Opinion by Chris Truax
Confabulation is sometimes called “honest lying,” because the person doing it genuinely believes what he’s saying, even if it is obviously and patently false. A person confabulates when they are telling completely invented stories that don’t provide them any particular tangible benefit. In other words, it’s not like lying to try and get out of a speeding ticket.
Confabulation isn’t misremembering a date or forgetting something. The mistakes of memory we are all subject to become confabulation when people remember false information in vivid detail — detail so vivid and complete that people who don’t know otherwise often believe what they are hearing is true.
In older people, confabulation is one of the clearest early signs of dementia. The day you witness someone confabulate is often the day you are forced to admit to yourself that a beloved parent needs help, and that all the little slips and oddities you’ve been seeing can no longer be rationalized away.
For Trump, the day we could no longer pretend everything is fine came on July 15, when he told a lengthy story about his uncle, John Trump, who he claimed taught at MIT and held three degrees in “nuclear, chemical, and math.” His uncle, according to Trump, once told him how he had taught Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and how very smart Kaczynski was.
Trump’s uncle was indeed a professor at MIT, but everything else in this story is pure confabulation. Trump’s uncle didn’t have degrees in “nuclear, chemical, and math” — he had degrees in electrical engineering and physics. And Kaczynski did not go to MIT at all — he went to Harvard.
But most telling of all, it is categorically impossible for Trump’s uncle to have told him any such story. Kaczynski became publicly known as the Unabomber when he was arrested in 1996. Trump’s uncle, the MIT professor, died in 1985. In other words, Trump’s uncle could not have told him the story because there was, literally, no story to tell during his lifetime….
Trump is speaking agram-Bagram on Afghanistan airbase
From falsely claiming that the US “built” the Bagram Airbase to issuing threats to Afghanistan to reclaim it, Donald Trump’s stern demand exposes a jumble of contradictions and doublespeak. It exposes his agram-bagram contradictory approach, say experts. On their part, the Taliban said they would fight for 20 more years if needed to rid Afghanistan of foreign troops….
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