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Jeff Hamm
Inspector
Username: Jeffhamm
Post Number: 470
Registered: 7-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, October 05, 2004 - 4:12 pm: |       |
Hi RJ,
Psychology is a complicated area, and it's not surprising that our understanding of individual criminals is poor even if we're learning something about "criminals in general". Psychology studies "groups" of individuals to see if there is something common about that group that differs (often in small and subtle ways) from some other group (again in general).
In other words, it's looking at "group characteristics" while averaging out the individual differences. Those who research psychology realise that it is because of this that it is very dangerous to make specific statements about a specific individual when your information comes from some sort of "group average".
It's not that studying groups is a bad thing, or something that doesn't further our understanding. It's just that one has to be careful about how that information is used. The TV, or movie, version of the psychologist (or psychiatrist) who sits there and describes the unknown bad guy to a T is just that: the TV or Movie version. The only way this could happen in the real world is if the "bad guy" just happens to be the "prototype", or the group average, of whatever group of which they are a member. There are cases where the "psych guy nailed the description", of course, but getting it right once doesn't prove the method is accurate. Now, if the same "psych guy" could make such accurate predictions most times, then that would be something. Getting it right once or twice out of hundreds of attempts, however, is probably the result of "guessing".
Anyway, in order to gain some sort of useful description of a group, in this case "psychopaths", one has to first identify who is in that group. Then, look for common characteristics of that group that differ from characteristics of those not in that group.
For example, let's say psychopaths are more likely then the general population to have a criminal record. That doesn't mean 1) all psychopaths have a criminal record or 2) all people with a criminal record are psychopaths. But, it does mean, if you think some unknown person is a psycopath, you might suggest that a check for previous criminal records is more likely that usual (general population) to have the suspect's name on it. It may not, of course, but it gives one an idea of where to look for more information. It's an inference, not a conclusion.
Psychology also has a strange habit of changing the names of various disorders. A Psychopath becomes a "Sociopath" who becomes "AntiSocial Personality Disorder". These are due to changes in the DSM criterions and definitions. The changes reflect various studies which suggest the "common group" has these characteristics, and as the definition of that group changes (as new characteristics are suggested, or found not to be common to that group alone, etc) so too do the individuals who end up fitting that diagnostic.
Because mental disorders are so complex, research, and studies, of all sorts of individuals are required in our hunt for clusters of mental disoders. Is schizophrenia one disorder with various "sub-types" or are the various sub-types indicative of different disorders with some similar symptomologies?
Anyway, because of the names changes for the disorders are associated with changes in the diagnostic criterion that must be met, if one wants to look at "psychopaths" then one has either to use the older definations (which have changed because they have been shown to be inadequate somehow) or use the more recent definitions, which one could argue may include "non-psychopaths". This latter argument, however, requires one to demonstrate that the current definitions are, in fact, combining at least two different groups of mental disorders (psychopaths and non-psychopaths).
Anyway, psychology as a science is more or less where physics was when people were trying to figure out how to turn up big stones to make
things like Stone Henge. We have the advantage, however, of a long history of scientific advancement to suggest how we might improve our understanding.
If the mind does get "ill", or "break", in some ways more so than others, then there will be clusters of mental illnesses; which are the mental disorders we're trying to understand. If it has no tendency to break in certain ways, then there is no such thing as a "mental disorder", which implies that there is a group of people with this common "problem".
Anyway, because Clerkly's work seems to include people with very different disorders, although he's grouped them all together, this grouping is questionable. That would mean that Clerkly's sample could be a mix of many disorders. And since David is using, well generally misusing as I've pointed out to him before, examples from all these different people, then his suspect has a mish-mash of psychological disorders no matter what Clerkly called it.
The evidence of this mish-mash becomes apparent in the theory where the suspect's actions and the theories explanations for them require a delusional thinking person, but the theory insists no delusions are present in the suspect. This makes the theory fall apart by the fact that it is not internally consistent. One part of the theory leads to the conclusion the suspect is delusional, another leads to the conclusion the suspect is not delusional, and therefore the "bootstrap" method that David is using (whether he knows it or not) disconfirms at least this part of the theory.
- Jeff
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R.J. Palmer
Inspector
Username: Rjpalmer
Post Number: 467
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, October 06, 2004 - 3:51 pm: | |
Radka---Define your terms. What do you mean by the following? '[ E ] Presence of pseudologia phantastica.' Does this conflict with Cleckley's attribute:
"2. Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking?
What is the defining line between a fantasy and a delusion? Can a fantasist be considered devoid of "irrational thinking"? And how would you respond to Jeff's criticism that you have your man both delusional and non-delusional?
RP
P.S. Tumblety's height was aprox. 6' even. I don't find this particularly relevant. If the DC sniper wasn't apprehended, the whole set of run-of-the-mill theorists would be sniffing their collective nose at Malvo (the culprit) because he wasn't driving a white van. And heaven knows what they'd make of the Tarot card found at one crime scene... |
D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Thursday, October 07, 2004 - 10:42 pm: | |
Look-in post, out of order:
Mr. Palmer wrote:
1. “Radka---Define your terms. What do you mean by the following? '[ E ] Presence of pseudologia phantastica.' Does this conflict with Cleckley's attribute: "2. Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking?”
>>No, it does not. By pseudologia phantastica I do not refer to delusions or irrational thinking, but instead to the type of gravely pathological lying found in psychopaths. The psychopath has an irrational personality structure, yet his thoughts are normal. The problem is not in what he thinks, but in what he is, or perhaps in what universe or how in the universe he lives to begin with, before he thinks anything. He does not have a personality adequately dynamical to enable him to exist, as we do in the universe normal people inhabit, our universe being in part preconditioned for human life in it by our human personality. Psychopathic lying is not different in terms of specific content than the lies of a normal person, but it is often done in such a place, time and manner that indicates the irrationality of the particular underlying personality disorder. For example, consider the following examples of pseudological “living” attributed to psychopaths:
A. “A man serving a term for armed robbery replied to the testimony of an eyewitness, “He’s lying. I wasn’t there. I should have blown his f*cking head off.” (Robert D. Hare: “Without Conscience.” New York: The Guilford Press, 1993, page 125.)
B. A psychopath serving a murder sentence was asked about his criminal methods. Among his responses: “If you throw enough sh*t, some of it will stick.” (Hare, page 49.)
C. A psychopath preparing to undergo trial for murder was asked if he felt any remorse. His response: “I don’t think that’s the proper word…Remorse implies you did something wrong…If I’m the one who stabbed him, it was an accident.” (Hare, page 42.)
D. Asked to describe how he had begun his career in crime, an incarcerated psychopath responded: “It had to do with my mother, the most beautiful person in the world. She was strong, worked hard to take care of four kids. A beautiful person. I started stealing her jewelry when I was in the fifth grade. You know, I never really knew the b*tch—we went our separate ways.” (Hare, page 40.)
The psychopath perceives the objective content of the universe without delusions, but is highly vulnerable to perceiving it as a totality his own oyster, his property, and is unaware of the danger of taking such an irrational primordial starting point. Thus he subjectively projects himself into it in a variety of arbitrary, one-sided ways—it is simply all his, all him—he dynamically lacks the appreciation of a two-sidedness, a projector and a projected-upon. This determines him, and endlessly gets him into troubles he ought to be able to anticipate but doesn’t. The enlargement of the Whitechapel murders series was no exception. In my Thesis I write as follows…
“…As the series progressed, the murdering and mutilating became increasingly disjointed from his initial preoccupations (gaining control over maternal authority that he might be subjected to it, making the inside of a mother figure the outside) and more a matter of performance (what the public expected of him and ‘paid’ him to do by its terrified attention to his pranks.) It was not a matter of any ‘deepening psychosis’--there isn’t any evidentiary reason to believe he had one. Neither did his apocryphal ‘acceleration of violence’ result from any increasing courage he may have gained by his previous successes, as has been broadly attributed to him in studious historical commentaries--he didn’t have any anxiety or fear to overcome from the beginning, and further was fundamentally incapable of transcending himself. Rather, he found widespread attention coupled to what he wanted in virtue of the natural reflexive reactions of the public; his reaction was typically pathological, he followed, then encouraged, then programmed its increments by turn; ultimately, he self-defaulted to capitalize in the proposition of a maximum extortion, a quasi-heroically vainglorious attempt to suck dry his final victims, witnesses, his own family, the police, the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee and its constituent merchants, the Home Office, the Jewish community, the population of London and even the whole civilized world at the highest possible ticket price of admission. Thus he disintegrated into the primo pseudoentertainer, acting a role significant to his self-projection alone, yet capable of the most potent performance. Like Sammy Davis, Jr. tap-stepping to the fore of the Rat Pack, he was the one everyone came and paid to see. The apparent increasing competence of his eviscerations was less the product of any medical skill on his part than a deftly, elegantly handled hat and cane stealing the show.” (David M. Radka: “Alternative Ripperology: Questioning the Whitechapel Murders,” copyright 2004.)
2. “What is the defining line between a fantasy and a delusion? Can a fantasist be considered devoid of "irrational thinking"? And how would you respond to Jeff's criticism that you have your man both delusional and non-delusional?”
>>A delusion is a type of fantasy in which the fantasist has lost the ability to appreciate that the thought or image is originating in his own mind—he believes it part of objective reality. Thus he has separated himself from reality. But concerning the Whitechapel murderer, I don’t think we’re talking about fantasies. We’re talking about the gravimatational constant of the universe, so to speak; what the whole universe is worth, what its value is. Normal people set this constant their way, and the psychopath sets it his or her way.
3. “P.S. Tumblety's height was aprox. 6' even. I don't find this particularly relevant. If the DC sniper wasn't apprehended, the whole set of run-of-the-mill theorists would be sniffing their collective nose at Malvo (the culprit) because he wasn't driving a white van. And heaven knows what they'd make of the Tarot card found at one crime scene...”
>>Someone who should know about it has just emailed me about the “A-Z”, and he told me that it might be wrong on Tumblety’s height. Various heights up to six four have been asserted at different times, and no one apparently knows for sure which is correct.
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Saturday, October 09, 2004 - 11:17 pm: | |
Where is Dan Norder?
It has now been over three weeks since Mr. Norder posted (on Sunday, September 19, 2004 - 2:40 pm) that he just couldn’t spare the time to refute my explanations of how JtR’s behaviors coincide with the PCL-R and DSM-IV checklists that I posted in detail above (on Sunday, September 12, 2004 - 2:17 pm and Tuesday, September 14, 2004 - 8:01 pm.) He still needs to explain “all the errors and self-contradictions,” in his own words, he claimed at that time to find in this work. The points he must prove, the points he has reiterated a hundred times based on his reading of these checklists beginning in April 2004, are:
1. That I believe psychopaths are incapable of any emotions.
2. That I believe psychopaths are incapable of feeling anger.
3. That in order to do what I claim JtR did on the night of the double event, he would have to be experiencing delusions, while psychopaths never experience delusions.
Quite a disappearing act for someone who spent 4½ months of the time of the readers of this thread petulantly insisting that I had certainly misunderstood the meaning of psychopathy, isn’t it? It’s time, Mr. Norder. Proof or apology to the readers, sir. Win or lose. Here’s your chance!
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Saturday, October 09, 2004 - 11:50 pm: | |
Sarah Long wrote:
1. {Mr. Radka:} Don’t you have any clue what psychiatry is, Ms Long? Haven’t you studied Freud, psychoanalysis, emotional refinement, neurosis, etc.? I thought everybody had. {Sarah Long:} Some people have more important things to do. I am, as it so happens studying to become a psychologist and have been spending a lot of time on that. I am not incorrect at all. When I said that you stated they had no emotions I was quoting Ian (if you check that again, you'll find the proof for that). How can you say I'm in the wrong when I was quoting Ian all along. This is riddiculus. You clearly have no idea on the subject. I have experience one of the psychopaths first hand and she got angry. I don't care what you say on the matter as you are clearly wrong.”
>>When you said that I stated that they had no emotions, you were entirely incorrect. I never said that. It doesn’t matter what Ian said. Ian is responsible for the correctness of what he writes, and you are responsible for the correctness of what you write. If you weren’t so fired up by Mr. Norder and his friends to have your fun by thrusting your vain sword through my chest, you’d perhaps exercise more responsibility. *** With respect to psychopathic anger I’ve been entirely clear. Please bother yourself to read my two recent exhaustive posts on the PCL-R and the DSM-IV above.
2. “Also, don't "Ms Long" me. I find it patronising. My name is Sarah. Also, I am no Ms. I will not have another arguement with you. It is obvious that you are trying to coax people into debating with you, as was shown in your posts above to Dan and Jason.”
>>If a person posted lies about you publicly, wouldn’t you want to right the wrongs?
3. “You are arrogant and ignorant. I cannot be bothered to try to reason with you. I shall not be back on this thread so replying really will be futile. If you must continue to talk to yourself, please feel free to do so. It only shows that the only person you're trying to convince is yourself.”
>>And this demonstrates, concerning the evidence of the Whitechapel murders, exactly--what?
|
D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, October 10, 2004 - 11:35 pm: | |
Mr. Hamm wrote:
“I can't believe I'm bothering, but here you go. Early in this thread, during one of David's many diatribes he posted the following in response to something I had suggested.
Quote By David Radka,
Posted on Sunday, May 02, 2004 - 5:39 pm:
>>Psychopaths are incapable of real anger--it is too deep and complex an emotion for them. Additionally, they do not "express" their inner feelings as normal people do, they in fact simply externalize. You are thinking wrongly here.
-------------- end of quote -----------------
Now, the statement psychopaths are incapable of real anger is unambiguous. In David's view, psychopaths are "incapable of real anger", so the only anger left they are "capable of" is "fake anger". And if it is fake anger, then by definition it is not anger now is it. The rest of the debate has just been David trying to claim he said something else.”
>>No, no, God no Mr. Hamm. Your thinking is so unread and mediocre I’m not sure I can say anything to reach you, but here you go. In the above quotation I am giving the simple, plain vanilla account of psychopathic anger found just about throughout psychiatry, which you’d likely immediately encounter if you’d ever bother having a look at the resources of the field. Psychopaths have an attenuated experience or “pseudoexperience” with respect to anger. They outwardly react in mimicry as if they are experiencing tragedy, irony, deep resentment, rage, devastating anxiety, and inner upheaval, because they can see others outwardly reacting that way, but they are fundamentally incapable of generating the appropriate feelings themselves. They are not “faking” anything as you claim, because they have no touchstone of comparison concerning how they feel when crying and howling to the way others feel when they do the same things. A psychopath may have an acute cognitive sense of when it’s time to cry and howl, i.e., when he sees doing it as a way of getting something he wants from someone, but he knows little or nothing of the emotions out of which crying and howling come. All a psychopath can do with respect to anger is become pettily irked, piqued, vexed, or slightly pi**ed off. He can get a hair up his nose if things aren’t going his way at the moment, but that’s about it. When he goes out and eviscerates somebody as JtR did, he is not experiencing the overwhelming rage that you or I would have to be experiencing if we were to do the same thing—his reaction is wholly out of proportion to his feelings. He can’t personally appreciate that, though, and that’s why gross antisocial misconduct or delinquency often follows upon a little slight.
Consider this example. I attend a family Christmas party each year. Many people gather together, and bring their children. One year we were singing carols in the music room, and Cindy, age three, got up on the unoccupied piano stool. When we started “Deck the Halls” she started making noises at the piano. She had no idea whatever how to play the instrument, but she was able to mimic playing, and in that way, as far as she knew, to participate on an even field with everyone else. She had seen the piano played by others before. She was able to sit upright on the piano stool, put both hands on the keyboard, move her fingers about, start at the beginning of the carol and stop at the end, press down on many different keys, and this pro forma performance was for her entirely adequate, the “real” experience. We all smiled and humored her throughout the one carol, and then her mother wisely removed her from the room. What making noises with the piano is to really playing the piano concerning Cindy, is what being slightly irked is to being really angry concerning a psychopath. In and of themselves, the emotions of a psychopath are innocent mimicries or counterfeits of real emotions, the preponderance of the psychopath’s efforts to fool others by deploying consciously faked emotions notwithstanding (a part of Cindy’s hammering at the piano was, after all, to get our approval.) Get it Mr. Hamm, finally and once and for all? Psychopaths are emotionally incompetent people who have no adequate notion or measurement of their incompetence.
Perhaps an analogy of Dr. Hare will help: “The psychopath is like a color-blind person who sees the world in shades of gray but who has learned how to function in a colored world. He has learned that the light signal for ‘stop’ is at the top of the traffic signal. When the color-blind person tells you he stopped at the red light, he really means he stopped at the top light. He has difficulty in discussing the color of things but may have learned all sorts of ways to compensate for this problem, and in some cases even those who know him well may not know that he cannot see colors.” Robert D. Hare: “Without Conscience.” (New York: The Guilford Press, 1993), page 129.
Because a psychopath can’t generate real, adequate, naturally human emotions, he can’t evolve an adequate system of inhibitions or behavioral controls, either. In other words since he doesn’t feel much of anything, he doesn’t have much of any need for personal modalities to impede him from doing what strong, deep emotions might move normal people to do. So thus we have the prospect of soulless little psychopaths heading out into the world with no systematic way of preventing themselves from grossly overreacting to minor matters, and thus ruining life for themselves and others. I addressed this matter with respect to JtR in my illustration of Dr. Hare’s PCL-R in my Sunday, September 12, 2004-2:17 PM post above:
“POOR BEHAVIORAL CONTROLS
Repeatedly reacted pettily to perceived insults or slights. Killed Tabram because he felt irked that his significant other exercised her maternal authority to admit Aaron into their household—an act of emotional “displacement” frequently seen in psychopaths. Double event occasioned by John Pizer having stolen the center of attention from him. Miller’s Court affair resulted from Levy not humbly entreating him to stop murdering on behalf of the Jewish community. Responded in the classic sense of a psychopath in a short-tempered and hotheaded way to frustration and being disciplined by another person. Despite that behavior was hair-triggered, the murder scenes reflect orderliness, indicating “cold” anger.”
My position on psychopathic anger remains unchanged from the Summary, item 7.
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Jason Scott Mullins
Inspector
Username: Crix0r
Post Number: 325
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, October 14, 2004 - 11:01 am: | |
Has the gravity of your situation began to sink in a little deeper now David?
Have you noticed how no one is really responding to you? How all that ego inflating attention is beginning to wane? Hmmm.. funny thing that. I wonder why?
I think you've made it clear on what your thoughts on the matter are. You would love to blame the decline on a conspiracy of some sort. I find that the truth is almost always more simplistic than any conspiracy. I can only speak for myself, of course, but I have a real life®. One that does not involve talking to someone about the same subject over and over again to the point of blatant lies and accusations that involve federal crimes which violate the RICO act. Perhaps it is like I told you earlier.. we're all just so fed up with your BS that there is no reason to respond to you. If you weren't such a nuclear attention whore, perhaps you would have picked up on this by now.
