A timely quiz: are you a sociopath?

The New Neo Posted on by

Or perhaps your friends might be?:

At heart, Hare’s test is simple: a list of 20 criteria, each given a score of 0 (if it doesn’t apply to the person), 1 (if it partially applies) or 2 (if it fully applies). The list in full is: glibness and superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, cunning/manipulative, lack of remorse, emotional shallowness, callousness and lack of empathy, unwillingness to accept responsibility for actions, a tendency to boredom, a parasitic lifestyle, a lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, lack of behavioural control, behavioural problems in early life, juvenile delinquency, criminal versatility, a history of “revocation of conditional release” (ie broken parole), multiple marriages, and promiscuous sexual behaviour. A pure, prototypical psychopath would score 40. A score of 30 or more qualifies for a diagnosis of psychopathy. Hare says: “A friend of mine, a psychiatrist, once said: ”˜Bob, when I meet someone who scores 35 or 36, I know these people really are different.’ The ones we consider to be alien are the ones at the upper end.”

I took the liberty of filling it out for one Barack Obama:

glibness and superficial charm 2
grandiose sense of self-worth 2
pathological lying 2
cunning/manipulative 2
lack of remorse 2
emotional shallowness 2
callousness and lack of empathy 2
unwillingness to accept responsibility for actions 2
a tendency to boredom 2
a parasitic lifestyle 1
a lack of realistic long-term goals 0
impulsivity 0
irresponsibility 0
lack of behavioural control 0
behavioural problems in early life ?
juvenile delinquency 2
criminal versatility 0
a history of “revocation of conditional release” (ie broken parole) 0
multiple marriages 0
promiscuous sexual behaviour. 0

It’s interesting that he fits the bill on all the inner, character-driven (as in “character disorder) portions, but not in most of the behavioral ones. The adult Obama (not the adolescent one) has been marked by extremely low impulsivity and high control, as I stated here.

Call him what you will—sociopath or not—but that combination of traits is a dangerous one in a different way than for the conventional criminally-oriented sociopath. Obama can harness his energies in the conventional world to the point where he’s become president, and as such can give full vent to the first group of characteristics while in a position of great power.

Of course, you might say that the same list of traits could be answered in the affirmative for a great many other politicians, and you’d be right. I’ve never seen a politician who displayed them with such purity and intensity as Obama has, however.

But let’s get off the political for a moment. Do you have people in your life who would score high on this test? If so, beware.

[NOTE: If you’re interested in a classic on the subject of sociopathy/psychopathy, read The Mask of Sanity. It’s old, but it’s very good.]

Will the real Barack Obama please stand up?

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t the time or interest to wade through the entirety of this NY Times Magazine article on how Barack Obama’s views on gay marriage “evolved”; I merely briefly skimmed the first third of it. But Ann Althouse has done the heavy lifting and extracted this quote:

Despite the president’s stated opposition, even his top advisers didn’t believe that he truly opposed allowing gay couples to marry. “He has never been comfortable with his position,” David Axelrod, then one of his closest aides, told me….

“The politics of authenticity ”” not just the politics, but his own sense of authenticity ”” required that he finally step forward,” Axelrod said. “And the president understood that.”

So, let’s see if I got this straight. Everybody knew Obama was lying about his stated opposition to gay marriage, and that the lie was a strategic one in order to gain votes during a time when gay marriage wasn’t all that popular. But later on, when he dropped his pose, Axelrod would have us think that it was because Obama’s such an honest-type guy that he just couldn’t stand being inauthentic a single moment longer. And it was just an accident that he would now probably gain more political points than he would lose for supporting gay marriage.

It was all about the authenticity. Got it.

To its credit, the Times piece reveals how Obama weighed the political expediency of his choice to come out on the subject. His decision seems to have rested on (as I suspected at the time, because it was rather obvious) his need to shore up the under-30 vote and get out the base for the 2012 election. And the article also goes into how Byzantine Obama’s “evolution” on the subject of gay marriage has been: he was for it (in 1996) before he was “undecided” (in 2000) before he was against it (in 2008) citing his “Christian faith” as the cause of his opposition. Then somehow prior to the 2012 election he suddenly found gay marriage compatible with that faith.

