Psychopaths (Adult and Otherwise)

?

except all of my autistic / aspergers kids in my classes tend to be very introverted and would be sitting by themselves looking at pr0n or sitting as far away from other kids as possible making lists of types of frisbees

i agree there is a similarity but the behavior is very very different

the proportion of engineering majors at good schools with autism spectrum disorders is probably higher than say the number of child soap actors or fast food workers with autism, but probably not so high that engineering majors can just be assumed as 'autistic'

there is no reason a psychopath couldn't have other developmental disorders or psychiatric conditions

engineering majors are just generally terrible, it's not a dsm-v thing

tbf i think roz was referring to offering other kids pr0n (unaware of social norms) and chasing the frisbee (lack of empathy)

yeah i think so, i misread that

frisbee example doesn't sound autistic at all tho

like higher forms of communication, intuition etc are impared, but most aspergers cases would realize jumping on some random person's someone's skull is problematic behaviour

i think of it as not understanding the tradeoff

i.e. assuming that being an athletic frisbee dude (he was big and stocky and muscle-y and i think he did track and lifted weights) who chases down frisbees w/ intensity would be impressive to girls rather than realizing girls are looking at him going "wtf is wrong w/ that psycho"

I was just reading the thread when tlg posted the first part and I was like, how is this guy a psychopath? and yep I was referring to the high school anecdotes - I wasn't assuming that engineering majors were autistic! I know I quoted that bit, but the part about him being an engineering student didn't quite register. sorry if it came out that way.

my theory is: our society favors psycopathic behavior. bingo, psycopaths!

no actually i misread yr post and got snarky on a false premise, sorry for that

im trying to read ronsons psychopath book and drink wine

in my mind

psychopath = doing socially unacceptable things (offering strangers pr0n, endangering underclassmen to catch a frisbee) in order to get a perceived reward (social acceptance)

asperger's = being intensely obsessed w/ a few interests to the point of not being able to relate to people on any other level, no cognitive impairment

autism (low-functioning) = serious neurological disorder w/ cognitive impairment which is not really the same as asperger's even though it has the same biological root

i'm not a psychologist so i'm not really qualified to draw these lines but i do work w/ a lot of special education students and have done some professional work on autism spectrum disorders and that's where i got my ideas about asperger's and autism (i have no professional experience w/ psychopathy)

my uncle's son has asperger's, he is super good at school and very very smart (he's in 10th grade and doing calculus) and does everything like a normal person (eating, dressing, hygiene, etc) but basically has no interest in anything but video games, particularly sims like farmville and pokemon-type rpgs, but if you want to he is glad to have a two-hour adult-level conversation with you about those topics that even though he is 15. he understands social norms and whatnot and will like get up from his pokemon to help his younger brother if he falls on his face (which he does a lot since he's a rambunctious kid who loves doing this like jumping off furniture) but he would really just rather play pokemon than make friends - except he has a ton of online friends and a few IRL friends who are also super-into pokemon and gaming and they do friend-type things like have little parties that revolve around those interests

but i have never seen him engage in antisocial behavior (as wikipedia puts it "behaviour that lacks consideration for others and may cause damage to the society") although he is pretty much what you might call "antisocial", ie introduce him to other kids and he'll say hello and smile and then go back to his ipod touch and ignore the other kids

i do sorta fear the day when he discovers pokemon pr0n (if he hasn't already) :-(

i guess that's a pretty stupid thing of me to say, he is 15 for god's sake

i had dim sum w/a bunch of friends and their kids and all of them were zoned out on iphones and made zero eye contact. could be a technology thing to some extent? kinda chilling to think how much i rely on technology and ~feel the lure~ and it didn't become prevalent at this level of 'necessity' until i was in my early twenties.

