Thursday, February 11, 2010
Letting Herself Go And Counting Backwards: With A Guest Appearance By Palin's Liquor Cabinet
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Of Course You Know, This Means War
Thursday, January 14, 2010
The Ethics of Outing Secrets Within the Dysfunctional Family
Monday, January 11, 2010
Word Salad - Earlier Comments on Sarah Palin's Peculiar Way of Speaking
- Further, it keeps us from inflammatory rhetoric, e.g. KaJo calling her a psychopath -- which she is not. -
Joe Christmas - July 19 - 8:21 PM
Joe, I am going to have to take issue with your statement above, because you say it with such authority. I believe that you said you were a doctor and your mother is a narcissist, which could give you some information on personality disorders but doesn't mean that you are up to date with the research that has emerged over the last ten to twenty years in the field studying psychopathy. Referring to it as "inflammatory rhetoric" tells me that this is not an area of expertise for you.
I have spent a large part of the last ten years reading, learning and observing personality disorders, particularly psychopathy with a special interest in how it manifests in women. On a part-time basis, I work with people who have been impacted by psychopaths. As part of that service, I explain to them how psychopaths operate and how to tell them apart from narcissists and people with environmentally caused anti social disorder. Within that context, I use Sarah Palin as an example of a woman scoring high on the psychopathic checklist.
The Psychopathic Checklist is the gold standard used by serious researchers in the field to determine who in fact is a psychopath. It was developed by the Canadian professor Robert Hare, who also advises and trains the FBI. There are twenty items on the checklist - half are intrinsic characteristics to who the person is while the other half are how these characteristics play out in lifestyle choices. These items include;
being glib and superficial
egocentric and grandiose
lack of remorse or guilt
lack of empathy
deceitful and manipulative
having shallow emotions
being impulsive
poor behaviour controls
having a need for excitement
lack of responsibility
early behaviour problems
and displaying anti-social behaviour
How does the above list not describe SP's behaviour? When you look more closely at how the traits are commonly displayed by people on the checklist, the match up with what we know about SP is even more striking. Many people who score high on the checklist are thought to be narcissists because narcissistic traits are part of being a psychopath. If, however, we look at occurrences levels in the population we find that only .67 of one percent of the population are narcissists while the rate of people who cross the threshold of the checklist to be full fledge psychopaths are one to three percent of the population. More importantly, another ten percent of the population fall just below the threshold but have enough of the traits to do serious harm to others.
To answer the other commenter's question - research has disclosed that the critical traits, such as lack of empathy, needed to be diagnosed as a psychopath are due to faulty wiring in the brain. Some of it is heritable, although it can occur spontaneously. Certain head injuries can also create the damage to the brain with the same effect. Environment does play a huge role on how these tendencies caused by miss-wiring in the brain manifest themselves over a person's life span.
If you are interested, I will tell you about the research that shows that SP's word salads are typical for a psychopath.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
The Palin Propensity for Padding
Standing up with a body that almost mirrors Piper's, including the swell of belly over the shorts. The abs of steel are a thing of the past here.
One or two days later, still in Hawaii and in response to Gryphen's post about her not having runner's legs, Sarah appears on the track. Failed liposuction notwithstanding, notice the sudden fullness of her "breasts." Within a day Sarah Palin has gone from an A cup to a C through the help of a rather good and, I believe, quite expensive bra.
As enjoyable as it is to get a few comments in on Sarah Palin's looks, that is not what struck me about the events surrounding these pictures. On all three days that Palin was in Hawaii last month, she knew she was being photographed and was responding to the press and bloggers commentary as it was happening. By the time that she donned her running shoes and a bra so padded that it could probably stop bullets, appearing for an obviously staged photo opportunity, she knew that there were comparison pictures from the day before.
So why would she risk drawing attention to the fact that she regularly pads her body to have people believe that it is something that it is not? My first question is why are her breasts so obviously different from one moment to the next. After doing a review of pictures of Palin, it became apparent that her breast size shifts depending on what she is wearing, but not when your expecting it to. The period when she was supposedly pregnant with Trig, when most women breasts noticeable swell one or two cup sizes, her breasts did not register as being any larger then before or afterwards. (Actually they are smaller, it must be her amazingly tight pec muscles.) Perhaps she felt she could only pad one part of her body at a time. By going back further to pictures of the younger, heavier Sarah, before she started excessive dieting, she did tip the scale into a B cup. (We should assume that any photos where her breasts appear any larger are because of padding.) It appears that Palin is seesawing between two body ideals - neither of which are her natural body type.
Here Palin has achieved the model svelte look, only after years of struggle, plastic surgery, and a restricted intake of diet Dr. Pepper, Red Bulls and lattes to get there. Although you can see that her face is fighting cheek and jowl (and double chin) to revert to it's natural shape. This is the tiny starlet body that she went on about when she attacked Ashley Judd and the anti wolf hunting ad, but obviously the body she wanted for herself. This is a body that looks good in clothes, if you knew how to dress yourself. (And, now that we have seen the Hawaii pictures, keeping her body covered is a necessity to maintain any illusion of attractiveness.) Since we know the real answer to Katie Couric's question of what does Sarah Palin read is fashion and gossip magazines, this is the body that is the media conscious woman's ideal. What it took to get Palin's naturally heavy legs this thin makes me shudder.
