Dirty work

A reader sent me this video of James Fallon, science-famous for having killer ancestors and violent genes.  My favorite part is where he basically says that sociopaths exist to do the dirty work for everyone else.




Here are paraphrases of what I consider to be the most interesting parts:

6:48  There's a societal receptivity to psychopathology, in fact one may say that there's psychopathology in all of us because we ask the so-called successful sociopaths or psychopaths to do the dirty work for us. Ok.  And not just the dirty work but the good work.  You don't want your neurosurgeon to be empathetic and caring emotionally when they're working on you.  You want them to be cold machines that don't care.  Same thing with an investor. . . . A society almost demands that we have psychopaths.  It's a very stable feature throughout society in history that these people are there.  And they pop up in a very malignant way sometimes but these traits seem to be very useful to society so we almost ask for it, or our genes and our behavior ask for it.

8:10 Many of them . . . have excellent memories.  And there's a genetics to this.  The people who have very good memories usually have two forms of a gene that allow you to have very good memories but they also make you very anxious to depressed.

12:40  The fundamental way that a psychopath is put together is like a three legged stool.  One of the legs is a high vulnerability genetic alleles (aggression, violence, lack of bonding), brain loss, and abuse.

14:00 Two areas of the brain that are damages are orbital cortex and the ventromedial cortex

15:30 Cold cognition (logic) in balance with hot cognition (emotions, ethics, morality, etc.) in a normal brain.

Here's another video of James Fallon.

Why we can't all be empaths

A lot of people think that the book and the blog argue that sociopaths are better than empaths. I make no such claim, I never have. But if people want me to justify my existence, I have some not-specious arguments about why we can be useful and an overall benefit to society. 

Even then, I acknowledge that the reason we work well are because there are so few of us, just like predators. If there were more sociopaths than there are already (maybe 25%), who knows, the world might be chaos. It would definitely throw our ecosystem off and certainly any competitive advantage that a sociopath has now would dwindle down to nothing.

So we can't all be sociopaths (or even have many more than we currently have), but we also can't all be empaths, at least not without throwing our ecosystem into a similar tailspin of chaos. Sociopaths within a society give that society an edge against other societies. And the very presence of sociopaths makes empaths behave in different, more robust and active ways that help propel a society forward instead of letting it stagnate or backslide. 

The NY Times provides an interesting economic analogy to this dynamic in "Why Can't America Be Sweden":

“We cannot all be like the Nordics,” Acemoglu declares, in a 2012 paper, “Choosing Your Own Capitalism in a Globalized World,” written with his colleagues James A. Robinson, a professor of government at Harvard, and Thierry Verdier, scientific director of the Paris School of Economics.

If the “cutthroat leader” – the United States — were to switch to “cuddly capitalism, this would reduce the growth rate of the entire world economy,” the authors argue, by slowing the pace of innovation.

***

These findings, if substantiated, will disappoint those who long for a Swedish-style mixed economy with universal health care, paid maternal leave, child allowances, guaranteed pensions and other desirable social benefits.

In a more detailed paper, “Can’t We All Be More Like Scandinavians?” Acemoglu, Robinson and Verdier expand on their argument that the world is dependent on American leadership in technology and innovation to sustain global growth. In order to maintain its position at the forefront of global innovation, the authors contend, the United States must maintain an economic system that provides great rewards to successful innovators, which “implies greater inequality and greater poverty (and a weaker safety net) for a society encouraging innovation.”

***

The three authors make the case that the interconnected world economy has reached what they call an “asymmetric equilibrium” in which the United States “adopts a ‘cutthroat’ reward structure, with high-powered incentives for success, while other countries free-ride on this frontier economy and choose a more egalitarian, ‘cuddly,’ reward structure.”

Directly challenging what they describe as the consensus view – that a country can substantially expand the welfare state without sacrificing its pioneering role in technological innovation – Acemoglu and his colleagues write that it is “the more ‘cutthroat’ American society that makes possible the more ‘cuddly’ Scandinavian societies based on a comprehensive social safety net, the welfare state and more limited inequality.”

In an e-mail, Acemoglu provided the following analogy: The U.S. is also the military leader of the world, and it cannot imitate Finland and reduce its military to a trivial size without taking into account the global repercussions of this (and I’m saying this as somebody who is strongly opposed to U.S. military interventions around the world).

Of course there are many criticisms to this argument (see the link to the original article), but it's not at all absurd to think that there is some element of truth to the idea that we can't all be the same and still see the sort of dynamic growth and prosperity we've become accustomed to. Similarly, the diversity that everyone (including sociopaths) provides has value to society as a whole.

Jim Fallon spoke similarly of sociopaths as being the members of society who do the "dirty work":

And not just the dirty work but the good work. You don't want your neurosurgeon to be empathetic and caring emotionally when they're working on you. You want them to be cold machines that don't care. Same thing with an investor. . . . A society almost demands that we have psychopaths. It's a very stable feature throughout society in history that these people are there. And they pop up in a very malignant way sometimes but these traits seem to be very useful to society so we almost ask for it, or our genes and our behavior ask for it. 

This is going to be especially useful in the zombie apocalypse. 

Another view (part 2)

(cont.)

Your story of the socipath woman who was persecuted by the Aspies really struck a chord. I was bemused by your confusion at why such a person would approach Aspies for help understanding neurotypicals. To me it's entirely reasonable and even brilliant: Her style was probably wrong, but she was groping in the dark. The thinking would be simple: "Neurotypicals don't understand me. I thought I understood neurotypicals but now I realize I don't and a lot of my life has been fucked up because I misunderstood shit. Here is a group that gets together and strategizes on how to deal with neurotypicals. They may be able to help me." That's not dumb dude, that's way fucking smart. Aspies and socios should be able to offer each other all sorts of insights, actually, as any two people looking at the same problem from different perspectives will often help each other. Both could help each other overcome where they are weak, and also identify where they are stronger and better than neurotypicals.

I suspect extremely sadistic sociopaths (i.e. deriving strong pleasure from inflicting suffering for one reason or another--enjoying the sounds of screaming and the sight of blood spurting and the feeling of power caused by cruelty) are probably dangerous to the point where they probably need to stay watched at all times. But otherwise, I begin to suspect that if more sociopaths "outed" themselves a whole hell of a lot of them could be made useful to society and have happier, more productive lives for themselves.

Why should you care if you're more helpful to neurotypicals? First so you don't have to hide; hiding may be fun sometimes but is probably exhausting much of the time. Also, because you can have a life you just plain enjoy more and which allows you to accomplish more of your goals in straightforward, no-bullshit fashion.

