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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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My knowledge of Putin consists of knowing he overplayed his hand as I stated in a post months ago. There is no way he gets out of the mess he created in the Ukraine without losing face. I am enjoying watching him squirm. As far as the Russian people go, as long as there hate for America at this point in history persists, I will enjoy watching them squirm and cry uncle as well. Besides, I have little respect for a country where the population are slaves to the government and like it.

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Wow, you sure do know a lot, THUGR!


You should at least read the link I posted. It will add to whatever store of knowledge that you already have.

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What, you thought by asking I would waste my time giving a comprehensive and thorough report on Putin, just for you to dismiss it as nonsense? Have you learned nothing about me yet?

Here is my report, fuck you comrade. Here is a history lesson. After World War 11 there was a place called the Soviet Union. All that is left 65 years later is a place called Russia which is still being criticized and sanctioned by the rest of the world. In another forty or so years Russia will have a free and democratic government and the bullshit will end.

Comrade

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Originally posted by G:
Saw the press conferences or read about them - naturally you assume otherwise - because *only Signym* knows or cares - what a pure ego f*ck you are.

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Saw the press conferences or read about them - naturally you assume otherwise - because *only Signym* knows or cares - what a pure ego f*ck you are.-G

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You don't care about Kiev killing thousands of civilians and displacing a million. -SIGNY

I care more than you do. I was the first to post about it.-G

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You don't care about the USA killing millions of civilians.-SIGNY

I care way, way more than you do on that one.-G

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No, the REAL story is that whatever Russia does is bad. Bad, bad, bad! By comparison, the USA and Kiev are so uninteresting you can hardly be bothered to think about them.-SIGNY

Signym likes to tell other people what they are thinking - how does she do it? Oh, she makes shit up!

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What I don't get is why you are so anti-gay. I understand you being against free speech, but hatin' on the LGBT community just doesn't make sense - unless going backwards is the plan. Revisiting the Soviet past maybe?

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Anyway, I think it's time we closed this particular line in the thread with a Merry Xmas, and I hope you have a wonderful holiday.

If anyone has anything to post on the ORIGINAL TOPIC, I would be very happy to read about if after Xmas.

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One way in which she does this is to cast aspersions and spew slanderous remarks about other persons and countries.

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What I don't get is why you are so anti-gay. I understand you being against free speech, but hatin' on the LGBT community just doesn't make sense - unless going backwards is the plan. Revisiting the Soviet past maybe? -G

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A sociopath started this thread about psychopaths.-THUGR

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Originally posted by 1kiki:


I had MANY potential sources for people to educate themselves. Did you cherry pick just one? And also - Who 'he'? You? KPO? THUGR? Rappy? Obama? Limbaugh? Bush (Jr and Sr)?

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
You are so fucking stupid it's not even funny. I posted the link to a google search. https://www.google.com/#q=sociopath That result has 'About 4,980,000 results (0.16 seconds)'. And out of ALL THAT, you says there's only one result. That makes you about (4,980,000 - 1) (0.16 seconds) times stupid.

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Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.

And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.

Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.

You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.

In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.

You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences will most likely remain undiscovered.

How will you live your life?

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

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Unlike you I realize that once someone follows the link one definition will be chosen and read. Anyone(you)who thinks more than one definition or dictionary needs to be read explaining what a sociopath is, is a moron.

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That's strange, because whole books have been written about the topic, that populate whole sections of libraries, and I've read roughly a dozen of them. brain function. brain structure. genetics. tests for. behavior. sociology of. prison population.

If you want an intro, read Hare. He literally wrote the book on the topic.

But yeah - you? Nearly 5 million results and you claimed: "You posted one link 1kiki to the definition ..." And then you doubled down on your own stupidity by saying well ANYbody would only read one. No - YOU would only read one out of 5 million. So you? Still a fucking moron. And so damn stupid you can't even admit you were wrong saying there was the definition when the were many definitions and literally millions of facts. Something obvious to everyone else - but you.

Apologies to morons for having to be included with you.

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Holy cripes on toast, this thread is a clusterfuck.

So I'm going to pour more fuel on the fire. And be surprisingly on topic.

Would it surprise any of you if I said that technically I don't think anyone who has posted before now in this thread qualifies under definitions of sociopathy? Some of you might be extreme in terms of ideology, some of you I might disagree with in terms of moral choices you've made or might be going to make. But I view all of YOU as fundamentally human.

Having a desire for control over one's surroundings and having a personalized perspective on what people are or what they are saying doesn't make someone a sociopath.

Hell, even not necessarily caring about strangers doesn't make someone a sociopath - sometimes you just don't have any money or any way to help a begger, and sometimes you just want to curl up with your cat for a while at home instead of deal with people. Sometimes you want to feel safe. That's fairly standard human behaviour. Most people can't be always on 100% of the time.

"I'm right, I'm justified, you're WRONG" is not sociopathy. However, it might be black and white thinking or splitting - which it seems a lot of you have been doing lately. Disagreeing on one thing suddenly changes whether or not someone is a bad or good person in your estimation.

Hey, it happens. In the heat of the moment, everyone does that. *I*'ve done that. And when I got especially ticked off, I turned self-destructive and started burning bridges - much like what we're seeing here in this thread from two people who except for Russia aren't that different in their beliefs.

Sociopathy is when you're willing to exploit or betray even people who are close to you, who you've known for years who have helped you and been kind to you, friends and family. Getting ahead at their severe detriment and your benefit and all the justifications about how you're right to do so. Whether for short-term gains, long-term gains, or the hell of it, the sociopath is ALWAYS thinking about themselves or how they can benefit themselves. Not sometimes when they're too tired or sick to do otherwise. Always.

Yes, they can care about people, yes they can have feelings for people (a scorned and rejected sociopath is terrifying to behold), sometimes, despite what most of the literature says, they can even regret what they are and what they do, even if they can't change.

But when they care about other people? They're thinking of it as a reciprocal exchange. They think of it as the other person owing them, and they see it as consequently that they OWN the other person.

Some of them become so bad (and are usually in such a high social position) that they start to think the whole WORLD owes them, and so they OWN the world. That's where you start to get problems.

Yes, our society feeds it a little by dividing people so strongly on political and ideological bases. When a person gives themselves up to a cause, they start seeing people on the other side as less human, and give up some of their own humanity in the process. But that is still not sociopathy. A person can still recover from that - provided they stop thinking about how right they are, and stop thinking about how the ends justify the means or about how this is all for the greater good, and stop thinking about how they've been hurt by others, and start thinking about how they're affecting other people. To do otherwise is to enable the REAL sociopaths.

Source: Your friendly neighborhood psycho nutjob.

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Just a VERY small example of your very LARGE contribution to that whole 'baiting' thing. So when you say there's been a lot of baiting going on lately - I hope you're looking in the mirror - buddy.

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I think you are throwing that word around too loosely. I mean, seriously - "I believe that the children of the ultra-wealthy, and those who attain some power are deliberately conditioned towards psychopathy." Really? Who's manipulating these people toward that?

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We can learn a lot about the art of living from Tolstoy's War and Peace - a 10-hour dramatisation of which is airing on BBC Radio 4 on Thursday. It acutely observes vanity and folly, sexual jealousy and family relationships. But we can also learn from the life of the master novelist himself, writes Roman Krznaric.

Tolstoy, who was born in 1828 and died in 1910, was a member of the Russian nobility, from a family that owned an estate and hundreds of serfs. The early life of the young count was raucous, debauched and violent.

"I killed men in wars and challenged men to duels in order to kill them," he wrote. "I lost at cards, consumed the labour of the peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely, and deceived people … so I lived for ten years."

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But he gradually weaned himself off his decadent, racy lifestyle and rejected the received beliefs of his aristocratic background, adopting a radical, unconventional worldview that shocked his peers. So how exactly might his personal journey help us rethink our own philosophies of life?

1. Keep an open mind

One of Tolstoy's greatest gifts was his ability and willingness to change his mind based on new experiences. The horrific bloodshed he witnessed while fighting in the Crimean War in the 1850s turned him into a lifelong pacifist. In 1857, after seeing a public execution by guillotine in Paris - he never forgot the thump of the severed head as it fell into the box below - he became a convinced opponent of the state and its laws, believing that governments were not only brutal, but essentially served the interests of the rich and powerful. "The State is a conspiracy," he wrote to a friend. "Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere." Tolstoy was on the road to becoming an anarchist. He would be the first to encourage us to question the fundamental beliefs and dogmas we have been brought up with.
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2. Practise empathy
Tolstoy displayed an unusual capacity to empathise by stepping into the shoes of people whose lives were vastly different from his own. In the 1860s, he not only adopted peasant dress but began working alongside the newly emancipated labourers on his estate, ploughing the fields and repairing their homes with his own hands. For a blue-blooded count, such actions were nothing short of remarkable. Although no doubt tinged with paternalism, he enjoyed the company of peasants and consciously shunned the literary and aristocratic elite in the cities. Tolstoy believed you could never understand the reality of other people's lives unless you had a taste of it yourself.

3. Make a difference
He also distinguished himself from his upper class peers by taking practical action to alleviate other people's suffering, most evident in his famine relief work. After the crop failure of 1873, Tolstoy stopped writing Anna Karenina for a year to organise aid for the starving, remarking to a relative: "I cannot tear myself away from living creatures to bother about imaginary ones." His friends and family thought it was crazy for one of the world's finest novelists to put one of his works of genius on the backburner. He did it again following the famine in 1891, spending two years working in soup kitchens and fundraising. Can you imagine a bestselling author today setting aside their latest book to do humanitarian relief work for two years?

4. Master the art of simple living
Following a mental breakdown in the late 1870s, Tolstoy rejected all organised religion, including the Orthodox Church he had grown up in. He adopted a revolutionary brand of Christianity based on spiritual and material austerity. He gave up drinking, smoking, and became a vegetarian. He also inspired the creation of utopian communities of simple, self-sufficient living, where property was held in common. These "Tolstoyan" communities spread around the world and lead Gandhi to found an ashram in 1910 named the Tolstoy Farm.
Leo Tolstoy

5. Beware your contradictions
This new, simpler life was not without its struggles and contradictions. Tolstoy famously preached universal love yet was constantly fighting with his wife. Moreover, the apostle of equality was never able to fully abandon his wealth and privileged lifestyle. He lived until old age in a grand house with servants. But in the early 1890s he managed - against his family's wishes - to relinquish copyright to a huge portion of his literary works, in effect sacrificing a fortune. Given the privileged position in which Tolstoy started his life, his personal transformation, if not complete, still deserves our admiration.

6. Become a craftsman
Tolstoy recognised that striking a balance between mind and body was an essential part of his creative process. He not only regularly put down his pen to guide a horse-drawn plough across the fields, but kept a scythe and saw leaning up against the wall next to his writing desk. In his last years, when writers and journalists came to pay homage to the bearded sage, they were always surprised to find one of the world's most famous authors huddled over his cobbling tools making a pair of boots. If Tolstoy were here today he would no doubt suggest we get some craft into our lives rather than grant so much of our leisure time to tweeting and texting.

7. Expand your social circle
circa 1880: The Russian ladies at a Nobles' Ball in Moscow gasp at the foreign court dress of a visiting Englishman

The most essential life lesson to take away from Tolstoy is to follow his lead and recognise that the best way to challenge our assumptions and prejudices, and develop new ways of looking at the world, is to surround ourselves with people whose views and lifestyles differ from our own. In Resurrection, he pointed out that most people - whether they are politicians, businessmen or thieves - "instinctively keep to the circle of those people who share their views of life and their own place in it". Cosseted within our peer group, we may think it perfectly normal and justifiable to own two homes, or to oppose same-sex marriage, or to bomb countries in the Middle East. We cannot see that such views may be perverse, unjust, or untrue, because we are inside circles of our own making. The challenge is to spread our conversational wings and spend time with those whose values and experiences contrast with our own. Our ultimate task, Tolstoy would advise us, is to journey beyond the perimeters of the circle.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:


You should at least read the link I posted. It will add to whatever store of knowledge that you already have.

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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

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