Woman are prohibited by biblical scripture from holding any form of leadership position in a church. There is no gray area on this issue. The episcopal church is blasphemous.
I left the Methodist church because of similar words coming from the pulpit. I was constantly admonished to “check your privilege.” I found out after I left that the female assistant pastor was a lesbian and left her husband and children to run off with another woman. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was when the pastor was going to require masks to attend church in person, stating that “If a certain President had told everyone to wear a mask, no one would be averse to wearing a mask.” Yeah, like when he ventured to suggest HCQ might be effective against CV19. I turned on my heels and walked out that moment.
Lord what a mess that must have been. Ugh. And it’s happening all over.
I tried to join a Lutheran church after I moved here. Found out that they were inviting teenage kids who thought they were homosexuals into the church on Saturdays to “hang out”. This, after the local library kicked them out.
It wasn’t so much the kids hanging out, or the sanctuary draped in pride flags, as it was the venom with which the library’s actions were discussed. Conservatives, to them, are demons/enemies/to be destroyed.
Can we please evict these squatters from the churches? At a time when we really, really need a place of spiritual respite we find that demons, gnomes and “queers” have taken residence there and there is no room for the people needing God. Are these folks so infinitely greedy that they won’t allow ordinary people just one place to refresh their souls?
That one place would be a church of another denomination. One that upholds the sanctity of life and adheres to scripture. Being Christian isn’t supposed to be easy, or just about feeling good. It’s about sacrifice and prayer, giving yourself to god, and trying to live by his word. Scripture doesn’t bend to the whims of the times to appease narcissists, or to help recruit more to the flock. Any church that doesn’t adhere to scripture is a heresy.
What they are doing, brainwashing, only works when it is totalitarian. It must be all you ever hear. The private is political for Marxists for that reason.
As a former Episcopalian, I concur with this message. The hardest task before the dissident right is to recreate a high church Protestantism which isn't fake and gay.
Rod Dreher has noted the apparent modern thirst for high liturgy with a high view of Scripture. It seems the two are nearly incompatible. He would argue the Orthodox church fills that void and I would suggest it has as many problems as answers.
Given the record of Orthodoxy in Czarist Russia, I'm not sold on Eastern Orthodoxy as the solution.
Tradition dominated Christianity has its flaws. Thanks to easy Bible access and even computerized Bible searches, these are increasingly obvious. Just as the printing press triggered the Reformation, computerized Bible searching triggers Sabbath Keeping, Sacred Names, and other attempts and getting closer to Scripture. These are good things -- but overly dissing tradition is a mistake. Every generation has its challenges.
I want to see more Bible consistent worship combined with tradition and acknowledgment of the saints who dealt with far greater trials than we face.
And while I give the Baptists great credit for staying Christian better than my own childhood denomination, baptism is a do-over, not a perpetual stay-out-of-hell free card. There are plenty of passages in the New Testament that indicate that Believers will be judged to higher standards than non Believers.
An over emphasis on Belief vs. charity and following the relevant portions of the Law.
Jesse Ventura had a point. What he didn't appreciate is that to be a Christian is to TAKE ON extra burdens -- but this is an easy mistake to make given modern praise and worship music.
I switched from my longtime Episcopal church to an Anglican one. The denomination is similar but conservative, and uses the old version of the prayerbook. I weathered years of growing wokeness at my Episcopal church, because I loved it and my family had a cherished history there. But the last straw was when one Sunday’s announcements included the news that the youth group (middle and high schoolers) would be taking a bus to attend a “pride” parade in a nearby city.
Chris, you did it again... you had me at “As a third-grade leather daddy..." and killed it with "six years old, into hot man-on-man action, and fearful of immediate violent death." Thanks for finding the dark humor these pissants deserve to be generously doused with.