But was there anyone on either side, liberal or conservative, supporter or opponent, who ever thought Obama’s 2008 opposition to gay marriage was authentic in the first place? Lies of that sort are so common among politicians that this one didn’t really draw a whole lot of fire, even from the right. And when Obama flip-flopped once again on the issue (the familiarity of that term underscoring how very widespread the practice is) it seemed almost inevitable, didn’t it?

But to claim the whole reversal was in some sort of service to authenticity is rich. Obama would have gone on being “inauthentic” without batting an eye if he’d thought it politically expedient to do so. The audacity of this claim of authenticity as Obama’s motive is what’s so special about the Obama phenomenon—his tendency to cloak himself in the mantle of sanctimonious righteousness while simultaneously being one of the more coldly duplicitous presidents in history.

Annals of Republican racism, latest installment

The New Neo Posted on by

Why, I hadn’t thought of that before:

…the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank suggests on Al Sharpton that [Sebelius] wasn’t threatened with impeachment (as Holder was) because she’s white.

Of course [slaps hand on forehead].

Or perhaps it’s because she has white hair?

Personally, I think it’s because she looks like Peter O’Toole, but I already failed to get much traction on that.

For Passover: celebrate freedom

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. The sentiments still seem to me to be highly, highly appropriate. Maybe even more so, if anything.]

It’s the holiday season, and one of those rare years when Passover and Easter come close together, as they did during the original Easter. So I get a twofer when I wish my readers “Happy Holidays!”

In recent years whenever I’ve attended a Seder, I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not really primarily religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.

Offhand, I can’t think of another religious holiday that takes the trouble to celebrate freedom. Nations certainly do: there’s our own Fourth of July, France’s Bastille Day, and various other independence days around the world. But these are secular holidays rather than religious ones.

For those who’ve never been to a Seder ceremony, I suggest attending one (and these days it’s easier, since they are usually a lot shorter and more varied than in the past). A Seder is an amazing experience, a sort of dramatic acting out complete with symbols and lots of audience participation. Part of its power is that events aren’t placed totally in the past tense and regarded as ancient and distant occurrences; rather, the participants are specifically instructed to act as though it is they themselves who were slaves in Egypt, and they themselves who were given the gift of freedom, saying:

“This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people…”

Passover acknowledges that freedom (and liberty, not exactly the same thing but related) is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence (which, interestingly enough, also cites the Creator):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

It is ironic, of course, that when that Declaration was written, slavery was allowed in the United States. That was rectified, but only after great struggle, which goes to show how wide the gap often is between rhetoric and reality, and how difficult freedom is to achieve. And it comes as no surprise, either, that the Passover story appealed to slaves in America when they heard about it; witness the lyrics of “Let My People Go.”

Yes, the path to freedom is far from easy, and there are always those who would like to take it away. Sometimes an election merely means “one person, one vote, one time,” if human and civil rights are not protected by a constitution that guarantees them, and by a populace dedicated to defending them at almost all costs. Wars such as that in Iraq only give an opportunity for liberty, they do not guarantee it; and what we’ve observed there in recent years has been the hard, long, and dangerous task of attempting to secure it in a place with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.

Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists. Sometimes they are cynical and power-mad; sometimes they are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny, and that this is no coincidence.

As one of my favorite authors Kundera wrote, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”

Note the seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom to further that dream will end with humans being crushed like insects.

History has borne that out, I’m afraid. That’s one of the reasons the people of Eastern Europe have been more inclined to ally themselves recently with the US than those of Western Europe have–the former have only recently come out from under the Soviet yoke of being regarded as those small black and meaningless dots in the huge Communist “idyll.”

Dostoevsky did a great deal of thinking about freedom as well. In his cryptic and mysterious Grand Inquisitor, a lengthy chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, he imagined (appropriately enough for the approaching Easter holiday) a Second Coming. But this is a Second Coming in which the Grand Inquisitor rejects what Dostoevsky sees as Jesus’s message of freedom:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

Freedom vs. bread is a false dichotomy. Dostoevsky was writing before the Soviets came to power, but now we have learned that lack of freedom, and a “planned” economy, is certainly no guarantee of bread (just ask the Ukrainians).