As for why I am required to respond to you. Allow me to fill you in so that you can see just how silly your line of thinking about me and Dan being in cahoots really is.
I am required to respond to you because I require myself to. I believe I know volumes more about your chosen subject of sociopathy (or pyschopathy to you) than you do. You claim to be this breadth of knowledge, yet when pressed you either refuse to respond or can't seem to get your ideas straight. In the interest of new members and old alike, I decided that I just can't sit back and let you spout off at the mouth, unchallenged. I'm not certain why you had to come up with a conspiracy theory based on a little sentence I wrote.. but cha did. You took one statement I made and turned it into 3 (I believe) posts on some conspiracy.. One that doesn't exist (save inside your own head) might I add. Just sit back for a moment and IMAGINE what you have done with your theory and summary, in this regard.
So you see, there is no conspiracy.. Just good old fashion "being put out". I grew tired of trying to stomp out your little "pearls of wisdom" and gave up for a while. On top of that, I bought a house. One that was in a serious state of disrepair. My time since has been occupied by putting up walls, knocking down walls, plumbing an entire house, redoing electrical, etc. I am just now getting to a resting point, hence the opportunity to respond to you.
As I'm sure you are aware, I have at least 2 confirmed sociopath's in my family. This places me in a rather interesting position of observation. A position that you have likely not been in before. I've already given you reasons why I'm almost positive that you are off by a long shot in your summary and your views on what a real "psychopath" is like or is inclined to do, So I won't repeat myself here. If you do not remember them, I highly suggest you familiarize yourself with the search button at the top right of this very page you are reading now. Just know that I know you are ill informed and have no problem calling you out on it.
So, please, press forward with your dubious theories. While you are busy accusing people of "gangsterism", "secret back door meetings" with "promises of editorial positions" or carrots on a string, people like me will be busy doing other much more thought provoking and productive things. While you are experiencing delusions of grandeur, people like me will be on to more pertinent things. Like trying to figure out where the rest of our evidence went or postulating over super symmetrical string theory.
Ok, so that last one wasn't really pertinent here, but it is thought provoking 
Until your next delusion,
crix0r
(Message edited by crix0r on October 14, 2004)
(Because grammatically, I was ALL over the place)
(Message edited by crix0r on October 14, 2004)
"I was born alone, I shall die alone. Embrace the emptiness, it is your end." |
Jeff Hamm
Inspector
Username: Jeffhamm
Post Number: 483
Registered: 7-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, October 14, 2004 - 4:20 pm: | |
David,
After stripping your response from all the irrelevant diatribe once again, I wish to thank you for proving my final point. You are simply trying to claim you said something else.
It's amusing how you use the term "pseudoexperience" of anger, which perhaps you do not realise would indicate a "false experience", which again leads to you saying they do not experience anger (pseudo means fake basically; pseudo-science, for example, means "fake science"). In other words, you've said it again, but I'm afraid it is your thinking that is so mediocre (to use your term) you probably do not even realise it.
This is hysterical actually. I love this bit:
Here's David:
They outwardly react in mimicry as if they are experiencing tragedy, irony, deep resentment, rage, devastating anxiety, and inner upheaval, because they can see others outwardly reacting that way, but they are fundamentally incapable of generating the appropriate feelings themselves. They are not “faking” anything as you claim...
Ok, let's examine the statements for some sort of coherance, shall we?
They outwardly react in mimicry as if they are experiencing (then a list of things, including deep resentment and rage, which cover anger).
1) outwardly react in mimicry
An outwardly reaction would be a behavioiur, in mimicry would indicate imitation, clarified by the use of "as if", which emphasises the fact that the actual emotion is not being experienced.
So, David tells us again, that they will behave in a mannor to immitate, or more simply, they "pretend" to experience internal emotions by behaving as they've seen others. This, of course, implies yet again they do this because they do not experience the emotions themselves, an inference strengthed by his use of the phrase "as if they are experiencing"
Now, not only is that inference acceptable based upon what David has just said, but David makes it very clear this is actually what he means when he follows up this statement with:
"but they are fundamentally incapable of generating the appropriate feelings themselves"
So, again, David plainly says that these people mimic the behaviours of emotions they are incapabable of feeing themselves.
Which, pretty much corresponds with how I interpreted his previous statement along the lines of they "fake anger". These are not even hard concepts here, but clear statements, that unambiguously repeat the claim that psychopaths are incapable of feeling emotions, so they fake it.
What is most amusing though, is the very next line from David is:
They are not “faking” anything as you claim...
First of all, David seems to have missed the point that he's the one claiming psychopaths "fake anger". I, and others, have been telling him that they are quite capable of experiencing anger.
Now let's just think about this for a moment.
At one point I suggested to David that psychopaths experience anger (other's have made the same point too, of course).
David responded, and I present a quote from his response, where he says that psychopaths are incapable of real anger.
I interpret David's quote as him claiming "psychopaths fake anger".
So, David is now trying to claim he does not believe Psychopaths fake anger (I guess he agrees with me, and others, that they do experience anger; which would make this all even more pointless).
So, to present his argument that psychopaths do not fake anger (which is what I, and others, have been telling him), David starts off telling me how they mimic the behaviour, without actually feeling the emotion, which by definition is faking the emotion again. So David again describes how they "fake emotions" and yet somehow he then feels it appropriate to end this presentation with the conclusion they are not faking anything as I claim!
David, the only person who's thinking is, how did you put it, ah yes, "unread and mediocre", is yours I'm afraid. Your lengthy posts, rather than clearing up the self contradictions contained in the summary, simply present more and more self contradictions, which is completely at odds with your claim of extensive philosophical training. If the above is an example of what you were taught concerning logic, you paid too much, even if it was free. You don't even keep track of who is making what claim.
- Jeff
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Jeff Hamm
Inspector
Username: Jeffhamm
Post Number: 484
Registered: 7-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, October 14, 2004 - 4:42 pm: | |
Oh,
And David requested "proof" of where he claimed psychopaths do not experience any emotions (not just anger, but any emotions), how about this gem from his previous post:
Because a psychopath can’t generate real, adequate, naturally human emotions...
shortly followed by:
In other words since he doesn’t feel much of anything,...
David, why do you insist on claiming people get it wrong when they say you claim psychopaths do not feel anger, or when they say you claim psychopaths do not experience emotions, when you keep repeating those claims?
And how in the world does repeating those claims refute other people's claims that you claimed it in the first place?
What you fail to understand is that what people are saying is wrong about your claims is that "psychopaths do feel anger". If you agree with that, then you disagree with yourself because you are the one making the claim that they don't experience anger. And you keep repeating it.
This whole thread is based upon you simply saying everyone is wrong, no matter how inconsistent that makes you look. It reminds me of a Monty Python skit actually.
- Jeff |
Scott Nelson
Detective Sergeant
Username: Snelson
Post Number: 89
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, October 14, 2004 - 10:33 pm: | |
I am required to respond to you because I require myself to. I believe I know volumes more about your chosen subject of sociopathy (or pyschopathy to you) than you do.
Well, in your 26 years of life, what could you possibly know? Why should anyone respect your observations/opinions? Are you an expert? You certainly try to write as one. Is it those two sociopaths in the family, or could it be three?
Hey, Jason Scott, go back to fixing up your new house. Leave this thread as you promised to do so, long ago. Your observations are based on very limited exposure to the real world and hold little weight to this thread.
Jeff-- you've distorted the "psychopath as angry observation". David has always maintained that a psychopath is incapable of experiencing "real" anger as far as his or her's observations of other's display of "anger" go.
It's like a poor imitation job of acting. What you have to do is step outside of "normal" perceptions, or common-sense" observations of what appears to be irrational behavior to so-called "normal individuals. This concept, for whatever reason, is difficult to grasp for readers who are, for whatever reason, trapped in their "common-sense" approach to psychopathy. In other words, the person observing tries to understand the psychopath as "abnormal" in terms of the observer's own thought processes. Maybe that says something, I don't know. David's thesis is brilliant; it is all encompassing and provocative. Can we put a name to the psychopath? No, not yet, but we're working on it (it's very close). It will be someone very close to the family of Aaron Kosminski, that I'm sure of.
The attacks on David for the past six months are really tiresome. I'm sick of them because the attacks come from posters who know very little about the subject of---Jack the Ripper, and little more about the field of Psychopathy. Post a little less, read a little more, then this thread will be more valuable. |
Sarah Long
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Sarah
Post Number: 1320
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Friday, October 15, 2004 - 7:44 am: | |
Just stopped by. Couldn't help myself really. I'm not going to reply to David though since he is beyond help. Just wanted to comment on the above post by Scott. I couldn't work out if he was joking or not. If it's a joke, then it's so sarcastic it almost sounds real. It's actually funnier if it's not a joke (which is what I suspect). Funniest words:-
David's thesis is brilliant
Couldn't help myself.
Scott, for the record, David has been dishing it out for ages, but it just seems that he can't take it. He insults people and pushes his point (which doesn't even make any sense).
Post a little less, read a little more, then this thread will be more valuable.
This thread was never really valuable. David is pushing an argument in which he contradicts himself over and over again. He keeps saying that psychopaths don't experience real anger and then says that he didn't say that. Many posters have proved him wrong in this and other issues many times but he won't ever admit that he may be wrong.
Sorry, just had to comment on that Scott. It made me laugh. Now I really shall retreat from this thread, I don't want to get laughter lines now do I?
Sarah
Smile and the world will wonder what you've been up to 
Smile too much and the world will guess  |
Dan Norder
Inspector
Username: Dannorder
Post Number: 326
Registered: 4-2004
| | Posted on Friday, October 15, 2004 - 8:07 am: | |
The magazine still has most of my attention right now, but, wow.
Scott,
Serious question: You're putting us on, right?
"Well, in your 26 years of life, what could you possibly know?"
Gee, Scott, there are 18 year olds out there who have already taken higher level classes on psychology than David (or presumably you, based upon your support of his statements) ever did. An informed student in a high school psych class could spot some of the errors David made, because they are so fundamentally wrong.
I thought attacking people based upon nationality was bad, but attacking based upon age is right up there. I know seven year olds who are at least smart enough to understand the concept that insulting a large number of people in an established group all at once, as you did in your last paragraph, is a bad idea.
I don't know if you've been looking at David over in there in the lunatic fringe and secretly wishing to announce to the world that you belong there too, or what exactly you hope to accomplish. I mean, come on, if this theory of David's was in any way "brilliant," don't you think someone with real credentials in the field would have said so before you?
Dan Norder, editor, Ripper Notes |
Jennifer D. Pegg
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Jdpegg
Post Number: 1188
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Friday, October 15, 2004 - 8:13 am: | |
Scott,
'David's thesis is brilliant'
I wouldn't know I have only read the summary.
Jenni
ps you'd be surprised what you can learn in just 20 years!
"Think things, not words." - O.W. Holmes jr |
Ally
Chief Inspector
Username: Ally
Post Number: 757
Registered: 4-2003
| | Posted on Friday, October 15, 2004 - 8:18 am: | |
Oooooooh the sandbox is getting snotty today. Soon there will be hair pulling.
Scott,
"Can we put a name to the psychopath? No, not yet, but we're working on it (it's very close). "
Can we assume that you are working with David on his little venture into the realm of fantastical speculation?
The Vitriolic Victimizer
|
Jason Scott Mullins
Inspector
Username: Crix0r
Post Number: 326
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Friday, October 15, 2004 - 1:04 pm: | |
Hmmm.. Scott Nelson is back on the Radka Bandwagon©, is he? I thought you two had a falling out so many moons ago. Good to see that you've patched things up.
At anyrate..
You typed:
"Well, in your 26 years of life, what could you possibly know? Why should anyone respect your observations/opinions? Are you an expert? You certainly try to write as one. Is it those two sociopaths in the family, or could it be three?"
Where to start. Let's begin with age. I just recently turned 27. However, that doesn't really matter much. I've seen good research come from your direction. Kinda surprised that you are snobbish enough to make a statement like "Well, in your 26 years of life, what could you possibly know?". A lot, actually. For all 27 of those years on this pale blue dot I have been an avid learner. I've read much, seen more, and experienced oodles. So in short: So what if I am 27? What does it really matter if I am 27 or 97? Would you claim that Einstein didn't know what he was talking about because he was only about 36 when he finally got a good version of general relativity published? I certainly would hope not.
Now, as to why someone should respect my observations and opinions. Bottom line: I could care less, really. How about they go and investigate themselves to see if I am right? Like the buddha, I advocate people to use their own grey matter and come to their own conclusions. Hell, I could be wrong. At least I openly admit it. Whether I am respected for my observations OR my opinions matters little to me, really. In the end it doesn't matter much to most others, either. Unless of course you are writing a thesis in the hopes that it might make you rich.
"are you an expert?"
I suppose that depends on what your definition of expert is and what the chosen subject matter would be. Wanna rap about computer programming, system administration, or just about anything computer related? In that case, yes, I am an expert. Wanna talk about quantum physics? I am quite well read on that subject too. I am by no means an expert though. Not many are. Since you didn't directly ask me what I was an expert in (just if I was an expert) I'll go ahead and presume that you wanted to know if I was an expert in the mental sciences. Nope. Not at all. Not by a long shot. I don't pretend to think that I can ever truly grasp a concept as deep as human emotions or the brain to a level I would define as "expert". Here's the catch, I have _NEVER_ claimed to be either. Radka (and now presumably you) seems to think that he knows wtf he is talking about. All I am saying is that from _MY_ first hand experience, he is wrong on a few very important points. By implication, you are too.
As for my writing style. I'm glad you see my writing style as "trying to write as an expert". Your only problem is, I'm not "trying to write as an expert". What you failed to realize is that I have been around message boards, BBS's and the internet for a _large_ portion of those 27 years (raise your hand if you remember ARPANET ) I've seen more arguments and flame wars than you can probably count (go hang out at www.theforum.com, then come back and tell me how bruised your ego is. Don't worry, you'll get banned within 10 posts). So what you apparently mistook for "trying to write as an expert" in reality is "years of experience in dealing with this medium". If my writing style bothers you, use your god given and constitutionally protected right not to read it.
Now, to your poor attempt to suggest that I am myself a sociopath. I'll let you figure that one out all by lonesome, but I must tell you that the mere suggestion of it shows that you don't really know what a sociopath OR a psychopath are. Of course I could be taking your statement "Is it those two sociopaths in the family, or could it be three?" out of context, but it isn't written very well. Ex: What is the "it" that you refer to?, what about the 2 sociopaths in my family?, etc.
"Hey, Jason Scott, go back to fixing up your new house. Leave this thread as you promised to do so, long ago. Your observations are based on very limited exposure to the real world and hold little weight to this thread."
Hey, Scott Nelson, why ya all up in the kool aid and don't know the flava? Wait.. that might be a little to urban for you. How about: Hey, Scott Nelson, why are you spouting off about a subject you really know nothing about? You weren't around anywhere when I spoke to Radka in the chat room. Where were you when he made nasty comments about me and mine? How about when it was Christmas and we decided to agree to disagree for a little while? Lurking, I suppose. You have no idea why David Radka and I are at each others throat. Even if he told you, I doubt you got the full story. Most people keep their mouth shut (or fingers off the keyboard) when they don't know what they are talking about. Lest they be "all up in the kool aid and not knoweth the flava".
So hey, Scott Nelson, why don't you go back to lurking. More importantly, you don't know me from dick, so who the hell do you think you are to presume that my "observations are based on very limited exposure to the real world"?? For all you know, I could be Bill Clinton. You have NO idea what my real world experience and exposure is. Do your homework before you make a statement like that. It makes you look foolish. That's like me telling you that your opinion doesn't matter on this message board because I have more posts than you do. Not only is it an unfair statement, it is also a rather stupid one because there is normally no correlation between post count and worldly experience. Go sit in the corner, you've been bad. Go on.
I'm glad you've learned how to share your opinion. Welcome to free speech. I, however, disagree with it. I believe that my opinion will be helpful to others, now and later on. Whether you do or not is irrelevant. There are always 2 sides to every story Scott. I'm sure in your long years you've deduced this. I'll put it this way: If David Radka's summary, thesis and theory were to go unchallenged, as the gospel truth, what kind of situation would that get us in? What kind of world would it be? What's to stop someone else from coming onto the message board and claiming they solved the case, except this time it was little green men from zeta rectilon and their famous time machine? Do you see where I am going with this? In this public forum we get to share our opinions and thoughts with one another. We (as a group and individually) get to decide whether we "buy it" or not. As for Radka and his thoughts on the subject of who and what JTR was, I'm not buying it.
"Jeff-- you've distorted the "psychopath as angry observation". David has always maintained that a psychopath is incapable of experiencing "real" anger as far as his or her's observations of other's display of "anger" go.
It's like a poor imitation job of acting. What you have to do is step outside of "normal" perceptions, or common-sense" observations of what appears to be irrational behavior to so-called "normal individuals. This concept, for whatever reason, is difficult to grasp for readers who are, for whatever reason, trapped in their "common-sense" approach to psychopathy. In other words, the person observing tries to understand the psychopath as "abnormal" in terms of the observer's own thought processes. Maybe that says something, I don't know. David's thesis is brilliant; it is all encompassing and provocative. Can we put a name to the psychopath? No, not yet, but we're working on it (it's very close). It will be someone very close to the family of Aaron Kosminski, that I'm sure of."
Most of the above paragraph was directed at Jeff, so I will not comment on it. Except for this little gem: "David's thesis is brilliant; it is all encompassing and provocative.". I myself haven't read his thesis. You apparently, have. So I can not yet comment on it's brilliance or provocativeness. I have however, read his summary. I personally do not find it brilliant or provocative. In all fairness though, I will wait for the thesis and book to arrive before I make a comment on it's brilliance. For all I know it IS brilliant and provocative. I'm not holding my breath though.
"The attacks on David for the past six months are really tiresome. I'm sick of them because the attacks come from posters who know very little about the subject of---Jack the Ripper, and little more about the field of Psychopathy. Post a little less, read a little more, then this thread will be more valuable."
I almost agree with the first part of this paragraph. What I find more tiresome is David changing positions, forgetting what he typed and who he typed it to and his personal attacks on people. Lest you forget that I was accused of "gangsterism" only a few short days ago based on a 12 word response to question he asked of me which in the end had nothing to do with gangsterism at all. It must have caught your fancy, as my response to his conspiracy theory was one of the first things you decided quote in your response to Jeff and myself.
As for the attacks coming from posters who know "very little about the subject of Jack the Ripper and a little more about the field of Psychopathy", perhaps you might want to do a little more homework on your chosen targets. You don't know us except for what we tell you on the boards. We know David a little more because he has been posting for a few years. See one of my paragraphs above where I address this issue (something along the lines of "you don't know me from dick").