I don't know why but when I read that I was reminded of that sequence in Annie Hall, when Alvie asks where his childhood classmates are now, and that one awkward-looking girl says, "I'm into leather". Maybe Allen was onto something.
her freeze up at the airport was stunning. even the smallest, most local idiot politician could have engaged with her interlocutor with something. even a “I’ll be giving a statement soon, I promise.” but she couldn’t even perform. she froze because she is hollow. same class of politician as Kamala, catastrophically incompetent when the training wheels are taken off of the bike.
Her freeze-up isn't unique to low level pols like her. Journalist Ezra Levant got the same reaction to 10 minutes of similar questions to Albert Borla (Pfizer CEO) the other year at Davos, and just yesterday or today, again at Davos, from Blackrock CEO Larry Fink. People who imagine themselves as Masters of the Universe see no need to answer for their crimes. It would only take a single disillusioned bodyguard to end their delusions.
Someone told her never say the word “sorry” or apologize because you have just admitted guilt. You could see her calculating. It was painful to watch because she knew the reporter was right and trapped her.
Mr Garcetti was a imbecile as well. I watched a interview on 60 minutes, about homelessness in CA, and he was boasting of 40 sheds, converted into living space for 80. The project cost millions, 20 or 40 million, on dontated land.
He was so ecstatic, and defended it with a straight face.
I worked for a black female symbol-object. Sued her for non payment of wages. She lost. At the "you lost" meeting with the lawyers I looked her in the eye and kept going--it was an abyss of insanity. There was no one there.
They took their leadership training, even the meaning of life itself, from Homer Simpson, who, as he put his arm around Bart’s shoulder after an incident at school, said “Just remember, son, being popular…is the most important thing in the world.”
I, OTOH, was taught to develop my skills to the greatest extent possible.
It is bad enough to have to walk amongst this detritus of humanity (the bishop, not the homeless) and periodically get their 🦮💩 smeared on your shoes, but it’s unacceptable when they’re put in charge and the 🦮💩 becomes a tsunami.
If so, she had to stand in line. Castro apparently had an endless, voracious appetite for women, to the point he probably sired Canada's current Prime Minister with noted Rolling Stones groupie Maggie Trudeau.
Very well written and important and overlooked point about Leftist discourse.
One question though. Why does everyone at the "fire department command post" look like they're from the Kamala Harris social media team? Is the Mayor dragging her little gang of Biden Youth around with her?
There's a mix, in that picture, of fire department employees and neighbors who stopped by to drop off supplies for the fire department. Firefighters were soliciting basic supplies from the community, as donations, during a devastating fire, and the mayor was apparently very proud of all that.
Is there a reason why the men in that photo look long-term demoralized? Rhetorical question, probably. Can you imagine being 30 and thinking of nothing but how many years are left until retirement?
Imagine what it does for morale when you see people with seniority and expertise - proven in the field - being passed over for promotion, for something like Bass?
One could even conjecture that the pervasive "hire someone who checks the appropriate boxes, AND is stupider than yourself' trend has been the 'real' pandemic.
The stupider part is very real. These kind can't stand to have someone competent under them for fear of being shown up. My secret sauce in corporate was to insist every member of my team was smarter than me.
To quote myself from my time as a student, when refusing "collaborative essays/projects":
"No group can be smarter or produce better results than its least intelligent member"
It raised merry Heck with my tutors at university, if they were female. The men had no problem with my attitude, basically just remarking "Suit yourself". But for the majority of the female professors, tutors et cetera, it was a personal affront apparently, to suggest that you wanted to go it alone as your free choice.
Weird I find it to this day that no-one realised that there's nothing in my objection saying *I'm* not the least intelligent (or knowledgeable or productive or whatever) member in a group.
"suggest that you wanted to go it alone as your free choice."
A moderately cynical observer might note, quietly, that this is yet another example of the tendency of the female of the species to do everything in groups - thereby absolving any one individual of responsibility - for anything.
And a *really* cynical person might connect that proclivity with the societal collapse with which the so-called 'Western Liberal Democracies' seem to be flirting.
Looked more like a Covid era nursing staff drill team about to cut some moves!!!!
