Cold-blooded

I have some quick survey questions for the sociopaths, mainly just curiosity as to objective physical manifestations of sociopathy. Answer as many as you wish. Feel free to email me answers if you want to get into more details that you would rather not be public. Some of the questions are red herrings (at least I think they are).

1. Do you have normal average blood temperature, run hot, or run cold?

2. Do you have normal blood pressure, run high, or run low?

3. What is your relationship to food?

4. Do you have corrected vision, i.e. glasses, contact lenses?

5. What is your tolerance to pain? Low, high, or normal?

6. Have you ever had stitches or surgery that could have been otherwise been preventable based on lifestyle choices?

7. Would you say you look about your age, younger, or older than your age?

8. Do you take cold medication? How soon after a cold do you start taking medication?

9. Do you have trouble sleeping

10. Which do you crave more, salty or sweet foods?

Any other suggestions?

Sociopaths in the news: DecorMyEyes

I love this story of cyber bullying between the owner of online retailer "DecorMyEyes" and his complaining customers. It reminds me of the stories empaths sometimes tell of trying to get even with their oppressors. It's a long article, worth reading, but here are the excerpts that lead me to think sociopath:

Dozens of people over the last three years, she found, had nearly identical tales about DecorMyEyes: a purchase gone wrong, followed by phone calls, e-mails and threats, sometimes lasting for months or years.

“Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes.com,” the post began. “I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

It’s all part of a sales strategy, he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: “I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.”

“I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works. No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?”

“When I fly to Las Vegas I look down and see all these houses,” he starts. “If someone in one of those houses buys from DecorMyEyes and ends up hating the company, it doesn’t matter. All those other houses are filled with people, too, and they will come knocking.”

Selling on the Internet, Mr. Borker says, attracts a new horde of potential customers every day. For the most part, they don’t know anything about DecorMyEyes, and the ones who bother to research the company — well, he doesn’t want their money. If you’re the type of person who reads consumer reviews, Mr. Borker would rather you shop elsewhere.

It’s almost painful to say, but Mr. Borker is amusing company. He is sharp and entertaining, although much of the entertainment comes from the way he flouts the conventions of courtesy, which he does with such a perverse flair that it can seem like a kind of performance art.

Despite the fear he has inspired, Mr. Borker doesn’t regard himself as a terror. He prefers to think of himself as the Howard Stern of online commerce — an outsize character prone to shocking utterances.

Except that Howard Stern doesn’t issue threats, I say.

“People overreact,” he pshaws, often because they’re unaccustomed to plain speaking, New York-style. Anyway, he adds, if somebody messes with you, and you mess back, “how is that a threat?”

And the victim's failed attempt of a comeuppance:

Ms. Rodriguez [a victim] has a meticulous record of all things Russo. Sitting at a table with a laptop, she reads some of his e-mails and plays several saved messages left by him on her phone. It is unmistakably Mr. Borker.

“I’m stubborn,” she says when asked about her persistence in the last few months. “I wasn’t going to let this guy push me around.”

I contacted T-Mobile to let them know I was being harassed,” she says, “but they said there was nothing they could do because it was coming from a blocked number.”

FOR months, Mr. Borker and Ms. Rodriguez were essentially working opposite sides of the Internet. He operated in the seams and cracks of the Web’s underbelly, while she was pleading for help with what is supposed to be the Web’s protective layer: a variety of corporations and law enforcement entities that could have intervened.

None did.

Moral of the story is don't bother trying to get back at them. Even I don't mess with people like this if I can avoid it. If they get you, learn a lesson and be more careful next time. Trying to get even is like throwing good money after bad. But I understand that for some people it is difficult to make coldly rational decisions, even for what is essentially a business transaction.

Rape and sexual abuse

This post is not about sociopaths committing rape or sexual abuse (this time), but rather about sociopaths being the victim of rape or sexual abuse.Sociopaths who have these experiences are typically female.