This thread lost it's real value the moment David took honest questions and interpreted them as personal attacks. Almost everything since then has been a real waste or an ego trip.
crix0r
"I was born alone, I shall die alone. Embrace the emptiness, it is your end." |
Michael Raney
Inspector
Username: Mikey559
Post Number: 435
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Friday, October 15, 2004 - 2:08 pm: | |
My, my, my. I knew I left this thread a long time ago for good reasons.
Mikey |
Kris Law
Inspector
Username: Kris
Post Number: 451
Registered: 12-2003
| | Posted on Friday, October 15, 2004 - 3:32 pm: | |
crix0r,
You are my hero. That was my favourite message in a long time.
-K
I'll see you in time . . . |
Jason Scott Mullins
Inspector
Username: Crix0r
Post Number: 327
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Friday, October 15, 2004 - 3:36 pm: | |
Mikey!!
How you doing man? Long time, no type.
Hoping all is well,
Jason
"I was born alone, I shall die alone. Embrace the emptiness, it is your end." |
Scott Nelson
Detective Sergeant
Username: Snelson
Post Number: 90
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Friday, October 15, 2004 - 6:14 pm: | |
"I've seen good research come from your direction."
Hey, thanks Jason Scott, that's all I wanted to hear.
Now carry on, you young whipper-snapper(s)...
back to lurking... |
Scott Nelson
Detective Sergeant
Username: Snelson
Post Number: 91
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, October 16, 2004 - 12:16 am: | |
I don't know if you've been looking at David over in there in the lunatic fringe and secretly wishing to announce to the world that you belong there too, or what exactly you hope to accomplish. I mean, come on, if this theory of David's was in any way "brilliant," don't you think someone with real credentials in the field would have said so before you?-Norder
Well I guess we'll have to wait for a qualified individual to assess David's case solution.
Meanwhile, why, oh why, did Christopher Michael DiGrazia turn over the editorship of RN to Dan Norder?
What a mistake. |
Dan Norder
Inspector
Username: Dannorder
Post Number: 329
Registered: 4-2004
| | Posted on Saturday, October 16, 2004 - 1:00 am: | |
Hi Scott,
As far as arguments and attempted insults go, your latest post is pretty nonsensical.
You should note that the editors of all the Ripper magazines have ignored David Radka, and Ripper Notes had done so long before I took over. I'm not aware of any other published author who takes him seriously, and a fair number have even posted to this very thread pointing out the gaping holes in David's logic.
If you are trying to claim that the experts in this field have not called David's work brilliant because they just haven't seen it yet, you are sadly mistaken. In fact, I'd find it difficult to believe that you could have paid any attention to the field in general and still entertain the notion that anyone might take David's theory seriously.
And, of course, since you aren't a subscriber to Ripper Notes and the new magazine has gotten rave reviews, I can only speculate as to how you managed to form an opinion that my taking over was a mistake.
Best of luck to you, Scott.
Dan Norder, editor, Ripper Notes |
D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, October 17, 2004 - 1:17 am: | |
Friends,
The counter indicates that we are approaching an auspicious event: The 1,000th post to our thread. I’d like to thank everyone for his or her participation, which has both surprised and gratified me. If it had been suggested at the time I emailed the Summary to Stephen on April 26th that we’d come to this point in less than six months, I’d have laughed. We have posted at a rate of better than 2,000 per year! At that pace, pretty soon we would have more contributions on one thread than some websites dealing with the case have in total. And even at a reduced rate, we’d make a distinguished contribution to the solution of the case over time. There are three people I’d especially like to thank; I’ll list them in alphabetical order:
MEPHISTO. A brilliant logical analyst and a solid, reliable man. His long philosophical dialogue with Mr. Palmer is the best the thread has to offer, and I recommend it to anyone new who wants to get up to speed.
SCOTT NELSON. If everyone had a friend like Scott, there would be a lot less trouble and division in the world. Scott questions the case evidence as an anthropologist. He is interested in the study of humankind, and is insatiably curious about where everyone came from, who knew who, where they all lived and how they lived, what kind of work they did, who was related to whom, and everything else related to the dramatis personae of the case. He doesn’t just pick up a hunk a case evidence at any old point, as had been done for 116 years, he pursues truth in a proper, orderly and critically appraisable manner. He seems to get little credit for this, despite that he has been one of the case’s best contributors for several years. If you are looking for inspiration in Ripperology, Scott is your man.
STEPHEN RYDER. Thank you so much, Stephen, for understanding my personal situation and letting me publish the Summary here. Thank you especially for allowing me to defend it.
May God bless everyone,
David
|
D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, October 17, 2004 - 1:21 am: | |
Mr. Hamm wrote:
1. “Indeed, the problem with Clerkly is that the research is outdated. It was an early work, and as you point out, includes a hodgepodge of individuals who are hard to see as representing one group (meaning, a group suffereing from a single, common underlying problem or disorder).”
>>And this opinion of yours, Mr. Hamm, is based on exactly—what? These individuals are hard to see, in virtue of exactly—what?, as representing one group. I think you say NOTHING here, and you know NOTHING whereof you speak. You are just FLAPPING YOUR LIPS on “no common underlying problem.” All of the individuals cited as psychopaths by Hare, Lykken, Cleckley and other psychiatrists were thoroughly tested and found to have no psychosis, yet they were clearly disordered, and their life histories mirrored one another to an astonishing degree. What FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT theoretical category is left for them, Mr. Hamm? Please be specific, now-- Hare, Cleckley and Lykken confused their psychopaths with exactly—WHAT kind of fundamentally differently disordered people? Please cite concrete examples from the case histories they give, naming Anna, Chester, Stanley, Max, Earl, Jason, Tess, Donald, Tom, George, Frank, Milt, Gregory, Walter, Roberta or any other of the proxy first names they used. Which of these people were possibly not psychopaths, and why not? Here is your chance, Mr. Hamm. Win or lose. Quote from other sources, too. Find some that agree with you that psychiatrists confused their case histories of psychopaths with people having other disorders, and let us see what you’ve got. Or show us where Hare or Lykken disagree with Cleckley on a diagnosis. I’m very generous with quotations and citations myself, but you’ve never provided even one to back your baloney up. Don’t cite minor theoretical refinements or developments in the idea-stream of psychopathy over the course of time, semantic changes or experiments within the same idiom; show us how psychiatrists have confused ESSENTIALLY different types of people with psychopaths.
2. “This has been pointed out before, and is one of the fundamental problems of David's theory as presented. It relies too heavily upon this one source. If the source is flawed, what he builds upon it will suffer the same flaws.”
>>Please show us, Mr. Hamm, specifically how my theory “relies too heavily on this one source (Cleckley.)” Show us specifically what aspects of my presentation are significantly challenged or contradicted by the work of other psychiatrists. Use quotations and citations. You are POINTING AT NOTHING and claiming it is something. What SPECIFICALLY are these alluded-to “flaws” in Cleckley’s, or anybody else’s—work? My alleged over-reliance on Cleckley is nothing more than an unsophisticated LIE originated by Dan Norder and repeated many times on this thread as if it were true. Right from the top, the Summary reads: “1. What is The Epistemological Center of the Case?: (1) It is that whoever he might have been, the Whitechapel murderer was a psychopath.” It does not read: “…a psychopath as defined by Hervey M. Cleckley.”
3. “(By "flaws", I am not saying Clerkly was an idiot, or dishonest, or any such thing, I just mean the earliest research, no matter how well it is done, will have errors, or flaws, in it. That's why more research is conducted, to smooth out those rough areas).”
>>What “rough areas” do you refer to, Mr. Hamm? If you can’t tell us in particular, then you say NOTHING and claim it is something. Research is conducted in the sciences because the study of objects is what science is all about, not to remedy these “rough areas or flaws” in psychopathy you speciously allege. Research is always an ongoing thing in the sciences, as is change, both positive and negative to the goals of science.
4. “Now, I do not doubt that what David "intended" with his statement {about psychopathic anger} is sometihng along what you've {meaning Roger Palmer in his Friday, October 01, 2004 - 2:02 pm post} outlined above. However, David's alledged philosophical background would provide him with the realisation that arguments must be phrased very carefully to ensure that what is "intended" is unambiguously carried by the words chosen. The words chosen, however, in their strictest interpretation do not convey this possible "intended meaning" but rather the more absolute interpration I, and others, have pointed out to David.”
>>What the HECK are you talking about here, Mr. Hamm? You refer to NO PART OF THE REAL WORLD. You SHOOT BLANKS. What “intended meaning” of mine do you have in mind? Mr. Palmer specifically stated in that post: “Radka's quote about psychopathic anger is pretty much straight Cleckley.” It is also straight Hare and straight Lykken, and straight many other psychiatrists. Exactly HOW am I misconstruing what any psychiatrist has written about psychopathic anger? You compare NOTHING to NOTHING and claim to get a valid difference between the “two.”
5. “Now, one learns early in philosophy training to base counter-arguments upon such sloppy use of language.”
>>WHAT “sloppy use of language?” Where, in exactly what sense, do I use language imprecisely? Copy and paste my imprecise language, and say why it is so. When you use the word “such” you LIE about what you say. You’ve identified and explained NO imprecise use of language by me, yet you refer to “it” as “such,” as a thing that actually exists. “IT” DOES NOT EXIST.
6. “As David claims quite a high level of philosophy training, then he would be familear with this, therefor it is safe to assume that what David "intended" was the interpretation above.”
>>WHAT “interpretation above” are you talking about? You say NOTHING.
7. “If this is not what David intended, then he would have to "clarify his intended meaning" and concede that his original statements do not reflect what they were supposed to reflect. A long winded way of saying, his original statement is "wrong" because it does not convey the "correct" meaning.”
>>I agree that a statement is wrong if it does not convey the correct meaning. But WHAT STATEMENT of mine do you refer to, and WHY is its meaning not correct? You SAY NOTHING. Does anybody know what Mr. Hamm is talking about? *** In this post Mr. Hamm separates the proper objects of philosophy from logical operations of thought. He is left with only a shell or skin of philosophy. Thus he proves nothing by what he says.
8. “The basic approach that David is presenting is simply a "bootstrap" style of theory testing. Which is, can I make a coherant and consistent explanation for all the data if I simply start by accepting a single (or small set) of initial premises. If everything starts to "link together" and does not contradict itself, the theory should be considered as a satisfactory explanation. Doesn't mean it's right, only that it is capable of explaing the data.”
>>You’ve got part of it right, and partial knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially in the hands of a petulant, prematurely excitable man like you’ve proven yourself to be. The epistemological center of psychopathy can be studied and coherently understood in and of itself, outside of the case evidence. I submit that it is not just any old set of initial premises, but the critically and logically best one. And it FULLY analyses all the case data, it does not merely “START to link the data together.” By the E.C., all the data is analyzed and made a coherent whole.
9. “And sure, the Jack the Ripper murders could be explained if we start from the premise that JtR was a psychopath. But they can also be explained if we start from psychotic as well, or just about from any other starting point; especially if we don't worry about emperical proof to constrain our claims.”
>>It is BALONEY that they adequately and satisfyingly can. Please SHOW us how the data can be THOROUGHLY explained by psychosis, a royal plot or any other center. Analyze each crime scene please, and SOLVE THE CASE for us based on it. Tell us whodunit, what his motivations were and how those motivations UNIQUELY and COMPLETELY organize the data into a whole. I suspect you will find yourself needing to make many assumptions outside the empirical evidence in order to complete your work, just like Edwards, McCormick, Matters, Harrison, etc. do. Again you SAY NOTHING. *** The A?R theory uses ALL the case evidence as its empirical proof. Its claims are 100% constrained by the case evidence.
10. “And, either way, simply starting with a disorder doesn't provide one with a suspect. Nothing in the evidence requires any connections be made between the murderer and Levey, for example. This means those connections are vapor. They could dissappear and still a nice consistent story could be told, though it would be different from what David presents.”
>>Why do we need to name a suspect to solve the case? You are not sophisticated enough to prevent yourself from wishing to invest magic powers in a name—any name—and then you must live with the consequences. But the principle line of inquiry concerning the Whitechapel murderer are all “why” questions, as Mephisto wisely says. *** There is massive evidence that Levy and the murderer were known to one another, straight by the evidence as interpreted as psychopathy. The marks on Eddowes face, the graffitus, the Miller’s Court affair on the day of the Lord Mayor’s procession, the attacking of Stride in front of a Jewish witness, and on many other evidentiary points the whole thing is connected. *** Put your fingers on your keyboard right this minute, Mr. Hamm, and TELL US THIS NICE CONSISTENT STORY WITH THE CONNECTION TO LEVY DELETED. Don’t just vacuously claim it can be done, DO IT. Put your story up to our criticism, like I do here. Be as much of a man as I am, for once. I think you will find that we don’t find it so nice or consistent, and that we can POINT OUT SPECIFICS in this regard, whereas you speak only in generalities.
11. “Now, by trying to use a bootstrap type approach, it becomes very important that the notion of what the disorder of Psychopath is be well established. And, since Clerky's work is an early work, it's not unlikely that this definition and some of the examples in his book, are going to be erroneous. If I were looking up on how to do "brain surgery", I don't think I would base my ideas on what the best doctor of the times thought in 1888; even if he was the first to write a book on the topic.”
>>Ha ha! This little gem is so childish I couldn’t keep myself from laughing at it. So you want to say that the notion of psychopathy is not “well established” in the literature of the field, do you? Ha ha! You are talking about hundreds of books, thousands of journal articles, many trained psychiatrists contributing, millions of readers reading, and many thousands of real psychopathic case histories presented and reviewed expertly. In all of that, now, there isn’t anything of the sort of a “well established” definition, you say? Let me tell you something, Mr. Hamm. Intellectual ideas, especially those concerning paradoxical and counterintuitive subjects like psychopathy, are streams. Really. What they are is the history, selectively chosen, of a long line of thinkers trying to come to grips with the issues and enigmas they find in an area. They make a clearing in the woods of distraction and talk about things there amongst themselves; hold a powwow so to speak. You can hear them talking to each other across the miles and the decades as you read and think with them. This is what A?R is up to, and this is what YOU have to be up to if you want to criticize A?R. You have shown above that you are IN NO WAY up to it; you haven’t got the FAINTEST CLUE what psychopathic emotional limitations are about.
12. “Once David's theory is stripped of all the ideas that are not required by the evidence, it boils down to "Jack the Ripper could have been a psychopath". And since even that statement is not necessarily true, it's hard to see this as a solution, and certainly not an original idea.”
>>When we “strip our theory of all the ideas that are not required by the evidence,” as you unwisely advise, we commit ourselves to a scheme of things—pure empiricism—that has failed to solve the case for 116 years. Why would you want to continue that, if there were a way to make a critically appraisable adjustment to your thinking? What is this slavish dedication to just one sort of intellectual life all about, anyway? What are all the Ripperologists so afraid of? Getting shot down by their contemporaries? If so, well then, just be better and smarter than they. Can’t you manage that? Is Ripperology a professional guild such as medicine or law, or is it just what we make of it? Aren’t we free to do so? It seems to me that Ripperologists suffer from an infinitesimally terminating case of conatus, imposed on them by and because of their own mediocrity in circular fashion.
|
D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, October 17, 2004 - 1:25 am: | |
Mr. Brown wrote:
1. “I'm going to tell you what everyone should have asked you from Day One...Remember now, this is coming from one of the " non-Whores" of Ripperology [ who are the whores ,by the way,Radka? ].......”
>>They include yourself, Cornwell, McCormick, Knight, etc. People who (1) Sell the public on the idea that the case must be solved on pure empirical information, and then (2) Sell them some 100% verified empirical information as the baloney sandwich that solves the case for them. Your recent efforts to secure a “doctor of the occult” to pronounce on behalf of the D’Onston theory is an example.
2. “Ready?”
>>Always.
3. “WHY did you assume....that a member of the Kosminski clan.....would react the way they did.....to a troubled family member...with anger,frustration,rage,violence....upon strangers....and NOT with kindness,empathy,concern,familial accord,and warmth...to that troubled family member? This is what everyone I know asks...This is what everyone I know SHOULD have said,way back when this thread was started.”
>>This is an unsubtle and scurrilous attempt to lay a devastating charge of anti-Semitism behind my back. It is a cowardly thing to do, and I have read Mr. Brown going on about it on another web site on which I cannot post to defend myself. Mr. Brown deals with me in this manner to try to compensate for not being qualified to discuss the case evidence on my level. The unstated upshot of the question is that I make the “assumption” that Jack the Ripper reacted to a situation that would nominally elicit compassion in an antisocial manner BECAUSE I THINK HE WAS JEWISH, AND BECAUSE I BELIEVE THE JEWS LACK COMPASSION. Mr. Brown wants to say that I believe and imply that Jewish people are miserable, untrustworthy, unethical, backstabbing users and abusers of honest and helpless people, even of their own family members, always with a trick up their sleeve. In other words, that I accept the gutterized view of Jewish people living in Gentile society made famous by the Nazi Josef Goebbels, in the sense of their being a sac of diseased pus on an otherwise healthy body. There are two parts to my answer to this question: (1) JtR didn’t react to his significant other’s informing him that she would make a place for Aaron in their home by killing prostitutes BECAUSE HE WAS JEWISH, but instead BECAUSE HE WAS A PSYCHOPATH. Please, Mr. Brown, pick up a few good books on psychopathy and bring us some quotations that attest to the real “…kindness,empathy,concern,familial accord,and warmth…” reported of psychopaths. I don’t think you are going bring us many. Did you even bother to read the Summary? In item # 2, part # 5 I wrote: “A psychopath chooses his actions according to the pathology of his personality type, and this includes exceptional vulnerability to being prompted to act by his present external surroundings and conditions. Therefore a Jewish psychopath living in Victorian Whitechapel may be expected to attempt to seize what he would view as opportunities involving the Jewish people, culture, and customs of that time. But clearly he would not be representing the attitudes or beliefs of nominal Jewish people or the Jewish community in what he does.” (2) I make no faulty classification of anyone’s being a psychopath based on partial or inadequate personal information about him or her. I know NOTHING of the personalities of Woolf Abrahams, Morris Lubnowski, or of anyone else in proximity to Aaron Kosminski, and am NOT misusing or manufacturing any personal information about them to classify anyone a psychopath. All A?R does is reasonably posit a psychopath as the generator of the case evidence, based on the case evidence itself, not on any particular individual’s personality. It then narrows down the likely situation of such a man as someone in Aaron’s close surroundings during the Terror, again, based on the case evidence. That is as far as it goes. There is NO evidence to support a classification of any particular individual close to Aaron as a psychopath, and A?R MAKES NO SUCH CLAIM.
4. “This is coming from someone who is not qualified to write,discuss,research,or analyze this case. Doesn't this make you just a little embarassed?”
>>It least I’m subtle enough to be capable of feeling embarrassed. I don’t believe you’d feel embarrassed if you soiled your pants in front of 97 kindergarteners after having consumed 40 Bavarian wieners.
5. “To have an a nti-intellectual bring this up....