yeah when my parents have parties sometimes there will be like a circle of kids in the living room and the ones in the middle-school to high-school range will all be on ipod touches or iphones chatting with their "real friends" or facebooking or whatever and yeah, zero eye contact or interest in each other, asperger's or no

the younger ones at least seem to show some interest in each other and are still into running around and doing things like playing with the cat and dog

i guess kids attitude nowaday is "why bother to make friends with these new kids who i'm only connected to cause our parents know each other and i probably won't see again for weeks or months if at all and i can just be hanging out with my IRL friends in computer land"

i've pretty much decided if i ever have kids i'm not going to let them have iphones or ipads or computers or nintendos ... EVER

although he is pretty much what you might call "antisocial", ie introduce him to other kids and he'll say hello and smile and then go back to his ipod touch and ignore the other kids

i think "asocial" is the official word for this kind of thing -- disinterest rather than hostility. but yeah everyone says antisocial.

i've pretty much decided if i ever have kids i'm not going to let them have iphones or ipads or computers or nintendos ... EVER

― the late great

word

right, like non-social basically

was LBJ a psychopath?

It's easier to see the traits in Stalin and not just because he ordered the death of thirty million people.

OHmigod my dad is like SUCH a psycho like do you WANT me to become a friendless xtian luddtardddd{unintelligble vocal fry}

i figure even in the year 2040 being able to make eye contact and being outdoorsy and athletic and knowing how to read books will still have more cachet than "being good at the internet"

one thing that strikes me about kids today compared to when i was in high school are that kids who are "good at computers" are not actually very good at computers ... like i had a kid who told me he did "procedural 3d graphics" and i was like "oh wow cool" and then i found out that meant that he'd pirated an expensive CGI program and was good at highlighting regions of the screen and pressing a button that said "TREES" or "MOUNTAIN" and manipulating the sliders

american kids who are "good at technology" nowadays seem to basically be just good consumers and proficient end-users rather than innovators or creators, but maybe it's just always been the case that 0.001% are creators and innovators and everyone else is basically just a "vulgar mechanick" in the words of isaac newton

xxp

the trait in stalin that gives me pause is his incredible patience. i don't know if a psychopath would have been able to play that long-term a game. but who knows.

lbj definitely comes off as one in the first couple caro volumes, especially in childhood; later on it's easier to attribute his psychopathic features to just Being A Politician. but yknow. don't have to be crazy to work here but it helps.

can someone link to studies showing what TV did if anything to the attention spans and social skills of the first generation exposed to it?

yeah Stalin could be impulsive but I can't think of any decisions after 1930whatever motivated by a bad temper (are there instances of Stalin yelling at subordinates like Hitler did to his?). The guy was methodical.

xp to myself (sorry for blogging) then again, i guess that's just the state of the american math and science educational system that values "watch what the teacher does and copy what the teacher does and then do it again accurately on a standardized test" rather than tinker and explore and figure it out yourself

re stalin and lbj i agree with DLH, i'm not sure how good of a working definition this is going to be because under that rubric pretty much every general or admiral or executive is going to turn out to be a psychopath

alfred i don't think that's going to be forthcoming because afaict ideas about social skills and emotional intelligence or whatever postdate the introduction of TV

he had those weird sadistic dinner parties where he made everyone drink way too much but that's in the twilight of his rule when he's genuinely starting to come unhinged and seems like pretty standard-issue Absolute Power madness.

the most psycho-like guy i ever spent real time with was a dude named l____ with whom i lived for about a year. this was during the early 90s, in a large, cheap and deliriously scuzzy rooming house full of drug & street casualties in seattle's university district. he was a smelly, perennially shirtless young hippie who inhabited a nice, expensive room upstairs with his girlfriend, while i lived in a dismal basement closet for which i paid $50 a month. l____'s girlfriend was sweet, smart and seriously cute.

l____, otoh, was completely insane. he said everything with a weirdly challenging smirk, so you could never tell if he was being sincere or just fucking with you. he was prone to proclamations of his own divinity and fits of furious anger in response to minimal provocation. while he could be decent, in a strangely childlike, moon-eyed way, he often expressed total, withering contempt for everyone around him, including his girlfriend. he seemed to reserve a special contempt for "social fictions" like love and friendship, and was quite up front about the ease with which he was able to manipulate others (including his long-suffering girlfriend, who fled back to massachusetts after a few months).

