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Explains a lot.
4 years ago
Karno's Rare-Because-He-Never-Has-Time Blather:
So I was reading "One Nation Under Surveillance" by Boston T. Party, to re-invigorate my paranoia glands.
https://www.abebooks.com/9781888766.....1888766115/plp
The chapter on sociopaths (and why you should never trust one with ANYTHING) stuck with me. A quote from "The Sociopath Next Door":
"When deciding who to trust, bear in mind that the combination of consistently bad or egregiously inadequate behavior with frequent plays for your pity is as close to a warning mark on a conscienceless person's forehead as you ever will be given. ....Though rarely violent, such a person is probably not someone you should closely befriend, take on as your business partner, ask to take care of your children, or marry."
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/.....tha-stout-phd/
In Iceland, we call one of these guys "sidblindur", "rule-blind". They used to be called moral cripples or moral imbeciles, before the sociopath and psychopath descriptors became common. The sociopath is incurable: These humans(?) simply don't have the brain structures that enable a person to feel compassion. Or shame, or remorse - any of the higher human emotions. But some of them can become very adept at imitating normal human behavior - they have to, so they can have a chance to fool normal folks with their lies.
That's a main sociopath identifier - the constant lying. They'll do it just for fun, just for the little kick they get out of fooling another gullible sucker. And of COURSE they do it to rip you off for whatever they can get - your money, your labor, your crotch.
So anyway, I was going down the list of sociopath characteristics:
They have a narcissistic and grossly inflated view of their self-worth and importance, astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement. Toxic cockwombles, basically.
Often have great charisma and polished acting skills.
Use social/professional roles and titles to dissuade dissent, scrutiny or confrontation.
Innate ability to spot decent and trusting people to fleece. Regard other people as chess pieces to play with.
Skilled at finding and exploiting the psychological weaknesses of others.
Constantly appeal to our pity (because it's very hard to pity a person and simultaneously suspect them of deceit).
Are deceitful to an incredible extreme.
When caught, they deny everything.
Feel NO shame.
Profound lack of empathy. Cannot bond with others.
Can't feel love, so their marriages are always loveless. Regard children as an inconvenience, and cheerfully mess up their own kids.
Pit their "friends"/victims against each other, so they won't get together and compare notes about the sociopath's depredations.
Incapable of remorse, so they rarely even try to fake it.
Don't know they're evil (an alien concept to an empathy/remorse-less person), and normally feel just fine about themselves.
Tries to avoid other sociopaths - the last thing an egocentric, demanding, callous person wants to deal with, is someone just like themselves.
Once outed, they blithely move on to the next big lie, or if that doesn't work, the next sucker. No shame, no remorse, remember?
So I was going down this list (longer than the one I wrote here - I don't have all night to type this), and checking if any of 'em applied to my friends. And yeah, almost all of 'em applied to this one former roomie. Huh, ol' Jimbo's a sociopath. Guess I've known that for a long time, I just never put a name to it.
Feel free to compare this list to your friends, see how many boxes they tick. Might save your life, or at least whatever the sociopath hasn't already stolen from you.
https://www.abebooks.com/9781888766.....1888766115/plp
The chapter on sociopaths (and why you should never trust one with ANYTHING) stuck with me. A quote from "The Sociopath Next Door":
"When deciding who to trust, bear in mind that the combination of consistently bad or egregiously inadequate behavior with frequent plays for your pity is as close to a warning mark on a conscienceless person's forehead as you ever will be given. ....Though rarely violent, such a person is probably not someone you should closely befriend, take on as your business partner, ask to take care of your children, or marry."
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/.....tha-stout-phd/
In Iceland, we call one of these guys "sidblindur", "rule-blind". They used to be called moral cripples or moral imbeciles, before the sociopath and psychopath descriptors became common. The sociopath is incurable: These humans(?) simply don't have the brain structures that enable a person to feel compassion. Or shame, or remorse - any of the higher human emotions. But some of them can become very adept at imitating normal human behavior - they have to, so they can have a chance to fool normal folks with their lies.
That's a main sociopath identifier - the constant lying. They'll do it just for fun, just for the little kick they get out of fooling another gullible sucker. And of COURSE they do it to rip you off for whatever they can get - your money, your labor, your crotch.
So anyway, I was going down the list of sociopath characteristics:
They have a narcissistic and grossly inflated view of their self-worth and importance, astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement. Toxic cockwombles, basically.
Often have great charisma and polished acting skills.
