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If the Bible is really true, then I'm fucked.
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Bah, you're hopeless.
You obviously would rather be mugged by a good-looking, well-mannered, honey-tongued thief, than to get a kick in the backside for walking around with a roll of bills in your hand.
Just another one in line...
Cheers! :bottle:Comment
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Don't listen to the voices, Sylicker, they are not you're friends.
Step awaaaaay from The White Album. Step awaaaaay.The Power Of The Riff Compels MeComment
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I didn't say psychotic I said psychopathic which is a different thing. Psychopathy is personality disorder characterized by an abnormal lack of empathy masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal.
It's not a conspiracy theory at all, in simpler terms think of it as more that the nice guy doesn't often get to the top of organisations. Having a lack of empathy doesn't stop you having excellent communication skills or charisma, in many ways quite the reverse.
I rarely pull figures out my ass, the figure seems to vary between 0.6% and 1% depending on definition.
Your false comparison of this with criticism of invisible cloud daddies or people taking legends and myths literally isn't worth comment.Last edited by Seshmeister; 05-17-2011, 08:46 PM.Comment
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I'll give you an example that I posted a while ago.
I think this is a demonstration of the actions of psychopaths. Again I'm talking about the disorder in it's clinical definition as opposed to the more commonly thought of Hollywood psychopath who eats your liver with fava beans.
It's not too long, I hope people will read it. It's from the Independent newspaper not some wacko blog.
How Goldman gambled on starvation
Speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of millions. What does it say about our system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?
Friday, 2 July 2010
By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.
It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."
Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis as if they had been struck by a tsunami. "My children stopped growing," a woman my age called Abiba Getaneh, told me. "I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died."
Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn't happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn't because demand grew either: as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand actually fell by 3 per cent. Other factors – like the rise of biofuels, and the spike in the oil price – made a contribution, but they aren't enough on their own to explain such a violent shift.
To understand the biggest cause, you have to plough through some concepts that will make your head ache – but not half as much as they made the poor world's stomachs ache.
For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer, he'll lose some cash, but if there's a lousy summer or the global price collapses, he'll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked.
Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into "derivatives" that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in "food speculation" was born.
So Farmer Giles still agrees to sell his crop in advance to a trader for £10,000. But now, that contract can be sold on to speculators, who treat the contract itself as an object of potential wealth. Goldman Sachs can buy it and sell it on for £20,000 to Deutsche Bank, who sell it on for £30,000 to Merrill Lynch – and on and on until it seems to bear almost no relationship to Farmer Giles's crop at all.
If this seems mystifying, it is. John Lanchester, in his superb guide to the world of finance, Whoops! Why Everybody Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, explains: "Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the 20th century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts – a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English." Poetry found its break with realism when T S Eliot wrote "The Wasteland". Finance found its Wasteland moment in the 1970s, when it began to be dominated by complex financial instruments that even the people selling them didn't fully understand.
So what has this got to do with the bread on Abiba's plate? Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was already deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in food contracts based on theoretical future crops – and the speculators drove the price through the roof.
Here's how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldmans pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market. They reckoned food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked, so they switched their funds there. Suddenly, the world's frightened investors stampeded on to this ground.
So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for derivatives based on food massively rose – which meant the all-rolled-into-one price shot up, and the starvation began. The bubble only burst in March 2008 when the situation got so bad in the US that the speculators had to slash their spending to cover their losses back home.
When I asked Merrill Lynch's spokesman to comment on the charge of causing mass hunger, he said: "Huh. I didn't know about that." He later emailed to say: "I am going to decline comment." Deutsche Bank also refused to comment. Goldman Sachs were more detailed, saying they sold their index in early 2007 and pointing out that "serious analyses ... have concluded index funds did not cause a bubble in commodity futures prices", offering as evidence a statement by the OECD.
How do we know this is wrong? As Professor Ghosh points out, some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period – but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation. Her research shows that speculation was "the main cause" of the rise.
So it has come to this. The world's wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won. Their Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?
If we don't re-regulate, it is only a matter of time before this all happens again. How many people would it kill next time? The moves to restore the pre-1990s rules on commodities trading have been stunningly sluggish. In the US, the House has passed some regulation, but there are fears that the Senate – drenched in speculator-donations – may dilute it into meaninglessness. The EU is lagging far behind even this, while in Britain, where most of this "trade" takes place, advocacy groups are worried that David Cameron's government will block reform entirely to please his own friends and donors in the City.
Only one force can stop another speculation-starvation-bubble. The decent people in developed countries need to shout louder than the lobbyists from Goldman Sachs. The World Development Movement is launching a week of pressure this summer as crucial decisions on this are taken: text WDM to 82055 to find out what you can do.
