How did you become you?

Shocked (and impressed) question from a friend after I explained to her how to seduce her crush. I didn't tell her, only smiled in response. She wouldn't understand.

Sociopath quote of the day: victim

Evil requires the sanction of the victim.

Ayn Rand

Aspie's bully sociopaths

In keeping with the previous post of aspie's/autie's not being as innocent as they seem, I was sad to see this story of an innocent sociopath being tormented by people with asperger's/autism. I guess being empathy-challenged makes aspie's/autie's excellent bullies:

I got involved in a forum war on Aspergia three years ago, in which I was arguing that a sociopath’s neurodiversity should be respected just like everyone else’s. The argument got started after a woman who was a clinical sociopath started posting on Aspergia’s forum. She had a very poor understanding of other people’s emotions, and she habitually made provocative statements as a way of getting responses that were strong enough for her to understand. Although she knew this wasn’t the ideal way to interact with people, she didn’t know what else to do. She came to Aspergia to learn how autistics dealt with the problem of misunderstanding emotions.

Of course, she didn’t explain all of this forthrightly and ask for help. I don’t think she was capable of expressing her intentions so clearly. Several of us dragged it out of her after a long, convoluted discussion that literally went on for days. After we figured out why she was there, a few of us started giving her advice on constructive ways to ask people about their feelings without being manipulative.

Unfortunately, by then she had already annoyed several other members of the forum with her confusing and provocative writing style, and they got together and decided to hound her off the forum with a barrage of nasty personal insults and rants about sociopaths. The poor woman did her best to avoid taking the bait and to practice writing friendly, non-provocative posts, but it didn’t matter what she wrote—they bashed it, and her, mercilessly.

I told them they should be ashamed of themselves for bullying a person because of her neurology on an autistic rights forum. The resulting argument went on for two months.

I’m not trying to start a war here, but I do feel it’s necessary to say this: Sociopaths have a cognitive disability. They’re not necessarily evil, and they can be taught more positive ways of interacting with people. And I am very strongly opposed to demonizing any group of people on the basis of their neurology.

First of all, I want to know what is this aspergia and what happened to this woman?Second, I wonder why she would be on an asperger's/autism site for advice on understanding emotions. That seems like the blind leading the blind to me. But fellow sociopaths, be warned that you will get even less acceptance from the rest of the empathy-challenged community than you will from the empaths themselves, to their eternal shame.

Living life as a sociopath

I asked a relative of mine to describe living life as a sociopath:

I might be a sociopath. When I make a nasty remark or hurt someone’s feelings, it is easy for me to blame my actions on the person I’m hurting. I lose patience with people that can’t do things as quick as me.

I am easily bored at social gatherings where all of the discussion is light small talk. I will use this time to get the most stoic person to laugh. This makes me feel I’m in control. I also use flattery to make people feel good.

I was a delinquent as a child and treated my teachers as tools for my pleasure. I would only stop the “torture” after they would cry and even then I felt a sense of victory when I could beat them mentally.

Sociopath or scoundrel?

Elie Wiesel, the nobel peace prize laureate and holocaust survivor, lost $15.2 million of his charity's money and lost his own personal life savings to Bernie Madoff. What did he have to say about him?

"Psychopath’ — it’s too nice a word for him,” Mr. Wiesel said in his first public comments on Mr. Madoff and the Ponzi scheme he is accused of perpetrating on thousands of individuals and charities, including the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.

"Sociopath,’ ‘psychopath,’ it means there is a sickness, a pathology. This man knew what he was doing. I would simply call him thief, scoundrel, criminal.”

Sociopath is too nice of a word for him?! I thought this day would never come! But NPR criticizes Wiesel's choice of words. In a 5+ minute commentary, their resident linguist says the following (paraphrased):

Sociopath is not a term we use affectionately, we reserve it for unsympathetic malefactors. . . Certain clinical language exonerates badness by reframing it as illness. Sociologists describe this phenomenon as the medicalization of deviance. . . Sociopath is a loose term now used to describe anyone unfettered by the pangs of conscience. . . "Sociopath" doesn't add anything to what Victorians would describe as "heartless wretch," but now it comes draped in a whitecoat.

Thank you for your unsolicited opinion, NPR. Wiesel, on the other hand, is clearly a true visionary and humanitarian.