The mayor is amazing! She seems unaware that the city is burning and that fingers are being pointed in her general direction as having a bit of responsibility.
Bass' smile resembles the Nicholson Joker smile, a chemically induced characature of a smile, that can only reflect the psychosis of the wearer. I am also reminded of people who laugh inappropriately because that's the only way they can handle negative moments in their life.
Everything is always so dramatic with these people. They always are looking for a chance to wear their flawless virtue on their sleeves. "Hey, look at me! I'm the one and only ________". Their narcissism is evident to all who are awake.
“she’s expressing…nothing. She’s saying nothing, about nothing, while thinking of nothing, for the manipulative purpose of eliciting an emotional state on the basis of an evasion and an empty expression.” Wow Chris you’ve summarized the left perfectly!! Nothing else needed.
I’m so, so ready for the era of narcissism to end (although my pessimism makes me skeptical that it will ever end). All the performative bullsh*t, the virtue signaling, the “luxury beliefs”, the humble bragging…it’s been massively tiresome and boring.
I think the era of Narcissism was ushered in when Eve decided the snake was right...she knew better than the Almighty, and to confirm it, Cain snuffed out Able because he was a vegan or something. An early example of Climate Alarmism virtue signaling I suppose. The problem today is that, unlike our forefathers, we've stopped ignoring and suppressing the most malignant of the breed. A true narcissist no longer has to pretend to be humble. As long as they perform the litany word perfect, they are approved and are free to pursue whatever gives the brightest reflection of their image, and worship it openly and in front of God and everybody.
A spiritual journey is supposed to take one away from narcissism but post-modernism has defined such journeys as the exact opposite. Sad that it has infiltrated churches.
It can only be ended by a super majority of voters ready for change. And then only if there is someone on stage smarter and better qualified. The machine has succeeded in ensuring that Option A and Option B are identical twins.
“One Voice” is how they think…and as a branding professional I find it ghoulish that they would try to leverage such a disaster into a political message opportunity intended to elevate their derelict “brand” of Dem-Leftist governance.
Kamela made an appearance at the Altadena fire damage the night of Trump’s inauguration. Funny how she shows up when she is out of political office and has no power. After she spouted her usual word salad, something about the community being part of the community, she mugged with her clown husband and some tool firefighters taking PR photos. Ridiculous.
Again - this time it’s Word Salad-Empty Headed Kamala leveraging the horrendous wildfire disaster to elevate her rock bottom profile and “brand” from the bottom of the toilet. God save us from these narcissistic knuckleheads.
We should not attend any institution (these aren’t churches anymore in any traditional sense) espousing such gibberish. Give them no support, don’t waste your time. Find a real church for these events.
Well said! And nailing something that is hard for normal people to grasp, hard to believe in what is happening when you encounter a person like this. Somebody who says what they say because they think that gets you to do something – as if you're the same as a cell phone or a motorbike only instead of pushing a button to get you to work one smiles a smile or speaks a cliche.
Long story short, I did have a relationship with a woman who damaged my life so that I looked for some understanding of what had happened to me and found Dr Robert Hare's Psychopathy test. From what little she told me and from her actions toward me I found that she scored at least once for almost all the categories of which I could supply any data. One might expect me to hate her. But I can't quite hate her.
She wasn't just a liar,she was ALL performance. These people don't know what the difference between sincerity and performance is. Love is smiling, it's performance and when the performance elicits a mirror performance that's the successful completion of love for them. They have no idea what it feels like to feel. Ask them if they feel something and they sincerely say they do. I cared for this woman, because I was lonely and had a need to care for somebody. I assumed that she was like me, a person with feelings. I had to finally be confronted with the undeniable evidence that she had heartlessly defrauded me. I confronted her, looked into her eyes and saw the frightening void. There was nobody to hate. There's nobody there. A relationship with a psycho is like having an industrial accident.
And I just do not buy The Gospel of Recovery from Narcissistic Damage, which has as its first tenet the assertion that we must remember that these people were traumatized in early life. I never bought it. The idea always seemed fraudulent, somehow.