Use social/professional roles and titles to dissuade dissent, scrutiny or confrontation.
Innate ability to spot decent and trusting people to fleece. Regard other people as chess pieces to play with.
Skilled at finding and exploiting the psychological weaknesses of others.
Constantly appeal to our pity (because it's very hard to pity a person and simultaneously suspect them of deceit).
Are deceitful to an incredible extreme.
When caught, they deny everything.
Feel NO shame.
Profound lack of empathy. Cannot bond with others.
Can't feel love, so their marriages are always loveless. Regard children as an inconvenience, and cheerfully mess up their own kids.
Pit their "friends"/victims against each other, so they won't get together and compare notes about the sociopath's depredations.
Incapable of remorse, so they rarely even try to fake it.
Don't know they're evil (an alien concept to an empathy/remorse-less person), and normally feel just fine about themselves.
Tries to avoid other sociopaths - the last thing an egocentric, demanding, callous person wants to deal with, is someone just like themselves.
Once outed, they blithely move on to the next big lie, or if that doesn't work, the next sucker. No shame, no remorse, remember?
So I was going down this list (longer than the one I wrote here - I don't have all night to type this), and checking if any of 'em applied to my friends. And yeah, almost all of 'em applied to this one former roomie. Huh, ol' Jimbo's a sociopath. Guess I've known that for a long time, I just never put a name to it.
Feel free to compare this list to your friends, see how many boxes they tick. Might save your life, or at least whatever the sociopath hasn't already stolen from you.
It's been a long time since I read The Sociopath Next Door. May I recommend Gaslighting, Recognize Manipulative and Emotionally Abusive People -- and Break Free by Stephanie Moulton Sarkis, PhD?
Only problem is we have a group of them on both sides, so...yeah the more I think about it the less hopeful it seems.
I think it was you who mentioned that you picked up a WWII pistol at a gun show and put it down so fast you almost dropped it?
My girlfriend is a psychologist with an open mind. She has tested me with knickknacks she knows the history of. I nailed most of them. She threw in a couple of her roommate's possessions, but I found and identified both of them -- her roommate is my previous girlfriend (long story).
I'm convinced the two talents are related. They feel different; I think they might be located in different parts of the brain.
so many personalities riccocheting qaround in there that we clled her "Sybil"
yeah, I know this list all too well...
Simon is controversial enough for some people to write him off as a crank in large part because of a hypothesis he has. It goes that Cluster B people aren't really "mentally ill" and should be in their own category of study of psyche. They just like fucking with other humans more than most (and should be treated as the predators they are). This sets off enough of a defensive reaction in some mouthy folks out there that, damn, I honestly wonder...
On the other hand, the guy who goes by "Anonymous Conservative" and writes anti-narcissism blog posts... he's just disappointed me at every turn over the years. Through a combination of his own personal trauma/history/survivor-guilt and of manipulation by others who're more conventionally political than he used to be, he just goes down the entropic road of tribalism more and more.
Similar story for "The Last Psychiatrist", who (aside from up-n-vanishing some years back) seemingly was just filled with bitterness that has to do either with class (disdain for the borgeouis he was surrounded by in school and his field) or the plain fact just that people don't care that much about Freud anymore. He wants to be all Nietzschean, supposedly even took his nickname one book by the guy, but I think TLP has-or-had an overly strong habit of falling back on herrenmoral, anyway.
In a confrontation, they change their attitude every 5 seconds, constantly fishing for a new angle to see what pushes your buttons. While they do this, they pay VERY close attention to your emotional reactions, and once they see what works, they will pummel you with that angle until you [supposedly] give in to whatever they want. They're just high school bullies all grown up.
I had an ex supervisor like that. He'd go from threatening to pleading to indifference to sarcasm at the drop of a hat. I quickly learned to just stare him in the eye with no emotion whatsoever until he was the one who gave up. Needless to say, he hated my guts since I was one of the few people at work he couldn't control.
And with that, I'd like to expand on something regarding labels and such of this particular nature. That is that I think it's just as dangerous to dismissively label someone a sociopath as it is to refuse to acknowledge red flags that you pointed out in this journal. I've had to deal with a few people these past several years who have shown some major red flags for some kind of personality disorder (that's what sociopathy technically is).
Sociopathy, or Anti-Social Personality Disorder (ASPD) is one of, iirc, four seriously detrimental personality disorders, that also include Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder. There are other personality disorders, but they don't have the same kind of characteristics that these four do. It is a significant qualifier though.