A cynical stereotype would be to say that we use you when killing and other nasty business needs doing, but that's ridiculous oversimplification; a person lacking empathy could do all sorts of positive things that aren't in the least bit destructive, and wherein lack of empathy has no more particular value than the inability to see the color red or a tendency to be easily sunburned; just not relevant. A socio who has fully concluded, "it is in my rational self-interest to help people in ways X, Y, and Z, and to not engage in A, B, and C" could be a tremendously productive in all sorts of fields where their sociopathy would be irrelevant. In other areas, it could be an outright asset in an endless number of subtle areas where your blunted or nonexistent empathic reponse would allow you to clinically analyze and recommend in areas where other people's emotions cloud their judgment. If I were a manager I'd probably want at least one of you on my team, and not necessarily for "dirty work." I don't need "dirty work," I need someone who thinks dispassionately and logically and can see shit other people can't. At minimum, you'd be the guy to tell me in a business negotiation, "Stop with the goody-goody reasoning with that guy. He doesn't care. You're just irritating him." Or better yet, "You don't know how to deal with this guy, I do. Just let me do it. I'll close the deal, watch."

If you are a sociopath, for whatever reason you have a blunted or nonexistent sense of empathy. Although this has multiple ramifications, in the end that's all it amounts to. It may amuse you to know that I discussed this with a very serious-minded Christian (Catholic) friend and he said (at first to my surprise but not now) that indeed, there's absolutely no reason a sociopath could be not just a good Christian but an outright Saint; his basic line was "emotions are overrated, it's actions that matter. It doesn't matter how you feel about it, it's what you DO that counts."

Thank you, sociopaths! (?)

I was having a conversation with a sociopath who is currently in the military about the relatively higher proportion of sociopaths in the military versus the general population.  The reader asked "What part do sociopaths play in the world? What's our niche?" and suggested: "In times of catastrophe, it's the socios that step up and lead until stability is restored, because at that point, we're the only ones who -can- do it, 9 times out of 10."

There are quite a few documented instances of sociopaths being exceptional in socially positive ways.  There is professor Jim Fallon his ideas about psychopaths doing the "dirty work" and the "good work" that others can't or won't do as well.   Joseph Newman believes that psychopaths are perhaps more inclined to be impulsively helpful than empaths. Also this post comparing heroes with sociopaths.

The reader continued about why sociopaths may be doing pro-social things, even when it doesn't involve the occasional "heroic" act:

In my experience, both personal and talking to others, sociopaths and psychopaths do seemingly random nice things for people more often than those seen as empathetic. If you walk the Path, you naturally want a leg up on those around you. You want to know what's going on, how to react, and you want people to defend you when someone tries to ruin your day. The best way to get that leverage is for people to like you and think you have their best interests at heart. Eventually, doing those small (but often meaningful) kindnesses becomes something the Path cares about, even if for no other reason than a flexible personality and unwillingness to change to suit others make it a routine.

Morality vs. rationality

I've mentioned Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, before.  He's probably best known for arguing that conservatives and liberals come from different moral universes in which they weigh values like fairness, harm, loyalty, authority, and purity differently and that difference explains their different opinions on moral and political issues.  He has a new book, "The Righteous Mind" in which he (according to this NY Times review) aims to expose some of the faulty reasoning employed on behalf of people's different moral beliefs.  Here are some selections of what I thought was most interesting/pertinent:

Haidt seems to delight in mischief. Drawing on ethnography, evolutionary theory and experimental psychology, he sets out to trash the modern faith in reason. In Haidt’s retelling, all the fools, foils and villains of intellectual history are recast as heroes. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be “the slave of the passions,” was largely correct. E. O. Wilson, the ecologist who was branded a fascist for stressing the biological origins of human behavior, has been vindicated by the study of moral emotions. Even Glaucon, the cynic in Plato’s “Republic” who told Socrates that people would behave ethically only if they thought they were being watched, was “the guy who got it right.”
***

We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided. The funniest and most painful illustrations are Haidt’s transcripts of interviews about bizarre scenarios. Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong. But none can explain why.

The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others. Haidt shows, for example, how subjects relentlessly marshal arguments for the incest taboo, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes these arguments.

To explain this persistence, Haidt invokes an evolutionary hypothesis: We compete for social status, and the key advantage in this struggle is the ability to influence others. Reason, in this view, evolved to help us spin, not to help us learn. So if you want to change people’s minds, Haidt concludes, don’t appeal to their reason. Appeal to reason’s boss: the underlying moral intuitions whose conclusions reason defends.

That last part about not appealing to reason reminds me of this 30 Rock video in which one character opines: "Your father is being irrational and irrational behavior doesn't respond to rational arguments. It responds to fear."  It also reminds me of how I often approach topics on the blog, like appealing to people's sympathy to suggest that any anti-sociopathic beliefs are fascist and one step away from being Hitler-esque.  I'm just trying to say things in a way that people are more likely to understand.  But seriously, I use reason for my readers that prefer that, but sometimes I like to do a little gut check for the rest of you.  I think most of you like it, at least the ones that stick around.  You don't mind having your beliefs tweaked with a little bit.  If you end up not changing your mind, you feel like you come out of the haze stronger for it.  If you change your mind a bit, you feel like the experience has broadened your horizons.  It pays to have a sociopath around for this very purpose.  You're welcome.  Now return the favor and don't commit genocide against my people.

I also like this part of the article about how maladaptive traits can hurt society, which I consider a bit of a nod to taking care of dirty work:

Traits we evolved in a dispersed world, like tribalism and righteousness, have become dangerously maladaptive in an era of rapid globalization. A pure scientist would let us purge these traits from the gene pool by fighting and killing one another. But Haidt wants to spare us this fate. He seeks a world in which “fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means.” To achieve this goal, he asks us to understand and overcome our instincts. He appeals to a power capable of circumspection, reflection and reform.

A comprehensive beginner's guide to becoming a sociopath

Because I can no longer find this available online, and because so many people ask for it:

Sociopathy. The word makes "good" people cringe. It is a very real syndrome that affects young and old. In general there are ten real symptoms:

1. Not learning from experience.
2. No sense of responsibility.
3. Inability to form meaningful relationships.
4. Inability to control impulses.
5. Lack of moral sense.
6. Chronically antisocial behavior.
7. No change in behavior after punishment.
8. Emotional immaturity.
9. Lack of guilt.
10. Self-centeredness.

   If you are a sociopath you probably don't know it, but if you want to be a sociopath and have fun unlike all the other blockheads in the world, then this is the recipe for you. 