Female sociopaths have particularly complicated existences. They need power, like all sociopaths, but there are certain situations in which they will always be more vulnerable than a man, if for not other reason than women are far more likely to be victims of sexual assaults than men. I would imagine that there would be a certain indignant detachment for the female sociopath that an empath wouldn't feel. Here is one female sociopath's experience with rape:

Saturday evening.
He spiked my Jack and Coke.
My body has never responded well to drugs, so it didn't take full effect like it ought to have: I was blinded and paralysed but had every other sense and was conscious. Not alert, but awake. He took himself for a joyride on my body for a couple of hours. Don't quote me on that, haha, my perception of time was warped. As I was kinesthetic for the whole event, I believe it was like this: missionary, spooning, doggy, missionary. Intermittent oral sex. I blindly (literally, not figuratively) fought to stay awake. When I awoke, my sight had returned, blurry but enough for me to drive myself home. Before I left, I gave him a kiss. We dated for a couple more weeks, then I called him and more or less told him thanks.

I wonder how normal people would react to this situation. I imagine the typical sociopath victim of rape would not report the incident, unless she thought the news would come out anyway. Otherwise I think the sociopath would only report it if there was a very good chance of the perpetrator getting caught, e.g. good description of who it was, DNA. The sociopath would wonder how the rape had changed them, question whether they "feel" anything about the rape, wonder what they were expected to feel. If the sociopath victim felt anything, I think it would be something like a feeling of loss, perhaps powerlessness, and isolation. I think all rape victims feel those last three to some extent, but the sociopath's strange relationship to self, power, and society would give them a unique flavor of nihilistic-void-"traumatized".

I think the example from "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is a good fictional depiction of what a female sociopath might do in response to that experience. Here is another sociopath experience of sexual abuse and domestic violence:

I know that between the ages of 3 and 5, another little girl and I were molested by some guy and our reactions were quite different. She became withdrawn and cried easily. From what I remember, I thought it was boring and annoying, but I recall being so confused as to why she'd cry and get weird when it happened. Dude gave me candy (the good stuff), so I think it was a fair trade. Eventually I told the guy that he'd better give me more candy or he'd be in trouble. Score. I know that this was at my babysitter's, but I don't know exactly what year/age I'm remembering. Even if it was at 5, that is pretty young to be so different from that other girl, the control in this experiment.

Additionally, as far back as I can remember, my mom always had us sleep with weapons in case the "bad people" would come. She meant my father, and I knew that, but I never felt afraid. Just prepared. Sometimes my 7-year-old self would lay awake planning how I could best bring him down if he were to show up. Again, I wasn't scared, but I loved to picture beating some guy's knees, and then back, and then head with the ball bat I kept by my bed. I was basically fantasizing about beating this man who I had never met (and harbored no negative feelings about) to a broken heap.

My first recurring dream that I remembered involved one of my childhood "bad people." Every time I had the dream, he would kill me. Each time I dreamt it I could remember what happened last time and plan ahead to avoid the same mistakes, but I would always die finally. The last time I had this dream, it ended with me bashing his head in repeatedly, then running as I heard the gurgling of air and blood pass through his mangled face while he suffered to death. This was my first violent fantasy hat I can remember. So I guess I feel like I can relate to the victim who is a sociopath.

Sociopath girl and gaslighting: Mini's First Time

One of my readers recommended Mini's First Time as a portrait of a young, teenage, sociopath girl. It's not the best film, but relatively accurate (for Hollywood) and also an excellent portrayal of gaslighting someone.

Sociopath song: John Wayne Gacy Jr

Sociopath quote: concerned face

From television show "Dead Like Me"

George: Do you really care how it's going with me?
Rube: Sure, I make my face look like this and the concerned words come out.