To have someone who didn't recieve 40,000 balloons, for a thesis on Nietzsche,as you SAY you did,bring it up ? To have someone who, as manager of a website, enforce a ban on discussing your theory,either in a positive or negative way,because.............it has nothing to do with the Case.”
>>This is an outright lie by Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown enforces a ban concerning me on another website it is true, but not for the reason he asserts. It is in effect instead to allow Mr. Brown to say what he wishes of me and the A?R theory without having to concern himself with any ability on my part to respond to defend myself. It is a form of cowardly bullying on his part in which he gets his jollies by posting misrepresentations of my work with complete impunity, a remnant of his early playground experiences apparently still fully in effect. On my hard drive and Zip disks I have complete HTML copies of all Mr. Brown’s posts to his website. I’d like to ask Mr. Brown for his permission to address them here, which he is personally empowered to give me as a copyrighter of that website. Or if not, to allow me to respond to them on his website. Either way is fine with me, as long as my replies if to his website are left there permanently for all to read. You wouldn’t want everyone to think of you as “Howard the coward,” would you, Mr. B? Step up to the plate, and show us what you’ve got. Please post your permission here for me to respond to your posts on the following of your threads:
1. “Much ado about……..”
2. “32 Degrees in hell and falling…”
3. "A.R." jokes
4. “David Radka - Boy Genius or Cracked Pot?”
5. “Psychopathy for Beginners”
6. “Kosminski, Aaron”
7. “In Case You Hadn't Noticed”
8. “Radkaisms”
9. “Don't anyone tell David Radka, but.....”
10. “A newbie who doesn't understand the little blurb under "You don't know Jack"”
11. “JTR Forums House Rules, by HRH”
12. “The Cash Cow Has Landed !”
I’m ready to go with my responses, too. I’ve got my MS Word files all cued up and ready to post, as soon as I have your permission. Incidentally, Mr. Norder has already emailed me his permission to respond to his posts concerning the A?R theory he made on your website, so I’ll need your permission to respond to that here as well, please, to complete the matter. Thank you.
6. “I wouldn't know Dan Norder if he was standing right next to me.”
>>So what? I wouldn’t know Scott Nelson if he were standing right next to me, either. But I know we are friends. Just because you don’t know what Mr. Norder looks like doesn’t mean various considerations between the two of you are not in effect when you post. You functioned as his plant on the Cassell’s thread, didn’t you? You write for his magazine on a continuing basis, don’t you?
7. “I wouldn't know 90 percent of the "whores" of Ripperology,if they were standing right beside me. You are aware of the fact that I told Steve Ryder that I would avoid commenting on your theory.....and I have.....and I will.
I'm not going to re-construct the multiple page threads of insults and disparagements YOU have made about Ripperology over at the Forums.”
>>If you promised Stephen you wouldn’t comment on A?R here, why did you post your question concerning why I “assumed” a family member would attack prostitutes because of Aaron? And why are you complaining below about an alleged “dogmatism” of A?R? *** What you DO “construct over at the Forums are multiple page threads of misrepresentations YOU have made about ME,” with cowardly impunity. I can’t post over there, but I’m not afraid of you or your mommy, Howard.
8. “Why? Because Ripperological studies is a TEAM game,Radka.”
>>You said it yourself, Mr. Brown. You are playing on Dan Norder’s team. You are his plant. You’ve got others on the team as well, don’t you?
9. “Because YOU bring all this animus upon yourself,Radka.....LOOK at the posts people have made in response to your dogmatic adherence to 2 psychologists' opinions about SOMEONE YOU AND THEY DO NOT KNOW...”
>>This is another way of saying that all you are capable of handling intellectually is suspect-based Ripperology, and I agree. You need to think about D’Onston to be able to think about a case solution. Never mind there’s insufficient evidence to warrant he did it, you can’t walk without that intellectual crutch.
10. “Not one of these good,intelligent people,came to this thread with a "hard-on" for you.”
>>I should hope not, because anyone who gets a “hard-on” for me is going to be very disappointed.
|
Liam Colligan
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Thursday, October 14, 2004 - 9:26 pm: | |
Solidarity Brothers!!
Jeff,
I completely agree with your last point. David has gone in a complete circle to the point where he is climbing out his own ass. His main object here, as in many of his threads, is to discredit anyone who doesn't agree with his views - which in most cases is everybody.
In my opinion, Mr. Radka needs to get out a little more. He needs to take a step back and start respecting other peoples opinions before going on his relentless rampages of psycho-analysis.
Liam.
"Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life".... |
Richard Brian Nunweek
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Richardn
Post Number: 1109
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, October 17, 2004 - 4:19 pm: | |
Hi,
I cannot comment on the merits of Radka's work, because i simply cannot comply it, I along if i dare to say with countless others on this site find it extremely baffling to ones mind.
I Assume that all of us realize that the killer whoever he was was not of sound mind, but all this intellectual jargon makes hard work to decifer.
I suggest that all this psycho-analysis is brain damaging to the majority of us, even if that makes me look thick, then so be it.
Regards Richard. |
Howard Brown
Detective Sergeant
Username: Howard
Post Number: 82
Registered: 7-2004
| | Posted on Sunday, October 17, 2004 - 5:07 pm: | |
Mr.Brown responds to The Radikulous One:
1.These people wrote books on the Ripper and WM. According to you,I am incapable. That puts me in good company....neither has Scott Nelson,someone I admire.
2.Mr.Brown has three collegiate level textbooks on psychology and abnormal psychology.
A. ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY BY Davison and Neale...Wiley Press.
B. INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY by Coon .........West Press
C. PSYCHOLOGY....by Myers.........Worth Press
Mr.Brown makes no assumption of a partial Jew,as Mr. Radka has admitted to being,to being an anti-Semite. Mr.Radka does not know and will never know the ethnic origins of this here boy....
Mr.Brown will give the boot to anyone on the site he manages that attempts harassment based on age or nationality ..just like this seminal site.
Mr.Brown continues to wait for Mr. Radka to answer the question: Why assume that a member of the collective Jewish Kosminski clan acted the way they did ? He will not. He will continue to attempt to resurrect interest in a dead horse,his theory. It won’t work. Over at the Forums,we aren’t interested....and apparently no one else is either,save those souls that try to assist you in the baseless perception that you have fabricated...Thats why I said that they were “good people”...
The “doctor in the occult” is none other than Dr.Dawn Perlmutter,PhD. Dr.Perlmutter is frequently called in to examine murders by a variety of police departments nationwide to examine murders that involve eviscerations and signs of rituals. I know your date card is probably blank,so you will have time to check out some of the programs she has been on.
You live and die by Saint Robert Anderson....a lot of us don’t.
..”It then narrows down the likely situation of such a man as someone in Aaron’’s close surroundings during the Terror, again, based on the case evidence. That is as far as it goes. There is NO evidence to support a classification of any particular individual close to Aaron as a psychopath, and A?R MAKES NO SUCH CLAIM.
As likely as it may be,it is just as unlikely. THATS as far as it goes....
4. I see you have become somewhat of a standup comic....Don’t quit your day job.
5. I invite anyone to peruse our site at www.jtrforums.co.uk Pack a lunch,because you’ll have to look for some considerable period of time to see any thread devoted to Mr.Radka.
Heck....he knows that. I am the one who personally made sure of this omission. Yes,we did all have a joke about the theory, at one time......Thanks for reading them Radka...
6. Mr.Norder was very gracious to Mr.Brown in placing a story he put together about an evisceration murder in his hometown. Mr. Brown did not and does not act as a Third Party to anyone,and that includes my portly pal on The Isle Of Wight. Mr.Brown asked the question about Saint Bob Anderson because he wanted to. Mr.Brown recieved a nice response from Mr.Begg that satisfied Mr.Brown to the point that Mr.Brown can see the logic of what Mr.Begg implied.
7. The promise to Mr.Ryder still stands....I am not involving myself with your A?R theory. I am simply asking a question about its ORIGIN....before you went into the tailspin....I wouldn’t be afraid of my Mom either...She’s in the boneyard,dead,deceased,and a memory... But if alive,she would put a country whippin’ and a whompin’ on you for your disrespect.
8. Ripperology IS a team game.....Here’s how it works: Steve has a site....Chris Scott finds material on a suspect...Dave O’Flaherty goes a little deeper....Paul Begg uses it in a book.....Tom Wescott blasts it. [ Just kidding about that ! ]...Mr.Hamm makes some observations.
Mr.Norder is one of the finest logical and objective thinkers in Ripper studies. His style may have irked you because he dared to question some of the comments you made. I don’t have to subscribe to Ripper Notes. I may not re-subscribe,as I now see Tom Wescott has yet another story coming out this month in the magazine.
9. Your answer is what I think interlekshuels call a non-sequitor...You have been pretty rude with people,which is one of the two reasons people like you get the boot at the Forums. The other is that I simply don’t like your Internet personality....or lack of one.
10. Thats a figure of speech. I believe you once asked the members of this site to post nude photos of themselves for your perusal......
Nice try,Radka.....but there ain’t no fish in your pond....so I ain’t goin’ fishing.
Yours Truly, How Brown
(Message edited by howard on October 17, 2004) |
John V. Omlor
Chief Inspector
Username: Omlor
Post Number: 864
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, October 17, 2004 - 8:07 pm: | |
This thread is a riot.
Anyway, David Radka wrote to someone recently, in response to a criticism about his offerings here:
"WHAT 'sloppy use of language?' Where, in exactly what sense, do I use language imprecisely?
And then later, in that same post, he wrote the following sentence:
"It seems to me that Ripperologists suffer from an infinitesimally terminating case of conatus, imposed on them by and because of their own mediocrity in circular fashion."
I'm not going to ask him if he knows "precisely" what "infinitesimally" means or how, exactly, it modifies "terminating" or what that final prepositional phrase "in circular fashion" modifies in the sentence it ends or why a reader can't tell.
No, I won't ask.
Because I don't really need an answer.
Loving the reading here,
--John
PS: The gratuitous use of "conatus" is charming, although I wonder if he means it in the Hobbesian sense or in the porcupine and prickles sense, "precisely."
|
Jeff Hamm
Inspector
Username: Jeffhamm
Post Number: 487
Registered: 7-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, October 17, 2004 - 9:17 pm: | |
Just a quick post to try and teach David a little about psychopaths and anger. Just did a quick search for you in the psych database.
Found about 50 articles on a combined "psychopathy and anger" search. Hmmmm, seems a lot of research is being done on something you keep claiming "doesn't exist" (anger in the psychopath). Maybe all these articles are just finding what David has claimed? Let's check, shall we?
Hmmm, I'm seeing all sorts of references to "primary" and "secondary" psychopaths. Gee, odd thing for modern researchers to use terms that suggest there might be "more than one group" or "kind" of "psychopaths" when our self proclaimed resisdent expert says they are all alike; almost carbon copies of each other has been the gist of some of his posts. One might think you would know about this if you didn't rely on such a small sample of sources where maybe the more recent research is not included? Hmmm, if the recent research isn't included in your sources, wouldn't that justify the comment that they might be considered "out dated"?
Here's the opening quote from a PhD dissertation on the topic (by Brian Lee Steuerwald):
Theoretical views of psychopaths' anger generally fall into one of two categories: the deficient/attenuated-anger hypothesis or the adequate/heightened-anger hypothesis. This study tested divergent predictions of these two hypotheses in a group of individuals with psychopathic characteristics. ...
Notice here David, there are two broad classes of theories about psychopathy. One is that anger is heightened (more anger than non-psychopaths), the other idea is that it is "attenuated" (less anger; note not "no anger" but simply less anger). You are pushing for an extreme version of one side of a theoretical debate. So, evidence for a "lack of consistency in the current understanding of psychopathy" is probably best demonstrated through example by this very point. The field is obvioiusly not even decided on the question of one emotion: do they feel more or less anger than non-psychopaths?
And what did this series of studies find? In his summary statement of his results it's:
Findings were generally not inconsistent with the adequate/heightened-anger hypothesis of psychopathy.
Which basically go right against your assumption that psychopaths do not experience anger.
So do modern theories think Psychopaths have anger David? Yup, they do, and it's a topic of study that is not yet resolved. Possibly because psychopaths are not one homogenous group as you seem to think they are.
Here's a quote from another PhD thesis on the topic:
"Second, psychopathy had both a direct relationship to aggression, and an indirect relationship to aggression for Ambiguous Scenarios, with hostile attribution bias and anger acting as mediating factors."
What that means, is that their level of anger acted as a predictor for aggression. Not surprising, unless you're David and you erroneously thought that psychopaths didn't experience anger in the first place. Hard to have different levels of zero.
Anyway, here's some information from another recent paper by Morrison and Gilbert, this one published in the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, 2001.
"Primary psychopaths perceived themselves to be significantly higher in social rank than secondary psychopaths, lower in shame, and lower in ratings of angriness, self-blame and anger towards others. A significant association was found between social rank and anger in response to provocation and an inverse relationship between social rank and both shame and angriness. Regression analyses revealed that social rank and self-esteem best predicted variance in anger intensity to provocation, controlling for antisocial personality deviation. Primary and secondary psychopaths differed significantly, therefore, in their self-evaluative and social evaluative processes. The key differences lay in social rank evaluations and shame. Primary psychopaths assume dominance and threaten others who challenge them, while secondary psychopaths assume defensive, subordinate positions within a psychopathy hierarchy, seek dominance, but are sensitive to attacks from above and below."
Once again, different kinds of psychopaths (so your original sorces will be combining primary and secondary psychopaths at the very least; and possibly other disorders as well). And as shown above, these groups tend to differ (they are not all carbon copies of each other just because they are psychopathic). And just look at how often that "angry" thing keeps turning up David. Anger is there, even if you want to say it isn't.
And, here's the conclusion statement from an article by Pham, Philippot, and Rime (2000) from the Journal Encephale:
"The results indicate that while psychopaths' autonomic baseline may be generally hyporeactive, they do not have any emotion-specific physiological deficit."
And perhaps a nice summary is presented in this Journal Article, although a bit older (1971):
Journal: Revista Mexicana de Psicologia
Title: The psychopathology of William McCord-Joan McCord
"Discusses the definition, historical background, causes, diagnosis, treatment, and sociolegal implications of a psychopathic condition and proposes that: (a) a psychopath is an asocial, impulsive, aggressive, and unprincipled S who has difficulty in adapting and relating to his environment; (b) his condition can be due to hereditary, neurological, environmental and/or neurosocial factors; (c) diagnosis of a psychopath is based on characteristics, e.g., egocentrism, superficiality, intense anger, fear of rejection; (d) adequate treatment is hard to find although psychodrama, individual therapy, psychoanalysis, drugs, etc. . . . are suggested with special emphasis on Wiltwick's method of rapport, tolerance, group influence and advice for children; and (e) laws regarding mental patients and psychopaths should be revised. It is concluded that studies undertaken in the past 150 yr. have led to nothing concrete and that a more thorough analysis of this problem is necessary.
The "bolded" sections are by me for emphasis in this last abstract.
Now, as much fun as it is to beat my head against a brick wall, I have some papers to mark now.
- Jeff |
R.J. Palmer
Inspector
Username: Rjpalmer
Post Number: 472
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, October 17, 2004 - 10:37 pm: | |
The root problem is the sloppiness of psycho-babble. Sometimes psychologists refer to "anger" as a behavior, (throwing a fit, storming out of the room, etc.) and other times they speak of it as an inner-state of being. Cleckley refers to psychopaths as "hot-heads", yes, but on the otherhand, he also argues that their emotions are in reality, shallow and hollow. (The distinction seems to me to be fairly cloudy ----probably an unknowable).
But, I'm a little confused. How exactly does any of this relate to the case evidence? Where in the theory does the distinction even come into play? How does it help us?
|
Jennifer D. Pegg
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Jdpegg
Post Number: 1196
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, October 18, 2004 - 3:13 am: | |
Hello everyone,
here's something to ponder over
'Why do we need to name a suspect to solve the case? '
of course how stupid of us!!!
Anyway, i think i have figured out why David accused us of being involved in some kind of syndicated gangstarism, it was to stop us saying things like:-
1)this thread is doing my head in.
2) this thread is going no where.
3) i still don't understand David and this thread has been going on for 6 months.
4) David - every time we say something to question your theory you go off on one about gangstarism and the like, accuse us of lying, or generally call us names, whenever we criticise your theory and you can't answer you start accusing us of lying and gangstarism and generally insinuating that we do not own a brain cell to rub together between us. Is this the kind of environment you want your theory to be seen in?
5) David please give it a rest what more can there be to say about your suspect-less theory at this point in time?
Jennifer
ps John it probably does!!
"Think things, not words." - O.W. Holmes jr |
Kris Law
Inspector
Username: Kris
Post Number: 453
Registered: 12-2003
| | Posted on Monday, October 18, 2004 - 4:52 pm: | |
I would just like to take my hat off to David Radka, for being the first poster I have ever seen give an acceptance speech in a post.
Good stuff! Keep it up! Next time, though, you should remember to thank your parents and God!
-K
I'll see you in time . . . |
Jeff Hamm
Inspector
Username: Jeffhamm
Post Number: 488
Registered: 7-2003
| | Posted on Monday, October 18, 2004 - 5:49 pm: | |
Hi RJ,
You are spot on, psychological research into human emotions is extremely difficult to do, and like any area of research, is often loaded with jargon (psycho-babble; chemico-babble; bio-babble; phsics-babble; etc).
As with any research, you have to measure something. If you define anger in terms of behaviour, then you will focus on "angry behaviours". If you want to get at the notion of the "qualia of that inner experience", well, how do you? How can we even be sure that two "non-psychopaths" share the same inner experience when they both report being angry? It's like wondering if I experience "Red" the same way you "experience Red"? Obviously, if one of us is colour blind, that is not true (one confuses red and green, one does not; so we could assert that the inner experience must be different). However, if neither of us are colour blind (or we both are), does that mean our inner perceptions are the same? Maybe, maybe not. Who knows.
Some call these kinds of things irrelavant, and in the end it's only the behaviour that matters. So, if psychopaths behave more "angrily", that means they "are more angry". Others argue that this means the inner experience (the qualia of the emotional experience) is not addressed if you leave it out of consideration.
Often physiological responses are used (heart rate, sweating, etc) to try and get at the idea of what the "qualia" might be. These findings tend to suggest that psychopaths have a lower response to emotional stimuli. However, having a lower response to images, or sounds, that normals have stronger emotional responses to may only indicate psychopaths have less "empathy", which is pretty much accepted by everyone I think. If they don't care, or respond emotionally, to an image of a starving child, for example, that doesn't mean they are incapable of feeling "sad", or of "feeling angry". It just means that the kinds of things that make "normals" feel sad and angry through "empapthy" don't cause a psychopath to feel sad or angry (or whatever). These kinds of studies are usually where the "low or deficient" emotion notion comes from; but they could be argued to simply be showing "a lower level of empathy", rather than a "lower capacity for those emotions".
However, deny a psychopath something they want, and they may experience anger, real anger and real frustation. They may show such a large response that normals would think this level of emotion is innappropriate. And this is where the "increased anger" ideas comes from.
