The Last Dose Of Reality

Bob Parks: Black & Right ^ | 5/8/08 | Bob Parks

[bocopar]

“Everything you do affects someone else.” – Raymond H. Parks

I can only imagine what my father would be saying to me if he were alive today.

As many of you may know, the radio show “Outside The Wire” is no more, and its producer Rick “Wright” Senninger is in a Florida jail awaiting extradition to Michigan.

[fieldmarshaldj]

What a mess. Always have to be on the lookout for con men everywhere... :-\

[bocopar]

Most of us believed conservatives weren’t capable of this kind of fraud.

Eyes now wide open.

[Grut]

Most of us believed conservatives weren’t capable of this kind of fraud.

The thing about corruption is that it doesn't matter what's corrupted... because it is corrupted.

[PGalt]

WOW! I’ve known con-men. One (about 30 years ago) I considered a friend. He was very good at deception and a very friendly guy. To meet them at higher levels with greater exposure can be EXTREMELY damaging. Witness Bill Clinton.

Anti-truth, anti-freedom, anti-individual, anti-life criminals are everywhere.

Condolences to YOU and YOUR friends. Thanks for notifying us and for YOUR great work. Don’t beat yourself up over this one. Our errors in judgement of MASTER deceivers happen every day to millions of innocent victims around the world.

Your dad was a smart man. Carry forward what you have learned. Teach others.

[Southerngl]

I married a con man. They can be very convincing, especially to a 22 year old girl. However I’m glad I learned so young. Made the rest of my life a tad easier, however skeptical I am of people.

[caseinpoint]

I don’t know all the details here and I don’t think I really care do know them. That said, don’t beat yourself up about this: wolves go to the flock, that’s how they eat their dinner. Everyone should have a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to business deals. Just because someone shares, or seems to share, your political, religious or social beliefs doesn’t make that person a worthy partner on business deals. In fact, when someone tries to burnish their business credentials or trustworthiness to me by flashing their religious or personal beliefs, I get even more suspicious. It has saved me a lot of grief over the years even though I am known (now that I’m older) as an old curmudgeon when it comes to “opportunity knocking” situations.

[shoptalk]

Just WOW!

.... but not to worry, Bob. In the marketplace of ideas, yours will get the airing they deserve and the money will follow.

Stay strong (with your hard-wired, Reagan-esque optimism), my friend.

[proud2beconservativeinNJ]

Take care Mr. Parks. I’m sure your Dad would be proud. Let us know where you land.

[I still care]

When you run into a REAL conman, you never know it until damage has been done somewhere. They look you straight in the eye, smile, tell the most believable lies, and are totally immoral - they don’t care if you drop dead from what they do.

For years I was friends with a family who had one for a brother. He stayed over their house for several months once, and they had no idea what was going on until the police showed up on their doorstep the week after he left.

They get away with it by unbelievable chutzpah. For weeks after, they were answering the door to poor slobs who had been sold things they’d come to pick up and already paid for - the same item for each person.

When the family went to clean out his apartment, three people showed up who tried to move in. He was a renter, and had posed as the landlord to several people - took their deposits, etc and told them all to move in on the first.

[PGalt]

When you run into a REAL conman, you never know it until damage has been done somewhere. They look you straight in the eye, smile, tell the most believable lies, and are totally immoral - they don’t care if you drop dead from what they do.

Exactly. It's easy to be caught up in their clever web of deception. When the realization hits you, often great damage is done to you, or to those that have trusted you, or to those that you love. The conman often scams you last, as you unwittingly become the point man for the projection of his credibiltiy...part of his plan to get at other unsuspecting victims.

[Question_Assumptions]

Psychopaths are very good at suckering other people of all kinds. Why? Because people assume that they have a conscience when they really don't. That allows them to look people in the face and lie without guilt, which catches most normal people off guard. (The Austrian father who kept his daughter locked up also fits the classic psychopath profile -- no remorse is a big warning sign.)

[Question_Assumptions]

Do some web searches on psychopaths. You can find an interesting description of them here (I don't endorse that whole web site, by the way). Researchers estimate that they make up 4% of the population or more and may account for 50% of all violent criminals. This is one of those stories that the press doesn't want to touch because it brings into question two strong liberal beliefs -- that human behavior is a product of nurture not nature (psychopaths actually think differently and react differently in ways that can be measured) and that criminals can be reformed (phychopaths are notorously difficult to reform and reform attempts that focus on compassion and empathy often make them more likely to commit more crimes. Once you've read some descriptions of pyschopaths and how they think, the nutty things that people do in the news makes a lot more sense. It not that everyone is going bad. It's that phsycopaths are very adept at playing a system that tries to be compassionate and understanding yet can't imagine a person with no conscience, no remorse, and no interest in being reformed or changing.

[shoptalk]

I highly recommend a brand new book on the subject, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley.

(just fyi, from a review) "Beginning her research, Oakley found an astonishing gap. She writes about exploring the authoritative Medline database for information on the physiology and biochemistry of Machiavellianism. "Antisocial personality disorder" turns up 5494 hits. "Borderline personality disorder" generates 3090 "meaningful hits, including hundreds of imaging studies, genetic studies, drug studies, and so on."

However, she continues, "...if I type in 'malignant narcissist'--a term used by world-class psychiatrists...to describe the kind of malevolent, yet high functioning people I'm researching - I get nothing. Zero hits. No medical studies whatsoever."

That discovery was "unsettling" to her, "like hearing that the oncologist about to operate on your father's cancerous liver actually has a fake degree from a diploma mill." The book is a narrative of how Oakley began trying to fill in the scientific details.

Machiavellian behavior, she writes, is probably closely related to borderline personality disorder, so named because it sits on the borderline between psychosis and neurosis. To illustrate its most extreme manifestations, the book devotes entire chapters to Milosevic, The Butcher of the Balkans, and Chairman Mao, The Perfect 'Borderpath', the coined word indicating a particularly evil constellation of borderline personality traits and psychopathic tendencies."

[Question_Assumptions]

My layman's opinion, looking as the information on psychopaths and other related problems, I suspect that it's a spectrum disorder that affects moral functioning in much the same way that autism is a spectrum disorder that affects social functioning. What I mean is that I think a narcissist is a mild form of a psychopath in much the way that Aspberger's syndrome is a mild form of autism. Here are the puzzle pieces:

Psychopaths Among Us

Is It Irrational to Be Amoral?

Whose Life Would You Save?

Proper moral decision making requires a functional visceral emotional response to moral problems. This visceral emotional response to moral problems is missing or broken in the psychopath so every decision that they make is a coldly rational decision without regard for empathy, compassion, or humanity. This illustrates why (A) utilitarianism always seems to end in brutal atrocities, (B) why rational arguments alone cannot support moral behavior, and (C) why psychopaths can't be fixed.

[shoptalk]

Great links.

Thanks!