anyway, i spent a lot of time with l___ because we were both unemployed, creatively dedicated and heavily into weed. we slept until the mid-afternoon and spent days into weeks on end smoking out and painting in his room, going out dumpster-diving or just running around being crazy at night. i've never done better work than during that year. l____ believed that the forces of nature communicated to him through the movements of animals and the patterns of glowing lines he saw everywhere, and he tried to represent this in his work. his extrasensory perceptions mostly made him wrathful, and he often talked about doing harm to the government figures supposedly for responsible for this or that building. he was really pissed about the arrangement of municipal buildings.

i remember hanging out with him on the roof once, watching birds come and go, and he told me about killing animals when he was a kid. squirrels, cats, dogs, etc. he related this with a creepy sort of dispassion, so i asked if he still did it and how he felt about it now. he said no, that he didn't want to kill animals anymore, that he felt bad about it and knew they deserved better. i got the impression, though, that this is what he felt he should say as a good hippie-shaman-type, that none of it really meant much of anything to him. while he was too obviously delusional to be a pass-for-normal psychopath, there was some really dark shit in there that he mostly kept hidden.

I only mention it because I'm reluctant to blame kids these days when I'd rather yell at their parents.

like the idea of social skills dates back to the 30s and 40s but i don't think people were really doing actually empirically studying it until the 50s so there's really no data set to look at

also it's an interesting question to ask what exactly are social skills and interpersonal skills and empathy defined as in societies that did or do things we think are really unthinkable like own slaves or force women to wear burqas or practice human sacrifice

http://www.arthistoryguide.com/images/294.jpg

what kind of social skills did these people have

would they be good at tumblr?

tbh I would prefer if a lot of parents my age would stick to playing with iPhones if it meant I wouldn't have to listen to their drivel.

as far as The Terror goes i think beria was probably a psychopath. he made stalin's wife's skin crawl from the moment she met him (and stalin back then was not totally dismissive of his wife) but he was a talented enough sycophant that he got to hang around the dacha all the time anyway.

tbh I would prefer if a lot of parents my age would stick to playing with iPhones if it meant I wouldn't have to listen to their drivel

QFT

(plus i think svetlana has a story about playing in the garden and running into beria's feet and looking up and seeing him smile down at her and for a moment just being really fundamentally freaked out in a way she couldn't explain.)

(but she blames him for everything cuz she can't bring herself to put it on her dad.)

recommend me a good book about stalin, this all sounds v v interesting and is something i know zilch about

tbh i think most of what i know about stalin is inferred from "animal farm"

all my juicy stuff here has come from this one; it is also suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper interesting to read svetlana's memoir twenty letters to a friend, even if she's obv not the most objective source. then there's conquest's the great terror for a dryer and less personal but totally exhaustive and horrifying analysis of the purges. the montefiore book also has a prequel called young stalin where he's running around being dashing, writing poetry, robbing armored cars for lenin, etc..

whoa at contenderizer's story . jeepers

what kind of social skills did these people have

would they be good at tumblr?

social skills are entirely context-dependent, so theirs were probably somewhat different than ours. i'm inclined to think, however, that social skills have always existed, whether or not they were defined as such. some people seem easily able to observe, absorb and make use of the complex social environment they inhabit (whether or not they do this consciously). others are almost catastrophically unable to do this. a lot of western literature, going back to shakespeare at least, concerns the application of social skills to achieve personal ends.

Conquest's book is wonderful.

contenderizer did you get the impression that the guy was telling the truth about having killed the animals?

yeah, he seemed pretty reflective in that moment

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/when-your-child-is-a-psychopath/524502/

I read that last week. Never really thought about child psychopaths before!