A flat chested Sarah, however, doesn't cut it with the people behind her real raise to power : conservative men who want starbursts. So the same folks that think that Ann Coulter is sexy, have elevated Palin into a fantasy figure. This works because Palin herself is so deep into fantasy that she won't correct them as long as she deems it to be flattering to her ego. Thus when she was being punked by the Canadian comics, pretending to be Nicolas Sarkozy the President of France, who were telling her they liked her in the Hustler produced porn movie Nailin Paylin all she did was giggle and, I believe, accept the compliment. (Interestingly, the movie includes a segment with "a younger Palin getting seduced by her college creationist professor who 'will explain a "big bang" theory even she can’t deny!' " Having not seen the movie, I wonder if that 'younger Palin' is a daughter or Sarah trying to make a grade during one of her many attempts of going through college. Either way, unlike Palin creating media attention with her accusations that people wanted to rape her daughters, she was hypercritically silent about this film and other porn references to herself.)
When I googled a search for images of Sarah Palin, it suggested, without prompting, 'Sarah Palin breasts.' Almost all these images were photoshopped with her head on a much more buxom body - like the one shown above, with the pink top and the ruler naughtly held in her hands. The other example, directly above, was screen captured by Bree Palin from Sarah Palin's facebook account, posted by a smitten fan for their Christmas eve enjoyment.
She also displays no shame when accusing people of doing the very things that she does herself. This is a common feature of people on the checklist. By projecting their behaviour onto others, they manage to stop the discussion of what they are in fact doing themselves. For example, when a less busty Palin posed for Runner's World she was obviously pandering to her male fantasy followers. (What else does this pose suggest?) However, when Newsweek sourced the same photo for its cover, which subtly drew attention to what Palin was doing, they were called sexist by Palin and her followers. I am not sure if they changed the charge to sexual jealousy when it was revealed that the photo was chosen by two women. (By the way, Sarah, isn't it sexist to suggest that women who question you are jealous, sexual or otherwise? And are you not showing jealous behaviour, quite sexual in fact, when your reaction to a man, who is not enthralled to your winking, flirtatious behaviour, is to berate him?)
Monday, January 4, 2010
Environment vs. Wiring - a Response
Environment does play an important part in dysfunctional families. It also can be pivitol whether someone on the psychopathy checklist progresses across the threshold to being a full blown psychopath. However, with the research that is currently being done, it appears that a precondition of being on the list is a miswiring of the brain and its ability to have empathy. There are people who are destructive individuals through environment alone, but they are not on the checklist (they fall in the broader catagory of anti-social personality disorder).
Checklist behaviour can also result from brain injury or tumours. The first important observation of of this was the case of a railroad dynamite tamper named Gage who had an iron rod blown through his head, but managed to pick himself up and appeared, miraculously, to escape serious injury. What was noted is that his behaviour completely changed from being a careful, conscientious family man and reliable employee to a shiftless, violent individual who left his family and became penniless. A more recent case may be the man who abducted the young girl and kept her in his backyard while he fathered two children with her. As reprehensible as his behaviour is, reports from family and people who knew him growing up indicated that his behaviour changed radically after he had a motorcycle accident. Although both men, after their accidents, would score high on the checklist, they are recognized as being something other then psychopaths. I believe that researchers have referred to it as injury induced psychopathy. (It is interesting to note that a high percentage of homeless men have been found to have suffered, at one point or another, from head injuries. Although different injuries will affect different parts of the brain and produce variable disfunction. Many others are the victims of extreme abuse including sexual.)
An over reliance on environmental causes for mental illness has double victimized families that are already under incredible strain. It wasn't until the nineties that North America began to stop claiming that autism was caused exclusively by frigid mothering and began acknowledging that their were organic causes to the disorder. Think about that for a minute: mothers who had special needs children were told that their child's problems were caused solely by their own inadequate mothering. That fits into my definition of cruelty and influences my criticism of psychology when it is reluctant to give up cherished theories and apply more up to date information on how the mind works.
The term sociopath, which is essentially the same as psychopath, is usually used by people who believe that the behaviour is more narrowly caused by environmental factors. This was my criticism of Martha Stout's book. And yes, the home life of a psychopath has a higher than average chance of being dysfunctional. One reason for this is that the miswiring is a heritable condition making it likely that at least one of the parents could be on the checklist and, as we see with the example of Sarah Palin, they make appalling parents. It is also quite likely that other siblings and relatives would have the miswiring as well - making the entire family toxic. But, even in cases where the rest of the family members are unaffected by the wiring glitch, we can not discount the effect that a budding psychopathic child will have on his home life. There are many people who read this blog who can testify to this from their own personal experience.
lilylake, the reason the checklist was developed in the first place was because of the utter lack of consistency in the research being done on psychopathy up to that point. Everyone was defining psychopaths differently, based on their personal beliefs, which made the results inconsistent and unusable. The checklist has been in place now for over two and a half decades and has lead to a greater understanding of what the problems and causes are for this condition as well as a better understanding of how to best treat them. That is one of the reasons that people with known injury induced psychopathic behaviour or environmentally caused anti-social behaviour are not included in the classification to keep the research as clear as possible.
I would suggest you may want to read Steven Pinker's excellent book The Blank Slate to have a better understanding on the origins of the nature vs. nurture debate. Like all of Pinker's books,it is fascinating on a number of levels.