   There is a general trend in the symptoms listed above, carelessness. There is a surefire way to disassociate yourself from feelings, which includes guilt. Can you think of what emotion and feeling has done for you? Nothing is what I am thinking. So here it is, without further ado, you own personal guide to becoming God. This means being totally free of emotion and feeling, unless you desire them. You will no longer associate certain actions with certain feelings so you will be able to do anything you want and not feel a damn thing, if you elect to. You can steal, lie, cheat, fight, hurt, and you won't think twice. There is a great balance that must be emphasized before we can start the program. Although the whole point of being a sociopath is to not feel guilt, sadness, or hurt, you will also be stripped of 'positive' feelings and often times actions that usually resulted in happiness will be replaced with anger and then normal bad emotion actions will become happiness producing instead. So if you are squeamish or don't desire a sadomasochist view on life, don't read on. 

   Here's the ten day beginners guide; start on a Monday for the best and fastest results. 

Day 1:

WAKE UP EXTREMELY EARLY, this will allow you to be groggy enough not to care on your own.

Good act 1: Go and buy 40 dollars in groceries for your local homeless man. It will fuck with his head so bad. This action is called 'Rampant Altruism".

Bad Act 1: Find the nicest luxury car at your work and vandalize it.

You are set for the day. Make sure not to think twice about anything you've done today.

Day 2:

Wake up earlier than the day before and play VERY loud music. This works on many levels, but you can't count it as a bad action.

Good Act 1: While on the hustle to work drive very slowly and let everyone in, don't get mad or stressed.

Bad Act 1: Go to a coffee shop and sit down, order the most difficult drink to make and keep changing your mind about it, then don't pay for anything and when she looks at you just say, 'ah never mind', then start muttering and swearing to yourself barely audible, but definitely call her a 'slut' or 'bitch'. Leave and slam things on your way out.

Good Act 2: Go to the Library. Find the most frumpish looking mid 20's girl and start flirting with her heavily. Leave and come back and bring her flowers, real nice ones, then give her someone else number when she asks for it. This will destroy her.

Bad Act 2: Hopefully it will be garbage day, but if it isn't find one of those huge dumpsters and spread trash all over the street. Break as much glass as you can.

Ok, you are getting into the swing of things. It is important not to dwell or celebrate about anything you did today, this is very important.

Day 3:

You can wake up normally, but don't eat breakfast, don't drink coffee.

Bad Act 1: Drive fast, mean, and flip off as many people as you can on your way to work. Make as many people start off with bad days, especially to women. If people follow you just keep driving till they can't anymore, but always flipping them off.

Good act 1: Bring Coffee and Donuts for everyone but just set them down and don't allow people the time to thank you or offer to pay you back or whatever, say as little as possible.

Bad Act 2: Find that dog that is always barking in your neighborhood while the owner is away, and terrorize the shit out of the dog, hit it with a stick if you want to, just make it pissed off. Make it meaner than shit and just leave.

Good act 2: Give 20 dollars to the cash register person and ask them for change in quarters, then right in front of them put each coin individually into the collection jars, it's especially good if there are people waiting.

Bad Act 3: This one is a wild card, but here is something you can do that will help you later. Get dressed up as White trash as you can, get yourself real dirty and roll in stuff if possible, then go to the Big 5 or other sporting good store. While you are there, just look at the guns with a sort of 'far away look', shaking and twitching. Deny help as many times as you can, but stay in one spot the whole time. Then after nearly half an hour, go up to the asst supervisor and plead for help, use 'fuck' and 'Jesus Christ' as many times as you can while you purchase an air rifle and huge amounts of pellets and BB's. Speed in the parking lot, flip off someone if possible. When you get home, get acquainted with your "lil' boom stick", make sure you aim is good, this will be important later.

Good act 3: Buy a pizza and bring it to the bookstore and say 'you know, this pizza guy just gave this to me and I already ate, would you take it?" if they accept it great, but if they don't just go and give it to another establishment, don't accept money and stay as little time as possible.

Don't sleep this night, read as much philosophy or propoganda'ish material as possible, the internet is great for that shit. Drink a lot of tea.

Day 4:

Hopefully you didn't sleep, but if you did make sure you got up early and promptly. Go and take a run, a long one, so that you are exhausted when you get back. Don't shower and don't shave.

Bad Act 1: Go to the store, but before hand fill your pockets with random trinkets, the weirder the better. Buy something like 4 grapes or one Tab soda, or something else really random. Then when it's time to pay, look at her for a second and then start rummaging through your pockets, act really worried. Then pull out one of the trinkets and offer her a trade for whatever it is you are purchasing. Keep going and ask her to call her manager, say 'man, I really need this but all I have are these guitar picks', he will not give in and you shouldn't either, get frustrated and finally pull out your check book, when she asks for your drivers license be reluctant and say that you don't have one, she will be damn angry and they will have probably asked you to leave several times, do it but call them a bunch of racist Nazi's. Everyone will wonder what is happening and you have to keep up the yelling all the way to the car.

Good act 1: Go to the coffee shop you visited on Day 2 and order a medium latte with heavy cream if possible. Pay for it with a 20 and just walk away when she tries to give you back the money. She will try in vain to get your attention, don't give in to her, and just walk out ignoring everyone.

Bad Act 2: Show up extremely late to work and walk in scowling at everyone, don't answer any questions, just mutter and look only at your feet. Everyone will be worried but you won't answer any questions. If your manager starts talking to you change the mood totally, be happy, but after he leaves continue snapping at everyone. Leave early from work if possible. Just shrug your shoulders if asked why you are late, but don't answer the 'are you ok?' type questions, people will be very concerned. Go home and shower.

Good act 2: Buy a bunch of flowers and hand them to the most beautiful woman you see. Don't say anything more than 'will you accept these?" Make sure you are very abrupt when you walk away and don't turn around for ANY reason. Don't do it if her boyfriend or husband is right there.

Bad Act 3: Buy a can of red Krylon Spray paint. When it is Dark go and Spray paint something awful on a wall that you pass everyday, make sure it is just fucking rude and mean, something that people will gawk at and be pissed off, something that would even piss off you.

Good act 3: Go to a bar, sit next to a semi-attractive girl. Do not make any come ons, pretend for a second that sex would actually make you ill and pretend you hate it, this will help you out. Talk about everything besides sex. Buy her many drinks, don't ask for her number and don't give you hers even if she asks. If she comes on to you, just look really surprised and even be offended, this will be a good time to leave.

Bad Act 4: Use your handy dandy pellet rifle and roam the streets of your neighborhood shooting out streetlights, car windows, or another building windows. DO NOT shoot at houses or anywhere where you could draw attention to yourself, be careful but make sure you have made visible damage.

   Ok, this is the right amount of good/bad actions you should be doing on a daily basis. Hopefully with the oscillation of emotions from the different actions you should start to feel numb about them. You are on the right start. 

   This weekend will be an important step: Your focus will be on reversing emotions. 