Corruption

Sociopaths can be toxic, and not always in the good Britney Spears way.  From a reader:

The problem with living a life like mine is I can't have friends at all. Not what other people call friends. My girlfriend accused me of being a virus. She says everyone around me becomes corrupted. I thought about it. I look back on the relationships I have with people and they root back to a time when they were just flirting with the darkness. People get caught up in me sometimes. They start hanging out with me all the time. Soon they are wrapped into what I was doing. The longer I'm around them the more they accept that what I'm doing isn't really that bad. Soon I start taking things even further. Ill do things way over the line and act like toning it down is a favor. Really its making further steps into my purposes seem like a compromise. Around this point they come to me with a dependency. Its not hard for me to get them to now do what they originally thought was 'bad', as they now see it as not being a big deal. After all its business as usual.


I realize what she says is reality. I don't even do the manipulation on purpose it is second nature to me. I don't associate with people who are not useful for me. I see them as liabilities. Why would I open up to somebody with no lot in my life? Instead I associate with people who fit in my goals. Everytime I do, I find that I don't even need to ask them to do anything. They are only to eager to offer themselves.


Ironically, the greatest strength I have is peoples empathy. It is their empathy that allows them to see things from my point view. It allows them to label me into a grey area where normally they would have seen black and white. I do this by acting like its perfectly normal for me to do what I'm doing. Its another day at work. Busniness as usual. People don't question things when it becomes a daily ritual. It becomes normal.


Some call me a parasite. I wouldn't call what I do parasitical. I find peoples needs and I provide for them. In return I only ask for them.

My reply:

I'm interested in the corruptive effect you have on your associates. It's fine to use people (we all do), but I think sociopaths struggle with not letting that toxicity creep into all aspects of our lives, infecting all of our associates, family, and friends.

I think some of your associates may have what I want to refer to as "Tinman syndrome." In the original Frank Baum Wonderful Wizard of Oz series, Tinman used to be normal, human woodsman but was stripped of everything that once made him human and had it replaced with his current tin parts -- stronger in some ways, but more vulnerable in others (rust). Read about his origins here.

If you believe this analogy, then you are like Ku-Klip, the tinsmith that replaced his human parts with tin. Like Ku-Klip, you made them stronger but you forgot to give them hearts. They need to realize that although you believe that the world is terrible and most people in it, you still believe that things you do in this life make a difference. If you make it clear to your associates that you think what you do in this world has consequences, I think that could be a way to stem the spread of corruption.

Love and other drugs

Watching these types of movies is the gateway drug to dating a sociopath because once this becomes something you want, reality will never again be good enough.

Sociopath song: infiltrating my way through the system

Controlling violent urges

A reader talks about "change" from a violent child, to a relatively in-control adult:

When I was young (Up until about Twelve years old) I had very little self-control with violent outbursts. I almost murdered a few of my peers, and was so alienated from this that no amount of charm or good deeds could win favor back into the affected parties. This greatly bothered me. I had been in fights all my life, yet I had never been in a situation where I was beyond social redemption. I noted this, and although I would still get angry, and still Want to maim them, I would not let myself cross the line of letting my instincts take over. The risk was just too great, and I was thankful that I had moved to another area where my slate was clean as far as the locals were concerned. This conscious choice to repress my violence evolved when I reached High School. The specific High School I went to would arrest all parties involved in violent activities (fights, usually) regardless of who the initiator was, and this could lead to time spent in a correctional facility and a juvenile criminal record. At this point, I had no desire to be seen off in a patrol car, as I had seen some of my peers arrested. Being a known criminal is crippling for your reputation, which is something I would kill for if needed to maintain. I made a conscious effort to alleviate tension before it could start, and managed to avoid physical altercations in High School almost completely, save one incident which thankfully was not brought to the attention of the authorities. I spread myself throughout the school, thanks to the segregation of various quads, and had a large network of 'friends' in multiple cliques. From years of experience, I had no problem quickly befriending dozens of classmates and was able to keep my list of so called enemies to an almost non-existent figure. If you will, I embraced the philosophy of 'Burn No Bridges', but not out of a notion of good, but practicality. Is this sort of behavior common? This, evolution from a violent sociopath to a non-violent one? It is easy to enrage me if done properly to this day, but I leave little opportunity for someone to even entertain the notion of it, and my intimidating physical features also discourage people from angering me.