I have been grateful to discover some younger doctors who don't believe it, either. Peter Salerno is one. Kerry McAvoy is another.
I was a pro actor and a movie lover. I noticed how script writers seldom understand that predators don't always come from trauma. Nichole Kidman's wonderful performance as the psycho Susan Stone in the too-underrated movie "To Die For" is beautifully accurate. It's great movie, I think.
"To Die For" had an intriguing structure which well supported its consistent black comedy tone. Susanne Stone's guilt is made obvious in the opening credits, yet there is a mystery to be solved. The question posed is not "who?" or "how?" but "why?". What motivates the killer? The solution is that she is "a four letter word that starts with C. Cold. Yeah. C-O-L-D, cold." Her crime is a psycho's idea of a joke. It's funny to murder a good and innocent man who thought you loved him. It was easy to construct a perfect and cunning plot that the people around you would be far too dumb to figure out. Or no. Scratch that. They can figure it out if they want but they'll be too stupidly conventional to convict Susanne, she is sure, because Susanne is "from a good home" and the common run of ordinary people in Little Hope, New Hampshire, do not have Susanne's ability to think big. These ordinary, contemptible dots make up the big picture, they aren't capable of seeing it. They are not destined for greatness, not like Susanne. She has had an offer from a big Hollywood producer who wants to ink a lucrative deal. So it's a wrap. Shut off the camera and dump this little town.
Susanne has a vulnerability that she is not capable of even sensing. People have feelings and that's something a psycho like Susanne has no conception of. Susanne has proto-emotions, truncated and unrealized. Most motivational in this instance is her infantile frustration without infantile bonding. "Ordinary" people grow up because they bond with their mothers; they can digest the milk of human-kindness and so become one of human kind. People make babies out of their love, and love is what prevents extinction. Love is deep and strong. Love will have the future at all cost. People will have justice and will have it by violence if the law doesn't deliver it. Life to them is not a joke or a picture. Life is love. And love is not kidding. Love will have revenge.
As an actor, I was impressed the script of "To Die For" and by what I saw as Kidman's technique. I was always a technical actor; I found a character in the lines, working from the outside in, so to say. Getting emotionally inside a psychopathic character, imagining the psycho as "yourself under unusual circumstances", is a great mistake. And script writers write bad scripts about psychos because they too make that mistake. The psycho is not quite human, not like the emotionally empathetic actor and writer. My fellow actors, you should work from the outside in, because the psycho is all outside, nothing "inside" about him. Orson Wells's "Harry Lime" in "The Third Man" is another perfect portrait of a psychopath. Neither Holly Martins nor Anna have a clue who Harry really is because they are real people who love like a human being.
That film resonated with me. I worked in small market TV news around the time of its release. I observed more than a few young female new-hires who pitched stories that consisted of nothing more than heading to the local high school with a mic and camera to “rap” with the teens.
I wonder how they explain Leopold and Loeb, as cosseted and pampered as any two rich boys could ever have been, who in 1924 decided to prove their superiority to us of the common herd by committing the perfect crime, which they deemed to be the murder of a 14 year old boy, Bobby Franks?
I know that Salerno contends that Cluster B types are likelier to have been spoiled rotten than abused.
I don't know whether you know anything at all about the murders of the Clutter family, which is the subject of the Truman Capote masterpiece, “In Cold Blood.” I'd nominate that book for American Book of the 20th century. The two murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, had dramatically different childhoods. Smith was traumatized, and later commented that he supposed that all of his life, he'd been carrying a rage around with him, and that it was the Clutters’ misfortune to be in his path when it erupted.
Dick Hickock, in contrast, was an only child, and the family had no great economic suffering during The Great Depression or anything at all to do with World War II. Dick's I.Q. was 130, he was a popular kid, he wanted to study engineering, and his prowess as a high school wide receiver got him a scholarship offer. He turned all of this down to do what he really wanted to do, be a professional criminal.
Very interesting! Co-incidentally, I had the great privilege to have been cast as 'The Chaplain' on the execution platform in 2005's movie "Capote". I saw the plot as the story of how Truman Capote made the fatal mistake of empathizing with a psycho who only used Truman's foolish sympathy. In real life the Clutter Case destroyed Truman Capote. He descended into alcoholism and never produced another book.
Wow! I had been looking for an excuse to watch that movie again, and you've given it to me. Did you see the other Capote movie which was made at about the same time, “Infamous?”
The things Capote got away with to write that book! Had you know that the warden of the Kansas State Penitentiary had cut off his access to Smith and Hickock not long after they got to the pen? Capote solved this problem with panache: bribery.
It's still remarkable to me that nobody snitched on him for having tacked on the invented ending of the book. No, it actually didn't happen that a meditative Alvin Dewey decided to make a solitary pilgrimage to the Clutters’ gravesite one day in 1964, where he found another mourner, Nancy's friend, Sue Kidwell, whom he had not seen in several years.
As ugly as it is, that's realistic. Dr Robert Hare insisted that psychotherapy to cure the "sufferer" from the "mental illness" of Psychopathy – OOPS! Sorry! "Anti-Social Personality Disorder", that sounds so respectably medical so we scientists prefer it – giving therapy to a psycho only makes him a better, more clever psycho.
I was enraged some years ago by a murder case here in Vancouver. A teenage boy raped and murdered a girl whom he had stalked. He had brought the rope and the metal pipe to the place by the pathway in the woods where he knew she would take to get home from school. He was apprehended and confessed to the murder. Three psychiatrists were court ordered to assess him for the sentencing hearing to decide whether he'd be sentenced as a juvenile and be out free in five years or be sentenced as an adult to 25-years-to-life.
The killer told the doctors that he was shy about girls and having done the murder he was all better now and remorseful and no danger to anybody anymore. One of the doctors was stunningly dense enough to buy this con, lock stock and barrel; he recommended five years in Juvie. The other two had actual brains along with their diplomas and recommended 25 years without possibility of parole for this obviously dangerous predator and the judge, thank God, agreed.
What really got my goat was that the two sensible psychiatrists were forced to say that prison would be better for the killer because unlike in Juvenile Detention, in prison he'd be able to benefit from therapy.
Thus it sadly remains that neither the law nor psychiatry can escape from the disease model. The psycho is "sick", "mentally ill", "Suffering from a Personality Disorder". Psychos are incapable of suffering. The real duty of a conscientious doctor should be the duty to relieve and prevent the real suffering of the real victims of psychopathy, the psycho's human prey.
Instead the modern doctor of "mental illness" sees a man who's just been bitten by a rattlesnake and rushes to attend the suffering of the poor abused rattlesnake.
Which oddly reminds me of what that oh-so-Woke female – yes, "assigned female at birth", that's the new term. As Alice's-Wonderland insane as that is! – firefighter captain said when somebody asked her if she would have the physical strength to bring a man out of a fire like the fires which were – and still are! – raging in Los Angeles now. She said that this hypothetical man got himself into danger and so it wasn't her obligation to get him out. Kind of C-O-L-D cold, isn't it?
Doctors, sociologists, criminologists have commented about the lack of fear in true psychopaths. Inasmuch as it was Dr Hervey Cleckley who was the first to publish anything extensive about psychopathy ( early 1940s ), and I can't imagine that much information about it had gotten into the general population a decade later, it makes it all the most astounding to me that James Agee was onto this weird phenomenon in them by the time he wrote the great horror film/film noir, The Night of the Hunter, which was made in 1955.
If you've seen the movie, you remember that the Robert Mitchum character seems amused as he's being taken off to be hanged.
Sociopaths/malignant narcissists, by contrast, seem quite capable of fearfulness. My mad bomber, as I think of him fondly, was a true psychopath. He’d been a safecracker for organized crime as well as a murderer for God knows how many years. And he'd won The Daily Double of derangement, having been a diagnosed tertiary syphilitic for twenty years before his lunatic apotheosis.