   You must take any action that would normally cause you pain or sadness and tell yourself how good it feels. You need to do your good actions as if they are actually doing harm to those you do them for. You will also start to associate the different actions. 

Over the next 3 days you should accomplish:

• Shoot one bird and be happy about it, go to the Dog Pound, find the cutest puppy and regard it as evil.
• Steal something and justify it.
• Cook a large meal for someone less fortunate, then later drink a bottle of castor oil and force vomit over a large plate of food at a restaurant.
• If you see someone at a bus stop, offer him or her a ride, they usually won't accept but ask until it happens. Pretend you hate the person in the car internally, but be SUPER polite to them, even go outside and open their door. Then when they get out and you drive away, tell them to fuck themselves.
• Drink heavily, very heavily. Then go to a park and talk to children, the parents will freak.
• Just start picking up trash in a public park, don't answer any questions. Donate blood as well.
• Slap yourself, cut yourself, hurt yourself, but regard it as 'masturbation', trick yourself into enjoying it.
• Watch your favorite movie four times in one day.

   Hopefully you should now realize that feelings or emotions are not directly associated to actions. With this knowledge you now have the ability to do things without feeling anything. You know you are detached from feelings if you do the same action twice with feeling both good and bad feelings about it. Then when you do it the third time, you feel nothing. You will no longer have a value of "good/bad". Everything will just be things, you will have an open mind. The important thing is to still continue to do both good and evil actions. 

Day 8:

This is Monday; you will notice that even though you have had the weirdest week of your entire life, you feel recharged but nothing more. You don't feel bad or good or even in between, you just don't feel. Live your day normally, but you notice that you don't care as you once did. Everything seems easier to deal with and is no longer stressful. Go out to eat tonight and don't tip your waiter. Give a homeless man the tip that you were going to give to the waiter.

Day 9:

Go to a bookstore and pick a fairly well known classic and sit there and read it for as long as the store is open. It will be you and the closing clerk there alone. Hopefully it is a women, tell her that you can't pay for the book but you love it so much. Give her your watch as collateral. Order a huge amount of flowers for her but when you come in to pay for the book and collect your watch be surprised about the flowers. Persists that you did not buy them but you really appreciate her kindness about the book. If she asks for your information or suggests that you should go out sometime, just look disgusted and walk away. On the way home that night pull up next to someone walking, start pretending to get directions but when they start insult them repeatedly and threaten their life. Drive away fast.

Day 10:

Don't go to work, call in sick if you have to. Drink tea ALL DAY. Find a pad of paper and start writing or drawing. Draw/Write the weirdest most convoluted stuff you can come up with, paste it all over your room. If you aren't thinking to yourself in some way 'man, I'm fucking crazy' than you aren't doing it right. Just repeat the week over until you can be in denial and know it. Yes your crazy, yes you know it, but it is sooo fun.

   Now that you are totally detached from the externalities of a social culture and you are totally void of feelings or guilt, you are on your way. Upkeep can be less frequent. Be unpredictable in your actions or moods. Don't keep the same face on twice with the same person. Love someone passionately that you don't know, hate someone passionately that you do know. Fight all the time; argue with everyone. Do charity and public service out of the blue without any reason. Don't have a favorite anything, try everything and be open minded about everything. Give someone your favorite book as a gift. 

   This plan has worked on about 7 or the 11 people that have tried it. Although there is great degrees on how they responded there was great general trends. The most important thing is that everyone is happy and their lives; which are greatly improved.

Cairns and Port Douglas in three efficient days

I'm a scuba diver and wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef while it's still there, it's been a childhood dream of mine to hold koalas, and I had like 4-5 days to kill between weekend appointments with people, so I headed up to the northeast to Port Douglas. I stayed at the Port Douglas Motel which was kitschy, cheap, centrally located, and great.

First, heads up. I feel like this is really not well publicized, but although this is a tropical part of Australia, you cannot really safely go swimming in the ocean, or even 100% safely hang out on the beach near bush or near the water particularly at dusk or dawn because (1) there are saltwater crocodiles and (2) all of the summer is "stinger season" in which you can get stung by all sorts of animals.

What are marine stingers?
Stingers are potentially lethal jellyfish that typically inhabit the waters off northern Australia. The most feared is the box jellyfish or Chironex fleckeri. Distinguished by its large box-like bell and trailing tentacles, the box jellyfish is responsible for about 80 confirmed fatalities in Australia since records began in 1883. The jellyfish's bell grows up to 30cm in diameter and extrudes about 60 tentacles, each measuring up to three metres in length. The Irukandji jellyfish, by comparison, is a pint-sized predator with a transparent bell measuring just 12 to 20mm and four small tentacles. There are numerous Irukandji species and two recorded deaths.

I literally only found out about any of this as I was take a shuttle from the airport in Cairns up to Port Douglas. By the way, I really recommend staying in Port Douglas, which is a charming tourist town, rather than Cairns which feels a little like not a place for tourists at all. My shuttle driver was talking to some locals about the two most recent crocodile deaths from the past 6 months -- an older woman who took a wrong turn while on a walk around her retirement home and a German young woman who was know to like to skinny dip.  For the elderly woman, apparently the family of the deceased pleaded with authorities to not kill the animal. Let's not make this a tragedy of two deaths instead of one!

Day one I checked in with my dive company for the next day then rented a bike and went to the Wildlife Habitat, which is a little small and a little kitschy, but also sketchy in all of the right ways like holding koalas and other animals and feeding various animals in a little bit of a free for all. I biked back to the motel via Four Mile Beach (pictured above). The sand is so packed, you can just bike on the beach itself, and probably safer with the crocodiles. At the Port Douglas end of Four Mile Beach, there's a little hill you can climb up to an ok lookout.

Day 2 I did a three dive tour to the outer reef using the ABC Dive Company, which seemed the most reputable and the smallest groups? The trip was nice, there was a shark apparently that I didn't see. I did see a lot of great coral, rays, an eel, a ton of little jellyfish. Basically it really did look like Finding Nemo, which I didn't expect for some reason. I think I had forgotten that Finding Nemo takes place at the Great Barrier Reef, so of course all of the same fish would be there.

Day 3 was not good. I had heard that the other great thing to see is the rainforest. Now this is like my third or fourth (fifth?) time doing tours of the rainforest, including the heart of the Amazon as well as other places in central and south America. I've done a ton of jungle tours and safaris and this one not only sort of sucked, it felt like I was trapped, which made me super grumpy. Daintree Discovery Tours. It was so bad that I was all set to post a bad review of it online, but then I started reading other one star reviews with my same complaints (basically just driving around in a car all day doing nothing of interest or no value added from the tour), and the response from the company was mainly to address the complaint that people had that they could have done the trip much cheaper themselves. The company responded by saying it would actually be around as expensive to do it yourself. But really, I just sort of wish I hadn't done it at all. My general impression was that either Daintree is not that cool of a rainforest to see, or no tour company has been able to highlight its charms well. It's sad, because apparently it is the oldest rainforest in the world? There were interesting things to see, I guess, but like 1-3 hours worth of interesting. Also, same notes as my post on Sydney about the service industry being a little lackluster in Australia. It felt like there was a lot of phoning it in going on.

