesota-texas-ice-shooting-christian-castro-461acb1a459bc0ecb41fef5f728df502?utm_source=app&utm_medium=iOS_share&utm_campaign=more_org_joinmastodon_app_shareactionextension -
Since humans don't (and maybe can't) know, nor can any current language express, absolute truth, it's impossible to tell 'the truth, the whole truth', as in court, and everything everyone claims to be true is, to some extent, a lie.
#truth #absolutetruth #language #knowledge #epistemology #law #court #honesty #lie #lies #lying #falsehood #expression #representation
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A Mirror That Lies About Where Objects Really Are
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Almost done with season two of #ResidentAlien and I have a hard time accepting, how he keeps #lying to Asta. I know he's an alien, but it somehow still hurts to see it.
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5% of Cantabrian brown bears can deceive each other
Journal of #Mammalogy reports, via camera studies, that some Ursus arctos exaggerate scent‑mark height to fake size, revealing mammalian guile.
A minority of the #bears living among the peaks of León, Asturias and Cantabria may be #lying about their true size to avoid having to face larger rivals
How? By using the signs and markings these mammals leave in their surroundings to stake out territory.
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“Never trust people who promise to make you rich in a day. They are generally crazy swindlers”*…
Scheduling note: as a consequence of visitors and attendant obligations, (R)D will be off tomorrow and Sunday. Regular service will resume on Monday.
Last month we lost Om Malick. The journalist, investor, and blogger who chronicled Silicon Valley was a collector of fine pens. In one of his final posts, he mused on one of his last acquisitions and on its inspiration…
I have always wanted to own a Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Carlo Collodi, the Italian author whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He took his pen name from the Tuscan village where his mother was born, and then spent his career writing under a false name about a character who could not sustain one. I grew up reading the tales of Pinocchio, but only read the non-Disneyfied version as a grown-up. The book left an indelible impression on me. It is a great parable for modern times.
In case you were wondering, I did get the pen. It is one of the most beautiful and underrated pens in the Montblanc Writers Series. I have been mildly obsessed with it for a long time.It is not overwhelming, gaudy, or over the top. It tells the full story, not just of the pen but the story behind it. And it starts with the clip, that subtly hints at Pinocchio’s nose.
The cap is where Montblanc’s craftsmen did their most serious work. It is cylindrical, dark resin, topped by the Montblanc snowflake, wrapped in a silver and platinum skeletal overlay, a filigree of characters and scenes from the story, the dark resin visible beneath through the cutouts. The effect is like looking at a shadow puppet theater contained in your hand. The barrel is restrained by comparison, dark resin with horizontal platinum ring banding, letting the cap hold the eye. The nib carries its own engraving tied to the story.
Holding it in my hands recently, I found myself thinking about the story of Pinocchio, and how it throws the names that dominate our headlines into sharp relief — the ones who shape our zeitgeist of half-truths…
… The Adventures of Pinocchio was published in serial form in 1881, aimed at Italian children in the way the 19th century aimed things at children, full of suffering, consequence, and moral instruction delivered through catastrophe. The puppet is hanged. He is swallowed by a giant fish. He watches companions degrade into beasts of burden. The world he moves through is predatory at every level, and the institutions that should protect him are either absent, corrupted, or actively hostile to his interests.
I can only imagine the outrage and horror over this story should it have been published today. I am old enough to have been smacked for my stupid mistakes as a kid. So this was actually not a bad story to read. Still, I can understand how much anxiety it might cause today’s parents.
Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.
The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.
The Fox and the Cat are the novel’s most modern characters. They persuade Pinocchio to bury his coins in the Field of Miracles on the promise that they will multiply overnight. Exploit impatience, exploit greed, frame skepticism as a failure of imagination, and dismiss skeptics as lacking vision. Remind you of someone? Space Cowboy for example?
That structure is so familiar I barely need to name it. But let me name it anyway.
Everyone from Jensen Huang to Sam Altman to Elon Musk spent a decade accumulating what I have called symbolic capital, the reputation, the prestige, the weight of being seen as someone who understands the future better than the rest of us. Now each of them seems to be running some version of the Field of Miracles, with promises that keep not arriving, timelines that dissolve, products that exist primarily as announcements, and platforms run as machines for generating more reputation regardless of what they actually do. They don’t need to be right. They need to be believed. Velocity is the new authority, and no one has weaponized that more effectively.
We are living, as I wrote years ago, in the golden age of half-truths.
Your average influencer flogging a supplement, a course, a skin cream, or a crypto token on TikTok and Instagram is running the same operation, just cheaper. The confidence is the product. The audience wants to believe. The Field of Miracles is open for business everywhere you look.
Collodi in 1881 was writing about all this at a point of major societal inflection. So perhaps now you understand why I am drawn to this story. Pinocchio is a story about a society organized around deception.
