Monday, August 27, 2012

Canadian Psycho: Luka Rocco Magnotta

I'm sorry to be so late on this, but there is apparently another (?!) "Canadian Psycho" on the loose, but not really because apparently the Mounties actually did manage to get him into custody. (Am I doing ok with the Canadianisms?)  He is the murdering star of "1 ice pick 1 lunatic". As reported by Thestar.com.

Aspiring model, self-professed bisexual porn star, hustler, small-time felon, palpable narcissist, dissected in recent weeks by profilers-for-hire as classic psychopath, the Scarborough born Magnotta — born Eric Clinton Newman, formally changing his name in 2006 — was obsessed with cosmetic surgery to alter the features he didn’t like and, reportedly, to look more like James Dean . What remained throughout was the signature sensuous pout, the bedroom mouth of a man described by a former transgendered girlfriend as actually a dud in the sack, disinterested in sex and woefully unskilled as amorous partner. Magnotta also, she claimed, hit himself compulsively.

In videotaped interviews, he touches delicately at his face.

“A lot of people tell me I’m devastatingly good-looking.’’
***
“If I don’t have my looks, then I don’t have any life. My looks and my body are my life.’’

Estranged from family, he’d already been accused by animal lover groups of torturing and killing kittens, suffocating them in plastic bags, feeding them to snakes, and posting the evidence online. This would be textbook emerging psychopathic behaviour, characteristics evident early to one relative who told the Peterborough Examiner: “He’s a nut job. I did not trust him. Eric is the type of individual . . . I think he’s mentally ill. He has delusions of grandeur. He concocts stories that he tends to believe and they in turn become fact in his mind.’’

“I am a survivor of mental illness and I’m not ashamed of it. I went through a very traumatic childhood and in my teen years experimented with drugs and alcohol. At first, I thought this was the problem . . . it wasn’t. I am manic depressive and bi-polar. One day I’m normal, the next I can’t get out of my bed and then next week I want to conquer the world. Very confusing to someone who doesn’t understand.’’

Compulsively exhibitionistic, in thrall to himself, but no more than a cipher for most of an utterly superficial life, as insubstantial as a hologram. His only known object of interest was Luka Magnotta — when not calling himself Vladimir Romanov or Angel or K. Trammel, perhaps inspired by the ice-pick murdering Catherine Trammel character from Basic Instinct.

So many identities, shedding bits of himself, forensically, in the short period that he remained a fugitive at large — he’d professed, online, to being expert in disappearing — tracked first to Paris, where he made others uncomfortable in a bistro. French police found porn magazines and air sickness bags from his flight in a room where Magnotta had stayed before lamming it when Interpol publicized his name.

“I do not necessarily feel the need to redeem my reputation since the people that know me best will be more than happy to vouch for my honesty in conduct and I can provide many satisfied and loyal references if necessary.”

Magnotta was arrested June 4 in a Berlin Internet cafĂ©, where he’d been surfing the web, reading about himself.

Is he really a psychopath? Parts seem to fit, yes, but I actually would bet borderline over both psychopath and bipolar. Thoughts?

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Sociopaths in literature: Persuasion

The charming, social climbing, unreproachable Mr. Elliot from Jane Austen's Persuasion:
Mr. Elliot is a man without heart or conscience; a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only of himself; who, for his own interest or ease, would be guilty of any cruelty, or any treachery, that could be perpetrated without risk of his general character. He has no feeling for others. Those whom he has been the chief cause of leading into ruin, he can neglect and desert without the smallest compunction. He is totally beyond the reach of any sentiment of justice or compassion. Oh! he is black at heart, hollow and black.

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Sociopath quote of the day: dragons

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them . . . How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.

Friday, August 24, 2012

Sociopath 12 step program

Pretty funny:
1. We admit that we are powerless over our character flaw - that our lives have become unmanageable -- we like it that way.

2. We have come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity -- but we don't care.

3. We have made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God or Society, as we understand Him/Her/Them -- if we trusted them more than we trusted our own judgement and responsibility.

4. We have made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves -- and have found nothing wrong.

5. We have admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being(?) the exact nature of our wrongs -- perfection.

6. We are entirely ready to have God remove all of these defects of character -- (assuming he put them there in the first place?)

