Sociopaths: The Predators Among Us.

This is a repost from a thread I started on SoulForce, in response to a request to elaborate on a statement I made about sociopaths:

But, I can’t stress enough, it needs to be understood and accepted that some people do not have the brain capacity to feel normal emotions, and are human predators, just as sure as the brutality of any wild animal. And they don’t wear a bell, but often times wear an air of disarming charm.

Here’s an article (quoted from below) with some excerpts from another book I just read: Without Conscience: the Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us © 1993.

It pretty much confirmed what I had read in The Sociopath Next Door © 2005.

(Some simple Google searches will lead to a lot of articles on the subject.)

The subjects were asked to perform a simple task: hit a button as soon as they recognized a word flashed on a computer screen. While monitoring the subjects' brain waves, the researchers alternated nonsensical strings of letters with neutral words such as "table," and emotionally evocative words like "maggot" and "cancer." What they found was that normal subjects spent more time processing emotion-laden words than the psychopaths. "When you see a word like 'cancer,' you have all sorts of associations - fear, or you think of someone who's had cancer," says Hare. "But for psychopaths, the word 'cancer' and the word 'table' had the same emotional connotations - which is to say, not very many. It's as if they're emotionally color-blind."

Even more staggering were the findings of a study conducted by New York City psychiatrist Joanne Intrator, with Hare's collaboration, at the Bronx Veterans Administration hospital in 1993. The investigators employed the same language test, this time injecting the subjects with a radioactive tracer and scanning color images of their brains. As normal subjects processed the emotion-laden words, their brains lit up with activity, particularly in the areas around the ventromedial frontal cortex and amygdala. The former plays a crucial role in controlling impulses and long-term planning, while the amygdala is often described as "the seat of emotion." But in the psychopaths, those parts of the brain appeared to remain inactive while processing the emotion-laden words. That, says Hare, helps explain why a psychopath's conscience is only half-formed. "I showed the scans to several neurologists," recalls Hare. "They said that it did not even look like a human brain. One of them asked, 'Is this person from Mars?' "

Tests like these are scientific indicators, there are also checklists of behaviors that are taken into account in the attempt to diagnose a person as sociopathic/psychopathic.
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This is a long one, so if you're interested, you can read the rest of it here.

FOF’s Stuart Shepard puts forth his best argument against Barack Obama.

Anti-Fame:

Transcript:

{~~special effects~~}:

Hi, I’m Stuart Shepard, and this is Stoplight.

Eventually it gets bad, you know it {~~Michael Jackson~~}. There comes a day when people start to say, oops, not again {~~Britney Spears~~}. It’s possible in the world of celebrity, to become so famous, to be on so many magazine covers, to collect so much TV airtime, that it becomes cool for people to say that a given celebrity is not so cool anymore {~~Barry Manilow~~}. There comes a point when a celebrity tips from fame to anti-fame {~~Brett Favre~~}.

But I had this thought, that if a politician runs as a celebrity, and the celebrity gossip magazines like Time and Newsweek, offer up positive cover after cover. And if the TV networks offer up more glowing coverage than the circumstances really demand, well…{~~Barack Obama~~}.

He ran a campaign that was all big crowds and photo ops, and he could deliver a scripted line better than any Oscar winner. And people imagined him to be whatever character they wanted, and they voted for what they imagined {~~Rock Star~~}.

Right about now, as reality starts to sink in, I can imagine a lot of those folks are privately thinking: “~~This doesn’t look anything like the change I thought he meant~~”. And by the end of summer they might just be ready to say it out loud: “THIS IS NOT AT ALL WHAT I WANTED.”

Now, it’s not a time to point fingers, and this is critical, it’s a time to say “Welcome home.” And then talk to them about the important issues at stake, the fate of pre-born babies, the definition of marriage, the role of the courts {~~Anti-fame~~fame~~fame~~}.

[announcer-like:] Coming to a polling place near you in 2010 and 2012.

Touché Mr. Shepard, touché. I accept your invitation, and now realize, to my eternal chagrin, that I should have voted for John McCain:

Hello, all 300 million of you American voters. In case of my absence, I've chosen Sarah Palin to be responsible for your safety:



"As for that VP talk all the time, I tell ya, I still can’t answer that question until somebody answers for me, what is it exactly that the VP does every day?"

Since many of the attacks are targeted at Melissa Fryrear...

(CitizenLink, September 11th, 2008)

...director of the gender issues department at Focus [on the Family], CitizenLink asked her to set the record straight.

2. We often hear that people like you — who no longer identify as homosexual — do not exist. How do you respond?

Melissa Fryrear: “We also have clinical studies and research that support what so many of us know personally. Last fall, researchers Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse released the results of a three-year study that showed sexual-orientation change is possible for some individuals going through religiously mediated programs. The study was the first longitudinal, peer-reviewed, scientific research of its kind.”

I’m sorry, did she just say “peer-reviewed?”