Sunday, October 8, 2017

OldAndWise?

Hey, are you still around? Or does anyone know contact info for her?

Thanks!!!

Saturday, October 7, 2017

Your Friendly Successful Psychopath

This TED talk is from a reader. It discusses some research about psychopaths and loss aversion (they don't experience it) and suggests some ways that non-psychopaths could learn to be a little more risk seeking themselves.

It also mentions (and this is the first I've heard about this, but does not seem wrong) about how psychopaths have naturally high mindfulness because they are laser focused on whatever task is in front of them.

A third point was regarding how to influence people by doing favors for a person. I'll let you watch the explanation for that one.

Sunday, October 1, 2017

Dirty John: Seduction and Deception

From a reader:

The LA Times has a front page story along with several other full pages in the first section devoted to a piece they are calling Dirty John, along with a 6 episode podcast.  It is a true story that happened over the last few years about a sociopath named John who married a lonely rich woman and then became abusive and went after her daughter.  [SPOILER EDITED] It happened last summer and it’s amazing to see how this is playing out as a feature story. Anyway, it should be a pretty good portrait of how an SP gets released from jail,  immediately finds, seduces and marries his next victim and deals with her suspicious children.  The wife secretly recorded over 100 of their conversations after she finally came to (she ignored thousands of red flags and believed every one of his lies), so the podcast includes many audio clips of him trying to seduce/con her.  And she gave the newspaper all their pics.  They are publishing a piece of the story every day this week.  I’m not sure when the first episode of the podcast starts, maybe tomorrow.

A red flag from the article:

He had thick dark hair and a warm, friendly smile that invited trust. His eyes were hazel-green, with the quality of canceling out the whole of the world that wasn’t her, their current focus.

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Pete Davidson diagnosed with BPD

I just saw this, and good for him for being so open and public about his diagnosis, Saturday Night Live cast member Pete Davidson talks about his struggles with borderline personality disorder. From Marc Maron's podcast, by way of Rolling Stone:

Pete Davidson considers this past year a "fucking nightmare," due in large part to his borderline personality disorder diagnosis back in December 2016.
***
"I've been a pothead forever,” the Saturday Night Live star said. "Around October [or] September last year, I started having mental breakdowns where I would, like, freak out and then not remember what happened after. Blind rage. I never really did any other drugs, so I was like, 'I'm gonna try to go to rehab. Maybe that’ll be helpful.'"

Once there, Davidson said he gave up weed, but doctors guessed there might actually be a deeper-seated problem at hand.

After being treated for a bipolar disorder for a while and thinking it was his marijuana use, he finally got a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder:

Three months after going clean, however, Davidson still felt the same, and was formally diagnosed by a psychiatrist as having borderline personality disorder, or BPD. As a result, he is taking a new medication geared toward helping him manage his BPD.

"It is working, slowly but surely," he said. "I've been having a lot of problems. This whole year has been a fucking nightmare. This has been the worst year of my life, getting diagnosed with this and trying to figure out how to learn with this and live with this."

So far reactions to his news appear to be overwhelmingly positive:







So that's good news for reducing stigma for mental illness.

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Re-education

File this under the failures of morality and neurodiversity (the process of thinking) but also diversity of thought (the result of the thinking -- the actual belief). Is it just me, or does it feel more like there's a thought police than even when I started the blog eight or nine years ago.

I was watching a Korean movie and saw a reference to re-education camps. I looked it up and found this NY Times article from 1981 about actual thought police:

This is the first time that the continuing large scale of what are known as ''purification camps'' or ''re-education camps'' in South Korea has been disclosed in a publication here. It is also the first indication that there have been deaths caused by beatings in the camps, a charge that has not so far been made by South Korean human rights groups in Seoul an d that has been deni ed by Seoul officials. Camps for 'Hooligans' Opened

Army camps for ''hooligans'' were first opened in the summer last year, after military leaders headed by Gen. Chun Doo Hwan took power. Between August 1980 and January 1981, a total of 57,561 people were ''warned or re-educated,'' according to The Korea Herald, an English language newspaper in Seoul. The paper said that 38,259 of these underwent ''correctional programs in military camps.''

Arrests were originally made under martial law decrees. But the newspaper account, printed in January, said that ''purification'' programs continued into 1981 after martial law was officially terminated. Some 6,506 people were to continue under detention in ''reformatory training'' and 6,852 ''hardened hooligans'' were given ''hard labor,'' The Korea Herald said.

Tolerance has been preached with some emphasis since the re-education camps, but even in the movie there were still some wishing for those halcyon days when people who did not fit a majority groups vision for human could be dismissed as being subhuman -- a deplorable. And nowadays, is it worse? Because people aren't just hating typical targets like sociopaths or pedophiles, everybody seems to be at everybody else's throats enforcing their standard of morality on the other. The one good thing about this is as more and more people find themselves on the receiving end of social justice warriors and others looking to remake the world more in their image (either in appearance in thought) normal people are realizing that the tactics that they often advocated as being fair and just for use by their side might be less noble or effective than they thought.

I wonder what would happen if people realized that morality is in the eye of the beholder and stopped trying to force others to comply with their own particular flavor or brand. 
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