Day 4 I did this Kurunda package that was pretty good, something like this in which you're basically just shuttled around on a bus from attraction to attraction. There seems to be no difference in the tour operators, so just choose the cheapest one that includes the little destinations you want to see, e.g. yes or no on the butterfly sanctuary. Rainforestation is worth seeing, so is the train and the skyrail. I had this terrible customer service encounter with a skyrail person who was yelling at people. I almost lost it for a second, and it reminded me that I'm for whatever reason most likely to lose my temper while traveling.

I did learn something interesting on the rainforest tour. Mangrove trees (pictured above) can grow in salt, but salt is still poison to them. They adapted a special root system that keeps most of the salt out, but salt still gets in. To keep the rest of the tree alive, the three designates a "sacrificial leaf". It puts all of the toxic salt in that leaf until it is full and then the leaf drops off. The leaf turns yellow.

I thought about how James Fallon has argued that sociopaths exist in society to essentially take care of the "dirty work" that is necessary and unavoidable in our society, work that give normal people PTSD if they had to deal it themselves. Kevin Dutton has made a similar argument about sociopaths being great soldiers, surgeons, and spies, I believe. Anyway, thanks to all of you sacrificial leaves out there taking one for the team!

Sydney in two efficient days

One thing that surprised me in planning my two week trip to Australia is how little detailed information there seemed to be about workable itineraries. I also wanted to post here a little about my trip, so people can see what I'm getting up to on these travels and understand why I want to meet them and a little about what it might be like to meet me this way. So I created a separate page/tab at the top where I will link all of these travel posts for people who are interested in these areas and/or hearing my goings on. If you're not interested, you can probably just skip these posts?

I flew New Zealand Air (very nice flight attendants, and apparently John Travolta can still sell luxury goods there). 

I got into Sydney in the morning. I found out right away that the reservation for two nights at the Megaboom Hotel was for the wrong days, starting the day preceding, and there was no availability for my actual days. The front desk person was not only not helpful, she was antagonistic and tried to thwart every attempt I made with whomever my booking provider (Expedia?) was to resolve my issue. She wouldn't let me extend, wouldn't let me cancel the reservation, and wouldn't refund me anything. Ok. It wasn't until the end of a 40 minute debate that she conceded that she could put me on a waiting list to extend my stay and ask her manager about a partial refund. 

I noticed arguing with the customer to be a common thing in Australia. I guess it's because there's not really a tipping economy? And there is a high minimum wage. The incentive therefore is not to please a customer, but to avoid losing one's job. So when I asked for anything that wasn't apparently completely standard, I often got pushback and even antagonism. Maybe it was my sociopathy shining through and rubbing people the wrong way, but I chatted with some of my new Australian friends about it and they seemed to confirm the trend of lack of customer service.

It was nicely located, though, and I walked around my neighborhood to the lovely Queen Victoria Building, the Town Hall, and then a little bit of Darling Harbor.  

My new sociopathically minded friend (diagnosed ASPD). S came to meet me at my hotel for a day walking from Bondi (Bond - eye) beach to Coogee, a beautiful walk with many great sea cliffs (sea cliffs are my jam, as I had told S when he was planning the day).  As the Uber driver suggested, we kept walking into the cemetery area and even beyond. There are salt water pools filled by the ocean that people swim laps in. Beautiful, truly, and I'm used to beach beauty. 

Bondi is a hotspot, all these jacked up dudes (apparently many of them from steroids, per new friend S) strutting around scantily clad. There are surfers, but not many. Most people seemed to be out for fun, which emphasis on fun is apparently an Australian cultural thing. S and our Uber driver got in a bit of a fight for verbal dominance to explain to me how the Sydney lockout laws have killed certain once vital neighborhoods because Australians want to be able to drink freely and flow freely from establishment to establishment until dawn. Very similar to the Brazilian mentality, and S was a little surprised when I told him that having last calls for alcohol at 2:00 a.m. is very common in the U.S. But apparently random acts of violence are common (as new friend and fellow Australian M told me when I met him in San Francisco, more on that later). M thinks it's because there are no guns but people still need to blow off steam or demonstrate aggression to other people, so bar fights are not unusual.

After Bondi, S showers in the very good public facilities they had there and we head to the hip and gay-ish neighborhood of Newtown to meet some of his friends for drinks.

Day 2. My new friend J was up the evening prior holiday partying Australian style, so I had the morning and early afternoon to kill. I started in the neighborhood known as the Rocks, a 12 minute walk from my hotel. The Rocks is the oldest neighborhood in Sydney, with tons of history about the very first attempts at colonization and has this very great app with audio tour and augmented reality functionality that will show you what the neighborhood used to look like at various time periods using old illustrations or photos -- Walking the Rocks. It took me about an hour or two to go through the neighborhood/tour audio.

Larrikin Culture
While in the Rocks, I learned about Australian larrikin culture.  It's an Australian specific word defined as: "a boisterous, often badly behaved young man. a person with apparent disregard for convention" or as Wikipedia has it "a person who acts with apparent disregard for social or political conventions". *cough sociopath* It was initially used to describe the street gangs that frequented the Rocks (e.g. the Rocks Push) in the 19th century and was derogatory. The street gangs, no joke, dressed in gang specific dandyish outfits with the male larrikins distinguishable by their high heels and pointy boots and the women (donahs) wearing huge colorful hats. The fact of being associated as a Larrikin was often an excuse to bring the full force of the law down upon your head:

The Queen must surely be proud of such herioc men as the Police and Irish soldiers as It takes eight or eleven of the biggest mud crushers in Melbourne to take one poor little half starved larrakin to a watch house. — Ned Kelly in the Jerilderie Letter, 1879.[10]

(Also, is Dawn Fraser, famed Australian swimmer and described as having a "larrikin" streak a sociopath?)

I walked the 10 minutes from the Rocks to the Sydney Harbor Bridge Climb, which was fun and beautiful, but also super expensive? And again, same thing applies re customer service here -- it took forever to get our gear on because we just had one person helping us, there was a ton of stopping on the bridge but no tour information on the buildings or the skyline or anything above just the very most basics, the photos they took were all sort of horrible, like they're not using any good technology or filters or figuring our good angles or anything. I noticed this a lot with Australian tours or activities, just ok being a little mediocre and a passable image of the thing it is supposed to be, like a sad looking amusement park cheeseburger. Because this bridge climb could have been much cooler.