Is freedom a “basic need, then? Ask, also, the Vietnamese “boat people.” And then ask them what they think of John Kerry’s assertion, during his 1971 Senate testimony, that they didn’t care what sort of government they had as long as their other “basic needs” were met:

We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart…

So that when we in fact state, let us say, that we will have a ceasefire or have a coalition government, most of the 2 million men you often hear quoted under arms, most of whom are regional popular reconnaissance forces, which is to say militia, and a very poor militia at that, will simply lay down their arms, if they haven’t done so already, and not fight. And I think you will find they will respond to whatever government evolves which answers their needs, and those needs quite simply are to be fed, to bury their dead in plots where their ancestors lived, to be allowed to extend their culture, to try and exist as human beings. And I think that is what will happen…

I think that politically, historically, the one thing that people try to do, that society is structured on as a whole, is an attempt to satisfy their felt needs, and you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name it is democratic; in others it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship. As long as those needs are satisfied, that structure will exist.

I beg to differ. I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.

Happy Passover, and Happy Easter! And that was no non sequitor.

Deficit reduced…

The New Neo Posted on by

…according to the CBO.

I freely admit that a true understanding of the deficit and the real reasons (as opposed to stated reasons) for its rise and/or fall has thus far evaded me. So I leave it up to you to discuss it in the comments section.

I have a few question, though:

Do you believe anything the CBO says any more? Do you believe some things, and if so, which? I, for one, tend to be particularly skeptical of projections for the future, but I’m skeptical in general too. And that’s true whether the news is good or bad, and whatever party is in charge of government.

Why do people tend to blame or credit a rising or falling deficit on a president rather than on Congress? Wouldn’t it seem that Congress would be more heavily involved, as a rule?

Couldn’t a lower deficit expressed as percentage of GDP have at least as much to do with possible rises in GDP as it would have to do with budget cuts?

Then there’s this:

Deficits will rise sharply after next year, CBO said. Cuts to discretionary spending on programs such as military defense and national parks will be more than offset by a rise in health care and Social Security costs, as the baby boomer generation ages into retirement, as well as higher interest payments on the national debt.

“If current laws do not change, the period of shrinking deficits will soon come to an end,” CBO said.

What’s it all about, Alfie?

Fun tax facts

The New Neo Posted on by

Eight of ’em.

I especially like numbers one and and three. Here’s the first:

It will take you 111 days this year just to pay off the government.

That’s an average, of course. But something called the Tax Foundation would have us celebrate Tax Freedom Day, “the day on which the money you earn effectively belongs to you rather than America’s governmental bureaucracy,” on April 21. Pretty sobering.

Here’s number three:

You probably pay more in Medicare and Social Security taxes than you do in income taxes.

That’s certainly the case with me, as a self-employed person with an income that isn’t high (keep using that Amazon portal, folks!). And it makes sense that it’s the case with most people, since Medicare and Social Security account for a huge chunk of federal expenditures (different percentages depending on how you figure it, but all those percentages are sizable).

Today’s posts: brought to you by the word “taxing.” Definition: “demanding, onerous, and wearing; wearingly burdensome.”

Revamp of annual census questions about health insurance coverage…

The New Neo Posted on by

…will make it hard to evaluate the effect of Obamacare.

How very convenient:

The Census Bureau, the authoritative source of health insurance data for more than three decades, is changing its annual survey so thoroughly that it will be difficult to measure the effects of President Obama’s health care law in the next report, due this fall, census officials said.

The changes are intended to improve the accuracy of the survey, being conducted this month in interviews with tens of thousands of households around the country. But the new questions are so different that the findings will not be comparable, the officials said.

An internal Census Bureau document said that the new questionnaire included a “total revision to health insurance questions” and, in a test last year, produced lower estimates of the uninsured. Thus, officials said, it will be difficult to say how much of any change is attributable to the Affordable Care Act and how much to the use of a new survey instrument.