The last time I spoke to her, Abiba said: "We can't go through that another time. Please – make sure they never, never do that to us again."Comment
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More stuff on psychopathy by Borat's cousin.
No really. He's a professor at Cambridge.
Why a lack of empathy is the root of all evil
From casual violence to genocide, acts of cruelty can be traced back to how the perpetrator identifies with other people, argues psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. Is he right?
By Clint Witchalls
Tuesday, 5 April
Lucy Adeniji – an evangelical Christian and author of two books on childcare – trafficked two girls and a 21-year-old woman from Nigeria to work as slaves in her east London home. She made them toil for 21 hours a day and tortured them if they displeased her. The youngest girl was 11 years old.
Sentencing her to 11-and-a-half years in prison last month, Judge Simon Oliver said: "You are an evil woman. I have no doubt you have ruined these two girls' lives. They will suffer from the consequences of the behaviour you meted out to them for the rest of their lives."
Most people would probably agree with Judge Oliver's description of Adeniji as evil, but Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, would not be one of them. In his latest book, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new theory of human cruelty, Baron-Cohen, argues that the term evil is unscientific and unhelpful. "Sometimes the term evil is used as a way to stop an inquiry," Baron-Cohen tells me. "'This person did it because they're evil' – as if that were an explanation."
Human cruelty has fascinated and puzzled Baron-Cohen since childhood. When he was seven years old, his father told him the Nazis had turned Jews into lampshades and soap. He also recounted the story of a woman he met who had her hands severed by Nazi doctors and sewn on opposite arms so the thumbs faced outwards. These images stuck in Simon's mind. He couldn't understand how one human could treat another with such cruelty. The explanation that the Nazis were simply evil didn't satisfy him. For Baron-Cohen, science provides a more satisfactory explanation for evil and that explanation is empathy – or rather, lack of empathy.
"Empathy is our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling, and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion," writes Baron-Cohen. People who lack empathy see others as mere objects.
Empathy, like height, is a continuous variable, but for convenience, Baron-Cohen splits the continuum into six degrees – seven if you count zero empathy. Answering the empathy quotient (EQ) questionnaire, developed by Baron-Cohen and colleagues, will put you somewhere on the empathy bell curve. People with zero degrees of empathy will be at one end of the bell curve and those with six degrees of empathy at the other end.
Baron-Cohen provides vignettes of what a typical person with x-degrees of empathy would be like. We're told, for example, that a person with level two empathy (quite low) "blunders through life, saying all the wrong things (eg, 'You've put on weight!') or doing the wrong things (eg, invading another person's 'personal space')."
Being at the far ends of the bell curve (extremely high or extremely low empathy scores) is not necessarily pathological. It is possible to have zero degrees of empathy and not be a murderer, torturer or rapist, although you're unlikely to be any of these things if you are at the other end of the empathy spectrum – level six empathy.
"You could imagine someone who has low empathy yet somehow carves out a lifestyle for themselves where it doesn't impact on other people and it doesn't interfere with their everyday life," says Baron-Cohen.
"Let's take someone who's very gifted at physics and they're focused on doing physics. They might not be interacting very much with other people but they are interacting with the world of objects. They might have low empathy but it's not interfering. In that respect it's not pathological and they don't need a diagnosis. They have found a perfect fit between their mind and the lifestyle that they have."
Baron-Cohen doesn't see very high empathy as potentially debilitating. He sees someone with level six empathy as possessing a "natural intuition in tuning into how other are feeling".
I was intrigued to read a different account of empathy overdrive. In a recent newspaper article, Fiona Torrance described the hell of hyper- empathy. She has a rare condition known as mirror-touch synaesthesia. She first became aware of it aged six when she saw butcher birds hanging mice on a wire fence. "I felt the tug on my neck and spine; it was as if I was being hanged," Torrance recalled.
Empathy excess, however, is much rarer than empathy deficit. And while people with empathy excess suffer alone, those with empathy deficits cause others to suffer. Or at least some of them do.
At zero degrees of empathy are two distinct groups. Baron-Cohen calls them zero-negative and zero-positive. Zero-positives include people with autism or Asperger's syndrome. They have zero empathy but their "systemising" nature means they are drawn to patterns, regularity and consistency. As a result, they are likely to follow rules and regulations – the patterns of civic life.
Zero-negatives are the pathological group. These are people with borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. They are capable of inflicting physical and psychological harm on others and are unmoved by the plight of those they hurt. Baron-Cohen says people with these conditions all have one thing in common: zero empathy.
