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#sociopathy

1 post1 participant0 posts today

There's a great article up by @cwarzel in The Atlantic about The Gleeful Cruelty of the White House X Account. It's a scary but thoughtful analysis of a grim societal trend, focusing specifically on how intensification is implemented via the ex-bird site, lately a cesspool of distilled toxicity from which many still regularly feed.

ESPECIALLY the part in Warzel's article about ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) made me shudder. The article is worth reading for that part alone.

(His post at BlueSky, which I've linked below, has what I think may be a gift link.)

bsky.app/profile/cwarzel.bsky.

Bluesky Social · Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel.bsky.social)I wrote about the White House X account — which is steeped in the sociopathic posting style of far-right extremists — and seems to get more sinister and cruel with its posts each week of the administration. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/gleeful-cruelty-white-house-x-account/682234/?gift=bQgJMMVzeo8RHHcE1_KM0fEulOousRZ7mgN3LeyPGbg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Continued thread

«Essential weather balloon launches intermittently suspend at National Weather Service in Gray

Due to issues with staffing, weather balloon launches are in jeopardy and could impact forecasting.»

Reports like this are VERY alarming. The failure to properly track weather means weather effects will blindside people. That will translate to more expense and probably more injuries or deaths. There is nothing "efficient" about this. This is a toxic blend of incompetence and sociopathy.

newscentermaine.com/article/we

www.newscentermaine.comBefore you continue to YouTube

"These are the kinds of people who rise to the top in our current system: the absolute worst among us. The more ruthless and underhanded you are willing to be, the easier it is for you to become obscenely wealthy and powerful. Our systems reward and elevate sociopathy, which is why we now find ourselves ruled by sociopaths.

And meanwhile the best among us toil in obscurity, swimming against the current of this sociopathic dystopia their entire lives before dying with nothing to their names but the love that they shared. These should be the people running the world and charting the course for our species, and instead they live and die unknown and unrecognized, because our system does not elevate such beings. Instead it elevates narcissistic plutocrats, vapid celebrity artists, and groveling pundits and politicians.

This is what you get when you have a system in place where mass-scale human behavior is determined by what is profitable instead of by what is right. This is what that looks like.

Is it working?"

caitlinjohnst.one/p/when-there

Caitlin’s Newsletter · When There's No Money In The Pursuit Of The Good And No Goodness In The Pursuit Of MoneyBy Caitlin Johnstone

Are all wealthy people like this, or is it just this particular cretin? Carolla, interviewd by Kilmeade on Fox:

"Thousands were homeless overnight after the fire swept through. How come nobody slept on the street? How come I didn't sleep on the street?

"Yet we have a huge problem with homelessness. Because they are drug addicts and have mental problems. Everyone else who became homeless fell back on their network and went to a friend’s house or checked into a hotel."

Sociopathy

If a person with a documented history of sociopathic behavior (e.g., Hitler) is a threat to democracy and yet irresistible to many voters, should they be allowed to run for public office, or should such a personality be disqualifying if it can be identified by experts in a reasonably objective way? (1 of 2)

See part (2 of 2) of this thread for context.

Replied in thread

@Snoro

We have two incompatible notions of the idea of "investing". One is to make money. The other is to put resource behind something we want to happen. If one blindly believes the capitalist premise that money is proportional to what people aspire to or are grateful for, it's easy to believe that the world wants the monetary outcomes these companies produce, and so must want the world these things collectively create.

It all goes wonky as a world view if one stops and realizes that what capitalism really brings us is a world where sociopathy--the single-minded pursuit of monetary profit at the expense of all other possible virtues--sells, and where efficient sociopaths therefore rise in the ranks, and so also a world where investing money has to choose between hitching one's wagon to that sociopathy and making a good monetary return or putting one's money into things that improve the world but may or may not make much profit doing it, or might even lose against the sociopaths but will at least be something to be proud of.

Easiest to see with kids. We invest in their future by educating them and spending time with them. Will that turn a profit? Who knows? But who cares? Most of us, hopefully, don't measure success of their kids by whether having them is net financially positive. But we do so for our other investments. Except for family, and people we care about, we call things good investments if and only if they turn a profit. Saving the world but incurring a net expenditure of money in the process is called a bad investment.

To pick something topical, Social Security and Medicare, among other social safety nets, are seen by some as frilly extras. The term entitlement has been carefully chosen and managed to corral us into thinking these a net drain on society. But their hope is to corner us into thinking we must invest in the sociopathy world if we want to live comfortably.

If instead these programs assured we would not fall to ruin, we could more comfortably choose to invest in the world as a whole, in the environment, in institutions we respect, not on the basis of who can outsell who by the most ruthless means, but by who joins us in a world vision.

Yes, safety nets are about individual human dignity, but that dignity in the aggregate is not mere charity. It moves the needle on who we can afford to be in life, on whether societally we can afford a world where people are kind or can afford to care about avoiding human extinction.

The sociopaths want us to think we can't afford to invest in, to spend money on, the safety and health and happiness of ourselves and the world, but only because if they can get us to believe that, most of the world's money, resource and hope will flow to the few of them and they'll be able to delude themselves into thinking that's because the world reveres them and wanted them to succeed in proportion to that windfall and at the expense of the rest of us.

But we CAN afford to invest in such goodness for ourselves and the world. More to the point, we cannot afford not to.

#MacdonaldTriad or the triad of #Sociopathy is a controversial hypothesis that suggests a link between 3 childhood behaviors: animal cruelty, firesetting and enuresis and later violent tendencies, particularly serial offenses.

Very Shocking and Disturbing Information About Barron #Trump

“There have long been rumors that #BarronTrump is harboring some dark tendencies. According to pretty credible sources, he “slapped the sh*t out of” his nanny one time, and that’s not hard to imagine. Remember that time he got caught on camera slapping away Melania’s hand when she tried to discipline him?’

#sociopath #weird
politicalflare.com/2024/08/nyc

Replied in thread

@RickiTarr
I don't.
I think that there're varying degrees of humanity and self interest that can be measured in an X axis that looks a lot like #Empathy ranging from none to consuming. The problem with labeling things as #Evil (way on the None side) is that there are pathologies that make it possible to do things that are on the None side, #Sociopathy is one and #Narcissism is another.

I hypothesize that most humans can't go all the way to None without causing injury to themselves. #LtCalley

A very interesting read from Dan Kaszeta.

「For someone to be stung by a charge of hypocrisy, they have to actually care a bit and think that being hypocritical is wrong. But if someone does not see anything wrong with saying one thing and acting in a different way, they have immunised themselves against charges of hypocrisy. They can shrug it off and say ‘so what?’」

Also worth noting that this rot will be encouraged by external actors with ill intentions.

#hypocrisy #sycophancy #sociopathy #politics #authoritarianism
@DanKaszeta