I responded: One of my friends thinks socios can only go one way -- bad to worse. The idea is that once corrupted, we will always have that particular weakness or penchant for corruption. For instance, I talked recently about the potential for training myself to enjoy bloodlust. I wouldn't do that, though, because I'd be worried that it would become an addiction. But your transition from violence to peacefulness suggests otherwise, unless you just have a great deal of self-control or the violence never had a strong pull for you. What do you think?

In regards to your comment on violence, I find the explanation simple and sobering (for me). I am not an addict, I do not have an addictive personality, and never have. I have an extremely indulgent and obsessive one, though. Violence to me is not an involuntary reaction. I don't think it ever has been. I like it. I enjoy inflicting pain and seeing the terror, pain and or anger in the eyes of my enemy. It gets me off. But so does smoking, drinking, and seduction. It's different, of course, but it is one of several ways for me to derive pleasure. It never had its own little pedestal all to itself.

A simple example, minus the human element is this. Bugs, I really, really dislike them. If they get in my house, it annoys me. I don't always kill them. It's not that I don't respect them, I just don't need to kill them. There's no irrational fear behind an act of violence. If they're crawling on me, sure I'll probably squish them out of reflex, but virtually every person I've met seems to consider them Kill On Sight targets, even outdoors. If the spider is in a corner near my overhead light, he'll probably kill the moths that sneak their way in. If a silverfish crawled up the drain, I'll pour him back down with water (and maybe a little soap for shenanigans sake). If an ant finds his way in and I'm not busy, I'll watch his path and sees where he goes, in hopes of blocking their entry point, preventing my annoyance and their genocide.

I apply similar logic to People. If there is no need to be violent, then why be so? A broken reputation, trust, or image is is far more devastating than my fists will ever be. I don't really consider it channeling, so much as diverting my anger from the emotional dam. It either goes away soon, or has to be dealt with depending on the severity of the situation. I might plot someone's downfall, or blow steam killing people in a videogame. Thankfully, it rarely comes to that being a necessity.

I understand the lust for blood all too well. Hunting human prey is intoxicating, and I found sports such as Paintball and Airsoft to be extremely satisfying. Quick reflexes, stealth, and wit combine to let you hunt the most dangerous game, with virtually none of the consequences.

In terms of being peaceful, in an abstract way I am. All the anger is still there, but I know how to manipulate it before it gets out of hand. With childlike naivety gone, a sociopath can accomplish a great many things, especially in regards to our own so-called downfalls. Violence is but one of them.

"Put on more weight"

I've always been really interested in torture methods. I heard a passing reference to the practice of "pressing," googled it, and found this:

Pressing, also known as peine forte et dure, was both a death sentence and a means of drawing out confessions. Adopted as a judicial measure during the 14th century, pressing reached its peak during the reign of Henry IV. In Britain, pressing was not abolished until 1772. Giles Corey, an elderly farmer in Salem, Massachusetts, was the only recorded incident of pressing to death in the United States. After eighty years in the settlement, most of them spend in hard work on his farm, he was still hale and healthy when the madness of 1692 started. He was subject to superstitions, as were most people in his day, and mentioned that he had observed his wife, his third, reading books. That was enough to bring her to the attention of the witch-hunters. His efforts to stop the insane persecution landed him in front of the judges. Giles was a crafty sort; he knew that his property might be confiscated by the state if he was condemned as a wizard. To avoid this and to ensure that his sons would inherit his land, he refused to plead. When asked whether he was guilty or not guilty, he stood mute. Under English law, he could be thrice asked to plead. After standing mute, he could not then be tried, but he could be, and was, subjected to the old punishment of peine forte et dure.... When the law was used against Giles Corey, he behaved with dignity. His last words were: "Put on more weight" (Engel 180-181).

