Psychopaths (Adult and Otherwise)

Was King Leopold II a psychopath?

27%

Same here. Popular score this.

33%

lol people are so easy

21% http://i.imgur.com/zi7hd.gif

After careful study of these results, I note that people are never any percentage of psychopathic which is not divisible by three. I confidently conclude from this fact that it is impossible to be 100% psychopathic, but 99% is the most one can hope for.

Nonsense! Just cut at thirty-three and a third.

Hit "agree" on everything and you get 100%

which btw gives the text
"You can play hardball with the best of them! You know what you want and are not afraid to go for it – even if it means bending the rules occasionally and putting a few noses out of joint on the way. Nothing fazes you. You are decisive, self-confident and pretty much up for anything. You are a ‘means-to-an-end’ person. For you, it’s not necessarily a matter of right or wrong, but of what gets the job done. ‘Bring it on’ is your mantra, but to help those around you keep their heads, you should learn some tricks to help you temper your self-satisfying tendencies..."

you get 100%

I am sorry. These results are anomalous and must be thrown out as suspect.

Experiences have me suspecting that some of these parents might be plausibly described as psychopathic or sociopathic, or just burnt out, in denial, etc.---from Irrationally Angrier:
This deserves its own thread, but right now I'm too depressed by latest incident: parents who let their children run wild in public.

― dow, Sunday, December 29, 2013 7:01 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

With the parent a few feet away in most cases, but also those who just fucking drop them off and leave (in malls where I'm working/consuming, libraries, etc)

― dow, Sunday, December 29, 2013 7:03 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And the ones who are a few feet away may either flip put if anybody says anything, or get this really creepy smile (sometimes while leaving with kid, even). But mostly the former. A few do get seemingly sincerely apologetic and worried, like they suddenly realize what they've done, or not done. I would never ever ever say anything unless it's my job, which occasionally it has been (gently someone to take her child outside after child has puked all over store: not a good idea).

― dow, Sunday, December 29, 2013 7:08 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

gently *asking* someone, that is.

― dow, Sunday, December 29, 2013 7:09 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

those ppl are not sociopaths

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/life-as-a-nonviolent-psychopath/282271/

he sure does self-diagnose as a lot of fucking things, im not surprised pyschopath happened to be one of em

has he taken the test for hypochondria has he

i'm interested in psychopaths like everyone else but they sure are trendy right now. "psychopathic" has basically replaced the word "selfish".

whatever happened to plain old narcissism.

the average selfish person has a lot to answer for these days

good luck getting a narcissist to own up to being 'average'

sorry, the above-average selfish person

i'm interested in psychopaths like everyone else but they sure are trendy right now

feel the same about unicorns, wonder if they have similar ontological status

I got 48%.Think I might retake and see if that's consistent. Mind on other things,

i got 12% on that test. i don't trust those kinds of surveys at all -- people don't know themselves -- but that score was in keeping with an argument i had with a friend recently where she said (more or less) that i can never relate to ordinary people because i don't understand the homicidal impulse.

There's a big difference between not understanding it and not indulging it.

yeah, this was about me allegedly not wanting to kill people whereas most people allegedly do. it was sparked by a thing on npr where a soldier claimed that most people (himself included) join the military because they deeply want the opportunity to kill someone. i was skeptical about this and my friend thought i was being naive.

i think that test mostly measures what people want to think about themselves, which is also something that impacts their behaviors. i guess i disagree with fallon (the nonviolent psychopathic neuroscientist) because i don't think inherent brain structure is the main determinant of how selfish people allow themselves to be.

that soldier and your friend are psychopaths fyi

The soldier is. My friend is just trying to be realistic about people's interest in violence, as evidenced by entertainment etc.