New friend J met me at Bridge Climb because I was running late and she was running early. We walked together back through the Rocks to the Sydney Opera House, didn't take a tour because the guy said they sort of suck (true?), but took a ton of photos from every angle. The best angle is landside, the furthest corner from the bridge on the high point. Make sure that you take a ton here because people keep walking in front of the camera.

The best photo I got, though, was on the Manly Fast Ferry. Very cool trip, because it's basically a tour of the harbor. The fast ferry is just the right speed, and our boat was filled with drunk people wearing santa costumes for a planned pub crawl. Once off at the ferry, walk directly away from the ferry building with everyone else across the narrow isthmus to the actual beach.

Manly is fun, but also there is a lovely walk to Shelly Beach, which has one lovely restaurant, but stops serving food after lunch. There are a few little lookout hikes, spend some time exploring the hill overlooking Shelly Beach.

When we came back into Sydney, we walked through the Botanical Gardens on our way back to my old hotel, swinging by St. Mary's Cathedral, then grabbed my bags and went to my new hotel in Surry Hills, also a hip neighborhood, grabbed a bite to eat, made out, went to sleep. Surry Hills, by the way, is the home of female mob boss Kate Leigh.

So I stumbled upon the history of razor gang wars in Sydney in the 20's. The reason they're called razor gangs is that they banned handguns in Sydney in the beginning of the 20th century, so they'd go around razoring each other up for their share of the cocaine, sly-grog (speakeasy), and prostitution trade. The two main mob bosses were both female for some reason, Kate Leigh, and Tilly Devine, and they were arch rivals. From what I've read, Kate would do some of her own enforcing, killing at least two men and often getting in fist fights with people (sociopath maybe?), although most of the time she hired thugs to do her dirty work. Tilly Devine was also known to be a potentially lethal woman, although for whatever reason I feel like Tilly is more a victim of her terrible circumstances (forced into prostitution as a pre-teen). Maybe it's the fact that Tilly always seemed to have a chip on her shoulder about being more glamorous than most upper class people? Also the main cop going after them was also a woman! Liillian Armfield. This is like a television show begging to be made (not a smallish budget Australian television show, which already has been made, but more like an HBO miniseries). Thank you Australia for providing us the source material for the all female cast biopic about razor wielding mobsters that we deserve.

Next morning I took a bath and watched tv, then took the Airport Train back to the aiport (great and fast, btw, and you can buy single tickets). The rest of the traveling I did was by Uber for convenience and efficiency, although Sydney's public transit is supposed to be great.  

Nature wills discord

Truth: nature wills discord. From Immanuel Kant's "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View" (1784):

The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men.

By “antagonism” I mean the unsocial sociability of men, i.e., their propensity to enter into society, bound together with a mutual opposition which constantly threatens to break up the society. Man has an inclination to associate with others, because in society he feels himself to be more than man, i.e., as more than the developed form of his natural capacities. But he also has a strong propensity to isolate himself from others, because he finds in himself at the same time the unsocial characteristic of wishing to have everything go according to his own wish. Thus he expects opposition on all sides because, in knowing himself, he knows that he, on his own part, is inclined to oppose others. This opposition it is which awakens all his powers, brings him to conquer his inclination to laziness and, propelled by vainglory, lust for power, and avarice, to achieve a rank among his fellows whom he cannot tolerate but from whom he cannot withdraw. 

Thus are taken the first true steps from barbarism to culture, which consists in the social worth of man; thence gradually develop all talents, and taste is refined; through continued enlightenment the beginnings are laid for a way of thought which can in time convert the coarse, natural disposition for moral discrimination into definite practical principles, and thereby change a society of men driven together by their natural feelings into a moral whole. Without those in themselves unamiable characteristics of unsociability from whence opposition springs-characteristics each man must find in his own selfish pretensions-all talents would remain hidden, unborn in an Arcadian shepherd’s life, with all its concord, contentment, and mutual affection. Men, good-natured as the sheep they herd, would hardly reach a higher worth than their beasts; they would not fill the empty place in creation by achieving their end, which is rational nature. 

Thanks be to Nature, then, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped. Man wishes concord; but Nature knows better what is good for the race; she wills discord. He wishes to live comfortably and pleasantly; Nature wills that he should be plunged from sloth and passive contentment into labor and trouble, in order that he may find means of extricating himself from them. The natural urges to this, the sources of unsociableness and mutual opposition from which so many evils arise, drive men to new exertions of their forces and thus to the manifold development of their capacities. They thereby perhaps show the ordering of a wise Creator and not the hand of an evil spirit, who bungled in his great work or spoiled it out of envy.

I have gotten a lot of flack for being ruthless, for ruining people, for going after my enemies with full force of mind and spirit, and particularly for enjoying it all (would Jesus do that? the God of the Old Testament seems to). What do we think of soldiers who enjoy killing? Monsters? What do we think of people who love beating their opponent soundly? Antisocial? What do we think of people who think that they are the best at what they do? Narcissists? Delusional? What do we think of people who are willing to get their hands dirty in order to achieve their goals? Primitive? Evil? One of my favorite things is to be beaten by a worthy opponent, so I have a hard time understanding when other people claim to be the "victim" of a sociopath who happened to, for example, outplay them at politics at work, or in a child custody battle, or business partnership, or any number of skirmishes that are necessary for the world to function as it currently does. I know that some people loathe the fact that this is life, that it makes us no better than animals. I love Kant's suggestion that it is exactly the opposite -- this antagonism is what prompts humans to strive to achieve something more than living like animals.

Along those same lines, from this NY Times article "Are the Roma Primitive, or Just Poor?" (which hilariously suggests that primitive/poor are the only possible explanations for their particular brand of "antisocial" living):

 “It is very difficult to interpret their behavior based on our own 20th-century standards,” Alain Behr, a defense lawyer who represented two of the accused clan chiefs, explained by telephone from Nancy. “This community crosses time and space with its traditions, and we in Europe have trouble to integrate them. Yet they have preserved their tradition, which is one of survival.”

Sexual sadism (part 2)

(cont.):

Until I met W, I spent my whole life lusting and obsession after various girls. I had huge crushes, where I was willing to devote my life to them, but they didn’t even notice me. I asked S out in high school, but she wasn’t even remotely interested in spending time with me. I didn’t really understand how people ended up hanging out together. The one cunt that did notice me in the Navy was married, and was fucking around on her husband while she was friends with me. I was in love with her, but she was a disgusting piece of shit whore. I should have known better.