“We are expecting much lower numbers just because of the questions and how they are asked,” said Brett J. O’Hara, chief of the health statistics branch at the Census Bureau.

It’s worth reading the whole article, which sheds light on how the questions used to be asked versus how they will be asked in the future. The gist of it is that the older method encouraged overestimate of the number of uninsured, while the newer method will be more accurate. That is, the older method bolstered the liberal argument that way too many people were uninsured and that we desperately needed health insurance reform of a major sort to rectify the problems, whereas the new method will tend to yield figures that would support the idea that Obamacare has been very successful in reducing the ranks of the uninsured, which can be used (and no doubt will be used) to justify the passage of the ACA.

Kind of neat, isn’t it? And a complete coincidence, of course:

Another Census Bureau paper said “it is coincidental and unfortunate timing” that the survey was overhauled just before major provisions of the health care law took effect. “Ideally,” it said, “the redesign would have had at least a few years to gather base line and trend data.”

But I guess they had no control over that. And yes, I’m being very sarcastic—although come to think of it, knowing the ponderous way government and its agencies work, it’s actually possible they didn’t.

Thoughts on tax day

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is an edited version of an essay of mine from the past.]

Today is April 15th.

Ah, paying taxes. What fun! Along with close to 100% of Americans, I hate the process. It’s an attitude that unites us like almost nothing else. This year, it’s even worse than usual, because the IRS has proven itself to be beneath contempt.

But to go back in time—tax day always reminds me of my father. He was both a lawyer and a certified public accountant, but it’s the latter profession that conjures up the April memories for me. He was not the Taxman (see video above) but the Taxmiddleman, the one who prepared tax forms—often of a very complex nature—and did it all by hand back in those pre-computer, pre-calculator days. Actually, I suppose there were calculators back then—clunky mechanical ones, much like the calculator our neighbors had in their house to use for their business. But my father disdained and distrusted calculators, preferring to rely on his lightening-fast abilities with pencil and paper.

Every year starting around February—when my parents always went away to warmer climes for about ten days, in preparation for the long hard slog to come—until April 15th my father would come home from work every night, eat dinner, and go immediately to a small table in our living room. There he’d set up shop until bedtime, around 11:30 or midnight, and then repeat the entire process the next day. Weekends it started earlier. No TV for him, and almost no relaxation, just this quiet sitting in a chair, bending over papers and fiddling with small figures.

For those months, we kids were instructed to tiptoe around in the evenings and not disturb him. This was a tense time. We could see it in his exhausted face and bloodshot eyes.

And so in our house April 15 was a very happy day. That’s probably true for all the Taxmiddlemen/women.

Did you know there is an entire genre…

The New Neo Posted on by

…of videos on YouTube that can be reached by searching for “dog eating with human hands”?

Yes, human ingenuity is just that awesome.

I do find them perversely amusing. For example:

Although it’s blatantly obvious how it was done (the “why” it was done remains something of a mystery, although I suppose umpteen million YouTube views is probably sufficient reason), apparently enough people were puzzled as to the mechanism that it prompted this explanatory video:

Often imitated, never duplicated. But the human’s laughter in this one makes up for a certain lack of finesse. Reminds me a wee bit of myself, late at night, with a spoon…:

Not to be outdone, cats get into the act. But the scale is completely off, which makes it an unsuccessful effort:

Irony of ironies…

The New Neo Posted on by

…all is irony.

The author focuses on irony and lack of seriousness in art. But the hegemony of irony is certainly something I’ve noticed getting more and more widespread in recent years. It seems to be the default position of most millennials, for example, at least in their public personae.

I haven’t quoted Milan Kundera for a while, but the ironic stance towards life seems to be a subset of what he calls “lightness” versus heaviness in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being [emphasis mine]:

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously the image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

But belief (in religion, for example) can lend both heaviness and lightness to life. Belief in God—especially one with standards who makes judgments—can mean that each act has weight on a scale larger than our individual identities and lifespans. But at the same time, belief in redemption and grace can mean that “my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Many people seem to crave heaviness and significance. If it’s absent (through lack of faith, the rise of moral and cultural relativism, or the prevalence of relative ease in terms of basic survival), they will tend to seek it out in other circumscribed areas of their lives. Thus we have a very serious attitude indeed on the part of the young, especially towards racism (imagined or otherwise), sexism, homophobia, and anthropomorphic climate change, to name a few. Heaviness can’t be banished; it sneaks in the back door.