Here's there the subject gets real interesting: personality disorders, like other psychological/neurological issues, are on a spectrum, meaning you have people who range from Low-Functioning (the absolute worst of the worst who can't function well in society, if at all) to High-Functioning (while they may seem off, they can function well enough in the day-to-day that it's difficult to pick up that they're not running on the same wave length). A high-functioning sociopath/ASPD-sufferer will be able to recognize that they're off, address it, and do what they need to maintain functionality. To continue with the ASPD example, someone who has that particular disorder will take to learning social norms, laws, rules, etc. to a T and using those as a guide to how they should interact with other so's not to make things difficult for themselves. Another way to phrase it that's become popular in the field of psychology is "Mask-On" vs "Mask-Off", where some are able to put on the act of being neurologically "normal" enough that their condition causes few to no serious hardships.
Another major and fascinating distinction, however, is that people with ASPD won't take it personally if you catch on to what they're doing and kick them to the curb. Someone with those other PDs, however? Oh they will take it VERY personally and might make it their mission in life to fuck yours up. They are the kinds of people who deal with their anger to losing in Call of Duty multiplayer than they try to 'SWAT' the other player(s).
I'm going to try not to go too far down the rabbit hole and I think this is enough detail for the time being, so I'll just leave the discussion on my end there for now. To summarize what I'm trying to say: be careful with labels, they are for convenience, not accuracy. Socioapthy is used to describe multiple personality disorders, some of which are actually more dangerous that ASPD.
I learned a lot of that in high-school. And mistakenly tried to emulate it. Army cured me of that. As I realized some of the highest brass and NCO's were just that
They'd acknowledge you. If you were useful to them at that moment. Otherwise you were there for their amusement when they grew bored
When I became an NCO and in a combat zone? Those were the fuckers that got your men killed or horribly injured, doing reckless glory seeking or ego puffing bullshit.
“I was looking at many scans, scans of murderers mixed in with schizophrenics, depressives and other, normal brains,” he says. “Out of serendipity, I was also doing a study on Alzheimer’s and as part of that, had brain scans from me and everyone in my family right on my desk.
I got to the bottom of the stack, and saw this scan that was obviously pathological,” he says, noting that it showed low activity in certain areas of the frontal and temporal lobes linked to empathy, morality and self-control. Knowing that it belonged to a member of his family, Fallon checked his lab’s PET machine for an error (it was working perfectly fine) and then decided he simply had to break the blinding that prevented him from knowing whose brain was pictured. When he looked up the code, he was greeted by an unsettling revelation: the psychopathic brain pictured in the scan was his own.
The article goes on to describe how important it was for him to have been raised in a happy family environment, where he was loved, cared for and provided a safe home.
But the real kicker? The thing that takes the vast majority of fuckerheads, shitbags, puscocks and assholes in this fandom and gives you free reign to cancel the BA-HU-WAH FUCK out of every last one of them?
Of course, there’s also a third ingredient, in addition to genetics and environment: free will. “Since finding all this out and looking into it, I’ve made an effort to try to change my behavior,” Fallon says. “I’ve more consciously been doing things that are considered ‘the right thing to do,’ and thinking more about other people’s feelings.”
And there you have it.
He knows what he is. He has a choice to be different.
And he chooses not to.
And you make an excellent point. Most scum are scum because they CHOOSE to be scum. Psychopathy just makes it easier (the no remorse thing). But you don't HAVE to go down that path. In the new Sherlock Holmes TV series from the BBC for example, he's described as a "high-functioning sociopath".
https://www.medicalindependent.ie/w.....-a-psychopath/
It's a common saying that abuse begets abusers. Well maybe that's not the exact quote, but we've known for a long time, longer than we were able to scan brains and assign psychopathic labels, that abusive parents raise abusive children.
I have a real admiration for people who are able to break that cycle, to be better parents than their own parents were.
And speaking of Q, this article shows that it's conservatives who are more likely to believe conspiracy nonsense.
Drawing from nationally representative survey samples involving 2,500 Americans, the researchers found a relationship between conservatism and conspiratorial thinking that was “positive, linear, and statistically robust,” they reported in the journal Political Psychology.
Although some research suggests that extreme liberals are just as prone to conspiracy belief as extreme conservatives, Van der Linden and his colleagues did not observe this. Both in their large samples and in smaller groups designed to retest their findings, they found that conspiracies were more readily embraced by people on the far right than on the far left.