I don't know why I find this passage so compelling.  I guess it's because even though Corey clearly recognized the lunacy of the witch trials (such a pristine example of mob mentality), when he was "caught" and tried he didn't seem to complain that the game of life was unfair, or that the people killing him were evil, or whine or preach.  He realized that you can't reason with irrational people, you just have to play the hand that you were dealt.  And he played his hand masterfully until the end.  He is basically a new personal hero of mine when it comes to focusing only on playing the game well and not stressing about the end results.

Self-gratification

From "Psychopathy: antisocial, criminal, and violent behavior," chapter 24 by Otto Kernberg:

The passive type of psychopath has been able to learn to deal with the powerful through pseudosubmission and through out-smarting them -- a passive, parasitic exploitiveness that at least implies the capacity to control immediate anger and rage, and to transform it into the slow-motion aggression of a "wolf in sheep's clothing." In the case of these patients, their own aggression can be denied, and the division of the world into wolves and sheep is complemented by the adapative function of the wolf disguised among the sheep.

Whether psychopaths are predominantly aggressive or passive, the gratification they seek is exlusively linked to bodily functions -- to eating, drinking, drugs, and alcohol, and to a sexuality divested of its object relations implications and thus devoid of love and tenderness. In the most severe cases of aggressive psychopathy, sexual sadism may become an invitation to murder, making these individuals extremely dangerous. Or else early aggression may dominate their emotional lives to the extent that even the sensuality of bodily contact and skin eroticism is eliminated. In this case, there is global extinction of all capacity for sexual gratification, which is replaced by senseless physical destrictiveness, self-mutiliation, and murder. 

I agree with about 60% of this. Does anyone completely relate?

Dealing with irrational people

Courtesy of a reader:

"Your father is being irrational and irrational behavior doesn't respond to rational arguments. It responds to fear." -Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock

Sociopath song: Conversation 16

Sociopaths in the news: James Frey

The old saying "you can't keep a good man down," does not apply to the author of the faux memoir "Million Little Pieces" James Frey because he is not a good man, but it is true that he can't be kept down. Apart from the obvious lying to a national audience to trump up his street cred for being a Criminal (always capital "C") in his Oprah book club autobiograpy that has been since dubbed "A Million Little Lies," he is making a sociopath name for himself by instituting the first ever (?) literary sweatshop. As reported by the Wall Street Journal:

For Mr. Frey's new venture, Full Fathom Five, the author oversees lesser-known writers as they develop fictional ideas into books that he then markets to publishers and film studios. Its first offering, "I Am Number Four," is a young-adult science-fiction thriller about an alien who comes to Earth as an Ohio teenager. It was published in August and hit the best-seller list. Michael Bay brought the project to DreamWorks Studios, where partners Stacey Snider and Steven Spielberg acquired the film rights after reading the book, with Mr. Bay as producer. Starring Alex Pettyfer, Dianna Agron and Timothy Olyphant, the film will be released in February, DreamWorks' first offering since it severed ties from Paramount and became independent, with its movies distributed by Disney.

Full Fathom Five is already wrapped in real-life drama. One writer hired attorneys to represent him when dealings with Mr. Frey grew contentious (the dispute was settled late last month). Mr. Frey says that a disgruntled writer is working on a magazine story about him. The writer declined comment. "I go to work and try to do cool things. I can't control what people write about me," says Mr. Frey.

'Unless James is an alien, this book is not a memoir,' says DreamWorks' Stacey Snider.

Some publishers and producers are happy to look beyond his troubled past. Ms. Snider of DreamWorks is unconcerned. "Unless James is an alien," she says, "this book is not a memoir."

Mr. Frey began contemplating the operation that has become Full Fathom Five around the time he finished reading the last installment of the Harry Potter series in 2007. "Someone is going to replace Harry Potter," he recalls thinking. "Maybe it'll be me." A co-owner of an art gallery in New York, Mr. Frey imagined a literary version of an artist's workshop, where one person with a vision employs others to execute it. "I have too many ideas," he says.

