site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3098 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 23, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Who are some people that you strongly suspect to be fabulists that the general populace has not identified?

I made a comment in the context of Jason Arday about fabulists and I used Jordan Belfort, Marcus Luttrell, Chris Kyle, Greg Mortenson, Frank Abagnale, Jr. as examples. I called out or was suspicious of all of them other than Abagnale and I chalk that up to me hearing his story as a child and then not thinking about it. Took 0 convincing.

There are a lot of politicians whose public story has significant mismatches with available facts. From Warren claiming Native ancestry, to Obama being marketed as Kenyan and associating with domestic terrorists, to Ilhan Omar descent from a genocidal war criminal and her fraternal marriage... Seems to be a common theme there. Does it raise to the level of Arday or Abagnale? Probably not, at least not in the public record. But is it in the same direction couple of steps removed? I think so. Most politicians are fabulists by trade, and many of them do not resist the temptation to apply this trade to their own story.

It’s a bit tinfoil hat, but I suspect many of them are completely sheep-dipped actors.

The classic spicy answer to this question is Helen Keller/Anne Sullivan. Not sure what the current consensus is on how much of what Helen Keller did was real, real but exaggerated, or fictional.

Spicy is apt. I would view this as a reddit-tier view aligned with the Tear-it-all-Down, Black-is-White teenegae angsty ethos of many users there.

Keller got into and graduated Radcliffe. There is good evidence that Sullivan misrepresented certain aspects of Keller's achievements at different junctures, but to dismiss them both as fabulists is, at least based on what the historical record suggests, unwarranted.

Edit: I am not saying your take is reddit tier as I took your post as a hypothetical answer.

No offense taken. I offer no opinion whatsoever on the veracity of any particular claim regarding Helen Keller. It's just the example that first came to mind as a popular conspiracy theory fitting OP's theme.

I think the vast majority of anecdotes you hear from actors are probably made up.

I think the vast majority of "great" stories are embellished from a little to a lot. Which isn't a big deal when it's a small audience, but become problematic when millions believe it. After a few retailing the teller can begin to believe it.

"Fabulist" is too strong a term, but for people working in the entertainment industries in Ireland and the UK, attempting to pass yourself off as coming from a more socioeconomically deprived background than you really did (class-Dolezalism) is the rule rather than the exception. If an actor, writer or (especially) musician claims (or implies) to have had a tough working-class upbringing, it's safe to assume they're lying unless they can provide receipts. (Prime example. You can just tell how fed up Beckham is with his wife's pretensions.)

I laughed when I learned that Tommy Robinson's real name was Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon. His family was working-class, but his name certainly wasn't.

It's funny, although a bit irritating that the journalists who insist on calling him that are the same people loudly insisting that it's never acceptable to refer to a trans person by their "deadname", even if said trans person is a convicted rapist or murderer. They're also more than happy to refer to entertainers by their stage names provided said entertainers hold the "correct" opinions.

The movie American Fiction is essentially that. I quite enjoyed it.

I've been meaning to see that.

Spoilers for the movie Saltburn

Saltburn points this out. Oliver get's far more cultural cache by portraying himself to the elites as coming from the underclass rather than what he actually was - upper middle class

Comment from reddit

Especially after we found out Oliver lied about being, it completely flushed any little narrative they had going on down the toilet.

That reveal was actually pivotal to the narrative. I think this isn't translating well across the Atlantic because most wealthy American families tend to be "new money," but people like Felix are descended from people like Mr. Darcy in Pride & Prejudice. They're called the owning class because they own vast swathes of land that have been handed down for generations and they can just live off the rent and never have to work. It's a very different kind of wealth from, say, Donald Trump or Jeffrey Bezos.

There's a big contrast between the owning class and middle class people like Oliver (who come from comfortable, privileged backgrounds but ultimately are still expected to work for a living), and there's another big contrast between the middle class and the working class. Especially at universities where students are a long way from home, you get a lot of middle class people pretending to be working class and exaggerating about how "poor" they are, because being working class carries some social capital whereas being middle class is just boring.

John Kiriakou for sure, although I still love him.

Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock.

Myth Busters is full of shit. Hathcock used a fifty caliber Browning machine gun that he had modified into a sniper rifle. The bullet is the size of a man’s thumb, it could easily penetrate the layered glass of a rifle scope. They didn’t even bother to research that so they used a 30-06 round for the test.

That was only one of his many tall tales.

The Mythbusters retested that particular myth, in episode 75, as a result of complaints they tested against the wrong model of scope. Against a much simpler scope with fewer internal components, such as an Vietnamese sniper of the period would likely have been issued, it was found to be plausible.

I'm pretty sure the through-the-scope shot was supposed to be done with his standard rifle, not the .50. particularly because, at least the way I heard it, the shot happened while the two shooters were stalking each other in the wild, and that's not really possible to do with a tripod-mounted Browning Machine Gun.

Every extreme left or right rising star politician is suspect.

Not sure if you’re aware but Abagnale has been exposed as a fraud. I forget who the guy was but there was a comprehensive analysis done that examined his backstory (and a subsequent book has even been written about it) that dismantles his con job; and the movie his story is based on was a complete fabrication. Just like other movies like Bloodsports, Frank Dux was completely exposed as a fraud and his story is wholly made up.

The fact that Abagnale managed to convince the world he was a genius con artist and even get a movie made out of it demonstrates he is, in fact, a genius con artist

I keep saying they need to make a sequel to Catch Me If You Can about the making of Catch Me If You Can, with Spielberg, Hanks, and DiCaprio playing idiot caricatures of themselves.

Truman Hanks as Tom Hanks

Robert Pattinson as Leo DiCaprio

James CromwellStanley Tucci as Steven Spielberg

You've got a stew going on

Everyone playing themselves, with no de-aging cgi or makeup. Except for Frank Abignale Jr., who is played by Gonzo from the Muppets, obviously.

Surely it takes less genius to convince the world you're a genius con artist than actually perform the feats described in the movie, thus necessitating a hierarchy of genius con artists.

Suppose a GCA_0 is a con artist who performed genius cons that did not have to do with convincing people you performed those cons. Then a GCA_n is a genius con artist who convinced the world he's a GCA_n-1, and so on. It probably goes asymptotic at some point where the difficulty of convincing the world of anything in particular approaches a constant value.

A fraud within a fraud. I assumed @zoink was aware of this but his query still holds with Abagnale as an exemplar.

Correct, I first heard Abagnale's story on Focus on the Family when I was a child. I saw him speak in person in my early 20's. While I didn't peg him as a fabulist back then it took zero convincing that he was a fraud within a fraud when I first heard the allegations.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats