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Total number of comments: 2 (since 2017-01-10 19:37:11)

Chris S.

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  • Welcome to Psychopathocracy
    • Chris S. 01/10/2017 at 11:39 am

      There's certainly evidence that many of those nominated for high office in the Trump administration are self-centered, but that's quite distinct from true psychopathy. For instance a selfish person puts themselves first because they value themselves more than others around them. A true psychopath is actually unable to empathize or relate to others around them; it's different, and there are many shades of unpleasantness on the axis from normality to true psychopath with an actual clinical personality disorder. Anyway, my back-of-the-napkin, interview-free and thus totally unscientific and inappropriate application of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist to Trump results in a score of 27 at most (the average person is probably around a 5, the average incarcerated person ~22, and true psychopaths over 30). Probably he's a lot lower than that, since various areas where I scored him at the maximum based on his public persona are probably much more nuanced.

      Now narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), on the other hand... Trump's basically a walking textbook case. HRC actually used several techniques in the debates to "push his buttons" that clinicians use in interviews when diagnosing NPD. Trump fell for it every... single... time.

  • Iraq, Iran and the Nuclear Phantasm: We've Seen this Picture
    • Chris S 11/09/2011 at 10:10 am

      The public's conditioned association of the term "nuclear" is so profoundly negative that nuclear magnetic resonance procedures in a healthcare setting had to be rebranded as magnetic resonance imaging/MRI to avoid the n-word. Given that fact, it's hardly surprising that juxtaposition of the terms "nuclear" and "weapon" produces far more uneasiness, even when the full context of a typical sentence is "there is no evidence Iran's NUCLEAR material is being diverted from civilian research toward an entirely hypothetical WEAPON's program". Simply having both words in proximity is enough.

      Regarding an Iranian policy of nuclear latency, that would certainly be consistent with announcements and developments post-2006 or so. Part of Iran's public relations problem is that they themselves were inconsistent in their messaging prior to that point, e.g. denying nuclear activity while satellites showed underground facilities under construction at Natanz. This led to moderate concern from the IAEA at the time, and even though such concerns have since been alleviated with far greater access and disclosure -- enabling the IAEA to positively confirm that nuclear material is not being diverted -- the spectre of "those sneaky Iranians" can still be raised by anyone wishing to add to the uncertainty. It's not rational, but it's certainly effective

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