Is the left aware of this? You betcha, and more.

[ADDENDUM: From commenter “Mac,” this article on Letterman’s ironic influence. I don’t quite agree that Letterman did it practically single-handedly, but he certainly had a lot more than a bit part in the spread of irony as the default position.]

Is there “significant” voter fraud?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This post is an expanded version of a comment of mine on a thread yesterday about voter ID and fraud.]

The left likes to argue that there’s no significant amount of voter fraud, so there’s no need for voter ID laws and those who support them are inherently racist.

But as far as I’m concerned, even one case of voter fraud is an abomination. And voter ID is a very reasonable way to deal with the phenomenon, for all the reasons that common sense would dictate.

But seeing that this is the left we’re talking about, I’m not even sure they believe their own arguments about the lack of voter fraud (even if they’re not the ones perpetrating the fraud, which we could—and no doubt will—argue about in the comments section); my guess is that the argument about insignificant voter fraud just appeals to them strategically. But it’s also illogical on its face, a sort of “what we see is all there is” assertion that makes no sense. It reminds me of people who say, “I always can tell when a guy’s wearing a hairpiece.” Maybe yes and maybe no, but how would they know? The really good, undetectable hairpieces would be like, really good and undetectable, wouldn’t they? The same with voter fraud.

However, the number of cases of voter fraud that have been found and prosecuted are certainly more than one or two. And there’s little question that those cases are certainly not anywhere near 100% of the ones that have occurred; a 100% prosecution rate would make them unique in the annals of crime.

It’s not hard to come up with links to documented voter fraud cases, such as this, this, this, and this. Not all of them are of the type that would have been prevented by voter ID laws, but many of them are.

Here’s another, and here’s one of my personal favorites:

The 2004 Washington State gubernatorial election was decided by 133 votes while 1,678 illegal votes, mostly by felons, were cast. The election was upheld because there was no accurate way to determine which candidate was the recipient of the illegal votes.

This reasoning ought to make sense to anyone not blinded by partisanship and demagoguery [emphasis mine]:

But the push for voter ID laws is not all about preventing fraud, said Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, who sponsored his state’s voter ID law.

“The driving factor is common sense,” Metcalfe told ABC News. “It only makes sense that when you show up to vote, to exercise that very important right and responsibility, that you prove you are who you claim.”

Metcalfe said the number of voter fraud cases that are prosecuted are only a sliver of the fraud taking place because there is no system in place to detect fraud. His voter ID law aims to do just that.

Voter fraud is hard to prove in the absence of ID laws, and adds to the paucity of cases. So the argument against voter ID laws is a form of circular reasoning. Lack of ID laws and difficulty of conviction makes voter fraud hard to prove, and the relatively low number of convictions is then used by people to argue against implementing voter ID laws. The following quote refers to Wisconsin, but it or something similar is true in many other states as well:

Because prosecution of election fraud falls on the shoulders of county district attorneys already strapped for resources, Bernier said such cases are rarely investigated, and hardly ever prosecuted. D.A.’s also must consider the high threshold of proving election fraud, weighing against the demands of other higher profile cases.

There are cases of voter fraud such as this one, where over a hundred people were convicted but the actual number of violations was thought to be in the thousands (there was a book written about that fraud and others perpetrated in the 2008 election of Al Franken and probably contributing to his close win, which was certainly “significant” since it was instrumental in giving the Democrats a majority in the Senate).

Of course, no matter how many cases one could come up with, the left won’t be considering those frauds “significant” enough—“significant” no doubt being defined as more than whatever the evidence might show.

Then there’s this, about how easy it is (and how likely it is) that illegal aliens vote in rather large numbers in certain states, and how hard it is to prove.

As for whether voter ID laws actually act to suppress black votes, see this for some evidence that they do not.