I don't know if that's true any more than liking a bacon sandwich is an expression of a desire to slaughter pigs but there is something to the idea that enlistment does reveal something about your comfort level with being complicit in killing people.

yeah saying "most people want to kill people" is a mischaracterization of the discussion; the main point that was raised is that there are natural inclinations to violence that are repressed and certain people look for outlets for these inclinations, one of the most dangerous of which being the military. freud said the same thing in civilization and its discontents. there's something to it, probably, even though i personally don't feel like society has repressed any of my inclinations toward aggression. freud felt like i did on this account; certain drives are more present in certain individuals, many of whom do not exhibit antisocial behavior.

i am listening to deafheaven right now. maybe music like this is how i deal with my aggressive energy, and maybe my self-identification as a pacifistic sort of dude -- which comes from my upbringing -- makes it so i don't like to recognize this aggressive energy. see, this is why i don't trust people when they diagnose themselves with things. it's a cheesy quote but vonnegut said "we are who we pretend to be" and i think this is true.

or at least, in large part true. self-described psychopaths seem to like the idea that they are different than other people, and to value certain psychopathic traits such as cunning and worldly success over traits like empathy and caring. maybe they have this value system -- and subsequent ego ideal -- because of a malfunctioning amygdala but maybe not. probably the amygdala is just one part of the equation and we have no way of knowing how big a part it plays.

Not all violence is pathological.

this story is insane, and this guy is def a psychopath:
http://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/1993/february/the-professor-and-the-love-slave?single=1

Some follow-up on that article.

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS

April 25, 1993, Sunday, HOME FINAL EDITION

Fugitive Cathey forged new life;
He lived life of Oklahoma woodsman

BYLINE: Pete Slover, Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 35A

LENGTH: 1234 words

DATELINE: HODGEN, Okla

One thing distinguished the well-spoken 51-year-old psychologist from the dozens of other Texas land buyers Monte Shockley had seen.

"He was probably the single most intelligent person I've ever met,' Mr. Shockley said Saturday, recalling the balding stranger he met in May.

The man had tooled five winding hours of highway to seek his corner of paradise amid the verdant rolling mountains of southeastern Oklahoma. Leaning on the bumper of his white Lincoln Continental, he handed Mr. Shockley a card stamped with his oddly alliterative name -- soon to be penned on papers closing a 20-acre sale -- Preston Primm.

But as suddenly as he appeared, Preston Primm -- or at least the fiction of Preston Primm -- disappeared, wiped out Wednesday in a shootout with local lawmen. He is jailed in lieu of $ 2 million bail on charges that he shot at officers.

His real identity, discovered after his arrest: Bill Cathey, former University of North Texas English instructor, a fugitive whose Texas charges include kidnapping and forcing a Dallas woman into sexual slavery in the summer of 1991.

In the same way that Dr. Cathey's Dallas associates reeled at his original kidnapping arrest, his Oklahoma acquaintances have watched in shock as the Preston Primm they knew melted like a carefully built snowman in a warm rain.

Last May, Dr. Cathey, as Preston Primm, answered Mr. Shockley's land ad in a Dallas newspaper. He said he was a widower, mourning his wife's recent death in a car crash, in need of a place to heal his withered psyche.

In truth, he was about to jump bond and flee Texas and faced a July trial on a kidnapping charge. After closing on the Oklahoma property in June, he bought about $ 1,400 in camping equipment and disappeared from Texas.

About that time, Mr. Shockley said, Dr. Cathey arrived to work his claim, a scenic square sandwiched between the clear-running Black Fork River and the Ouachita National Forest. Access to the plot requires a 20-minute, four-wheel-drive creep along a rocky trail, covered in spots by foot-deep streams.

The newcomer sank a well, hauled in wood and began building a cabin, the locals recalled. With a small cash down payment, he bought an adjacent 20 acres, regularly making total mortgage payments of $ 300 to Mr. Shockley for his $ 30,000 debt. Unlike other settlers, he told folks that he wasn't a hunter and couldn't shoot another living being.

"He just seemed real, real nice,' said Danny Baxter, an exterminator from Poteau, Okla.

The woodsman's friendly face and bushy beard became known among the 8,000 residents of Poteau, the LeFlore County seat. He would sip coffee with the regulars at the new car showroom, chatting wittily about any and every subject: religion, politics, history. The man is a genius, the word got around.

"He was real likable, and I liked him,' said Sara Allen, a Poteau lawyer.

Mr. Shockley recalled that he last drank coffee with "Preston' Wednesday morning, the day of the fateful shootout. Preston said he was headed to the courthouse to check on his property taxes and inquire about getting a utility hookup.

Confrontation over car

Authorities say that about 2 p.m. that day, Dr. Cathey approached two deputies who were investigating a stolen car found abandoned near a minimum-security prison a few miles from his encampment.