The Land of Toys is the sequence that haunts me most, especially now. Children abandon school and responsibility for a place of permanent amusement. They play. And then, gradually, they begin to change. They grow ears. They grow tails. They become donkeys, beasts of labor and exploitation, stripped of language, used until they break.
This is a parable of who we have become, a BNPL-fueled spectacle in itself.
Collodi was writing during rapid industrialization and the early emergence of mass entertainment. He understood, earlier than most, that distraction offered as pleasure can be a leash. The children who choose the Land of Toys over school are not liberated. They are owned more completely than any schoolroom could manage.
The algorithmic feed is the Land of Toys. It is built to keep you there past the point of nourishment, past the point where you are even enjoying it. Outrage travels faster than understanding. Spectacle beats judgment. The algorithm doesn’t care whether something is true. It cares whether it moves. And it keeps you scrolling, reacting, and returning in ways that benefit the platform, not you.
The political system has learned the same lesson. Governance is slow and grinding and unsatisfying. Performance is fast and shareable. We have built media and political economies that reward entertainers over administrators, and the clean story over the complicated truth.
Collodi refuses to assign blame only upward. That is what keeps the novel from collapsing into moralism. Pinocchio is deceived because he wants to be deceived. He chooses shortcuts over work, belonging over truth, spectacle over judgment, every time, until the costs become too steep to ignore. The Fox and the Cat succeed because he hands them what they need. His credulity is not innocent. It is participation.
The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury their coins there.
The Fox and the Cat is how the whole thing works.
Pinocchio becomes real, becomes human, only after he accepts obligation. Collodi is saying that it is important to have self-governance. It is necessary to choose the difficult truth over the easy satisfying one. That doesn’t jibe with everything the attention economy is selling, dopamine hits delivered so frequently that it becomes hard to distinguish stimulation from autonomy.
There is an obvious irony in a luxury pen commemorating a story about the seductions of wanting things you have not earned. The Montblanc Collodi is made to be admired, displayed, collected. And it honors a puppet who had to lose everything, friends, coins, his own body, before he understood what was actually worth having.
I am not sure Collodi would find that irony disqualifying. A beautiful object that makes you think seriously about the spectacle we are living in. It makes you think about what is the cost of being real. It is a more interesting pen to own than one that simply confirms your taste.
The clip is shaped like Pinocchio’s nose because the nose is the one honest thing in a world built on performance. It grows because the body keeps the score even when the mouth doesn’t.
When I hold this pen, I try to remember what that means…
A story for our times: “We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World.”
* Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio
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As we know that the nose knows, we might remark that today Rhys Frake-Waterfield‘s horror film reimagining of Collodi’s tale, Pinocchio: Unstrung— featuring Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund as the voice of “Cricket” (Jiminy!)– opens in theaters around the U.S.
The trailer is here.
#CarloCollodi #CarloLorenzini #childrensLiterature #clhildrensBooks #culture #deception #film #FreddyKrueger #grift #halfTruths #history #horror #humanity #lies #literature #lying #movies #pinocchio #PinocchioUnstrung #RhysFrakeWaterfield #RobertEnglund #truth -
Jenrick and Reform just can’t help lying can they. As repeated, Farage was NOT refused any protection, he refused to take it.
The old joke about ‘How do you tell Farage/Jenrick are lying - watch their lips’ is unfortunately true.
Now Nigel, about those £5M in your account and tour presentations to the Treasury…
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/14/robert-jenrick-nigel-farage-security-meeting-reform
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I understand that many politicians are generally #corrupt as fuck, but just running roughshod over every shred of #decency and #fairness is today's hallmark of the #Republican Party.
If you're not a #hypocritical sneering, #lying cheat and #crook, you're simply not good enough for today's #gop.
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It makes sense to say that those without a solid memory should not get in the habit of telling lies.
[Ce n’est pas sans raison qu’on dict, que qui ne se sent point assez ferme de memoire, ne se doit pas mesler d’estre menteur.]Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) French essayist
Essays, Book 1, ch. 9 (1.9), “Of Liars [Des Menteurs]” (1572) [tr. HyperEssays (2025)]More about (and translations of) this quote: wist.info/montaigne-michel-de/…
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #montaigne #complications #liar #longmemory #lying #memory #memorylapses
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BODIES DON'T LIE
This morning’s breathwork was hard.
#Cold room.
Very #intermittent_breathing.
I finished the session, but it was not comfortable.
And afterwards, I found myself thinking about the ACIM line, “I am not a body.”
Some mornings, I can say that easily enough.
Other mornings, honestly, it feels like #lying to myself.
Because the body is right here.
Cold.
Spasming.
Needing shoes, fire, warmth, patience, and #care.
So I can’t use “I am not a body” as a way to deny what is happening.
That feels false.
What feels truer is this:
The body is having a hard morning, and I am aware of it.
The body is here, but it is not the whole #truth of me.
That is enough for now.
#Kindness first.
Warm the room.
Let the breath be broken if it is broken.
No need to pretend.