I still have no clue how people end up hanging out together. Now I have a job, and everybody I know, I met through work. I don’t meet people outside of work, because I have no idea how people meet each other, or what a normal social script is even supposed to look like. I envy the sociopath, because, they learn that they don’t know, and they learn to mimic these retards living around them. I’ve gone thirty-five years, just thinking I was shy; whereas, even if I was completely uninhibited and extroverted, I wouldn’t have a clue as to how to play this social game.

So, full circle, I’ve been denied proper access to sex and friends my entire life. I don’t even think I really care about friends anymore. I’m over that. Sex still pisses me off though. When I see all of these whores running around, playing the same stupid games, throwing their bodies around to every stupid douche bag that pushes their buttons, it just disgusts me.

First, I want to hurt them. I want to hurt them, because their behaviour is disgusting. I want to hurt them, because they hurt other people. Even if they’re not doing it consciously, it’s in their biological makeup to make stupid decisions, and ruin their life and other people’s life. I want to hurt them beyond anything their mind can imagine. Even prolonged torture, mutilation, and murder isn’t enough. I want to rape their dirty fucking souls.

Second, I want to control them. They go through life wielding this godly power. Sex is one of the core biological reasons we exist, and we have strong biological urges to reproduce. Controlling the world’s sex is like controlling the world’s food. Restricting sex is unacceptable. Lions fight over a mate and then rape the shit out of that bitch. Our society says that it’s unacceptable to make people do things they don’t want to do, but my conscious tells me that her power is unacceptable. I want to tie her down, hold her down, force her, and control her. She’s nothing. She didn’t earn that power that she mistreats. She’s a worthless piece of shit, and needs to be raped and murdered.

Finally, I want to rape her. I not only want to rape her to hurt, degrade, and use her, but I also want to rape her for sex. She’s denied me of access to sex my entire life. There was plenty of opportunity for me to mesh with society, make friends, and date women, but they wouldn’t have it. Instead they spread their legs for other dip shits. And, our “moral code” says when some stupid cunt decides to mate with ten worthless incompetent half-wit retarded shit-brains, we need to respect her rights and her sexuality. Well, fuck her rights. It’s my right to shove my cock up her ass repeatedly until I shoot my cum into her bowels. It’s her right to struggle, but that’s about it. Society can back the fuck off.

So, you think your ten year-old daughter is “innocent.” Not in this world. Unless she’s a complete and utter social reject, she’s part of the problem. Might as well be proactive, and rape the little bitch right now.

Moral codes, boundaries and food allergies

I think empaths' brains work differently than mine. There are certain things that they consider sacrosanct that I just think are normal, or even silly. Luckily I was brought up in a religious household, so I learned that some invisible things actually mean a lot to other people: love, patriotism, god, goodness, etc. I learned that the general rule to avoid unwanted conflict is to respect those beliefs in others, even though they do not mean anything to me. This is sort of a hallmark of a modern, civilized society. When we walk into holy buildings, we remove our shoes if that is the custom even though the god of that temple may not be our own.

That is what we are socialized to do, but there is some debate regarding how much respect we should give other people's beliefs. For instance, if you believe cows are sacred, I'm fine with your boycotting beef, but your beliefs won't stop me from eating a cheeseburger in front of you. If the average person is willing to take off his shoes in your temple but eat a cheeseburger in front of you, what will he do about your belief that abortion is murder or your beliefs that the female labia is dirty and needs to be cut off or the vagina stitched up to ensure the purity of the woman? What is legitimate?

To me it seems like random line drawing: sodomy between two consenting adults is legitimate, sodomy between an adult and a child not legitimate. Public nudity is wrong, but so is a woman covering up from head to foot. There are reasons, sure. I have heard reasons. But many empaths will criticize dolphin slaughter while eating animals raised in deplorable conditions. (By the way, stop eating octupus. They are very smart, precocious creatures.) How do they reconcile this? What makes them freak about one thing and be so permissive about another?

I am a very tolerant person. I attribute this to my sociopathy. Unlike empaths, who are so hard-wired to believe whatever their culture has programmed them to think, I can look at something from a blank slate point of view. I guess this is also why I'm a libertarian -- I don't believe that my ideas are so right that they should be imposed on others, even if those other people disagree. In other words, I am as skeptical about the beliefs I hold as I am about the beliefs of others. And I don't play favorites like empaths who say, "Imposing my beliefs on others is fine because mine are supported by (fill in the blank pet reasons: science, religion, logic, tradition, etc.), but you can't do the same because your beliefs are only supported by (fill in the blank hated reasons: science, religion, logic, tradition, etc.)." So I trend away from imposing my beliefs on others, and I don't necessarily think that one basis for beliefs is better than another. That doesn't mean I don't respect people's beliefs, though. To keep the peace and as a courtesy to others that I expect to be reciprocated, i will almost always take off my shoes when walking on someone's sacred ground.

Does that make me not a sociopath? Ha. Well, the process of how I do it sounds at least Aspergian. How do I know when to take off my shoes? It's like discovering a food allergy. Maybe you eat something at a restaurant and get sick. Other people from your party ate the same thing and did not get sick. Maybe you just caught a flu bug, you think. A few months later you eat something else and get similar symptoms. The symptoms seem the same, but you don't know what could be the common ingredient. You keep collecting info, eliminating this, eliminating that, keeping a mental log of what you could possibly be allergic to. It is clear to you by now that even though you cannot see what is making you sick, can't even identify it, there is certainly something wrong because you keep getting bad reactions. Maybe your boss periodically gets angry at you in the same way. Maybe your spouse can't stand to be around you when you are like _____. I am in those types of situations all the time -- people are mad at me and I have no idea why. chances are, though, I am encroaching on someone's moral code and/or sense of personal boundaries. I have learned that either I keep doing the same thing and getting the same adverse reaction, or I figure something else out. otherwise I'm in for a world of hurt, because it's like a moral/personal boundary minefield out there. Right aspies?

Famous sociopaths in history: Nancy Wake

From a reader (quoting extensively from other sources, not always notated in quotation marks):

I was recently reading about a spy in WWII named Nancy Wake, known as The White Mouse, and it struck me that this woman shows many of the classic traits of a sociopath. Im not sure if you have heard of her before, so here is a not so brief summary:

"The youngest of six children of Charles and Ella Wake, with the next eldest eight years ahead of her, she always felt a little isolated from the rest of the family, with the sole exception of her filmmaker father, whom she adored, but was devastated when, at the age of four, her father abandoned the family – an event believed to have sparked her rebellious nature and fearsome temper. The rest of Wake's childhood was spent waging a kind of guerilla war against her mother and, to a lesser extent, her siblings, which ended only when she ran away at 16."

