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> He was consistent and clear when he talked about his identity in California courtrooms as he tried to fight the charges on the grounds that he really was the

• lylejantzi3rd 2y ago
  "I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else." Isn't that everybody now? Credibility is a strange thing in the age of social media.
  • add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    Evaluating things people say in the context of their general credibility and character is pretty evergreen.
  • orwin 2y ago
    No, i don't think so. I have an older friend that is persuaded to have seen something most people don't believe in back in the 90s. He just won't claim it publicly, and don't talk about it all the time, it's not a core part of his personality. Even if some people make fun of him for it (i don't think it happen nowadays, but it might), they can, and probably will believe him on other subjects (he is a very precise and knowledgeable in electronics, and have really interesting philosophical point of views).
• daseiner1 2y ago
  “problematic” being a rather charitable term here, I think
  • drawkward 2y ago
    What word would you use?
    • contravariant 2y ago
      Sounds schizophrenic at this stage.
      • drawkward 2y ago
        [flagged]
    • daseiner1 2y ago
      In contemporary parlance, “problematic” connotes to me that said individual expresses ideas, in their words, speech, or way of life, that are anathema to the dominant paradigm of thought/manners/civility, but does not necessarily imply anything about the mental health of the related individual. Disordered thinking of the quality you’ve described is indicative of a serious psychological unwellness that, as the other commenter suggested, suggests paranoid schizophrenia or a related form of psychosis. But I don’t intend to seriously engage in back-of-envelope psychologizing. Prattling on about irrelevant history and insinuating 9/11 conspiracy theories in a courtroom not at all concerned with either of those items does harm credibility, and I think rightfully. For reasons of both family and personal history I am genuinely sensitive to the phenomenon of the “deemed crazy” person being consigned to permanent non-consideration of their words and expressions, their concerns, but I also recognize that such legitimate unwellness poses genuine issues for the believability of anything they claim. Putting my extended aside aside, I would phrase it as “how many people are telling the truth about something, but aren't taken seriously because they're severely psychologically disregulated generally.” It’s not necessarily outrageous for me to assert that I warned the FBI about 9/11 in June 2000. It seriously harms my credibility if I decide to bring up this grievance when I’m speaking to a judge about my undeserved traffic ticket in October 2024.
• RobotToaster 2y ago
  Just because you're crazy doesn't mean you're wrong.
  • mchannon 2y ago
    The contrapositive of which is just because you’re right does not mean you are not crazy.
    • LoganDark 2y ago
      I was crazy once. Actually, maybe multiple times. Weirdly, whenever I'm not crazy I think I want to be crazy, and whenever I am crazy I just want it to stop. "I didn't ask for that crazy, I wanted a different crazy!!!"
      • Alive-in-2025 2y ago
        Can you explain. Like maybe you have a condition that causes some psychological challenges and then you get better and it goes away for a while? That would be horrible.
        • LoganDark 2y ago
          I don't know if I have any actual condition. I probably have maybe 5 mental disorders but I don't think any of them cause actual crazy just on their own. Usually my crazy is induced by staying awake for unhealthy lengths of time. I think last time this happened I joked about being schizophrenic because I kept hearing things in silence and being incredibly agitated/panicked about it. I probably said the exact quote "I didn't want that schizophrenia I wanted a different schizophrenia!!!!" since sometimes I wonder what it would be like to actually be schizophrenic. (I wonder this about so many things, though generally people tell me that wondering this is not normal)
• bragr 2y ago
  I have a cousin who is paranoid schizophrenic. He makes all kinds of wild claims about all sorts of things: family abuse, screwed over by employers/landlords, beaten up by the police for no reason, the people living in the crawl space are poisoning him, etc, etc... Many of them are provably false e.g. those family members didn't live there at the time of the allegation, the body cam clearly shows him charging the police and then trying to grab their guns while they try to wrestle him into handcuffs, nobody in the crawl space, etc. The problem is that it'd take a full time detective to track down all his various claims. It's very sad that as a vulnerable person he probably is sometimes taken advantage of by people, but at the same time he's never been compliant with medicine and therapy for more than a couple months at a time, despite extensive support. It's kind of a no win situation.
  • honestSysAdmin 2y ago
    [dead]
  • 542354234235 2y ago
    It is a weird twist on the fairy tale. What if you had a medical condition that compelled you to cry “Wolf” all the time? Obviously the townsfolk can’t spend all their time responding to false wolf sightings, but there is no lessoned to be learned when The Boy actually believes he sees a wolf every day.
    • gunian 2y ago
      the guy from that story was lucky they even responded once
  • asveikau 2y ago
    I have been close to multiple people who made similar paranoid allegations while psychotic. It is sometimes hard for people to understand the allegations are false or part of an illness. This can include judges and mental health professionals.
  • RobotToaster 2y ago
    Shouldn't he be on a long acting injection?
• thih9 2y ago
  > or assert that he had tried to warn the F.B.I. in advance of the Sept. 11 attacks That’s a very long shot but I now want someone to verify this claim too, in case he was also telling the truth.
  • ykonstant 2y ago
    Imagine if some member of the bin Laden family was high on something and had rumors of their cousin's shenanigans and were spilling them out on some IRC channel or BBS or whatever, and that guy happened upon them and tried to alert the police, only to be dismissed as a lunatic and end up in prison for unrelated reasons while the disaster happened. That would be a true Kafkian nightmare.
• ty6853 2y ago
  I was once dragged to a hospital by police because they were looking for a drug smuggler that was not me. They told hospital staff I was a druggie criminal with drugs up my ass, as I sat there in cuffs. It is incredibly hard to overcome such accusation by someone in authority. Nurses cursed me, touched me without consent, and several doctors examined me. They ultimately found nothing, and noted no intoxication, but noted in my medical record that they think i am a smuggler anyway, with no explanation as to why. I am now in medical debt for a non-existent 'overdose' bill that notes no intoxication... I imagine as soon as some official person insists the identity isn't yours, just as multiple doctors wouldn't believe despite all evidence to contrary, they won't believe you.