I loved "Night of the Hunter" and got a DVD of it more recently. Mitchum's performance is awesome. Kleckley's book is searing. His story of a psycho who lives a lie for years at a time as a respectable doctor but has to relieve the pressure by periodic "holidays" during which he sneaks off to binge for weeks on an orgy of depravity and crime and possibly even murder. "Beauty, ugliness, joy, sadness,disgust ... these are beyond their experience..."
Absolutely right. Childhood trauma produces different damage. It's another issue entirely from narcissism/psychopathy. I knew that this woman had had a trauma free upbringing. Robert Hare was informative and so was Martha Stout. And Hervey Kleckly. Psychopathy can manifest in children from normal homes. But a society such as ours provides so much easy prey for psychos that they prosper as they would not have done in more principled ages. Dr Hare's book,"Snakes in Suits" about psychos in business is a good read.
To compound the issue's problems, most are perfectly normal as long as they are in a normal and healthy setting. This would be my semi-professional opinion, based on my teaching career.
In a normal, quiet, well-ordered class room in a quiet normal school, they are rarely a problem since the clearly and explicitly ordered environment teaches them how to fit in and how to achieve without resorting to violence, manipulation and threats.
They may not feel normal emotionality the way they should, but they know how to perform it without sadistic maliciousness and understand that being/acting/making "nice" is a more profitable strategy. While not ideal, at least that means they aren't a great danger to anyone.
But in a chaotic, arbitrary environment, their forte - violence, threats and manipulativeness - come to the fore as their optimal survival strategy, and such an environment (f.e. a Karen Bass-like person being awarded laurels simply for being born a Karen Bass-like person, weighted more than any tangible achievement) also teaches them that society is built on a Great Lie and a collective delusion, and that he/she who ignores the alleged norms of the delusion (or illusion) and instead learns to work it as one would a puzzle-box.
To the detriment of everyone, even themselves in the end.
As we say in German: Ordnung muss Sein. Order must rule.
Very thought provoking! It explains a lot! Specifically it explains a lot about why the instances of psychopathic crimes seems to be tied to social/cultural factors. These crimes seem to be more prevalent in North American society than anywhere else. And as our society descends into decadence and chaos it becomes the psycho's happy hunting ground.
Thinking of it in terms of evolutionary pressure makes it obvious:
A society which curbs, channels, harnesses or obliterates those with undesirable and dangerous traits flourishes.
A society which in the name of rights does nothing of the above, or only gives "smack on the wrist" so to speak, degenerates.
That's not to imply I support eugenics or anything like that, simply that once someone proves themselves a clear danger to others, they are removed from society permanently.
As I asked liberal and progressive colleagues:
"How many children raped is one too many before a pedophile is to be out down? 1? 10? 20? Give me a number!"
That almost led to fisticuffs at times. Academics hate being put on the spot like that, having to make definite statement about anything.
You remind me of what a great teacher and a great person my ex-wife was and still is and why I feel so lucky that she was the one I married and how proud I am to love her still even after we broke apart all those years ago. She was a great teacher and counsellor and still is in retirement now.
Thirty years ago she got her first teaching job in a small private school. She had a mixed class of 15 or so grade 3-4-5s. One of them was a boy who had deformed hands and feet so that the other kids had to help him on stairs so he wouldn't fall. One day a Canadian government person came to lecture the kids about being kind to disabled people. This boy was in the front row. She asked the kids, "Do you think you might know someone who is disabled?" The kids looked at one another in puzzlement. One even asked this boy if he knew a disabled person. No, they all said, we never met a disabled person. That's the kind of class atmosphere my wife created.
I have read Martha Stout's book, but have never felt much need to study psychopaths beyond my own maulings by at least four of them, including, no kidding, a mad bomber.
You were lucky to get away alive then! I feel lucky that the psychos I encountered – including a sexual abusing "free sex" theatre manager I didn't realize was a psycho at the time – happened not to have acquired a taste for violence.