To find writers, Mr. Frey trolls writing classes and other writers' gathering places. Writers contracted with Full Fathom Five earn no salary and make almost no money up front (they get $250 upon signing and another $250 upon completion of a book—"Chinese-food money," one author called it). They are promised 30% to 49% of all revenue whether it comes from videogames or publications rights.

This idea is genius. I also have "too many ideas." In fact, I also am looking for slave labor to shoulder all of the work that I will then take credit for, Jeff Koons style (also a sociopath). All interested applicants, please send a c.v. and a sample of your work to -- me at sociopathworld dot com. I'm not even close to kidding. First priority is making a spoof on the trailer for the movie "Love Actually" called "Sociopaths Actually," playing on its tagline "Love actually is all around us."

Sociopaths in the news: Albert Gonzalez

This is an interesting (but long) profile in the New York Times of a hacker, turned government informant/consultant, who managed to continue his criminal activities under their noses. I'll include the excerpts that scream sociopath (or autism, really):

“He could be very disarming, if you let your guard down. I was well aware that I was dealing with a master of social engineering and deception. But I never got the impression he was trying to deceive us.”

Gonzalez’s gift for deception, however, is precisely what made him one of the most valuable cybercrime informants the government has ever had. After his help enabled officials to indict more than a dozen members of Shadowcrew, Gonzalez’s minders at the Secret Service urged him to move back to his hometown, Miami, for his own safety. (It was not hard for Shadowcrew users to figure out that the one significant figure among their ranks who hadn’t been arrested was probably the unnamed informant in court documents.) After aiding another investigation, he became a paid informant in the Secret Service field office in Miami in early 2006. Agent Michael was transferred to Miami, and he worked with Gonzalez on a series of investigations on which Gonzalez did such a good job that the agency asked him to speak at seminars and conferences. “I shook the hand of the head of the Secret Service,” Gonzalez told me. “I gave a presentation to him.” As far as the agency knew, that’s all he was doing. “It seemed he was trying to do the right thing,” Agent Michael said.

At his sentencing hearing in March, where he received two concurrent 20-year terms, the longest sentence ever handed down to an American for computer crimes, the judge said, “What I found most devastating was the fact that you two-timed the government agency that you were cooperating with, and you were essentially like a double agent.”

Gonzalez’s closest friend, Stephen Watt, who is now serving a two-year prison sentence for coding a software program that helped Gonzalez steal card data, describes Gonzalez as having “a Sherlock Holmes quality to him that is bounded only by his formal education.” Like the other hackers who would go on to form the inner circle of Gonzalez’s criminal organization, Watt met Gonzalez when both were teenagers, on EFnet, an Internet relay chat network frequented by black hats. Watt and Gonzalez interacted strictly online for a year, though each lived in South Florida. Once they began spending time together, in Florida and New York, Watt, who is 27, noticed that Gonzalez’s talents as an online criminal carried over into his life away from the computer. “He could spot wedding rings at 50 yards. He could spot a Patek Philippe at 50 yards. He would have been a world-class interrogator. He was very good at figuring out when people were lying.”

Like many hackers, Gonzalez moved easily between the licit and illicit sides of computer security. Before his first arrest, in the A.T.M. lobby, Gonzalez made his way from Miami to the Northeast after he hacked into a New Jersey-based Internet company and then persuaded it to hire him to its security team. The transition from fraudster to informant was not too different.

“I did find the investigation exciting,” Gonzalez told me of turning against Shadowcrew. “The intellectual element. Unmasking them, figuring out their identities. Looking back, it was kind of easy, though. When someone trusts you, they let their guard down.”

Indeed, no one I spoke with compared him to a gangster or a mercenary — preferred honorifics among hackers — but several likened him to a brilliant executive. “In the U.S., we have two kinds of powerful, successful business leaders. We have people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who are the most sophisticated of electronic technicians and programmers,” says Steve Heymann, the Massachusetts assistant U.S. attorney who, in the spring of 2010, secured a combined 38 years of prison time for Gonzalez and his co-conspirators for their corporate breaches. “Then we have others, like the C.E.O.’s of AT&T or General Electric, who are extremely good in their area but also know when to go to others for expertise and how to build powerful organizations by using those others. Gonzalez fits into that second category.”

