Toxic debt and the Anti-Madeleines.

by vee8 Fri May 28, 2010 4:47 am

This was posted on PFA, and it explains a lot about how the lies of the anti's end up being regarded as incontravertable truth. It is, I think, an old 3a's post, by that rarest of people, a reasonably inteligent 3a member.

Pogacsa
Post subject: Re: REAL NEW HOPE!
Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 3:07 pm

I exchanged as many as 300 pms with Coldwater, starting in the Mirror Forum days. Whatever impression he made with his posts, he was far more convincing in private and certainly came across as an entirely credible 3-dimensional person. He said time and again that "I'm not posting for the benefit of the forum, I'm being used to influence certain people who read it", which I assumed meant the McCanns and the Tapas friends. According to CW, he was not posting "leaks" but carefully crafted misinformation that were effectively messages from the investigators to the McCanns and their friends, to unnerve them. I found that credible although perhaps this is was partly because it reproduced a plot line for a detective novel that I once thought about writing (and no, I didn't finish it). But I also could not understand why someone would go to such lengths to fabricate such an involved lie to me across a correspondence of eight months. I have known pathological liars in my life, and usually they are easy to catch out because they can't resist making something up to explain a sudden discrepancy in their tale. Coldwater never once did this, and I never once caught him out despite my not infrequent efforts to trip him up. His adamant insistence that the rogatory interviews would take place in Leicester, despite convincing arguments to the contrary, was impressive. And in this at least, he was right. I do agree that his later posts were perhaps slightly less impressive but it was the effort he put into his private messages that is the point of my post here.

BUT, now that we know more about what was really going on, Coldwater's story truly makes no sense. The McCanns (and indeed the friends) would have known instantly that he was not passing on authentic information (they didn't go to Chaplins). I suppose he could have been trying to unnerve the financial backers, but on whose behalf? We now know there was not a parallel investigation going on in the UK on the scale he claimed and I can't see any logical explanation other than he was making it all up for his own entertainment. Perhaps I'm naive but nothing in my everyday life prepared me for someone going to such immense trouble (fabricating a story, a personality and much else besides, day in, day out, for nearly a year) not just with his public posts, but in his most detailed private ones. And yet that is what he did.

But he was certainly not alone. I also received some wonderfully warm and witty letters, from a much admired poster, who told me about a friend of hers who had worked with Rebelo and could vouch what a clever genius he was. It also transpired that this poster had been living just fifteen miles away from me earlier in the year. We gossiped about the area, but it suddenly became apparent that her information was coming from Mr Google and she slipped up rather badly. She also forgot that we'd swapped pms during the Mirror Forum days when I had a different name and when I reread them, found out that although the basic story of her life was the same, certain personal details were totally different! I was still prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt, but then another of my online acquaintances told me about their own pms with the lady in question, which presented a quite different yet highly detailed and convincing account, but crafted around my friend's life with a lot of help from Google. I have no idea why, but this person demonstrably devotes a lot of her spare time fabricating online personas via pms in a way that is actually a bit sinister. It certainly is enough to throw into question her claim to have been an active law enforcement officer, a former "investigator of the year" and much else besides (and indeed one of her claims about a murder case she was involved with was indeed publicly discredited by Harvey Humphries, but this is now forgotten.) It is also paradoxical why someone who is paranoid that her real identity being revealed online should regale everyone with tales of a remarkable life that would make her instantly identifiable (how many distinguished British born American policemen are there, let alone whose who speak an Indian language with an English accent??)

But does it matter if this woman is pretending to be something she is not? After all, she has contributed some fantastic posts both here and on the Mirror Forum, beautifully written and argued, indeed some of the best things I've read here. When it comes to opinions and general posts, of course it doesn't matter. But in parallel to general posts, are others which make claims about forensics, police procedures and the like, which are not backed up by sources but accepted because of who she claims to be. (I'm also amazed no one has challenged her claim to have a degree in biochemistry which would have been awarded in 1970 at a time when the subject was barely recognisable and quite irrelevant when it comes to discussions of DNA fingerprinting which was not invented until nearly two decades later!!!)

What we have is an influential poster, who is certainly in the habit of lying about her true life identity, using her probably fabricated persona to smuggle probable untruths onto this forum unchallenged. I find this rather sinister. Fortunately for her, she is an "anti" and not questioned these days.

There are two points I want to make here. The first is that until you have experienced it (as I have), I don't think people realise just how many convincing fantasists there are out there in internet land.

The second (and more important) point, is this: I think 3As is suffering from its own "sub-prime" crisis. One of the problems besetting the banking system is that individual banks have "toxic assets." Sub-prime mortgages were parcelled up and then sold as assets to other banks, which has become a problem because these mortgages may never be repaid, meaning the asset the bank has bought is of very uncertain value.

By the same token, 3As is awash with "toxic information" that has been pumped into our consciousness by frauds (some of whom have been unmasked, and some who have not.) Even though Coldwater was playing games and many of his specific claims discredited, his influence can still still be sensed (often in the form of memories by individual posters of events he invented, now attributed to newspapers accounts they remember having once read.) But CW was just one of many. Remember Docmac, who claimed to know that O'Brien was "the gravedigger" but didn't bother to report this to the police. Or Vera from the Skyforums. And many others. Their claims (and the expectations that their claims aroused) are still resonating across this board. To put it graphically, this place is awash with its own "toxic debt" i.e. debt to truth.

I rarely post now but still read the forums from time to time. It does shock me how posters such as Nicked and Cushty, whom it seems to me are being scrupulously fair in their examinations of what the DVD and interviews really contain and thus creating "toxic free" assets, are now regularly derided as trolls, because what they have discovered undermines some of the prevailing beliefs that have been pumped into the forum's consciousness by certain fantasists, some of whom are still active.

by Cath Fri May 28, 2010 5:31 am

What an amazing good post and analysis.
People who don't make up stories or post lies themselves, honest people, don't expect other people to lie to them. How naive some of us have been.
Even the sceptics, people who question things, have been fooled on occasions.
Still don't understand why people are doing that, lying, fabricating stories, creating myths.
The attention? Fun of fooling other people? Or something more sinister, like an orchestrated attempt to brainwash us?

Toxic debt and the Anti-Madeleines.

Toxic debt and the Anti-Madeleines.

Re: Toxic debt and the Anti-Madeleines.