After saying that he owned the car, stolen from Paris, Texas, Dr. Cathey learned that the deputies planned to tow the vehicle, deputies said.

It was then that he reportedly pulled a 9mm pistol and threatened to shoot one of the deputies. The other officer distracted Dr. Cathey, and the first deputy shot him. Dr. Cathey shot back, missing the deputies but hitting their car, deputies said.

Dr. Cathey was wearing a bulletproof vest. He was nicked on the cheek, and another bullet neatly pierced his left ear, according to a friend who visited him in jail. Another shot hit him in the chest of his protective vest, then careened into the fleshy part of his upper chest.

After two days in a Fort Smith, Ark., hospital, Dr. Cathey was moved to the LaFlore County jail Friday, where he is being held in lieu of $ 2 million bail. He has pleaded not guilty and faces up to life in prison on several felony charges stemming from the shootout.

Police speculate that Dr. Cathey parked the stolen vehicle because it could not make it through the rough road leading to his camp. When they searched his encampment, they reported finding a cache of stolen vehicles, including a pickup truck and a sedan taken from the Dallas area about the time he fled last year.

They also confiscated Dr. Cathey's dwelling, a 2-year-old motor home stolen from a Garland dealership about the same time as the other cars.

All of the vehicles had altered identification numbers, and police say they found equipment for doctoring those vehicle numbers, similar to rigs that Dallas-area police seized during their investigation of Dr. Cathey.

The contents of the cram-packed motor home, now parked at a Poteau bank, include keymaking equipment, gun silencers, a small quantity of amphetamines, evidence of 20 aliases and numerous books, including survivalist manuals and volumes on concealing identity.

A visit to Dr. Cathey's camp Saturday showed that he left behind a finished outbuilding, power tools, lumber and empty boxes of blanks for making duplicate keys. Also visible were a sturdy pumphouse, electrical generator, kerosene lanterns and an open-air toilet -- a frame of two-by-fours perched over a hole in the ground.

On the building door was a computer-generated note asking, "In case of emergency, please call Preston Primm,' with a Dallas phone number.

That number apparently was a voice-mail service, still answered by a recording of a voice resembling Dr. Cathey's.

Dr. Cathey has asked for a court-appointed lawyer, saying he cannot afford to pay one. Dallas authorities say they will wait until Oklahoma charges are disposed of to prosecute the kidnapping charge and related drug and driver's license forgery cases.

The Preston persona

It was with a mixture of puzzlement, shock and embarrassment that the LeFlore County citizenry learned the truth behind the man still commonly called by his assumed name.

"Preston' had not operated a lucrative counseling practice, as he had said. He wasn't a Vietnam veteran, a motivational weight-loss lecturer, a published author or a computer programmer. Preston, in short, wasn't Preston.

Heck, even his bald patch turned out to be fake, a shaved disguise that revealed a coating of stubble after several razorless days behind bars.

"I never would have guessed it. Never,' said Jim Kersh, who met Dr. Cathey over coffee at the local car dealership. "Preston was just a real decent guy.'

But Assistant LeFlore County District Attorney Gary Buckles offered a concise summary of Dr. Cathey's adventures in Oklahoma.

"He conned everybody,' Mr. Buckles said.

On the tip of many Poteau tongues was a tough question: Why would a fugitive, comfortably out of sight, risk his future in a confrontation over a stolen car?"Maybe he liked it here. Maybe he wanted to live here the rest of his life,' Mr. Shockley said, taking a slow glance around Dr. Cathey's rustic settlement, the shadowy woods, the bass-laden river nearby.

"Maybe he knew it could all be taken away from him, and he couldn't handle that.'

"The Professor & the Love Slave" sounds like an early-90s Flaming Lips track

He got life plus fifty in Oklahoma and was never sent back to Texas to be tried for the kidnapping.

xp: LOOOOOL

well, that was totally horrifying!

yeah i couldn't read it, and i have a near-bottomless appetite for horrific things

Some utterly chilling bystander effect documented in there.

holy crap, that guy sounds like both of my parents. they tried to turn me into a mindless slave growing up and waxed romantic about slavery in general. both came from established, well-respected upper middle class backgrounds. real swell sorts. everyone loved 'em! most perfect people in the world.

there are some truly fucked up people out there, and there's way more of 'em than you might think (cue spine chills).

