Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Lie to me

I've finally gotten around to watching the television drama "Lie to Me," where they detect lies by reading microexpressions. It's sort of making me nervous. I realize that like all fictional depictions of science, the good guys are going to have a success rate of almost always, when in real life the accuracy of these methods is not nearly as high. Still, I'm worried. When I say I fake emotions well, I mean well enough to get by in a world where people assume that I am having normal emotions and/or don't care. My skills are not good enough to withstand this sort of close scrutiny.

The show also portrays the struggle that occurs when one person can intuit things about another person that that person doesn't want to be known. First, it's hard to be the one intuiting, to look the other way, to pretend you don't see what is happening, or to be presented with the temptation of using that information for your own gain and to not yield to that temptation. Second, it is hard for the person being read to not conceal their secrets, to not be able to control how the reader sees them, and to feel constantly vulnerable around another person because they can read you and you can't even fathom them. This is sort of an interesting dynamic that most people here are familiar with, but rarely gets represented in entertainment media.

And the show does make you more aware of different means of deception, which will always be relevant if you ever interact with anyone.

Monday, May 31, 2010

Sociopaths in the news: predator


This article is worth reading about a textbook sociopath running amok:
With wonder and horror, authorities and associates are recounting a singular crime spree in which, they say, a dogged con man exploited others' goodwill or greed.

"This guy wanted that quantum leap," said Greg Ovanessian, a veteran San Francisco police fraud inspector, "from zero to everything."

In his wake, authorities say, he left ruin. He contributed to the 2008 closure of New College of California in San Francisco, which had been around for 37 years. He is accused of conning an art collector out of $400,000 - money he blew in Las Vegas.

In the capper, police say, Niroula and an odd band of accomplices killed a Palm Springs retiree and tried to sell his home. That has the 28-year-old Niroula - whom San Francisco prosecutors call the "Dark Prince" - in a Riverside County jail awaiting a Sept. 7 murder trial.
Among the priceless text messages Niroula sent to friends and lovers:
"I am a predator. That's why you love me."

"Honey, everyone believes me until they have been conned ... some even after that."
I included the mug shots above of Niroula, his accomplices, and people that got caught up in everything just because I think it is very obvious who the sociopath is.

Friday, May 28, 2010

Gloves come off

I know nothing about hockey, but apparently you must take off your gloves to fight. When the gloves come off in boxing, that means that things are going to get ugly, hence the origin of the phrase "gloves come off." If it is the same in hockey, it seems unusual that officials would promote that sort of violence, or at least more than they already do by routinely allowing fights to proceed uninhibited.

I sort of like the hockey rule. I feel that there is something more honorable about fighting with the gloves off than with them on. You're not pretending. You're not hiding behind something or somebody else. The way I feel about things is that if you have a problem with me, let's go at it. I can play dirty and you can play dirty, but don't try to kid yourself or anyone else that you don't want to, that you are just doing your job, or whatever else. Don't hide behind your badge. If you think you need to take out the trash and that includes me, then okay, but don't later pretend that you've never gotten dirty. That's what I really can't stand about the guilt trips or the public shaming. Let's just both agree to disagree and get on with it because you can take me down in a fair fight, or you can cheap shot me to death, but even if I don't have the time or the inclination to play enforcer with you, some other crusader will, and I know for a fact that you will eventually get yours.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Sociopaths on television: Breaking Bad

Our time is now (!), as suggested by this review of "Breaking Bad":
When, and why, did American television and cinema viewers first fall in love with the Sociopath protagonist? Perhaps the audience was always there, nascent and ready to be born. My current favorite Sociopath television show is AMC’s Breaking Bad, the story of an ordinary, albeit resentful and self-loathing, married man who breaks out of his bourgeois cocoon to become a Methamphetamine dealer. His bourgeois name is the aptly constructed “Walter White,” representing the plain vanilla nature of his high school Chemistry teacher life in small town New Mexico. His alter ego name is “Heisenberg” (after Nobel winning German physicist Werner Heisenberg), chosen by White, to represent his genius in making the purest and best “Meth” ever seen in the Southwest and Mexico.

I think Coppola’s Godfather series created the modern heroic Sociopath. We rooted for Brando’s and Pacino’s characters, although Michael Corleone became unlikable by the end of Godfather II. Coppola was the first to romanticize the familiar character of the gangster in movies. But Quentin Tarantino perfected the generalized concept of the protagonist Sociopath. His breakout film was, of course, Pulp Fiction, a so-called dark comedy with such a wide variety of watchable sociopaths one could probably make a television series around virtually every major character in the film. In fact, the two strands of modern Sociopathic television and films can be plausibly traced to either Coppola or Tarantino. In the organized crime motif, for example, there is of course The Sopranos and the unfortunately canceled series Brotherhood. But shows like Dexter and Breaking Bad are in the dark comedy mode consistent with Tarantino’s sensibility.

Breaking Bad has 2 million viewers. Stuck on AMC (I have 150 HD channels but AMC is not one of them) this is a pretty big audience. Going back to my opening question, why are these shows appealing? For me, the theme was repulsive. Then I watched it. I root for Heisenberg/White, even though he has been directly and indirectly responsible for many deaths. In real life I would want him dead yesterday. But in my sometimes fantasy life, I somehow identify with him. What’s that all about? Maybe “between the dust and love that hangs on everybody, there is a dead man trying to get out.” Or a Sociopath.
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