Clicked the "like" because this was one of the best descriptions of low-tier/non-violent (I'm assuming and hoping it was non-violent!) psychopathy.
I sincerely hope you managed to put yourself back together; I've seen first-hand how torn apart people can become from living with the kind of person you describe.
She was not a violent person, thank God. But it goes deep. I still feel it after going on 14 years since I finally broke away. It gives me the willies to remember how deeply enthralled I was. Men are hard wired to care for a woman and a child, protect them, provide for them. She was a childish woman and I was lonely.
"The destructive element seems so small and weak that a man fancies he can dally with it and come to no harm" – I Ching
The episcopalians ceased to be anything resembling a Christian church some time ago.
Woman are prohibited by biblical scripture from holding any form of leadership position in a church. There is no gray area on this issue. The episcopal church is blasphemous.
The Bible is quite clear: a woman is never to be in spiritual headship over a man. Ever.
The Episcopal church has been dead for years. As has the Lutheran, Methodist, and PCUSA.
I left the Methodist church because of similar words coming from the pulpit. I was constantly admonished to “check your privilege.” I found out after I left that the female assistant pastor was a lesbian and left her husband and children to run off with another woman. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was when the pastor was going to require masks to attend church in person, stating that “If a certain President had told everyone to wear a mask, no one would be averse to wearing a mask.” Yeah, like when he ventured to suggest HCQ might be effective against CV19. I turned on my heels and walked out that moment.
Lord what a mess that must have been. Ugh. And it’s happening all over.
I tried to join a Lutheran church after I moved here. Found out that they were inviting teenage kids who thought they were homosexuals into the church on Saturdays to “hang out”. This, after the local library kicked them out.
It wasn’t so much the kids hanging out, or the sanctuary draped in pride flags, as it was the venom with which the library’s actions were discussed. Conservatives, to them, are demons/enemies/to be destroyed.
I left.
'Female Assistant Pastor' lol.
FAP?
I'm clutching my pearls (while laughing)!
The Bible is “quite clear” about stoning people to death as well.
Yes, in another time. It's never presented as normative behavior--more a historical action than anything.
Sir, I believe you are confusing the Christian bible with the Quran.
I’m not a Bible scholar, but I’m pretty good with Google.
Ah, Google, the fountain of all wisdom. 😂
Jesus said that the one without sin should throw the first stone.
Your point being???
For more than just THAT reason too
Yep. Blasphemous and satanic.
Everything is a LARP for women, anyway.
Can we please evict these squatters from the churches? At a time when we really, really need a place of spiritual respite we find that demons, gnomes and “queers” have taken residence there and there is no room for the people needing God. Are these folks so infinitely greedy that they won’t allow ordinary people just one place to refresh their souls?
That one place would be a church of another denomination. One that upholds the sanctity of life and adheres to scripture. Being Christian isn’t supposed to be easy, or just about feeling good. It’s about sacrifice and prayer, giving yourself to god, and trying to live by his word. Scripture doesn’t bend to the whims of the times to appease narcissists, or to help recruit more to the flock. Any church that doesn’t adhere to scripture is a heresy.
Yes. And here's what's wrong with The Church these days imo. And it was made abundantly clear during the plandemic
1: Absence of Trust
2: Fear of Conflict
3: Lack of Commitment
4: Avoidance of Accountability
5: Inattention to Results
6: Absence of spiritual belief, compensated for by secular political virtue signaling. (Main-line Protestant churches, anyway.)
Great addition.
Too long though. Yours make a better list.
0. Aligning with present-day political hot topics to try to be "cool".
Jim, hit the nail on the head. I’ve made a similar comment on other Substacks and get blasted for being anti-fill in the blank.
I say to people, look, you may not like it and maybe you don’t want to believe it, but the Word is what it is.
The diabolical never rests.
“Are these folks so infinitely greedy that they won’t allow ordinary people just one place to refresh their souls?“
Dude. They serve the devil—the answer should be obvious.
the country is in the midst of a narcissistic crisis, where the emptiest and neediest fill most of the positions of leadership
"For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind"
You can find a church without them, but you really have to look and listen.
