Posts Tagged ‘sociopaths’
Wednesday Night Links!
* Journal Sentinel columnist James Causey was a third-grader at Samuel Clemens Elementary School. The problems of the city would play out with his classmates.
* Teen’s brothers witnessed his ‘violent, senseless’ death in Texas police shooting, family says.
* Flint puts 8,000 people on notice for tax liens for unpaid water bills.
* Ah, the holy mystery of free speech, with its inscrutable twists and turns.
* Today in academic controversies. I’m hard-pressed to think of a recent issue where my Facebook feed divided so evenly for and against.
* NASA, here to help: Science Fiction Space Technology Terms.
* Contingent No More: An Academic Manifesto.
*Democrats Can Retake the House in 2018 Without Converting a Single Trump Voter. Of course, they can lose that way, too… And speaking of losing. The coming clown show. I would have thought Gillibrand would be an instant frontrunner. Why did Trump win? New research by Democrats offers a worrisome answer. More on that last link here.
* A noncriminal mother of four was deported. Now in Mexico, she fears for her safety.
* Well, this seems fine: Donald Trump on whether he could start war with North Korea: ‘I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see.’ How Trump Could Get Fired.
* The Whole World Is Now a Message Board.
* Why does a newspaper employ opinion columnists at all?
* Thor-centric podcast from Miles while Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is on hiatus.
* A Rare Journey Into the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, a Super-Bunker That Can Survive Anything.
* Finally someone said it: Let’s end compulsory schooling and stop forcing education ‘down everybody’s throat.’
* How your selfie could affect your life insurance.
* Shock finding: Colleges Respond to Racist Incidents as if Their Chief Worry Is Bad PR, Studies Find.
* Even more shocking! Men Are Less Moral after Exposure to Images of Sexy Women, Research Finds.
* Teach the controversy: Are Baby Boomers A ‘Generation Of Sociopaths’? Seems harsh.
* Mike Pence — IN SPAAAAAAAAACE!
The Rich Are Different from You and Me
The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behavior at work, researchers reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Take candy from children! Yikes.
The Stockbrokers Behaved as though Their Neighbor Had the Same Car, ‘And They Took After It With a Baseball Bat So They Could Look Better Themselves’
“Naturally one can’t characterize the traders as deranged,” Noll told SPIEGEL. “But for example, they behaved more egotistically and were more willing to take risks than a group of psychopaths who took the same test.”
The headline reads: “Share Traders More Reckless Than Psychopaths, Study Shows.”
Saturday Afternoon!
* I was going to offer this post from Matt Yglesias on Weber’s “Politics as Vocation” as a potential intervention in the argument Vu and I have been having over the last few comment threads. But upon reflection I don’t think “compromise vs. compromised” is quite what we disagree about after all; it’s really a much smaller dispute about the efficacy of adopting an aggressive negotiating posture when you’re playing Chicken with sociopathically indifferent ideologues. The bad actors will always win such a fight, because we care about outcomes and they don’t. What we we need to do, therefore, is direct our attention away from mere political affect toward structural reform, wherever possible, of the various political institutions that give these bad actors final say.
* The Wonk Room compares the original health care bill to the (presumably final) manager’s amendment, with more on the new CBO score from Steve, Ezra, and TPM. I have to say this post from mcjoan on making sure doctors don’t take away our precious guns made me smile, as did the follow-up on mandates from the comments. So did Benen’s Botax/Boeh-tax bit.
* Stupak launches another desperate bid to be thrown out of the Democratic caucus.
* More ‘Flopenhagen’ analysis from Mother Jones, MNN, Wonk Room, Kevin Drum, and immanance. One’s level of happiness/sadness and optimism/pessimism on Copenhagen continues to strongly correlate with the extent to which one thought a genuinely successful agreement was ever possible at Copenhagen in the first place.
* ‘In the Shadow of Goldman Sachs’: Trickle-down economics on Wall Street. Via PClem.
* Jack Bauer interrogates Santa Claus. Via Julia.
* Captain Picard to become Sir Captain Picard.
* And very sad news: Influential film theorist Robin Wood has died.
