You must be a gemini

Some people are just asking for trouble. And by trouble I mean sociopaths. As further proof that those who seek after and date sociopaths are asking for it, here's a response to this email after my original personal ad:

Okay, actually, I should have added a few more things to my list: sinister, promiscuous, flexible definition of the truth, emotionally unavailable, able to rationalize almost anything to myself, manipulative, prone to boredom, weak sense of empathy. Still very Jimmy Stewart-esque, right?

"Marty" responds:

you sound like a Gemini!! I am a Taurus....Marty

Marty, you sound like you're asking for it. I hope you get what's coming to you.

You can kind of see why Marty would guess Gemini because they are two-faced monsters. But sociopaths are not two-faced so much as one-faced with a mask. Maybe that seems like a distinction without a difference, but I have the sense that not many sociopaths are geminis. I've often wondered if certain astrological signs had more sociopaths than others. I think cancers may be prone to sociopathy, but I am biased being a cancerian myself. I also think that even though Geminis might not be great sociopaths, they can easily be narcissists. But I don't really have anything besides anecdotal evidence to base these assertions on. Thoughts on the astrological connection?

Life = futility punctuated with tragedy

While driving to work today I saw a school-aged child walking a bike with a flat tire down a busy street in inclement weather. It made me remember how horrible and awkward childhood was. Then I started trying to remember when things got better. I kept thinking, moving more and more recently in time, and I couldn't really pinpoint a specific time when I stopped feeling like that kid with the flat tire. Then i started wondering, did things ever get better? Am I still that same kid?

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

-- Barry Lopez

Sociopaths = next Holocaust target

I posted earlier this month about a new television show exploiting criminals by giving them the best day ever right before arresting them. The TV executive responsible for the show rationalized the exploitation: “If it were a regular person you’d feel bad for them, but they are all wanted by the law.” This sort of rationale is used frequently to justify persecuting sociopaths or other unpopular sub-populations. Take for instance the justifications for the horrible medical experiments practiced by the Nazis on their Jewish captives:

What underpinned this behaviour was a widespread belief that some people were less than human, relegated to a lower plane of existence by their inherited degeneracy - or their race. For German doctors, a camp inmate was either a racially inferior subhuman, a vicious criminal, a traitor to the German cause, or more than one of the above. Such beings had no right to life or wellbeing - indeed, it was logical that they should be sacrificed in the interests of the survival and triumph of the German race, just as that race had to be strengthened by the elimination of the inferior, degenerate elements within it. After all, German medical science had uncovered the causes of several major diseases and contributed massively to improving the health of the population over the previous decades. Surely, therefore, it was justified in eliminating negative influences as well?

These days, it is obvious that racial hygiene is pseudoscience, but in the 1920s and 1930s it was considered a perfectly reputable science, and indeed many universities had academic departments devoted to it, not just in Germany. Against this backdrop, with their nation engaged in total war and steeped in propaganda and ideology that proclaimed the Jews to be a "cancer" or an "infection" threatening the health of the volk, physicians and scientists really did come to believe that the enemies of the Nazi state were subhuman.

Does the term subhuman sound familiar?

Sociopath TV execs exploit their sociopath criminal brothers

Fox Television is planning a new television program tentatively titled, Smile, You’re Under Arrest. The show features law officers setting up elaborate sting operations to lure criminals with warrants:

“It is a reverse Punk’d,” says Fox President of Alternative Entertainment Mike Darnell. “Instead of the worst day of your life and then a joke at the end, this is the reverse. This is the best day of your life, and then we arrest you.”

One of three set-ups just shot in Arizona features the cops luring a criminal to a movie set with the promise of making him an extra and paying him a couple hundred dollars. An elaborate film set is staged and filming begins on a faux movie. The set-up continues as the director then gets mad at the lead actor, fires him and replaces him with the law-breaking extra.

The scene escalates with the fake director introducing the mark to a supposed studio mogul and continuing to create this dream-comes-true sequence. Finally, all the participants are revealed as officers of the law, and the criminal is apprehended (before signing waivers to let the footage be used in the show).

Other scenarios include a fake fashion shoot where the subject thinks he is about to become a supermodel and another in which the mark becomes an auto racer, a set-up which ends when a police car comes up behind him on a race track to pull him over.

“If it were a regular person you’d feel bad for them, but they are all wanted by the law,” Darnell says.

This is why people feel fine persecuting sociopaths. You can just hear someone justifying sociopath abuse: "If it were a regular person, you'd feel bad for them."

Sociopath quote of the day: evil

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.

Edmund Burke.