In conjunction, we might end up thinking something like "Psychopaths will respond with less emotion to situations which normally evoke an empathetic emotional response. Paradoxically, they may have an increased emotional response when the emotion is invoked by an event operating on them directly, rather than through another". I'm not saying this is the "correct answer" for psychopaths. My area of research does not include these kinds of questions, so I'm not up on all the current research that is being done. But I'm familear with enough of it to know that it is not as simple as David seems to think it is.
Because the question is so hard to address, it is not surprising that the literature is not entirely consistent on the issue. One has to first decide what to measure, and how to measure it, and in response to what change will these measurements be taken. Since we can measure human behaviour (physiological changes being a form of behaviour), that is what gets measured. Trying to get at the notion of that intangible "inner experience" through only behavioural observations, makes this kind of research very difficult. Some say impossible, some say it can be done despite the difficulties.
It's also why relying on one or two sources, that may share a common view, is so dangerous. You get a biased perspective because you don't have the background or knowledge to realise that the issues are not as clear cut as your one or two sources may seem to imply. Being more widely read, and more critical in one's thinking, is essential if you really want to understand what the problem is, let alone what the answer might be.
And, much like research into JtR, we may simply not have enough information yet to actually answer the question. The only guarentee is, if we stop looking for the answer, we will never find it.
- Jeff
|
Glenn L Andersson
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Glenna
Post Number: 2154
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - 7:02 pm: | |
Based on what we know from the behaviour of some criminal psychopaths, their supposed lack of human emotions generally refers to their lack of empathy and their inability to have true and deep feelings of love in a sincere way. It is in this context their emotions are referred to as "shallow", since they are not real, but only displayed as an act in order to maximize their own personal benefits.
That doesen't mean that they can't become angry or feel genuine rage, however. There are emotions and emotions. In a situation when they feel pressed or gets stuck in a position that threatens them, they can apparently show a dangerous rage. Psychopaths are complex, since they on one hand can be cunning and street smart and on the other suddenly becomes irrational when their "animal" driving forces takes control -- during intense moments. That is why psychopaths generally are labelled as "unpredictable".
However, we are miles from this to the strange behaviour of Radka's character suspect.
It is irrelevant to debate over whether Radka's "psychopath" is a psychopath or not, since he is a confused mix and jigsaw puzzle of all possible mental disorders put together. It is just not credible.
I feel happy on Radka's part, though, that he's found such a loyal and totally uncritical follower in Scott Nelson, especially since Mephisto seems to have disappeared -- he sure needs everyone he can get to back him up.
It is very much up to Mr. Nelson to label Radka's delusional and ... well... imaginary work as "brilliant" as well as insult and smack those in the head who dares to critize it, although I would assume such statements would probably belong to the worst intellectual suicides ever seen on these Boards. At least I had a good laugh.
But whatever makes you happy, Scott...
All the best
Glenn Gustaf Lauritz Andersson
Crime historian, Sweden |
Howard Brown
Detective Sergeant
Username: Howard
Post Number: 85
Registered: 7-2004
| | Posted on Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - 12:49 pm: | |
In our lives,we encounter our share of numerous bizarre and offbeat incidents that many of us can relate to. Some are mirror images of what others have experienced,while others have their peculiarities that make them fairly unique.
One such incident has happened in my tour of the planet just now..I thought it would be worth reading,because there is a similarity to this incident that requires comparison to the Ripper related issue on this thread......
I will refrain from any attempts at jocularity,because it is a pretty sad tale and one that has no humor within it....
On July 12th of this year,my plant hired a man from The Dominican Republic,whom we will call Jose X....My crew had been “short” a man,to man a machine crucial to my department’s success . Filling this position has at times been hard for me,as despite being tolerant,the material fabricated on the machine requires not only a good head for mathematics,it requires a degree of sobriety,discipline,and attention to detail. Some people don’t make it on this machine,as tolerance bows to material costs and losses,if the operator isn’t proficient within a period of time considered “long enough” to learn...
Jose X spoke almost no English. His few words were the usual “hello” and”goodbye”,along with a few descriptive words. Other than that,I had to communicate with him in Spanish,as I speak Spanish.
His first week was his hardest.....learning techniques..adjusting to the machine’s nuances....and becoming acclimated to his new environment. I was very happy with the accelerated progress he made,a progress that convinced me he was a “keeper”....
His accuracy with the machine rivaled mine,and I have been doing what I do for almost 30 years. He was precise,methodical,conscious of the always present danger of losing a finger or hand,and above all,quick to ask questions when he forgot instructions...wanted to improvise...or had a need-to-know about some specific job. These latter attributes are what sold me on Jose X. His teamwork,courtesy,and general demeanor were top shelf and among the best of any worker in the plant...
Because of these superlative qualities,I voted, without hesitation, for Jose X for three straight months as “Employee of The Month”. I also used my influence combined with his work output reports that I am responsible for to get him two pay raises within this 3 month span..which he recieved without the usual delay other employees usually encounter.
Jose X is a portly man of 29. About 5 foot 5 inches tall,and 220 pounds,the good natured and friendly man came to the area from the D.R. to live with his mother and step-father, both employees of the plant,and pretty lowkey,industrious,and reserved people in their own right. Not being very familiar with these two as I became with Jose X, my perception of his family comes from the encounters I have had with them in passing at the plant. Just plain folks....
On Thursday last,the 14th of October, all of this changed and is the gist of my story....
That Thursday,while going over instructions on how to pack the material Jose X had been fabricating,with a girl in my crew, Jose turned off his machine...walked over to where I was...and broke down in tears. This was alarming,as it came out of the blue...Others came over to see what the problem was and we all patted him on the back,assuring him that whatever was wrong,would be made right,as soon as he told us what the problem was.
This took about 1 minute,which in these circumstances,seem as if it was a half hour...I could tell some of us were getting a little irritated as Jose X continued to gasp,sob,heave...step back...return to tears,heave,gasp...all the while refusing to tell us what the problem was.
Well, he did....He told us that he was arguing with his stepfather,whom as I mentioned works at,but not near,where we work...Jose grabbed my forearm and told me that I treated him better than his stepfather,because I am always nice and respectful to him,unlike the stepfather,who talks “noisy” [ mi padre es muy ruidoso conmigo ! ] to him.
The owner came out and it was decided to let him go home and relax and forget about the day....He punched out..but instead of going home, he stood by several of the female machinists,going over his arguments with his stepfather over and over...It got to the point where I had to ask him to come sit by me,as he was being a distraction..He did and that was that.
Friday saw him,unknown to me,have another minor fit of anxiety. He could not find his measuring tape. Instead of coming to me,his supervisor,he instead started throwing things around and muttering to himself,according to one of the other supervisors. This supe found him a tape and told me later that Jose X had a strange look on his face and was way over the top in his anger at not finding a tape. I’m familiar with characters who have anger control problems,but Jose X didn’t have any precedent for me to believe this about him. I brushed it off as a bit of exaggeration by my co-worker.
Saturday proved to be the unraveling of this young man....At his home,his mother and stepfather asked him to begin looking for his own apartment,out of the need of privacy and most importantly,there comes a time when Junior has to live on his own,out of the nest,and into the world.After all,he is 29. Along with the age factor,he displayed every indication of being more than capable of being a solo act...
Thats not the way Jose X saw things......taking a baseball bat,used as home protection by his family, he managed to destroy the apartment...chase his parents into their bedroom,pulverizing the door with repeated blows so loud that some neighbors called the police...By coincidence, some fellow employees were partying nearby and saw what transpired....
As soon as the police came,Jose X took a deep breath and dropped the bat. According to his mom,he told the cops that “he had a problem”. In Pennsylvania,if a transgressor pleads temporary insanity,he can avoid jailtime [ unless, of course,there is murder involved...], and be sent to a mental health facility, by taking what is called the “Statute 302 “. Jose X took it and was shipped off to the local mental home.....
Needless to say,everyone at work was nonplussed....His work status was considered “still active” and we were fully prepared to wait for his release,thinking that this was some sort of “bad episode” that wasn’t everything it appeared to be...
We were wrong.
Today,the 19th , one day before his mandatory release,[which is even more scary considering his mother declined to press charges for the Saturday blowup ]provided that the counsellors deemed him “healthy” enough to leave the facility, he made the faux pas of his life.
He called a fellow supervisor here at work,from the minimum security area of the mental facility,because of that supervisors proximity to his mother and told him,in a serious monotone, “ I want you to tell my mom if she doesn’t come and get me today and not tomorrow, I will kill her....kill Alberto [ the stepfather ]...burn down their house....go kill my cousin...kill everyone in my way...because I am working for the FBI..the government of La Republica Dominicana...I am an agent sent here on a assignment to perform a mission...Now tell her to get me out. I am serious”.
This message made it to me and some others quickly. We now knew that Jose X was seriously troubled...Then he called the plant for me. I knew,somehow,that it was going to be him...None of the violent threats were restated to me,but the last thing he said was, “If I don’t get out today...I’ll be there tomorrow.”.
We called the police as the other supervisor and I had to tell them what we had heard. Hopefully,this man will be staying a lot longer than he had hoped.
Now...back to the analogy of this to the Ripper theory.
In all fairness,I believe that there is a degree of immaturity in Jose X,which can be misconstrued as a “mental problem”....No doubt the man has mental problems,no doubt...Maybe he is suffering from psychosis and is a psychotic....In reality,in my gut,I feel that it’s a combination of his fear of living alone, being a big baby needing Mommy,and the mental problem,which is not a gut feeling but a sad fact...........
The comparison with a theory going around these days about a psychotic killing 5 strangers due to altered living conditions,hit me like a ton of bricks...I was,for once,speechless. When I heard of the threats made on the phone about what Jose X would do,if forced to look for an apartment, it took a nanosecond for me to be reminded about this thread......
I felt it only right and fair to post this,as there may be a precedent for the theory to be based upon..
This is not to accuse the theorist of using a prior incident such as the one I have experienced over the last few days, one that saw a man,whom DID have a prior stay in a D.R. mental facility [ now they tell us !!],go from the “top of the world”,an absolute dream employee,who anyone would have employed in a New York minute, to his bleak future confines of Building 51,Norristown State Mental Hospital,where psychotics like John DuPont make their home,The Hell on The Hill...But out of the sheer incredible coincidence of this incident and in a honest,forthright manner
and without any intention of being duplicitous, I would like to ask the theorist if there is a prior incident that he may have heard of that possibly influenced his thinking relative to his theory, due to the disruption of what had been Jose X's living condition and status, and what I have to admit,made me think immediately of the scenario depicted within his theory...Again, this is not a joke...not a trick..not a fabrication..just a simple question.
Thanks for your time....
How
P.S. If D.R. does not want this post here,by all means move or delete it. |
D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Tuesday, October 19, 2004 - 1:01 am: | |
Mr. Palmer wrote:
1. “But is it really a matter of "Cleckley being out-dated"? I'm not so sure. If one looks up the entry on psychopathy in The Oxford Companion to the Mind (published fairly recently by the Oxford University Press--1998), the studies of psychopathy that it references are all pretty much contemporaries of Cleckley's (from the 1950's & 1960s). One, I seem to remember, even dates to the 1930s. But I admit that my background is in the humanities, not the sciences, so I tend to get a bit nervous when people speak about "progress" in understanding human nature. Is Montaigne outdated? Or Shakespeare?”
>>Excellent point once again, Mr. P. I wish the other posters would listen to you better, especially lately. There’d be less dirt to clear from the doorstep, and more opportunity to discuss rationally the important issues of the case, with which A?R attempts to grapple and on which its truth-value hinges. What I would give for one or two more posters like you, even though we disagree on some things. Instead we must all endure Hamm getting himself caught between his undergarments, Mullins walking into walls, and Brown mucking like an antediluvian hippo. *** There is no “progress” in understanding human nature, and there is no strict “outdating” of notions of psychopathy. When we study this subject, we have to be able to STEP INTO THE STREAM of thinking about it, beginning way back at Pinel, and currently stationed at or about the DSM-IV. We must be THINKING about what the other thinkers have thought, LISTENING to them talk to one another, and CONTRIBUTING our own feelings, values, intuitions and cognitions. It is a RELATIVE matter to learn about the syndrome of the nothing, the hollowness at the innermost chamber of being, it doesn’t have fixed signposts such as does learning how to operate a computer. We ourselves undergo DYNAMICAL CHANGE when we make a sincere study of these enigmatic people, that change is risky but it may indicate GROWTH on our part. In the end, we know little more than when we started, but we’ve TONED OURSELVES UP A BIT by the effort, we are refurbished by our dance, and we experience ourselves more prepared to deal with issues, these and others. Learning about psychopaths is like practicing for the big football game—the goal is to get yourself as READY TO PLAY as you can be. Was the genius of Shakespeare a matter of WHAT HE KNEW of human beings, or rather HOW PREPARED HE WAS TO ASK THE NEXT QUESTION about them? This scheme of human possibilities seems totally lost on most of the IDIOTS that post here. All they want to do is go and MEMORIZE SOME CR*P that will serve to put a few dollars into their retirement plans.
2. “What I did like about Cleckley is that he's sincere; he's trying to describe a disturbing condition that he's seen in his practice but which seems to almost defy a definition, let alone an explanation. It's a bit like the old Supreme Court quip: "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it." I'm a little more extreme than you, I suppose. In general, it seems to me that Psychologists have made a lot less progress in regards to understanding criminal behavior than they would have us believe.”
>>Right. Mr. Andersson notwithstanding, models of criminal behavior are nothing more than bundles of unrelated data held together by statistical probabilities, the way a bunch of mutually unrelated sticks would be held together by a rubber band. They are matters of probability, not predication. They give the false impression of a genuine novelty, but in fact nothing new happens of them. But with psychopathy we have a real type, finally an organic unity, and a peg to hang our Ripperlogical hat on, albeit a paradoxical one. Good enough!
3. {Mr. Radka wrote:} "or Littlechild talking about how they picked Francis up 30 minutes after Nichols’ body was discovered with blood on his sleeve. " {Mr. Palmer responds:} We're drifting away from your theory a bit, but this seems to be too confident an argument from a position of ignorance. (Our collective ignorance) Since I don't know why Littlechild considered T a likely suspect, I can't fully discount the possibility that he was found with blood on his sleeve in the Whitechapel Road----particularly since Littlechild seems to be suggesting a knowledge of T's arrest files when he calls him a "likely suspect." Not too unlike me not knowing precisely why Anderson stated that a Jewish suspect had been positively identified. It might be a inconvenient fact, but it's a fact nonetheless, and one that must be considered.”
>>But Littlechild doesn’t SAY that. If he did, I’d come right out of my shoes looking for reasons to accept Tumblety. I don’t believe any of my clients have any money until I see the balance on their bank statements. I don’t try to guess empirical information, I try to assemble it. Assembly can be logical, critical. We could say instead that Littlechild said what he did of Tumblety because the Victorians thought homosexuality was deviant, plus Tumblety was known to be violent, therefore presto! He’s Jack the Ripper. Thousands of people thought they had identified JtR by similar means.
3. “As for Stewart Evans, I think it's fair to say that he has greatly influenced my thinking about the case, for which I make no apologies. Not to say that Fido and Begg don't have their charms.”
>>Evans is a great teacher and role model to have. I like his books, too. Even his Tumblety book. I think, given the Littlechild letter, the case for Tumblety should have been made, and Stewart did an excellent job of it. That notwithstanding, if he comes out for Tumblety he shouldn’t say he is entirely objective or distanced from him in his other works. If you do that, you open a wound on yourself that just festers and gets worse. You become a distortion of yourself, like two different people in one, and it shows in the positions you take. Fido is actively looking for ways to disprove and dispense with David Cohen, so he can get onto other things. Begg admits he plumps for Kosminski insofar as Stride is concerned. Neither lives in a universe parallel to him, at least as far as I can see.
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Monday, October 18, 2004 - 1:06 pm: | |
Quick Look-in post, out of order:
Mr. Palmer writes:
"...Sometimes psychologists refer to "anger" as a behavior, (throwing a fit, storming out of the room, etc.) and other times they speak of it as an inner-state of being. Cleckley refers to psychopaths as "hot-heads", yes, but on the otherhand, he also argues that their emotions are in reality, shallow and hollow. (The distinction seems to me to be fairly cloudy ----probably an unknowable). But, I'm a little confused. How exactly does any of this relate to the case evidence? Where in the theory does the distinction even come into play? How does it help us?"
>>Concerning the recent posts of Mr. Hamm that I haven't answered yet, Mr. Palmer hits the nail on the head. I couldn't have explained the matter better myself. When I get round to responding to Mr. Hamm, please be assured my detailed answers will be essentially the same in germ as what Mr. Palmer writes here. Mr. Hamm is typically saying NOTHING about what I write, and NOTHING about the case evidence. He is SHOOTING BLANKS. The merely semantical distinction he attempts to make "does not even come into play concerning the case evidence," precisely as Mr. P questions. Mr. Hamm has spent the greater part of the last six months PUBLICLY MAKING A FOOL OF HIMSELF.
(Please note I am in this post endorsing only what Mr. Palmer writes above. I am not not necessarily endorsing everything he says about my work, or what he may write subsequently.)
David
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Monday, October 18, 2004 - 6:01 pm: | |
Mr. Palmer wrote:
1. “Jeff--I'm no champion of Radka's theory--I think you know that. Indeed, it surprises the hell out of me that Radka tips his hat in my direction, considering the fact that he elsewhere calls me a sophist and suggests that my posts be scrutinized for dishonesty...”
>>You called yourself a sophist, Mr. P. I did not and do not attribute sophistry to you, and would have no way of doing so apart from your own statements. You wrote in a praising way of Protagoras’ lost book “Truth,” supposedly the principal and seminal work of all sophistry. If you want me to go back and find it in the archives, I will. I thereupon recommended Robert Pirsig’s book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” a modern sophistical work (or at least Pirsig thought so,) as a possible partial replacement for Protagoras’ lost book. Despite that you are or say you are a sophist, everyone subsequently saw you engage in a lengthy philosophical dialogue with Mephisto on this thread, thus I’ve adjusted my thinking concerning you. I still am not quite sure how I should account for you in all respects. Further, he regards you worthy in discussions, and I have to consider that as well, because Mephisto is a good judge of character.
2. “At any rate, Radka's quote about psychopathic anger is pretty much straight Cleckley. The whole schtick of the Cleckley's book is an attempt to explain or define the bizarre behavior of some of the patients he's come across in his practice. He also uses plenty of literary examples as well as a discussion of some fairly well-known criminals. I'm no expert; in fact, I'm rather skeptical of the entire field of psychology, but it seems to me that part of the problem here is that Cleckley's definition of "psychopathy" is a lot broader than the folks that Mr. Norder is dealing with.”
