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it's always good to ensure you read what you are replying to, just so everyone is on the same page.

> Not sure why you made up a scenario involving a hospital receptionist

from: "When I run into this (most recently at a hospital)"

> I challenged your assertion that it was an 'outlandish and obvious lie' for one to state that they don't have a smartphone due to a court determining they're a threat to national security

and we're back to "Is your point that because you can name one person who was banned from using a computer before the invention of the smart phone, a receptionist working at a hospital would therefore consider that a reasonable and common reason for someone to not possess a smart phone?"

i guess your long winded answer to that is "yes", and i guess we'll just leave this discussion at that because i don't believe there is much to add to that.

in the future, you could have just replied "yes" to that comment and saved us all some time. instead you derailed the discussion because you couldn't identify the outlandish part in the sentence "i'm banned from using a phone by court order because i'm a threat to national security", then continued to focus on what a specific receptionist might think rather than see that it's obviously a stand-in for someone else you're interacting with.

to summarise for you in clear language, because i think you perhaps you need to hear this:

- telling someone else that you are a threat to national security when you are, in fact, not a threat to national security is a strange, outlandish lie

- it is very obvious to people if you tell them strange, outlandish lies during a conversation

- the general reaction to you doing something abnormal like that during a otherwise normal situation is for the other person to consider you abnormal

- the colloquial, catch-all term for this is "crazy"



Well it seems I forgot a detail, and you didn't make up the hospital receptionist, you just brought her up and then for some reason asked why I was responding to the scenario you brought up.

  > and we're back to "Is your point that because you can name one person who was banned from using a computer before the invention of the smart phone, a receptionist working at a hospital would therefore consider that a reasonable and common reason for someone to not possess a smart phone?"
No, I already responded to that, pointing out that I could name a bunch of others if I spent 30 seconds on it. And in fact i did name another right there. And you totally failed to respond to that part of my post and instead decided to wildly guess what the internal monologue of a receptionist might be, as if that was somehow relevant.

It's always good to ensure you read what you're replying to, just so everyone is on the same page.

In the future, you could have just replied "ok so my comment was hyperbolic" to my initial post and saved us all some time. Instead you derailed the discussion by trying to shift goalposts and change the subject to something you thought you could "win", for some reason.

There's other things in your long-winded posts which I could respond to, but given that you've repeatedly failed to respond at all to points I've made, for example where I asked why you seem to think there's no middle ground between "common" and "outlandish lie", but why would I bother? It's not like you'd respond to any points showing how your logic is flawed. So I guess we'll just leave this discussion at that because i don't believe there is much to add to that.

To summarise this for you in clear language, since I think you perhaps need to hear this:

* There are multiple already-cited precedents for exactly the type of thing you're calling an "outlandish and obvious lie". If you'd like more examples, I'd suggest a search engine, where you'll find lots of them.

* It's possible for things to be uncommon edge-cases without being "outlandish" or "obvious lies"

* Hospital receptionists deal with these uncommon edge cases all the time, and are trained to do so. They also regularly deal with crazy people too, and are vanishingly unlikely to even bat an eye at the claim you're calling out. It's unlikely to be the craziest thing they've heard today. And it might even be true.

* There's no compelling, widely-accepted evidence of extraterrestrial visitations to earth, or of their interest in smartphones. Which makes the claim "i don't have a phone because aliens took it" orders of magnitude less likely to be true than the claim that one doesn't have a phone because a court decided that they are a threat to national security - something that, while uncommon, has definitely happened.

* Simply assuming that something is a lie because you haven't personally heard of it before is an excellent way to be incorrect.

* It's actually not a personal attack when someone points out that your logic is flawed and that you're lacking relevant information. And so you probably shouldn't take such things personally and get all upset because your obvious, incorrect hyperbole was called out for what it was.




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