The question is: did people with these personality disorders lose their empathy or were they born that way?
One of Baron-Cohen's longitudinal studies – which began 10 years a – found that the more testosterone a foetus generates in the womb, the less empathy the child will have post- natally. In other words, there is a negative correlation between testosterone and empathy. It would appear the sex hormone is somehow involved in shaping the "empathy circuits" of the developing brain.
Given that testosterone is found in higher quantities in men than women, it may come as no surprise that men score lower on empathy than women. So there is a clear hormonal link to empathy. Another biological factor is genetics. Recent research by Baron-Cohen and colleagues found four genes associated with empathy – one sex steroid gene, one gene related to social-emotional behaviour and two associated with neural growth.
Does that mean, in the future, we will have gene-therapy to correct for low empathy?
"I'd be very concerned about those sorts of directions," Baron-Cohen says. "I mean, they are at least plausible from a science point of view, but whether they're desirable from a societal point of view is another matter. I would probably put more emphasis on early interventions – environmental interventions. I think empathy could be taught in schools for example."
The other side of the empathy coin is environment. John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who developed "attachment theory", was the first to point out the lifelong impact of early neglect and abuse. "We think children are very robust, they'll somehow adapt," says Baron-Cohen, "but Bowlby showed that children who had what he called insecure attachment – a lack of opportunity to form a strong bond with a caregiver – are more at risk of delinquency and they're more at risk from a range of personality disorders, which I translate into a lack of empathy because many of the personality disorders, like the psychopath, or people with borderline personality disorder are just operating on a totally self- centred mode. Early attachment is one big risk factor for low empathy."
With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners, it is possible to look at the effect hormones, genes and the environment have on the brain. In his book, Baron-Cohen identifies ten interconnected brain regions that are part of what he calls the "empathy circuit". People who score low on the empathy questionnaire show less neural activity in these brain regions.
Science is beginning to unravel the mystery of why some people have less empathy than others and the implications are potentially far reaching, not least for the criminal justice system. "The hallmark of a compassionate and civilised society is that we try to understand other people's actions, we don't try to simply condemn them," says Baron-Cohen.
"There is even a question about whether a person that commits an awful crime should be in a prison as opposed to a hospital."
But if someone endures a neglectful upbringing and they subsequently grow up to be a violent criminal, should they be absolved of any wrong doing because an fMRI scanner reveals low neural activity in their inferior frontal gyrus? "When people do commit crimes there may be determinants to their behaviour which are outside their control," says Baron-Cohen. "No one is responsible for their own genes."
Indeed, but we are all capable of making moral choices. Making the right choice may be more difficult for people with compromised empathy circuits, but the choice still exists.
Baron-Cohen wants to move the debate on the causes of evil "out of the realm of religion and into the realm of science", but I wonder if he is going beyond science and into other domains such as moral philosophy and jurisprudence.
"I don't see that we have to keep them apart," he says. "What I'm hoping is that the book will be seen as: how can science inform moral debates. It might even have relevance for politics and politicians, that when we try and resolve conflict, whether it's domestic conflict or international conflict, issues about empathy might actually be useful. The alternative is that science just does science and doesn't engage with moral issues or the real world. I think that would be a backward step."
If you consider the big atrocities in history – the ones we think of as evil – the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, the slave trade, communist purges, Rwandan genocide, apartheid, etc, it took the support of the masses to make them happen. Can we blame evil on this scale on psychopaths (who comprise less than one per cent of the population) and narcissists (also less than one per cent of the population)?
Surely beliefs are a much bigger cause of evil than biology or upbringing? Negative memes are spread by the church or state about the outgroup until they become thoroughly dehumanised. And the thing to restore humanity to the outgroup is not drugs and therapy but re-humanising narratives.
"Whatever your causes of loss of empathy, it's the very same empathy circuit that would be involved when you show empathy or fail to show empathy," says Baron-Cohen.
He argues that our beliefs can have an impact on the empathy circuit. Our level of empathy isn't necessarily fixed for all situations and right across our lives. It can fluctuate, depending on the situation. When people are tired or stressed they may show less empathy than when they're calm and rested. Baron-Cohen wants to differentiate transient changes to empathy, where empathy can be restored, versus more permanent changes.
"If for genetic reasons, for example, you have low empathy, it might be much harder to restore it but I remain optimistic even in those situations that there are therapeutic or educational methods that could be tried to improve anybody's empathy," he says.