>>You are correctly describing psychopathic classifications as a struggling stream of consciousness made in an attempt to understand incomprehensible people and their behaviors, an observation worthy of moment to Mr. Norder, were he to wake up to it. I think you’ve got it exactly backwards insofar as groupings are concerned, though. The “folks Mr. Norder is dealing with,” as you say, include any of a very large group of people who Mr. Norder thinks show some of the signs of the checklist characteristics. We’ve all known plenty of people who are egocentric, or callous, or superficial, or criminal, or antisocially rebellious in a variety of ways, or emotionally limited, but who are not psychopaths. Because Mr. Norder limits his thought to merely the checklists, he concocts an inadequate sense of the consciousness of the psychopath in his mind, and thinks he knows what he’s talking about. He’s wrong—one needs to study the field extensively in order to not be misled, its subject matter being among the most paradoxical on earth. Mr. Hamm makes the same mistakes. When he says that I have a “mish-mash” of characteristics of various psychiatric conditions in mind, in fact he is the one who has the “mish-mash” in mind, he is thinking of too broad a grouping because of the superficiality of his research, and thus he fails to isolate the essence of the sub-group of psychopaths. The consciousness of the psychopath is spectacularly fragmentary and defective, and leads to behaviors as irrational as schizophrenia despite the absence of cognitive delusions, an oft-repeated psychiatric observation that completely passes both Mr. Hamm’s and Mr. Norder’s minds. Norder and Hamm seem to just begin to let themselves touch upon the notion of psychopathy, and then, terrified, to run away and hide under the carpet. *** Please note also that one of the criminals Cleckley discusses as a psychopath is Jack the Ripper, as do Hare and Lykken.
3. “This isn't a strange thing. It's surreal to me that there seems to be some unwritten assumption here that psychologists and psychiatrists agree on the definitions. Maybe there is more uniformity & agreement than when I was in college 15 odd years ago-- I don't know. But I recall alot of disagreement. One branch, the Behavioralists (B.F. Skinner & clan) probably would conclude that the whole argument about anger is moot, since outward behavior was all the mattered, and the so-call 'inner workings' were irrelevant. If I understand them correctly, whether than man was exhibiting real anger or whether he was only mimicking anger would be (to Skinner) irrelevant and unknowable, and speculations along these lines would be nothing more than an unhelpful diversion from treatment. (I'm not saying that I agree with this view, only that it's out there).”
>>Good point. Mr. Norder seems to have a dangerous, oversimplifying gift of objectivity. He thinks he can be adequate dealing with psychiatric subjects using whatever tangible meanings come quickly to his mind. Anger is anger. Emotion is emotion. And thus he proceeds to sort it out so unsubtly. He and Mr. Brown have much in common in this respect, I think, a couple of intellectual gangsters looking to operate lucratively, if not sensitively. They both have to learn how to appreciate the various different nuances of purposes and related meanings in the field. This is not for kids.
4. “What Cleckley seems to believe is that a wide range of behaviors can all be linked under a common trait of shallowness. A big feature of psychopathy for Cleckley is a lack of emotional depth. "They" are as intelligent as anyone else, but "they" have no insides.”
>>Shallowness is a common descriptor used, but it only the part of the syndrome. A complex deficiency related to a mis-development of the whole personal identity structure is in effect, resulting in an all-encompassing perversity. What is the nature of this deficiency? The question remains up for grabs. The term psychopathy is predicated on the syndrome as a whole, whatever it may be, not just on shallowness.
5. “Ie., "The Stepford Psychopaths. Good Doctor Cleckley describes everone from the poet Swinburne to murderer Neville Heath to a petty female criminal and bookworm (who can't differentiate between the emotional strength of King Lear and a dime-store novel), to a local upstanding citizen who one day breaks into a dog kennel and runs around on all fours naked as a jay-bird. To Cleckley, what is wrong with these people is a sort of soul-less, shallowness. Their lack of empathy is evidently merely a symptom of a deeper problem. This is why (I think) Radka is stating that Psychopaths don't express any real anger. The key word is real; to Cleckley these people are only a "mask" of a genuine, three-dimensional person, hence the title of his book, "The Mask of Sanity."
>>Quite right. The mask of sanity is a fixed structure composed of the cognitive mimicking of emotional states the psychopath incompletely or inadequately feels. It is quite a sane state as far as cognitive sanity goes, and cognitive sanity is used as the legal definition of sanity. Becoming masked is at the same time both an innocent thing, in the sense that the subject has no choice in the matter, and a monstrous perversity of human nature, in the sense that cognitions are grossly, arbitrarily, irreversibly, and unsubtly substituted for or counterfeited as feelings. A pretty smart dramatic representation of it recently appeared on the Discovery Channel in a program about Ted Bundy. First Bundy’s early years were reviewed. This came down to Ted feeling slighted and irked when he discovered through research in civil records that the person who had always told him she was his sister really was his mother. At that point, he constructs his mask. The scene shows, against a black background, the living, grinning, expectant face of the young Ted in the upper left quadrant of the screen as an inanimate, clay comedy mask rises up from the lower right quadrant and proceeds to cover it. Overwhelming! From that point on, the motivational aspect of the mask is clear: the self-ruinous pursuit of destroying or overpowering maternal power or woman power (however oddly he may have defined it,) thus succumbing to it. Bundy and JtR are similar people, in my view.
6. “A bit of editorializing. Only my opinion. The book is interesting and recommended for its lurid reading, but much of Dr. Cleckley's book is rather hard for me to take seriously. Cleckley is a latter-day Erasmus worried and wearied by his fellow beings and it seems somewhat relevant to me that this text was a product of 1950s McCarthy-era rural Georgia. There is a certain disdain for the world going to "hell in a handbasket," For instance, from Cleckley's white-picketted estate in Atlanta, Oscar Wilde and indeed all homosexuals are border-line psychopaths. I can't imagine anyone would take this too seriously; at least I don't. (It's impossible for me to believe someone like E.M. Forster could fall into a definition of psychopathy).”
>>Lurid, eh? Yeah, I guess these people are lurid. Everyone needs to try to apprehend them his or her own way, I reckon. *** I don’t agree with a lot of Cleckley’s opinions either. Especially his too-Freudian notion of a “masked psychosis” when no delusions are present. He got the mask part right, but not the psychosis. Cleckley lived and died by Freud, I’d say.
7. “Some of his other conclusions are simply wrong: for instance about the insanity of James Joyce. Maybe I lack imagination, but my main problem is that his definition is too broad to be of much value; Cleckley's patients and subjects exhibit such a bizarre and wide range of behaviors that it's difficult to accept that they can all be lumped together under a general diagnosis. (Indeed, this is my main problem with Psychology. I don't really except the notion of psychological "types"--human behavior is too complex and idiosyncratic).”
>>Here we disagree. I can see all of Cleckley’s case histories predicated on the single notion of a defective partial transcendence of space and time. The idea of it is totally substantiated in the case histories, if that is what you look for in them. The human personality, or principle of individuation, essentially never entirely forms, and what you have is something like a cat with a human mind and body, or perhaps a human infant with an adult mind and body. I think the “structures of the mind” oft-discussed when Kant comes up may really be the synthesizing of emotions and cognitions as the human personality. Thus what I do is read the “Critique of Pure Reason,” then imagine what life would be like if that didn’t apply to someone, and I have my psychopath. This means that the life Kant envisions as necessary for everybody may be defectively or only partially attained by some people, with the result that gross irrationality and purposelessness seems normal and acceptable to them, even rational and purposeful. To talk of such things blows the mind…
8. “I don't think Radka has the right bloke, but my partial acceptance of Radka's hunch about the type of person Jack the Ripper might have been isn't really based on a study of psychology, but, rather, on reading criminal case histories. If Cleckley is too broad to be meaningful, I think Glenn Andersson's definition of "lust killer" is too narrow to be meaningful. There are all sorts of bizarre criminals that don't fall into any neat catagory, and are seemingly fueled by obscure, contradictory, and bizarre motivations. If we knew the full history of Neill Cream and Michael Ostrog we might have examples. I forget the name at the moment, but there was a French madman and criminal who was everything from a crooked politician to a poisoner to a shoplifter to a rapist and mutilating murderer to an arsonist. He was finally arrested for running a horrific murder for profit scheme during the French occupation.”
>>”…obscure, contradictory, and bizarre motivations,” eh? Yeah, you could say that about JtR. A fragmented personality, fearless, externalized, walking around Whitechapel bored and looking for something to do, and then he sees people walking down from the Lyceum, gets caught up in their excitement…
9. “I think the overwhelming problem Mr. Radka is faced with is this. Since a psychopath --by his own definition---is capable of bizarre, "baffling", and unpredictable acts, how on earth is he going to convince his readership that he can correctly decide what elements in the history of the Whitechapel Murders are the product of the unidentified psychopath? Couldn't he be opening himself up to the accusation that he is merely just picking and chosing? (Indeed, this seems to be the main criticism of Andersson & Norder).”
>>I follow the case evidence, via the epistemological center. I pick and chose when psychopathy indicates I should. “I know both sides because I am both sides;” that is the way Nietzsche worked, and how I work. I learned from him. It is all-encompassing, nothing left over. Could it be wrong? Anything can be wrong, but what about the logical conformity of the case evidence taken as a whole to the E.C.? You don’t HAVE to believe it, but shouldn’t you, if you wish to think about the Whitechapel murders in an orderly, reasonable way? *** Who? Oh yes, <yawn> Andersson and Norder. Neither knows what a psychopath is, a prerequisite to commenting on the case, as I see it.
10. “Radka's theory would be more convincing if he could definitely demonstrate that: 1) the man seen by Schwartz (and who cried "Lipsky!") was the actual murderer; 2) the Goulston Message, and the Lusk Kidney were all the work of the murderer; 3)that Levy was the witness; etc., etc. etc. Of course this is an impossible task, and Radka admits that it's not a matter of "proof." (proof, schmoof) Faced with these facts we would have to ask ourselves what these indisputable facts tell us about the nature of man we were dealing with. As it now stands, it seems to me the theory is trapped in limbo because all we have is a catalogue of loosely related or acausually related events open to too many interpretations. Still, despite his combative tone, I have to give Radka some credit, because, like Fido, Evans, and a few others, he doesn't balk at wrestling with the harder enigmas of the case. It's only unfortunate that (as Rupert Gould once noted) all inventors of perpetual motion machines feel obliged to begin their treatise with an attack on Sir Isaac Newton---(if you know what I mean).”
>>The Briton starts sliding down the slippery glass mountain, so he instinctively grasps for his empiricism. So go the Brits, but not we good Europeans. Someday you will look up and see—I think—Scott Nelson standing at the top.
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Jeff Hamm
Inspector
Username: Jeffhamm
Post Number: 491
Registered: 7-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - 3:56 pm: | |
David,
If your behaviour for the past few years is what you consider "non-foolish", then you have no idea how happy it makes for you to classify me as being in some other group! Now, since you've continued to avoid anything like a response (meaning, in your words, you've said nothing), I see no reason to support your ego.
Over this thread I have asked you to define Epistimolical Centre. I have pointed out that this term is not used in any philosophical work that I can find in the University Philosophy database reference system. I have asked friends of mine from the Philosophy Dept, and they have never heard of such a term. I ask again, if all you mean is "fundamental premiss", why do you feel the need to make up a term like epistomological centre when your alledged philosophical training would have provided you with the phrase "fundamental premiss"? On this, you have said nothing.
Second, you asked for proof of where you said psychopaths do not feel anger. I (and others) have provided that proof. You keep trying to claim you said something else, but during your rants, you keep repeating the same claim. This is evidence of "sloppy use of language". If you really do mean something else, admit your mistake and re-explain what you mean. From your behaviour, however, I see no evidence that you even know what you mean, but you are sure you are right and everybody else is wrong.
Third, you asked for evidence that the definition of psychopath is not consistent in the literature. So, I went to the psychological references and did a quick search. I presented to you some research papers which backed up what I already knew, but as you asked for proof, I supplied it to you. Since you don't know me, I don't expect you (or anyone else for that matter) to simply take my word for it. So, I showed you various publications from research into psycopathy which suggests there are at least two sub-classes (I've seen other reports suggesting there may be 4 factors along which psychopaths could vary, but this model does not appear as often so I'm assuming it is, as yet, not as well accepted). I've also presented literature which shows that the theories about psychopathy can range the entire spectrum from "more anger" to "less anger" than "normals". This is called proof of the inconsisentancy in the field, which you asked me to present, and I have.
You asked for proof that you claimed pychopaths do not feel any emotions. I presented that above; and if you go with Clerkly, I fail to see why you would have a problem with people when they say you claim this (as with the anger issue). Clerkly's basic stance is that psychopaths are emotionally "flat", but "pretend to experience emotions". For some reasons, when people try and credit these views to yourself, you claim they are lieing, or not listening to you. So then you go on a verbal rampage, where you repeat the claims over and over, then conclude you don't mean what you just said.
Finally, I find it very odd that you seem to think that "proof/schmoof" is the way to go, and yet everytime someone offers an alternative, you demand your "schmoofy proofy". Isn't this against the principles of A?R? Aren't you, yourself, simply caving into empericism everytime it appears you might have made a slip? Are you not aware of just how self-contradictory your posts and/or behaviours are?
Anyway, if such behaviour in your view is not foolish, again, thank you for calling me a fool.
I've given you some information that could be food for thought. I suspect you'll starve yourself though, while claiming you are full. Have a nice day David.
- Jeff
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Lindsey Millar
Sergeant
Username: Lindsey
Post Number: 15
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Monday, October 25, 2004 - 8:04 pm: | |
Good people,
Well, I never thought I'd find myself posting on this thread... but here I am.... But only to thank you, Howard, for your recent post about the employee at your company. I found your post very interesting, and immensely enlightening. I found myself reminded of my step-father, who people (on the outside) thought to be the most wonderfully helpful person. However, those of us on the 'inside' knew that he could flip from being loving husband and father to a complete maniac in a split second. When he was arrested on suspicion of murder for my mother's death, many friends and neighbours mentioned that they couldn't believe it, whereas, my brothers and I all said that "we wouldn't put it past him".
As it turned out, the police let him go after 48 hours because they only had circumstancial evidence to go on - although they, at the time, said that they believed he was guilty. He then legged it to Spain, and has not been seen or heard of by my brothers or myself since.
Anyway, Howard, thank you again for such an interesting post!
Best regards,
Lindsey |
Howard Brown
Detective Sergeant
Username: Howard
Post Number: 92
Registered: 7-2004
| | Posted on Monday, October 25, 2004 - 8:20 pm: | |
Lindsey:
I am sorry that I dredged up bad memories for you. That certainly was not my intention. I apologize for this..
The young man has been detained by that facility for at least 18 more days [ from today ],as a result of what was relayed to the police and subsequently the mental hospital authorities....
This now makes my buddy[ a supervisor like myself ] and myself potential payback recipients,as eventually he will get out. Thats not a problem for me. What I do worry about is his parents.
Again,I'm sorry, Lindsey..... |
Lindsey Millar
Sergeant
Username: Lindsey
Post Number: 16
Registered: 9-2004
| | Posted on Monday, October 25, 2004 - 8:29 pm: | |
Howard,
Truly no need to apologise! No, you didn't dredge up bad memories by any means! Those memories are with me because.. well, they just are. But, don't for one minute think that you dredged anything up - please! I didn't mean to imply otherwise by my post.
I just wanted you to know how much I appreciated your post! It was a good one!
Best regards,
Lindsey
|
D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Friday, October 22, 2004 - 6:33 pm: | |
Mr. Hamm wrote:
1. “And David requested "proof" of where he claimed psychopaths do not experience any emotions (not just anger, but any emotions), how about this gem from his previous post: {Mr. Radka wrote:} Because a psychopath can’t generate real, adequate, naturally human emotions...{Mr. Hamm wrote:} shortly followed by: {Mr. Radka wrote:} In other words since he doesn’t feel much of anything,...{Mr. Hamm wrote:} David, why do you insist on claiming people get it wrong when they say you claim psychopaths do not feel anger, or when they say you claim psychopaths do not experience emotions, when you keep repeating those claims?”
>>I do not believe, and never have believed, that psychopaths do not feel any sort of anger. And I do not believe, and never have believed, that they do not experience emotions. I did not say they are emotionless in the Summary. In item#7, I affirmatively state that all three phases of the murder series were occasioned by the murderer feeling pettily irked.
When I say that the murderer “doesn’t feel much of anything” I mean THAT HE DOES FEEL SOMETHING. I do not say THAT HE FEELS NOTHING. If psychopaths felt nothing, they wouldn’t be psychopaths. The pathology of being a psychopath is that he feels SOMETHING, but that it ISN’T ENOUGH to dynamically generate a normal human identity structure, and therefore he compensates for the lack of adequate feeling by various means in order to be able to live life at all, similar to how a color-blind person compensates in his daily functioning for not being able to adequately discern colors, or a functionally illiterate person for not being able to read and write. There are various ways to partially work around these respective handicaps, and it is in the nature of things that these different kinds of people more or less automatically discover and employ them.
Saying it another way: The antisocial actions of a psychopath are occasioned by his emotions. Those emotions are as real to the psychopath as our emotions are to us. However, the psychopath is permanently and irrevocably fixed in a shallow range or “narrow bandwidth” of emotions.
Saying it another way: Psychopathic emotions fail to meet a normal standard. The standard of emotions is what the normal human being feels, and these include dynamically complex personal states such as anger, joy, tragedy, sacrifice, hatred, beneficence, motherliness, fatherliness, trust, irony, love, despair, empathy, beholding one’s own destiny, delight, friendship, and so on. We can identify emotionally with the lives of fictional figures that experience the same emotional states and progressions as we do, as portrayed by Sophocles, Shakespeare, and other fine writers. A psychopath can read a play like “Mac Beth” and “understand” the drama, plot line, and literary effects in the cognitive sense, and he can approximate a participation in the emotional perspectives being played out, but THE EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE DOES NOT COME TO PASS IN HIM. He feels SOMETHING, but he does not feel WHAT BANQUO FEELS. He can wear the masks of comedy or tragedy, i.e. he can pick and chose emotions to show outwardly, but that is as far as it goes for him. With respect to deeper feelings it is as if he were an actor, but an actor with no ability to tell the difference between what is acting and what is not. He can enact Banquo, but he can’t feel a similar dynamic concerning himself. He feels something, and these feelings are emotions, and the experience is real to him, but he doesn’t experience full-scale emotions as a normal person would, and he for the most part doesn’t appreciate that he doesn’t.
2. “And how in the world does repeating those claims refute other people's claims that you claimed it in the first place? What you fail to understand is that what people are saying is wrong about your claims is that "psychopaths do feel anger". If you agree with that, then you disagree with yourself because you are the one making the claim that they don't experience anger. And you keep repeating it. This whole thread is based upon you simply saying everyone is wrong, no matter how inconsistent that makes you look. It reminds me of a Monty Python skit actually.”