Good god.

they were more like evil hippies from dragnet than tweedy professor wannabes. last birthday my dad tracked me down and sent me a copy of Steal This Book for my birthday, which pretty much sums up his philosophy on life. anywho.

The fact that he had to track you down suggests that you're not in regular contact with them, I hope? Phew. I'm sorry.

nah, now that i'm finally making sense of things i don't see how i could ever talk to my family again. or why i'd even want to. the whole relationship was built on lies and trickery, with nothing behind it all except their own screwed up, self-serving desires. none of which makes a lick of sense to me.

putting myself into contact with them gives them a chance to tinker around with my head again. so in short, no. might not ever talk to anyone in my family again for the sheer pointlessness of it, and for my own mental well-being. i made it this far in life alone, so it's not like i need a family like that hanging around.

A wise and excellent choice.

My mother and I are pretty sure at this point that my 47-year-old sister is an actual sociopath. Since she was about 10, she's always had a tendency to lie about basically everything, to blatantly deny wrongdoing when caught, to steal, to be superficially charming if it benefits her, to desire attention and approval, etc. Her behavior over the years has varied from the casually amoral to the outright bad, but I found something out this weekend that pretty much clinches it for me.

Three years ago my mother was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Since mom doesn't make a lot of money and doesn't have the greatest insurance, we decided to hold a fundraiser for her. My sister organized it, and she got a local bar/restaurant to host it and provide food and drink, got people to donate literally dozens of raffle prizes, got tons and tons of people to attend, and we ended up raising several thousand dollars. People were amazingly generous, donating raffle items as expensive as new bicycles and a weeklong stay in a Florida condo. There was also a 50/50 raffle with a sizeable pot, and the winner donated it back.

I found out yesterday that my sister stole every single penny of that money.

After the fundraiser, an interest-bearing account was set up with four signatories: My mother, her boyfriend, my aunt and my sister. (She was handling a lot of the insurance interaction for my mom at the time.) Little by little, over the course of the next several months, my sister took out $250 at a time. When my mother called the bank to ask them something about the account, she was told there was only $750 in it. My mother's boyfriend called my sister, and she resorted to a tactic she's been using since she was 12 years old and has never worked: "I don't know what you're talking about." By the time he hung up the phone and went to the bank, she had taken the rest of the money.

A person who would stand there and collect praise for raising money for her sick mother, who would go sit at chemotherapy sessions with her, who would handle talking to her insurance company, who would take donations from friends (many of whom were needy themselves, esp. the 50/50 raffle winner), and then turn around and betray all their trust like that . . . how can they not be an actual sociopath? My mother decided to just let it go. She's resigned herself to never seeing or speaking to her daughter again, and said, "If I had pursued it, I'd have given her power over me again, and I'm never letting that happen again."

(I also found out that she put her soon-to-be-ex husband, on whom she walked out two years ago, abandoning her two minor children, in danger of losing their house. She apparently did not make a single payment on it for two years, and managed to intercept every bank statement and notification so that he would not know.)

What the fuuuuck
this is awful (obv). Has your mum not needed the money yet or was she able to use any of it? Such a betrayal at the worst time.

Has she any more history of weird money-related behaviour?

Tons. About 20 years ago there was an episode where she was stealing checks from my mother's boyfriend's checkbook, faking his signature and cashing them. She also stole some of my mother's jewelry and pawned it. Then she took a car from them, went to Florida, stayed several months and left the car behind.

Five years ago, she was (ostensibly) thinking of buying her husband an acoustic bass guitar, and asked if he could borrow mine to see if he likes it. (Mine was a Breedlove Acoustics and cost quite a bit, and was an anniversary gift from my wife.) I loaned it to her and never saw it again. I asked for it over and over, and after she left her husband I asked him if it was in the house, and he claimed to have no knowledge of it. I'm pretty sure now it went from my hands to hers to the pawn shop.

But no, my mother never got any use from the money. And she had knee replacement surgery last year, missing three weeks of work unpaid, and could have really used whatever was left.

That's ghastly. So sorry to hear about this Phil.