So far, science has made little progress in treating empathy deficits. Psychopaths, for example, are notoriously untreatable as are children who present with callousness/unemotional (CU) trait. And trying to improve the empathy of sex offenders is one of the least effective interventions, according to Tom Fahy, professor of forensic mental health at the Institute of Psychiatry.
As someone who works with violent criminals, I wanted to know if Fahy thinks zero empathy is a good explanation for cruelty. "It may be one of the ingredients," he says, "but it's not usually an entirely satisfactory explanation for cruelty or acts of serious violence."
Narrowing the focus down to empathy when trying to prevent repeat behaviour is not a very effective approach, in Fahy's view. "It's difficult enough, anyway, to reduce offending behaviour through complex psychological interventions," says Fahy, "but to put all your eggs in one basket is undoubtedly a mistake."
Although zero degrees of empathy is necessary for someone to do evil, it is not sufficient to explain it. As Fahy says, there is usually a "complex tree of experiences" that leads to a violent or cruel act. Also, not everyone who has zero empathy will commit evil acts – Baron-Cohen devotes an entire chapter to extricate himself from this dilemma. Zero degrees of empathy requires too many qualifications to make it a satisfactory explanation for evil. And trying to boost empathy using therapy and other non-drug interventions doesn't appear to have much effect.
I wholly agree with Judge Oliver's description of Lucy Adeniji as evil. That doesn't mean I want to shut the conversation down. I think it's important to know – from a biological, psychological and societal point of view – how someone like Adeniji came to be cruel and uncaring, but I also think it's important to condemn her actions. I don't see the two things as being mutually exclusive.
I agree with Baron-Cohen that we shouldn't use evil as an explanation for why people do bad things, and finding ways to improve empathy, can't be a bad thing. But, for me, replacing the idea of evil with the idea of empathy-starvation is a simplification too far.
'Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new theory of human cruelty' is published by Allen Lane on 7 April (£20). To order a copy for the special price of £18 (free P&P) call Independent Books Direct on 08430 600 030, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.ukComment
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I think that was maybe Rocky II, the first of the sequels.
By the 4th movie it certainly does become a fairytale where he is fighting giant Russian robots while being cheered on by a huge crowd of Russians who are won over by his amazing ability to be repeatedly punched in the face.Comment
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How the earth is/was made will not affect most people's daily lives. Like wise, a faith that is wholesome is really a mute point.
Believing in an folklorist heaven, which provides motivation toward a wholesome life is not necessarily a bad thing.
Nevertheless, many are not able to gain a pious discipline. That does not mean a pious life should be disregarded."I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. - Some come from ahead and some come from behind. - But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. - Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!" ~ Dr. SeusssigpicComment
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Surely the ability to communicate effectively with people requires a sense of empathy? That is, giving people want they want requires you to understand that they want it and why....I didn't say psychotic I said psychopathic which is a different thing. Psychopathy is personality disorder characterized by an abnormal lack of empathy masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal.
It's not a conspiracy theory at all, in simpler terms think of it as more that the nice guy doesn't often get to the top of organisations. Having a lack of empathy doesn't stop you having excellent communication skills or charisma, in many ways quite the reverse.
I rarely pull figures out my ass, the figure seems to vary between 0.6% and 1% depending on definition.
Your false comparison of this with criticism of invisible cloud daddies or people taking legends and myths literally isn't worth comment.
I actually just looked up the definition of psychopath and realized I come pretty close. Surely, anyone is successful or driven pretty much fits the bill? A top sportsmen as much as a top politician or CEO? Really, isn't this just the case of the most able, dedicated and driven rising to the top? I'm not sure it makes the world a (more) dangerous place - in fact, I'd argue that the whole mentality is an outgrowth of the more aggressive forms of capitalism we've experienced since the '80s.The Power Of The Riff Compels MeComment
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I just need a clean whore who's ass is tight like a little boy's and some vodka and that's therapy for me. Oh yes, please no vagins as loose as sleeve of wizard please.More stuff on psychopathy by Borat's cousin.
No really. He's a professor at Cambridge.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-st...l-2262371.htmlNo! You can't have the keys to the wine cellar!Comment
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The interesting people are narcissists. They have zero empathy for anyone and love attention. They even love negative attention. In fact, they often will create a crisis just so they can have the attention of trying to fix the problem.
When Bernie Madoff got caught he just reveled in the attention. He loved every minute of it as the reporters followed him with that big smirk on his face. Then in prison he bragged about stealing tens of billions. He got a rush from successfully scamming people but he absolutely loved the attention that was on him after he got exposed.Last edited by Nitro Express; 05-18-2011, 03:35 AM.No! You can't have the keys to the wine cellar!Comment
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