>>Monty Python were educated people who knew how to peel back the various interactive layers of human existence comedically, which apparently you don’t know how to appreciate yourself. I agree, “Psychopaths do feel anger.” But they don’t feel real anger. I understand what you are saying, and why you say it. But I am unable to help you beyond a certain point with what you are simply not able to appreciate within yourself, Mr. Hamm. I reached the same conclusion concerning Mr. Norder some time ago, and told him as much.
|
D, Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Saturday, October 23, 2004 - 11:42 am: | |
Mr. Nunweek wrote:
“I cannot comment on the merits of Radka's work, because i simply cannot comply it, I along if i dare to say with countless others on this site find it extremely baffling to ones mind. I Assume that all of us realize that the killer whoever he was was not of sound mind, but all this intellectual jargon makes hard work to decifer. I suggest that all this psycho-analysis is brain damaging to the majority of us, even if that makes me look thick, then so be it.”
>>I agree that many Ripperologists don’t come into the field expecting psychiatric prerequisites, and that therefore the A?R theory may at first appear imposing to them. But it is at bottom relatively easy to understand once you become clear on the meanings of a few basic terms. I’d be happy to respond to whatever problems you may have in understanding it, Mr. Nunweek. Just ask me.
David
|
D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Thursday, October 21, 2004 - 2:40 pm: | |
Original statements shown first. My responses shown in { } brackets following.
I HAVE HEARD IT PUBLICLY STATED…
1. That I am homosexual. {I am heterosexual, and have never had sex with a male or desired to.}
2. That I am a disturbed person under psychiatric care, required to take the psychotropic drugs Haldol and Thorazine. {I have never been under psychiatric care, and have never been given psychoactive prescriptions.}
3. That various posters have made critiques on this thread devastating to my theory (Palmer, Hamm, Souden,) and that my reaction to them has been to masturbate excessively. {I have responded to all these critiques forthrightly and in detail, and rationally disposed of them. I do not masturbate excessively, and have never felt erotically moved either by the Whitechapel murders, or by critiques aimed at me.}
4. That both Stephen and Ally want me banned from this web site. That Ally personally dislikes me. That despite her dislike of me, I have been able to trick her into defending me before Stephen, thereby preventing him from banning me as he wishes to do. And that in so deceiving Ally to act on my behalf, I have in effect hidden myself behind a woman’s skirts, a cowardly thing for any man to do. {Not a word of this is true, as far as I am aware. I am fond of Ally, and believe she likes me as well; at least she once said she did.}
5. That I certainly did not think I would be countered on the publication of my theory; that I thought I would be able to palm it off on an unsuspecting public and breeze on by with complete acceptance. {This is certainly not the well-known historical norm for Ripperlogical theories. I wrote the Summary to be defended, point-by-point, in accord with the norm. I consider it a highly defensible position. I feel I have acquitted myself honorably in its defense so far, appreciate my supporters, and am happy to continue.}
6. That my theory is a dead issue as of May 8, 2004--no further posts will appear on the A?R thread. {How many posts are we up to now? Over 1,000 I see.}
7. That A?R is nothing more than an ostentatious attempt on my part to impress people using bogus reasoning I copied out of philosophical texts. {What does this have to do with the truth value of the A?R theory, one way or the other? In other words, on what point is the A?R theory proved wrong by this general charge?}
8. That I am an Ubermensch, a Connecticut Lorelei, a cartoonish Connecticut crime solver, a Promethean Browed CPA, a joke, a yo-yo, a whacked out case and an ar*ehole. {Argumenta ad homina, logically fallacious.}
9. That I regularly stick my unwanted and bulbous schnozzola into other people’s private conversations by making unwanted posts to various threads on this web site. {This is a public posting forum, and everyone is invited to post whatever thread they please. There are no private conversations here.}
10. That I am a 1040-EZ specialist. {Internal Revenue Service Form 1040-EZ is the simplest tax return the government has. I never prepare this form for any of my tax clients. I prepare only the full length Form 1040.}
11. That I court any attention. {I didn’t write A?R to gain attention, but to say the truth. The great difficulty my critics have had in disputing it is an indication that I thought prudently before I published. If I had written just to gain attention, there likely would be obvious flaws in its fundamental logic that would have been pointed out.}
12. That the A?R theory smells like a carton of milk left in a refrigerator since 1997. {What does this have to do with the truth value of the A?R theory, one way or the other?}
13. That I wear a beanie cap with a propeller on it. {I haven’t since about 1960.}
14. That although both Ally and Stephen want to ban me from the web site, they keep me around solely because I am a drawing card for them. Although I am incompetent as a Ripperologist, I do have the ability to raise the rabble, and this is what they count on to keep their web site popular. {Ally and Stephen certainly don’t need me to keep going. They have a great and successful web site on its own merits. I’d like to think my theory has helped just a tiny bit.}
15. That Ally practices situation ethics and politically correct nice merde. That she protects me from attack (otherwise I wouldn’t be able to defend A?R,) and in so doing allows me to nurse at her breast. That Ally and Stephen are a laughable couple. {Bizarre and immature personal smears.}
16. That A?R is a “magnum opus anus” and a “fecethesis.” {Scatological immaturity.}
17. That A?R would surely be considered by many people rank anti-Semitism and a blood libel against the Jewish people, because all it does is narrow the list of suspects down to 2,000 Jewish psychopaths present in Whitechapel during the Terror. {A scurrilous lie on several counts. (1) If male psychopaths are 1% of the population, then there were only a few hundred male Jewish psychopaths available at the time, not 2,000. (2) As the Summary clearly states, being Jewish had nothing to do with why the man committed the murders, being a psychopath did. (3) According to psychiatric texts, the incidence of psychopathy is unrelated to race, ethnicity and religion. (4) The Summary clearly states that the murders took place because the murderer’s significant other pulled maternal privilege on him, forcing him to accept Aaron Kosminski in his home. This narrows the suspect list down to a very small number of people: Woolf Abrahams or Morris Lubnowski being the most likely because each was married to a sister of Aaron, and each had a record of sheltering Aaron during his dementia. A less likely alternative to these two is left open, in that a more distant relative such as Isaacs Kosminski or another we don’t know of yet might have taken Aaron in. My suspect list is very small and specific, and logically understandable as to its dimensions.}
18. That Hamm, Andersson, Souden and other posters could and should have ended all debate on A?R the very first day the Summary was published. They would have accomplished this simply by deciding not to be civil to me in their posts. By being civil they gave me a great deal of latitude, and it is only with this latitude that debate on A?R has been able to continue. {No explanation is made concerning how incivility would have served to end debate on a public posting forum.}
19. That the critiques are like the guns of Navarone and my theory is like the first little pig’s straw house. {It appears the house of A?R is still standing much later.}
20. That I am a load of sh*t from the word go who wouldn’t dream of informing the public media of my theory because I know it to be embarrassingly faulty and a load of cr*p. {But what I did is publish a full summary of it to a popular web site offering world access. This constitutes making it available to the media.}
21. That I am up to my neck in sh*t. {Well, why don’t you try to list all the so-called lies I tell in A?R, and post them here so that I can respond to them? Wouldn’t that be fair?}
22. That A?R is a nonsensical, unsupportable and onanistic theory. That works of similar caliber are often published in liberal bastions, the Casebook being such a venue. That liberals offer platitudes and practice tolerance and acceptance of other liberals’ writings as a kind of safety valve, because they know they will someday publish their own liberal works of mountainous muck, and they don’t want to be much criticized by them when they do. This accounts for the surprising degree of civility and interest that has been shown to A?R. In a conservative venue, A?R would have been uncivilly burned and tossed away immediately. {This item in context reveals what the writer is really all about. He ascribes magical powers and qualities to incivility and intolerance. It is possible to dispose of false ideas merely by being uncivil! Logical analysis of ideas, erudition, depth of knowledge and successful articulation are not required, only a few low blows antithetical to civilization and other personal insults are! If you insult someone brutally enough, you hurt and ruin him or her personally, and you win! He is entirely wrong in this. Incivility ruins the uncivil person himself or herself. This is the self-justification of a man who does not wish to restrain his base impulses.}
23. That I should not be thanked for adding two new suspects to the case—Woolf Abrahams and Morris Lubnowski—but blamed. The case has too many suspects already. {But what if the existing list of suspects doesn’t contain the name of the murderer? One assumes it does by taking this position, but then one must offer proof of whom JtR was.}
24. That A?R attempts to solve the case by imagining what the Ripper thought, and that is impossible. That any attempt to try to think along the same lines as someone as evil as JtR is a waste of time, unless one is equally evil oneself. {I agree that it is impossible to get inside JtR’s head and imagine what he was thinking, and therefore this is precisely what I DON’T. Instead, A?R follows the chronology of the evidence. For example, I DON’T claim to know what JtR was thinking when he walked down Berner Street in front of Schwartz, rather I interpret his actions in terms of what Schwartz said and in the wider context of the evidence of the other crime scenes. And certainly it is not necessary to be as evil as JtR in order to understand him and his behavior. That is why there is psychiatry.}
25. That psychopathy cannot be used as the epistemological center of study of this case because the psychiatric field changes its definitions concerning what the condition is. {A thoughtless position. So what if the listed characteristics change over time? Theories are made for development and further innovation. But what psychopaths are all about is available through their case histories.}
26. That Ripperology should properly not attempt to explain why the murders were committed as A?R does, but instead what objective characteristics they had, how they were done, and who did them. The organ removal is the key element for doing this, and the most interesting aspect of the case. {How many people have defaulted to this dim conception over the past century? One hundred thousand? Half a million? Thus speaks the same old uninspired empirical bull. How mediocre.}
27. That I wrote A?R to get attention and boost my self-image. {I wrote A?R to say the truth. The work has an additional benefit of providing the public with a valuable picture of psychopaths and their lifestyle, useful to help prevent being taken in by them.}
28. That all I do in the A?R theory is take up Robert Anderson’s account of the case, and then arbitrarily accept or reject various different pieces of it, contributing nothing new. {Rubbish. Did Anderson suggest that the witness lied at the inquest and at Hove? That the witness may have recognized the murderer in Duke Street? That the murderer tried to set up witnesses at two different crime scenes to get the reward money? That the Lusk letter was intended to get Lusk to continue pushing for a Home Office reward despite Matthews’ recent official rejection of outside influences? That Aaron was a proxy suspect? That psychopathy is the epistemological center of the study of the case? All this and considerably more is new with A?R. Most importantly, A?R has its own critically-appraisable starting point and methodology.}
29. That A?R is a dead theory, and the Masada of Ripper theories, as of May 11, 2004. {Masada was an isolated Jewish settlement that came under siege by Roman legions. With no hope of defense or escape, its settlers decided to commit mass suicide rather than surrender. The writer means that I must soon publicly give up on my theory, i.e. “commit suicide,” because Norder, Hamm, Souden, etc. have made such a devastating debunking that I have no hope of defense or escape. But we’ve had—what?—800 posts since?}
30. That in order to classify someone as a psychopath one needs to have a great deal of knowledge about him or her personally. That since I don’t have any personal information concerning the people in Aaron’s extended family, I cannot so classify any one of them. {This is an incompetent distortion of my work. I know NOTHING of the personalities of Woolf Abrahams, Morris Lubnowski, or of anyone else in proximity to Aaron Kosminski, and am NOT misusing or manufacturing any personal information about them to classify anyone a psychopath! All A?R does is reasonably posit a psychopath as the generator of the case evidence, based on the case evidence itself, not on any particular individual’s personality. It then narrows down the likely situation of such a man as someone in Aaron’s close surroundings during the Terror, again, based on the case evidence. That is as far as it goes. There is NO evidence to support a classification of any particular individual close to Aaron as a psychopath, and A?R MAKES NO SUCH CLAIM.}
31. That the posts I have made to this thread in defense of the A?R theory are rabbit turds. {Childish scatology.}
32. That I have posted to the Casebook as Stewart P Evans, hiding my identity by attempting to mimic his writing style. {I have never done so.}
33. That I have exhibited a behavioral pattern that would be explained by my being a psychopath myself. {Oh I have, have I?}
34. That A?R is dogmatic drivel. {The ground of the theory is not dogma, but asking questions. The theory addresses the evidence by systematically asking a question entirely new to Ripperology, providing a novel alternative to all past studies of the case—‘Why did these things happen?’}
35. That critiques of A?R have raked me over the coals and crushed my cojones. {I do not feel debilitated by the treatment I’ve been accorded since publication of the Summary, but invigorated. Bring it on all the more! I’m ready!}
|
D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, October 24, 2004 - 4:56 pm: | |
Mr. Colligan wrote:
1. “I completely agree with your last point. David has gone in a complete circle to the point where he is climbing out his own ass. His main object here, as in many of his threads, is to discredit anyone who doesn't agree with his views - which in most cases is everybody.”
>>In what “complete circle” have I “gone?” To date, I have acknowledged only two insignificant points offered concerning the Summary: (1) That the spelling “Juwe” may not necessarily refer to the German “jugendwerke,” and (2) That the marks carved on the face of Catherine Eddowes by the murderer may not necessarily be tailor’s symbols. Neither makes a jot of difference in any interpretation of the case evidence A?R makes.
2. “In my opinion, Mr. Radka needs to get out a little more. He needs to take a step back and start respecting other peoples opinions before going on his relentless rampages of psycho-analysis.”
>>No “relentless rampage of psycho-analysis” has taken place here. Two posters who have actually read about psychopaths—Ms Severn and Mr. Palmer--have generally praised my perspectives on the matter, and the latter despite that he disagrees with me in other respects. The rest either haven’t studied psychopathy at all, or don’t know the sense and nuance of it as employed in the E.C., and only want to stick a quick discrediting knife into a man who they perceive as dangerously cleverer than they. I knew something like this was going to happen before I emailed the Summary to Stephen, and was prepared. A?R is a defensible position, a high ground for Ripperology.
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Wednesday, October 20, 2004 - 7:06 pm: | |
Mr. Hamm wrote:
1. “Psychology is a complicated area, and it's not surprising that our understanding of individual criminals is poor even if we're learning something about "criminals in general". Psychology studies "groups" of individuals to see if there is something common about that group that differs (often in small and subtle ways) from some other group (again in general). In other words, it's looking at "group characteristics" while averaging out the individual differences. Those who research psychology realise that it is because of this that it is very dangerous to make specific statements about a specific individual when your information comes from some sort of "group average".
>>I’m not making any “specific statements about a specific individual” in A?R. I’m treating the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders as a psychopath—using a general notion of the group characteristics predicated on the term “psychopath”—and that is as far as it goes. I’m not saying that the “specific individual” Woolf Abrahams, for example, exhibited certain characteristics and did certain things in a certain manner based on the general notion of a group I may consider him to have been in. I stop short of that. I’m saying that whoever he was, the unknown Whitechapel murderer was a psychopath BECAUSE THE CRIME SCENE EVIDENCE AND THE HOVE IDENTIFICATION SO INDICATE. Any of a number of people WHO I DON’T PERSONALLY KNOW could have been the psychopath that committed the Whitechapel murders—Woolf, Morris Lubnowski, Isaacs Kosminski, etc. I have NO INFORMATION that any of these people actually were a psychopath, and make no claim of this nature.
2. “It's not that studying groups is a bad thing, or something that doesn't further our understanding. It's just that one has to be careful about how that information is used. The TV, or movie, version of the psychologist (or psychiatrist) who sits there and describes the unknown bad guy to a T is just that: the TV or Movie version. The only way this could happen in the real world is if the "bad guy" just happens to be the "prototype", or the group average, of whatever group of which they are a member. There are cases where the "psych guy nailed the description", of course, but getting it right once doesn't prove the method is accurate. Now, if the same "psych guy" could make such accurate predictions most times, then that would be something. Getting it right once or twice out of hundreds of attempts, however, is probably the result of "guessing".”
>>I am not attempting to “describe the unknown bad guy to a T.” I don’t have to. All I am doing is predicating the case evidence on the GENERAL notion of psychopathy found in the literature of psychiatry. The Whitechapel murderer, whoever he was, was a psychopath. That’s what item #1 of the Summary says, and that’s ALL it says about him. If all you say about someone is that he is German, or Italian, or an accountant, are you attempting to “describe him to a T?” There are fat and thin Germans, smart and dumb Italians, and short and tall accountants. JtR had all sorts of characteristics besides psychopathy. What of it? I’m not “describing him to a T” and saying that my solution to the case is predicated on ALL his characteristics as I describe them, I’m predicating the solution based only on his PSYCHOPATHIC characteristics, which are available for reasonable study in the literature of that field. You are confusing what A?R does with criminal profiling.
3. “Anyway, in order to gain some sort of useful description of a group, in this case "psychopaths", one has to first identify who is in that group. Then, look for common characteristics of that group that differ from characteristics of those not in that group. For example, let's say psychopaths are more likely then the general population to have a criminal record. That doesn't mean 1) all psychopaths have a criminal record or 2) all people with a criminal record are psychopaths. But, it does mean, if you think some unknown person is a psycopath, you might suggest that a check for previous criminal records is more likely that usual (general population) to have the suspect's name on it. It may not, of course, but it gives one an idea of where to look for more information. It's an inference, not a conclusion.”
>>Fine with me. I agree with this.
4. “Psychology also has a strange habit of changing the names of various disorders. A Psychopath becomes a "Sociopath" who becomes "AntiSocial Personality Disorder". These are due to changes in the DSM criterions and definitions. The changes reflect various studies which suggest the "common group" has these characteristics, and as the definition of that group changes (as new characteristics are suggested, or found not to be common to that group alone, etc) so too do the individuals who end up fitting that diagnostic.”
>>Not fine with me. You are unsubtly combining, conflating and lumping together all sorts of things into an inappropriate monolithic methodology here, in an unreflective manner. You are doing this by misusing the terms “psychology,” “common group,” “the definition of that group,” and “different studies.” You are boiling down complex dynamics to too hard a mass, which in turn no longer responds to the values of the fields of psychology and psychiatry, and how they operate. (1) Psychology certainly isn’t univocal, like logic or mathematics. It is composed of a large number of different schools and branches, each of which has its own starting points, methodologies, language, questions to be asked, answers that can be given, conclusions, etc. There are Freudians, Jungians, behaviorists, humanists, humanistic Freudians, etc. The list is long, and open-ended. We are talking about the study of the human psyche, of human nature, after all. There are no univocal “principles of human nature,” just various different perspectives one can take on the subject. The purpose of studying human nature is to prepare oneself to be ready to responsively understand human beings, to open oneself to ask the next in the infinite series of questions that can be asked about them, not to finish off the matter. So when you say “psychology has a strange habit of changing the names of various disorders,” I think you are misunderstanding psychology. You are lumping all the different perspectives together so as to be able to pronounce with the authority of what you take—and I maintain falsely identify—as a univocity. It seems “strange” to you that the “names change” in part because you don’t comprehend different types, aspects and groups within psychology interacting and contributing. For example, what “anger” means to a behaviorist is a different matter than what it means to a conventional Freudian. The notion of psychopathy is thus a living thing, a theory, a changing thing; it may mean somewhat differently to one type of psychologist than to another. (2) The referent may also change over time, if viewed absolutely. Part of this is due to different cultures, and cultural changes in how psychopaths and their behaviors are perceived, part of it is due to the respective changes and relative intermix of the various psychiatric perspectives on psychopaths, sometimes political, at any given point in time. At the same time, while a psychopath can’t stop being a psychopath, but he can react to his environment and do different things in a different way over time. These people are not stupid, they can pick up cues, read books, etc. (3) What does not change, however, is the fact that the psychiatric theories about psychopathy have reference. The theories and their referent(s) are engaged in an intelligible cha-cha. Ultimately, they change together over time. If you went way back to the first proto-psychologist who seriously dealt with this group, Pinel, he would tell you things about Maurice that would sound very similar to the kind of things Cleckley told you about his patient Stanley, and Hare now tells you about Earl, once you filtered out the chatter on both sides of the particular equations. A cha-cha dance is in effect, Pinel and Maurice dance it together a bit differently than Hare and Earl, but the cha-cha is the cha-cha. And I repeat once again, learn about these people from their case histories, not only from checklists. Comparison of case histories teaches you the cha-cha—here you have Cleckley commenting on Stanley, you can see how Cleckley’s values and Stanley’s behaviors relate, and there you have Hare commenting on Earl. Get to know both sides, be both sides.