7. We humbly [sic] ask Him to remove our shortcomings -- easy job, since there are few.

8. We have made a list of all persons we have harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all -- by getting out of their lives.

9. We will make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others -- (see number 8)

10. We will continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong promptly admit it -- however, other people will surely take on this responsiblity for us.

11. We have sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out -- daddy replacement?

12. Having had this spiritual awakening as a result of these Steps, we will carry this message to other Sociopaths, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. (see also sex addicts anonymous)

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Dialects and self-awareness

The other day I get in an almost fight with a Palestinian about my accent. He happens to be in my country for work and we met during a poker game with some mutual friends of ours. He asked about my accent and I said that it does not originate from my country of origin. He thought I was lying. More than that, I think he thought my refusal to own up to also being a foreigner was somehow a way to insult his own pronounced accent. When he started to get belligerent I figured I would just lie and gave him a fake backstory about a thickly accented grandmother that raised me with absentee parents, which seemed to satisfy him.

With that in mind, I found this Slate article to pretty entertaining, perhaps even a parable. It discusses the rise and spread of an American English dialect called the Northern Cities Shift, "NCS" and had this to say about the acquisition of regional dialects:

Children acquire language from face-to-face interaction with their parents and peers, and this learning is shaped profoundly by our desire to fit in. People wring their hands about the supposed disappearance of dialectic diversity for the same reason that such diversity is not, in fact, going anywhere: We cling to our specific identities and peer groups, and we defend our individual and regional idiosyncrasies when and where we can. Our dialects are often the weapon readiest to hand in that fight.

Did I not acquire my own regional dialect because I was not necessarily motivated by a desire to fit in, at least not as a very young child? Or because I never really identified with my peer group? The most unusual aspect of the NCS dialect spread, according to researchers, is how unaware the "shifters" are of their own speech patterns:


If news of this radical linguistic shift hasn’t made it to you yet, you are not alone. Even people who speak this way remain mostly unaware of it. Dennis Preston, a professor of perceptual linguistics at Oklahoma State University—he doesn’t merely study how people speak, he studies how people perceive both their own speech and the speech of others—discovered something peculiar about NCS speakers when he was teaching at Michigan State University. “They don’t perceive their dialect at all,” he says. “The awareness of the NCS in NCS territory is zero.” (Well, almost zero. The high point for NCS awareness may have come 20 years ago, when “Bill Swerski’s Super Fans” was a popular recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live.)

According to Preston, most American dialect regions are oblivious to their quirks, but NCS speakers show a particularly striking lack of self-awareness. In one experiment, shifters were asked to write down a series of words, some affected by the NCS, some not, but all dictated by someone with an NCS accent. The expectation is obvious: Shifters should ace this test. But, amazingly, NCS speakers frequently did not understand their own speech. When they hear the word cat in isolation, for example, they seem to flip a mental coin to decide whether the speaker is talking about a common pet or a folding bed.

In a separate experiment, Nancy Niedzielski, an associate professor of linguistics at Rice University, told 50 NCS speakers that she was going to play a recording of a speaker from Michigan saying the word B-A-G, which she spelled out for them. She then asked the test subjects to identify whether the signal they heard sounded like byag (the NCS pronunciation), bag (the “standard” pronunciation), or baahg (a vaguely British pronunciation). Not one of the 50 subjects said that they heard the NCS pronunciation. “There’s just an incredible deafness to the local pronunciation,” Preston says—adding that the reason, in his opinion, is clear. “They believe that they are standard, normal, ordinary speakers, and when they’re confronted with evidence to the contrary, they reject it. They reject it in their daily lives, and they reject it even experimentally. They don’t even understand themselves.”

For me it's hard not to see parallels between these NCS speakers and your typical empath: oblivious to their own behavior, unable to see parallels in their behavior and those of others, unable to even understand the fact that they are failing to understand something that is relatively obvious to others. When people talk about sociopaths being able to see right through them I usually think, yes, but a lot of this stuff is obvious if you're not caught up in that particular flavor of self-deception.

But I'm glad that people think I speak with an accent to the point that they won't even believe the truth about me. It just makes it that much more easier to obfuscate. I guess people will just believe what they want to believe, right?
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