With $300, she moved to New York and was soon working as a freelance journalist, which led her to Paris where she apparently led a wild life:
"She once described herself — as a young woman — as someone who loved nothing more than “a good drink” and handsome men, “especially French men.” She found work as a freelance journalist, and managed at the same time to live “Parisian nightlife to the full,” according to Mr. FitzSimons. By 22 this globetrotting Aussie/Kiwi was living in Paris, working as a freelance newspaper journalist during the day and  then rocking out at the hottest Parisian nightclubs after dark.  A tough-as-hell chick who could rarely be found without a double gin and tonic in her hand and designer cosmetics in her purse, Wake had a reputation for drinking hard, telling dirty jokes, and then getting a tall, dark, and handsome Frenchman pick up the tab for her. "

After being sent to Germany to interview Hitler, Wake developed a "deep, deep hatred" of Nazis and devoted her life to eliminating them. She married a rich industrialist, and together they helped rescue refugees, spy on Germans, and smuggle information across enemy lines. She used her charms to manipulate German soldiers:
"Against the suspicions of German guards manning the various checkpoints she had to get through, she regarded her beauty as her principal shield and played upon it to the maximum, openly flirting with many Germans. Using her charms and a native cunning, she was so successful with the Resistance that she soon graduated to taking groups of refugees - often downed Allied pilots or Jewish families - between safe houses until they reached the base of the Pyrenees, where other guides would get them across."

She was soon on Gestapos most wanted list, and after her husband was tortured and killed by Nazis trying to find her, she waged open war against the Nazis, leading a resistance movement of 7,000 men against them.

"In April 1944 she parachuted into France to coordinate attacks on German troops and installations prior to the D-Day invasion, leading a band of 7,000 resistance fighters.  Her chute got stuck in a tree on the way down, and when the local French resistance leader said some asinine thing like "I wish all trees grew such beautiful fruit," or something equally cheesy she gave him the finger and said (in perfect French no less), "Don't give me that French shit." In order to earn the esteem of the men under her command, she reportedly challenged them to drinking contests and would inevitably drink them under the table. But her fierceness alone may have won her enough respect: During the violent months preceding the liberation of Paris, Wake killed a German guard with a single karate chop to the neck, executed a women who had been spying for the Germans, shot her way out of roadblocks and biked 70 hours through perilous Nazi checkpoints to deliver radio codes for the Allies."

"With her coiffured hair and red lipstick, Wake was the epitome of glamour, but when she was dropped into occupied France she became a fighting force.
Even without a weapon, she could be deadly. During one raid she reportedly killed an SS guard with her bare hands to prevent him raising the alarm. "She is the most feminine woman I know until the fighting starts. Then she is like five men," one of her French colleagues recalled."

Despite the violent nature of her heroic deeds, she displayed no hint of remorse over killing.

"Afterwards she would declare: "In my opinion, the only good German was a dead German, and the deader, the better. I killed a lot of Germans, and I am only sorry I didn't kill more."

"Lady was ice-cold.
Known as "The White Mouse" by her German pursuers, Wake spent much of the war as an Allied operative in France, helping escaped POWs and others wanted by the Germans flee to Spain, running messages between the British military and French resistance — and, of course, choking the life out of various Nazis.

"I was not a very nice person," Wake said once, according to the Times. "And it didn't put me off my breakfast.""

"She returned several times to live in Australia, making unsuccessful attempts to get elected to parliament, but had an uneasy relationship with the country of her childhood, feeling unrecognised and underappreciated. This led her to refuse decorations from the Australian government; with characteristic bluntness, she said they could "stick their medals where the monkey stuck his nuts". In February 2004, she relented and was made a Companion of the Order of Australia.

Naturally, not giving a crap about awards and stuff like that, Wake sold off her medals and lived off the money for the rest of her life.  When asked why the hell she sold a trio of Croix de Guerres, she said, "There's no point in keeping them… I'll probably go to hell and they'd melt anyways."
Wake found post-war life uneventful. "It's all been so exciting … and then it all fizzled out. I had a very happy war," she said. FitzSimons told Australian radio: "She was a woman who was always a hair-trigger from being in a rage … and that rage within her was wonderful during the war, [but] it could be problematic when the war was over. She was a force of nature."

"Her volatility and bursts of rage, which had been so effective in the war, did not stop with the peace. A lot about Wake was ill-suited to regular civilian life and she was keenly aware of it. ''After the war ended, it was dreadful because you've been so busy and then it all just fizzles out,'' she told The Australian in 1983.

"In an interview a decade ago, at the age of 89, Wake appeared to have lost none of her fighting spirit. "Somebody once asked me: 'Have you ever been afraid?' Hah! I've never been afraid in my life," she said."

"“I was never afraid,” she said. “I was too busy to be afraid.”

By most accounts, Ms. Wake never figured out what to do with her life after the war.

She settled, the best that she could, for being a homemaker for her second husband, a garrulous former RAF pilot by the name of John Forward, whom she had met in the mid-1950s and who took up a position as a mid-ranking executive with an Australian textiles firm. Generally, the two were very happy together and John came to cope with being with a woman who was only ever a hair-trigger away from high hilarity or high-octane fury."

Exceptionalism

I was at a conference this weekend where the buzzword was exceptionalism.

I met this man who is well respected in my field.  It turns out that he had heard of my own work and had been promoting me to some of his colleagues.  We quickly became friends, spending much of one day and evening together, the activities gradually escalating in terms of personal intimacies shared and substances consumed.  As I saw his professional mask begin to drop around me I was suddenly struck with the thought, this man is like me.  I almost wanted to talk to him about it, at least feel him out about it.  But then I was struck with another thought -- this man does not believe he is like me.  If I started asking him about it, he would vehemently deny it.  He would be horrified to hear me describe my own thoughts on the matter.  I might be outted and shunned.

This second train of thoughts was triggered by one realization -- this man thinks that the concept of exceptionalism aptly applies to him.  The Wikipedia definition of exceptionalism is the perception that something is exceptional in some way and "thus does not need to conform to normal rules or general principles."  In the context of my conference, people would refer to things as being part of a particular group, but despite that inclusion, they warranted special treatment from other members of the group.  A quick and dirty example is a baby.  Let's say the general rule is that citizens of a country should carry their own weight.  Let's also say that babies are unable to carry their own weight because they're by their nature relatively helpless.  Exceptionalism would apply to that baby to excuse it from complying with that particular rule.

This guy's version of exceptionalism was more like the classic ubermensch mentality that (I have found) is still quite popular amongst people who consider themselves to be intellectuals.  Morality is for the bourgeoisie.  They do not need to actually adhere to those moral standards because they are exceptional.

When this man that I met was evidencing his clear lack of moral standards about things that I think are pretty clear, societally speaking, I got excited, thinking that I had met another someone like me.  On second thought, I realized that although he doesn't believe morals apply to him, he believes they apply to everyone else.