Gonzalez relished the intellectual challenges of cybercrime too. He is not a gifted programmer — according to Watt and Toey, in fact, he can barely write simple code — but by all accounts he can understand systems and fillet them with singular grace. I often got the impression that this was computer crime’s main appeal for Gonzalez.

But he also liked stealing. “Whatever morality I should have been feeling was trumped by the thrill,” he told me.

It seems clear now that Gonzalez didn’t mind betraying people.

When they pieced together how Gonzalez organized these heists later, federal prosecutors had to admire his ingenuity. “It’s like driving to the building next to the bank to tunnel into the bank,” Seth Kosto, an assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey who worked on the case, told me. When I asked how Gonzalez rated among criminal hackers, he replied: “As a leader? Unparalleled. Unparalleled in his ability to coordinate contacts and continents and expertise. Unparalleled in that he didn’t just get a hack done — he got a hack done, he got the exfiltration of the data done, he got the laundering of the funds done. He was a five-tool player.”

[When sentenced] Gonzalez just leaned forward and peered straight ahead at the judge, as though — the set of his head was unmistakable — staring intensely at a computer.

The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure

The title of the new self-published book available from Amazon that has apparently successfully triggered a boycott. As reported here:

An author named Phillip R Greaves 2nd stirred up fury on Amazon today, self-publishing an eBook entitled The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure.

As of this 4:20 p.m. writing, more than 300 people had given the book a one-star rating and angry reviews. The book has also received the “boycott amazon” tag, a category urging boycott over 30 controversial books about topics ranging from dog fighting to Scientology. UPDATE: Amazon has sent a statement to TechCrunch that says, in part: “Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable.”

Greaves also published of A Government of Service to All, Our Gardens of Flesh, and The Grand Delusion.

We downloaded a free sample of the eBook, exploring the first few pages–a section called “Facts and Fallacies.” If you wish to read an excerpt, we’ve included a brief passage below.

“While it is not my intention to promote or excuse this practice, I would rather see pedosexuals conquer the world than hear of even one more child being killed because another pedosexual-pedophile is driven into a state of pedocidal-psychosis, or a paranoid-panic-attack, due to the constant hate-mongering which can be heard from every corner of the Earth, demonizing every juvephile regardless of the quality or character of their sexual relations with minors.”

Even though the book itself is down, the forums discussing it are still up. They're pretty entertaining, especially this one. Poor pedophiles.

Dispassionate juror

A friend of mine was particularly disturbed by this gruesome murder that happened near New Haven, Connecticut:

The men put him and his family through an ordeal of beatings and sexual abuse that ended as flames tore through the house where the girls, still alive, had been strapped to their beds. Their mother had already been strangled.

Only the father — Dr. William A. Petit Jr., dazed and bloodied after being beaten with a baseball bat in his sleep — managed to escape.

The jury just voted for the death penalty for one of the murderers.

When I was reading the article, I was looking for signs of sociopathy, which I didn't see. Instead I read this sentence, "For nearly two months, jurors learned every searing detail of the night and morning in July 2007," and started thinking about how much counseling these jurors are going to need.

The concept of having lay jurors as part of a legal system is an interesting one. They are supposed to be dispassionate -- coldly and rationally interpreting the facts that are presented to them. Eventually they must come to a decision, perhaps about whether someone lives or dies, and be able to live with that decision themselves.

I started thinking, sociopaths would be great at this. Sociopaths would be so good at this, in fact, that I wonder why no one has thought of an all sociopath jury before. It's like getting someone who has lost their sense of smell to take out the trash, am I right? Someone has to do the enforcing, why not have it be someone who is naturally good at it, and even likes it? I'm going to add "jury duty" to the list of reasons why societies with sociopaths have an advantage over those without.

Sociopath song: Papa was a rolling stone

Bad ex