To say the whole thing above using different words: Whatever the current definition of psychopathy, APD, sociopathy, etc. is or changes into, A?R can nod to that definition, filter out the chatter, and solve the case. The case histories subsumed under that definition will include analyses equivalent to Cleckley’s Stanley, Hare’s Earl, etc., and they are equivalent to A?R’ s treatment of JtR under the case evidence.
5. “Because mental disorders are so complex, research, and studies, of all sorts of individuals are required in our hunt for clusters of mental disoders. Is schizophrenia one disorder with various "sub-types" or are the various sub-types indicative of different disorders with some similar symptomologies?” Anyway, because of the names changes for the disorders are associated with changes in the diagnostic criterion that must be met, if one wants to look at "psychopaths" then one has either to use the older definations (which have changed because they have been shown to be inadequate somehow) or use the more recent definitions, which one could argue may include "non-psychopaths". This latter argument, however, requires one to demonstrate that the current definitions are, in fact, combining at least two different groups of mental disorders (psychopaths and non-psychopaths).”
>>This segment is mostly inane babbling in my view. The key error that generates the babbling is the phrase:
“…the older definations {sic} (which have changed because they have been shown to be inadequate somehow)…”
”Inadequate” is used here to indicate a merely mechanical discombobulating, as if psychiatry had realized it had been trying to fit a 1/8-inch nut to a ¼-inch bolt. It is a simplistic over-objectification of the psychiatric fields. To say that the study of human nature has been inadequate implies that you have some absolute position to use as a touchstone to determine what is and isn’t adequate. No such touchstone exists. This is why Mr. Hamm says “inadequate SOMEHOW.” He doesn’t know HOW the definitions are inadequate, because there is no absolute “adequate.” Once Mr. Hamm makes this error, his position goes straight to the dumpster.
6. “Anyway, psychology as a science is more or less where physics was when people were trying to figure out how to turn up big stones to make
things like Stone Henge.”
>>Mr. Hamm speaks of the status of his own knowledge here, not of that of psychiatry.
7. “We have the advantage, however, of a long history of scientific advancement to suggest how we might improve our understanding. If the mind does get "ill", or "break", in some ways more so than others, then there will be clusters of mental illnesses; which are the mental disorders we're trying to understand. If it has no tendency to break in certain ways, then there is no such thing as a "mental disorder", which implies that there is a group of people with this common "problem".
>>It is the mark of an inadequate thinker to take “scientific advancement” unreflectively as an absolute standard, as opposed to making an effort to think through for oneself the issues and logical oppositions involved. Is “scientific advancement” good? Why or why not? *** The idea of the “human mind” “breaking in certain ways” is so childish as to make me feel ill. I conjure up an image of 2 year-olds trying to fit colored plastic pegs into the plastic holes of their play-table.
8. Anyway, because Clerkly's work seems to include people with very different disorders, although he's grouped them all together, this grouping is questionable. That would mean that Clerkly's sample could be a mix of many disorders.”
>>Show us SPECIFICALLY who in Cleckley’s case studies is not one of the group, Mr. Hamm, don’t just sing your usual BALONEY SONG for us. ON WHAT BASIS is the grouping questionable? Isn’t it true that Cleckley says ALL of his patients were tested for psychosis, and were found to have none? They weren’t drug addicts or suffering from brain tumors, either. What else of all the “VERY DIFFERENT DISORDERS” you nebulously speak of is left for them to be? When Stanley concocts his astonishing story of Yvette being sick in Belgium and needing her “medicine,” this is due to exactly—what? When Max throws his homemade handheld device for fooling Las Vegas slot machines into paying off for him every time into the first trashcan he finds, exactly—exactly—what causes this? On what basis, cite pages for us SPECIFICALLY, do you conclude that Cleckley diagnosed as psychopaths people with “VERY DIFFERENT DISORDERS” than psychopathy? You are MAKING THIS WHOLE THING UP. You are a TERRIBLY INEFFECTIVE baloney artist. You haven’t even read Cleckley, have you? YOU CAN’T EVEN SPELL HIS BLASTED NAME CORRECTLY, CAN YOU? It is “CLECKLEY,” not “CLERKLY.” I have his book (fifth edition) before me right now. The eighth word on page 163 is “his.” Tell us what the twenty-seventh word on page 191 is (counting the article “a” as a word.)
9. “And since David is using, well generally misusing as I've pointed out to him before, examples from all these different people, then his suspect has a mish-mash of psychological disorders no matter what Clerkly called it.”
>>What Mr. Hamm is trying to say here is that Cleckley was able to dance the cha-cha, and that some of the people he studied were dancing the cha-cha with him, but others weren’t, they were doing the twist but Cleckley thought they were dancing the cha-cha. But if you read the works of psychiatrists that deal with psychopathy and compare them carefully, you can SEE FOR YOURSELF when the cha-cha is being danced all around. You can LEARN SOMETHING FOR YOURSELF about this disorder. There in a nutshell is the epistemology of A?R. *** You publicly soil yourself, Mr. Hamm. You VERY STUPIDLY repeat the same BULLSH*T Mr. Norder started way back in May, concerning how I allegedly rely too much on Cleckley. As I’ve indicated scores of times, I do not, I read other qualified psychiatrists on the subject. NO EVIDENCE WHATEVER has ever been offered to substantiate this charge. Please SHOW US distortions or errors in Cleckley’s work that the A?R theory needs to use in order to reach the conclusions it reaches.
10. “The evidence of this mish-mash becomes apparent in the theory where the suspect's actions and the theories explanations for them require a delusional thinking person, but the theory insists no delusions are present in the suspect. This makes the theory fall apart by the fact that it is not internally consistent. One part of the theory leads to the conclusion the suspect is delusional, another leads to the conclusion the suspect is not delusional, and therefore the "bootstrap" method that David is using (whether he knows it or not) disconfirms at least this part of the theory.”
>>No, no, God no, Mr. Hamm. Mr. Hamm is here saying that I attribute psychotic, delusional thinking to JtR (he means the intended messages concerning the markings on Eddowes’ face and the graffitus) because I “picked it up” from reading Cleckley’s INCORRECT case histories, which present delusional people as non-delusional psychopaths. Mr. Hamm means that there is just no way of explaining the lurid, inane, astonishing, coarse and drop-dead irrational antisocial actions found in Cleckley’s book other than by attributing them to insanity. These people just have to have been NUTS to do the things they did. Why then, prithee Mr. Hamm, do almost all Cleckley’s people do these “nutty” things? And why do Hare’s people do them too?
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, October 24, 2004 - 8:04 pm: | |
Mr. Hamm,
I have tried to find the sources you claim to be citing above on the internet without success. Please provide here the exact URLs for:
1. What you call "the psych database."
2. Morrison and Gilbert, published in the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry, 2001.
3. Pham, Philippot, and Rime (2000) from the Journal Encephale.
4. Revista Mexicana de Psicologia
Title: The psychopathology of William McCord-Joan McCord.
5. a PhD dissertation (by Brian Lee Steuerwald.)
Thank you,
David
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Saturday, October 23, 2004 - 12:25 pm: | |
Where is Dan Norder?
It has now been over four weeks since Mr. Norder posted (on Sunday, September 19, 2004 - 2:40 pm) that he just couldn’t spare the time to refute my explanations of how JtR’s behaviors coincide with the PCL-R and DSM-IV checklists that I posted in detail above (on Sunday, September 12, 2004 - 2:17 pm and Tuesday, September 14, 2004 - 8:01 pm.) He still needs to explain “all the errors and self-contradictions,” in his own words, he claimed at that time to find in this work. The points he must prove, the points he has reiterated a hundred times based on his reading of these checklists beginning in April 2004, are:
1. That I believe psychopaths are incapable of any emotions.
2. That I believe psychopaths are incapable of feeling anger.
3. That in order to do what I claim JtR did on the night of the double event, he would have to be experiencing delusions, while psychopaths never experience delusions.
Quite a disappearing act for someone who spent 4½ months of the time of the readers of this thread petulantly insisting that I had certainly misunderstood the meaning of psychopathy, isn’t it? It’s time, Mr. Norder. What's the matter, cat got your tongue? Your mommy isn't available, you can't hide behind her skirts? Proof or apology to the readers, sir. Win or lose. Here’s your chance!
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D. Radka
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Thursday, October 21, 2004 - 11:35 pm: | |
Mr. Hamm wrote:
1. “After stripping your response from all the irrelevant diatribe once again, I wish to thank you for proving my final point. You are simply trying to claim you said something else. It's amusing how you use the term "pseudoexperience" of anger, which perhaps you do not realise would indicate a "false experience", which again leads to you saying they do not experience anger (pseudo means fake basically; pseudo-science, for example, means "fake science"). In other words, you've said it again, but I'm afraid it is your thinking that is so mediocre (to use your term) you probably do not even realise it.”
>>No, no, God no once again, Mr. Hamm. You and especially Mr. Norder seem to suffer from an incurable phony objectivity. Both of you are so confident that an apple is an apple is an apple that the sense of what psychiatry is saying blows right past your heads, unnoticed by either of you. There are apples, and then there are apples. I have never said, “Psychopaths do not experience anger.” I have said instead, “Psychopaths do not experience REAL anger.” I have never said, “Psychopathic anger is pretend anger.” I have said instead, “Psychopathic personality is a counterfeit of a normal personality.” And directly related to this matter, I have never said, “Psychopaths do not experience emotions.” I have said instead, “Psychopathic emotions are shallow, and inadequate to constitute the emotional depth necessary to generate a normal adult personality structure.” “Pseudoexperience” means that psychopaths do not experience the world as normal human beings with an adequate human personality, it does not mean that they are tin robots having no experience of the world at all. Robots have no experience of the world; normal human beings have a normal experience of the world, with each of their their respective cognitive and emotional sides mutually and dynamically relating to and producing effects on the other; and psychopaths have a pseudoexperience of the world, with their adequate cognitive side inadequately dynamically related to their largely inadequate (but not non-existent) emotional side. We are talking about subtle things here, and you just can’t permit yourself a simple-minded objectivity, you have to DO THE WORK necessary to get yourself to understand.
2. “This is hysterical actually. I love this bit: Here's David: “They outwardly react in mimicry as if they are experiencing tragedy, irony, deep resentment, rage, devastating anxiety, and inner upheaval, because they can see others outwardly reacting that way, but they are fundamentally incapable of generating the appropriate feelings themselves. They are not “faking” anything as you claim...” Ok, let's examine the statements for some sort of coherance, shall we? They outwardly react in mimicry as if they are experiencing (then a list of things, including deep resentment and rage, which cover anger).
1) outwardly react in mimicry
An outwardly reaction would be a behavioiur, in mimicry would indicate imitation, clarified by the use of "as if", which emphasises the fact that the actual emotion is not being experienced.
So, David tells us again, that they will behave in a mannor to immitate, or more simply, they "pretend" to experience internal emotions by behaving as they've seen others. This, of course, implies yet again they do this because they do not experience the emotions themselves, an inference strengthed by his use of the phrase "as if they are experiencing"”
>>Right insofar as they do not experience the real emotions themselves. But “pretend” is not always correct. A psychopath can consciously pretend to experience an emotion he doesn’t feel to trick somebody, just like a normal person can. But he isn’t a psychopath because he may sometimes do this. The kind of mimicry of real human perspectives and inner states that qualifies someone as a psychopath is done unconsciously and automatically. He cannot do otherwise. The psychopath is not in control of it, and for the most part is unaware that it is happening, or at least he can’t appreciate it for what it is. He might be able to verbalize it to a limited degree, but would have difficulty doing so, as would a color-blind person find it difficult to discuss different colors. Psychopathic mimicry of the formal presentments of the human personality involves the presumption on the part of the psychopath that he is experiencing deep emotions that in fact he is unable to experience.
3. “Now, not only is that inference acceptable based upon what David has just said, but David makes it very clear this is actually what he means when he follows up this statement with: "but they are fundamentally incapable of generating the appropriate feelings themselves"
>>Right, insofar as they do not experience the real emotions themselves.
4. “So, again, David plainly says that these people mimic the behaviours of emotions they are incapabable of feeing themselves. Which, pretty much corresponds with how I interpreted his previous statement along the lines of they "fake anger".
>>WRONG!!!!! FATAL ERROR!!!! GROSS MISINTERPRETATION!!!! SYSTEM SHUTDOWN!!!!! Can’t you see what you are doing here, Mr. Hamm? You are illicitly playing around with the terminology used, switching its meaning under the table. This time you are switching meanings of the word “fake.” If a psychopath behaves in a manner that would indicate to a normal person that he is experiencing anger, the psychopath is indeed experiencing an emotion that HE, THE PSYCHOPATH thinks is real anger. We think it is real anger and the psychopath thinks it is real anger, we agree with him that he is experiencing real anger. But in fact he is not experiencing real anger, he is experiencing a mild state of petty vexation instead; such as what we experience when we get a hair up our nose. The psychopath is thus unwittingly and innocently mimicking or counterfeiting our deeper emotion and attendant reactions and perspectives, based on his innocent unknowing observations of us. He doesn’t know he’s doing this and we don’t know he’s doing it either. The psychopath isn’t “faking” anything. The feeling he experiences is as real to him as what we feel is to us, but if we felt the same way he is feeling, we would call it petty vexation and not real anger. But both he and we in observing him make the same mistake concerning what feeling he experiences; he makes the mistake because he has no standard of comparing his inadequate anger to real anger, and we make the mistake because all we have to go on are our observations of him; we cannot feel what he is feeling.
5. “These are not even hard concepts here, but clear statements, that unambiguously repeat the claim that psychopaths are incapable of feeling emotions, so they fake it.”
>>I have no so such position. We are talking about the intermixing flux of emotion and cognition that generate the human identity, not simply consciously purposeful actions like “faking it.” We are discussing our human transcendence. You are not grasping that. You don’t get how our third dimension perspective is enabled. You are instead thinking strictly in terms of an emotion for an emotion, an apple for an apple.
6. “What is most amusing though, is the very next line from David is: They are not “faking” anything as you claim...First of all, David seems to have missed the point that he's the one claiming psychopaths "fake anger". I, and others, have been telling him that they are quite capable of experiencing anger.”
>>Psychopaths experience shallow and inadequate forms of anger, such as feeling dissed, bored, irked, vexed, piqued, or slighted. They do not experience what Hamlet, Medea, or Antigone experienced, and which elevated them, or which at least elevates us in reading about them or witnessing a performance of their characters. They are unable to experience the depth of tragic emotions that enable the experience of irony, or the adequacy of the self as transcending but at the same time limited by time and space, as normal people do.
7. “Now let's just think about this for a moment. At one point I suggested to David that psychopaths experience anger (other's have made the same point too, of course). David responded, and I present a quote from his response, where he says that psychopaths are incapable of real anger. I interpret David's quote as him claiming "psychopaths fake anger".
>>Consciously “faked” anger has nothing to do with BEING a psychopath. An unconsciously counterfeited personality structure, caused by cheap and shallow emotions does. The psychopath essentially doesn’t have sufficient depth of emotion to enable him to form a conscience or an adequate consciousness of himself as both transcending and limited by space and time. I HAVE NO POSITION THAT “FAKED” ANGER IS A CONSTITUENT PART OF BEING A PSYCHOPATH.
8. “So, David is now trying to claim he does not believe Psychopaths fake anger (I guess he agrees with me, and others, that they do experience anger; which would make this all even more pointless).”
>>They do not experience real anger. They are unable to experience deep emotions of any kind, and anger is a deep emotion.
9. “So, to present his argument that psychopaths do not fake anger (which is what I, and others, have been telling him), David starts off telling me how they mimic the behaviour, without actually feeling the emotion, which by definition is faking the emotion again.”
>>The normal human personality presumes the experience of deep emotions and the normal person really does feel them, and the psychopathic phony imitation of the human personality presumes the experience of deep emotions but the psychopathic person does not feel them. What could be clearer and simpler than that? The psychopath unknowingly falsifies a real human personality that would have deep emotions, and doesn’t know he isn’t what he thinks he is. How many times do I have to repeat it for you?
||| I feel a good person to ask for help for you here would be Scott Nelson, who is a student of the late novelist Philip K. Dick. Dick wrote the book that Ridley Scott made into the movie “Blade Runner.” One of the characters in that futuristic story is a “replicant,” or a phony human being manufactured out of proteins and other chemicals in a test tube. She was created to do certain functions for a corporation, and was programmed with the memories and other mental content of a real person. She was given no idea that she is a replicant, however, and it is up to the main character played by Harrison Ford to break the news to her eventually. In the same sense that the replicant is a PHYSICALLY unreal human being without the ability to tell that she is, so is a psychopath a PERSONALLY unreal human being without the ability to tell that he is. Just as there is no real human body for the replicant, there is no real human personality for the psychopath. Just as a replicant is a virtual human being without the physical underpinning, a psychopath is a virtual human being without the emotional underpinning. I’d like to defer to Scott if he is reading to perhaps tell us a little more about the book or Dick’s postmodernist perspective, if he wishes. |||
10. “So David again describes how they "fake emotions" and yet somehow he then feels it appropriate to end this presentation with the conclusion they are not faking anything as I claim! David, the only person who's thinking is, how did you put it, ah yes, "unread and mediocre", is yours I'm afraid. Your lengthy posts, rather than clearing up the self contradictions contained in the summary, simply present more and more self contradictions, which is completely at odds with your claim of extensive philosophical training. If the above is an example of what you were taught concerning logic, you paid too much, even if it was free. You don't even keep track of who is making what claim.”
>>Please list specifically “the self contradictions contained in the Summary,” as you say. I know of none there.
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