#fasting #acim #acourseinmiracles #newthought #eckharttolle #buddhism #breathwork #connection #healing #pridemonth #Karma #TrueNature #Awakening #Meditation #Mindfulness #Spirituality #intermittentfasting #nonduality #reality #life #quantum #kitchen #cooking
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I wonder if the AI companies will ever be sued for deceptively making their products pretend to be human, especially in order to replace humans. Phrases like 'I want' and 'our bodies' (talking about biology or medical conditions), and even the word 'I', are deceptive, coming from an AI.
#ai #deception #lies #lying #fake #humanity #replacement #subjectivity #psychology #desire #mood #craving #biology #medicine #healthcare
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Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Ukraine claims strikes on bridges, Russian command posts and logistics . . . . . If Europe wants real peace, it must make a frozen war unattractive . . . . . Ukraine in talks with France on production licenses for SCALP missiles . . . . . Massive explosion in Monaco injures Ukrainian businessman and his family . . . and morehttps://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/06/tuesday-june-30-2026/
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https://www.contrariannews.org/p/americans-know-trump-is-lying
#lie #liar #lying #trump #trumpstein #trumpsteinclass #trumpcrimefamily #donold #donaldvonshitsinpants #donnydipshit #criminal #crime #corrupt #traitor #corruption #treason #war #crime #warcrime #warcriminal #thehague #news #usnews #globalnews #history #ushistory #worldhistory #policy #politics #uspol #uspolitics #globalpolitics -
Isn't that cute! Buy yourself out of legal consequences. That's the standard operating procedure for GOP. Buy out the opposition. Scumbags, the entire lot of corrupt to the core MAGA and GOP.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/voting-machine-company-drops-1b-224625449.html
#liar #lying #corrupt #GOP #MAGA #scumbags #justice #elections #defamation #money #USPolitics #USPol #TraitorMAGA #TraitorGOP
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https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/government-claims-credit-for-huge-rise-in-deafblind-interpreters-despite-providing-just-15000/. "The #Government has tried to claim #credit for a #scheme that will significantly increase the number of interpreters trained to support #Deafblind people, despite providing just £15,000 in new #funding." The #Labour Government #lying its head off? Well I never!
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A quotation from Ambrose Bierce
DICE, n. Small polka-dotted cubes of ivory, constructed like a lawyer to lie on any side, but commonly on the wrong one.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) American writer and journalist
“Dice,” “Devil’s Dictionary” column, San Francisco Wasp (1882-03-24)More about this quote: wist.info/bierce-ambrose/84592…
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #ambrosebierce #devilsdictionary #dice #lawyer #lying
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A quotation from Hannah Arendt
Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American philosopher, political theorist
Origins of Totalitarianism, Part 3, ch. 11 “The Totalitarian Movement,” sec. 2 (1951)More about this quote: wist.info/arendt-hannah/41783/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #hannaharendt #arendt #absurdity #belief #cognitivedissonance #cynicism #deceit #deception #lying #mistrust #propaganda #totalitarianism
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“'I actually have a meeting scheduled in the very short, in the very near future, with — did you know that? — all of the companies,' Trump told reporters on Air Force One."
It appears that the #AI companies "didn't know that." #Lying, Mr. #Trump? Or simply #dementia?
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https://www.notus.org/technology/trump-blindsided-ai-companies-equity-meeting-plan#uspol #trumplies #trumpdementia #invokethe25th #trumpunstable
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If the #TrumpRegime tells you that the sun will come up tomorrow, you need do a quick check. #Lying is a Trump regime strong suit. You can never trust what they say is they are likely to change their minds within the next several hours.
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Very relevant to a lot of Trump, MAGA, and Republican rhetoric these days:
The Hidden Cost of LieSpeak
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/6/3/800040936/community/the-hidden-cost-of-liespeak/
LieSpeak is a sly tactic for covertly pursuing an immoral goal while appearing blameless. Instead of admitting their intent, LieSpeakers make outrageously false accusations of their target’s wrongdoing as justification. This can cause internal conflict, conscious or not, undermining authentic self-esteem.
An example: accusing immigrants of widespread voter fraud to "justify" suppressing nonwhite citizens' votes.
#Trump #DonaldTrump #TrumpLies #MAGA #Republican #Republicans #RepublicanParty #lying #lies #hypocrisy #OwningTheLibs #racism #SelfEsteem #SocialCohesion #LeavingMAGA
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Politics demands a great capacity for self-deception, which rescues the politician from hypocrisy. He can normally manage to believe what he is saying for the time it takes him to say it. This gives him a certain sincerity even when he is saying opposite things to opposite people.
Garry Wills (b. 1934) American author, journalist, historian
Confessions of a Conservative, ch. 15 (1979)More about this quote: wist.info/wills-garry/41929/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #garrywills #cognitive dissonance #deceit #hypocrisy #lying #politician #politics #selfdeception #sincerity #candor #honesty #dishonesty #inconsistency