  • mlinhares 2y ago
    Being skeptical about authority figures is always a good thing, it always surprise me to see populations so deferent to them like americans are to law enforcement.
    • nadermx 2y ago
      Law enforcement in the US has a license to kill with paid leave after. The fear that instills in an entire populace is chilling.
      • cm2012 2y ago
        80% of Americans like the police. https://www.lexipol.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/polls-favorable-unfavorable-view-of-police-bar.png https://www.lexipol.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/polls-fav...
        • redleggedfrog 2y ago
          1 in 5 Americans don't like the police.
        • pjc50 2y ago
          Yes, because they assume that the license to kill with paid leave will be used against someone they don't like. It's a real "fix your hearts" situation. Watch this play out in the current fiasco with USAID.
• garciasn 2y ago
  This is how divorce goes now based on my experience. The legal system is not setup to handle these sorts of problems well and leaves the innocent to deal with the fall out of bad actors and lawyers who empower them. This won’t be corrected until there are penalties for political, legal, and administrative professionals who don’t do their due diligence.
  • kylebenzle 2y ago
    Yes! This is divorce in America right now, if one party is willing to make up a series of lies, no matter how unbelievable the court will just default to the one making the accusations because its too much work to even try to sort out truth from lie, thats why the lawyers call it, "Liars Court" because the biggest liar wins.
    • giantg2 2y ago
      Even many of the lawyers encourage it with stuff like suggesting filing baseless protection orders.
    • latency-guy2 2y ago
      The standard for the judicial is not "the truth", its about what you can "prove". Judicial cannot claim one party is lying or not, in fact it is impossible, given the fact its nearly always a "he said she said" deal (in this particular scenario). Quite literally, the judge was't there, lawyers weren't there either and they get a twisted version of truth no matter if they are prosecuting or defense. It sucks, fully agreed, but there is no way around it. As long as the judgement is not too punitive is about the best you can hope for.
      • CPLX 2y ago
        > The standard for the judicial is not "the truth", its about what you can "prove". It's not though. Completely unprovable allegations by a single person have real consequences. That's just the way the system works.
• Workaccount2 2y ago
  I wonder the same but I also firmly believe it's a useless and unproductive thing to worry about. I mean, I wonder how many gold coins are laying in the forest? Surely there are many, and you can find ample news stories of people locating them out there, but I can confidently tell you that if you assembled a team an combed the forest for a year, maybe you would find one object worthy of a news story. And definitely you would wasted thousands of man hours that could have produced far far far more than what the object is worth.
  • fwip 2y ago
    Is it? There's a sibling comment to yours about somebody who went through this - seems like the rate is higher than the "gold coin in the woods."
    • Workaccount2 2y ago
      I'm surprised there is only one. There are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people who view posts on here. If I searched ten thousand forests, I'd be hopeful for more than a single coin.
      • robertlagrant 2y ago
        You seem to have switched what you're saying to "it's not many gold coins in one forest; it's at least one gold coin in many forests". Or rather, you now seem to think it's pretty likely that lots of people have this happen to them.
        • Workaccount2 2y ago
          In absolute terms, it happens to many people. In practical terms, it happens to virtually no one. Hundreds of people win $10,000+ in the lottery every month. That is a lot of people. You can post a thread and will likely get comments from those who have won before. But as a percentage of the population, virtually no one wins big in the lottery. If you are foolish and think social media accurately portrays reality, you might quit your job to play the lottery full time - because hey, look at all the winners in the comments.
• heavyset_go 2y ago
  This is just the system getting rid of (in their eyes) an undesirable. The truth doesn't really matter in these cases unless you have tens of thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer to plead your case.
• Almondsetat 2y ago
  >I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else. (Un)fortunately, there is a quite famous experiment >The Rosenhan experiment or Thud experiment was an experiment regarding the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. For the experiment, participants submitted themselves for evaluation at various psychiatric institutions and feigned hallucinations in order to be accepted, but acted normally from then onward. Each was diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and given antipsychotic medication.
  • gpt5 2y ago
    "The meds are working"
  • debugnik 2y ago
    > For the experiment, participants submitted themselves for evaluation at various psychiatric institutions How did anyone volunteer for this? Isn't there a risk of actually getting stuck at the asylum, or failing to clarify it was an experiment to have it removed from your records?
    • deleted 2y ago
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• sixothree 2y ago
  Having grown up in the Deep South, I feel like every single person in the justice system from police to judge make decisions about you based on how you look and subconsciously decide to not believe facts or allow weak facts to have more weight. Nothing about this question seems outrageous to me whatsoever. And I think that’s the shocking part here.
• speakspokespok 2y ago
  The literal moral of "The boy who cries Wolf"? Liars are not believed even when they tell the truth. ... probably all of them.
• SecretDreams 2y ago
  > I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else. Likely a metric fuck ton. The perceived quality of one's character plays an outsized role in getting people to believe you. Serial killers figured that out a long time ago.
• saghm 2y ago
  I'm not sure that being "problematic" was the issue here; it sounds more like they might have thought he wasn't fully sane. I could imagine thinking that someone fully believed what they said about their identity in the same way they believed that they could have stopped 9/11 if people had listened to them beforehand. The issue isn't thinking they have bad takes or unsavory opinions, but that they have trouble distinguishing reality from delusions.
• interludead 2y ago
  This is how these institutions work. If someone behaves erratically, holds unconventional beliefs or just doesn't present themselves in the "right" way, they can be dismissed entirely
• draw_down 2y ago
  [dead]