Tuesday Night
* If you missed it, TPM has the text of Obama’s speech tonight explaining the escalation in Afghanistan. Very disappointing, if not altogether unexpected. The (very) small bright side is the timetable for beginning our withdrawal: July 2011.
* TNR‘s The Vine has a good post on the CRU hack in context. Judging from the emails I’ve been receiving I suspect his call for a sense of perspective on this may go unheeded.
* Cal Cunningham will run for Senate in North Carolina after all.
* Krugman: Yes, the recession is probably over in a technical sense, but that doesn’t mean that full employment is just around the corner. Historically, financial crises have typically been followed not just by severe recessions but by anemic recoveries; it’s usually years before unemployment declines to anything like normal levels. And all indications are that the aftermath of the latest financial crisis is following the usual script. The Federal Reserve, for example, expects unemployment, currently 10.2 percent, to stay above 8 percent — a number that would have been considered disastrous not long ago — until sometime in 2012.
* And Boing Boing highlights a study showing altruists and sociopaths share similar pathologies—not that this is news to any reader of Batman comics…
Triple Threat
Wednesday triple threat.
* The Gervais Principle for corporate organization.
* Congratulations to John Glenn High School for an absolutely 100% legitimate victory over hated rivals Plymouth Wildcats.
* Neilalien explores the monster-carrying-unconscious-woman visual trope with a series of links.
Easy Money
Wall Street has apparently learned nothing from nearly toppling the global economy last year.
The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.
Awesome. See you in a few years for the next crash.
An nice overview of the Samenow/Yochelson “criminal personality” study referenced in tonight’s Sopranos is available at criminology.fsu.edu. Via Television Without Pity.
The rejuvenated focus of the criminal personality study aimed to see the world as the criminals viewed it(Harris,1984:227). In general, the criminal saw the world in “chess-board” terms, as people were there pawns to manipulate at will for their own personal gain(Harris,1984:227). The anti-social behavior developed when the offenders were young, some as young as age four(Nott,1977:*). The criminal, early in life, consciously removed himself from the rules of society. The conventional activities and interests of his peers were abhorred by the fledgling criminal(Samenow,1978:17). Fighting, lying, and stealing were very frequent activities by the young criminal. Notably, the criminal is pro-active in his approach of rejection to others(Samenow,1978:17). Consequently, he is the first to establish polarity between himself and others(Samenow,1984:49). Additionally:
* he shies away from affection(Nott,1977:*)
* he is very restless, dissatisfied, and irritable(Samenow,1984:26)
* he perfunctorily engages in civil communication only to prevent others from being suspicious of his behavior(Nott,1977:*)
* he considers requests from teachers, parents, and others as impositions(Samenow,1984:47)
* he continually sets himself apart from others
* he is enamored with living a life of excitement, at whatever expense (Samenow,1981:6)
* he habitually experiences anger as a way of life(Samenow,1984:172)
* he lacks empathy
* he feels no obligation to anyone except his own interests
* he has no understanding of responsible decision making, having prejudged situations(Samenow,1998:68)
* he has a daily struggle with “Murphy’s Law”. That is, when something is bound to go wrong, it probably will. Criminals cannot cope with this obstacle well(Samenow,1998:69).All told, fifty-two thinking patterns were distinguishable in the criminal personality(Harris,1984:227). These were considered “errors” in thinking, and though not unique to criminals, they were displayed to extreme magnitudes by criminals (Harris,1984:227). Though criminals may differ in the types of crime that they commit, and their modus operandi, they exhibit identifiable and classifiable paralleled errors in thinking(Samenow,1978:17). For example, the white collar criminal and the inner-city street drug dealer come from very different backgrounds, yet they conduct their lives very similarly according to the way that they consistently supersede their wants and desires over those of others. Importantly, the criminal act is the end product of a specific thinking process and personality characteristics. The criminal personality precedes the criminal act. But criminality goes well beyond arrestability. It pertains to the way in which a person acts, thinks, and lives his life (Samenow,1978:17). Because a person has a criminal personality, however, does not necessarily mean that he will have a criminal record.
Gerry Canavan 