What they are doing, brainwashing, only works when it is totalitarian. It must be all you ever hear. The private is political for Marxists for that reason.
Yes, they absolutely are that greedy.
As a former Episcopalian, I concur with this message. The hardest task before the dissident right is to recreate a high church Protestantism which isn't fake and gay.
https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/rule-7-market-christianity-to-college
The task is above my halo grade, but somebody needs to do it or the Anglosphere is doomed.
Rod Dreher has noted the apparent modern thirst for high liturgy with a high view of Scripture. It seems the two are nearly incompatible. He would argue the Orthodox church fills that void and I would suggest it has as many problems as answers.
Be the man you would wish to be shepherded by.
Blessings.
Given the record of Orthodoxy in Czarist Russia, I'm not sold on Eastern Orthodoxy as the solution.
Tradition dominated Christianity has its flaws. Thanks to easy Bible access and even computerized Bible searches, these are increasingly obvious. Just as the printing press triggered the Reformation, computerized Bible searching triggers Sabbath Keeping, Sacred Names, and other attempts and getting closer to Scripture. These are good things -- but overly dissing tradition is a mistake. Every generation has its challenges.
I want to see more Bible consistent worship combined with tradition and acknowledgment of the saints who dealt with far greater trials than we face.
And while I give the Baptists great credit for staying Christian better than my own childhood denomination, baptism is a do-over, not a perpetual stay-out-of-hell free card. There are plenty of passages in the New Testament that indicate that Believers will be judged to higher standards than non Believers.
You make good points. Not sure what your comments on baptism mean; however.
An over emphasis on Belief vs. charity and following the relevant portions of the Law.
Jesse Ventura had a point. What he didn't appreciate is that to be a Christian is to TAKE ON extra burdens -- but this is an easy mistake to make given modern praise and worship music.
I'm still lost. Could be the hour. Definitely not the bourbon.
And I ceased to be anything resembling an Episcopalian. Some time ago - about 45 years. When the "church" discarded the old 'Book of Common Prayer'.
I switched from my longtime Episcopal church to an Anglican one. The denomination is similar but conservative, and uses the old version of the prayerbook. I weathered years of growing wokeness at my Episcopal church, because I loved it and my family had a cherished history there. But the last straw was when one Sunday’s announcements included the news that the youth group (middle and high schoolers) would be taking a bus to attend a “pride” parade in a nearby city.
Amen to that!
Chris, you did it again... you had me at “As a third-grade leather daddy..." and killed it with "six years old, into hot man-on-man action, and fearful of immediate violent death." Thanks for finding the dark humor these pissants deserve to be generously doused with.
I don't know why but when I read that I was reminded of that sequence in Annie Hall, when Alvie asks where his childhood classmates are now, and that one awkward-looking girl says, "I'm into leather". Maybe Allen was onto something.
The Mayor - that ear to ear grin - does she ever stop performing/patronising/pretending?
Literally never. She's barely a person. She's a symbol-object with legs.
her freeze up at the airport was stunning. even the smallest, most local idiot politician could have engaged with her interlocutor with something. even a “I’ll be giving a statement soon, I promise.” but she couldn’t even perform. she froze because she is hollow. same class of politician as Kamala, catastrophically incompetent when the training wheels are taken off of the bike.
how did these people get so far ahead?!?
Running for local government is not attractive to many competent people.
Venal, yes. Competent, no.
Her freeze-up isn't unique to low level pols like her. Journalist Ezra Levant got the same reaction to 10 minutes of similar questions to Albert Borla (Pfizer CEO) the other year at Davos, and just yesterday or today, again at Davos, from Blackrock CEO Larry Fink. People who imagine themselves as Masters of the Universe see no need to answer for their crimes. It would only take a single disillusioned bodyguard to end their delusions.
Someone told her never say the word “sorry” or apologize because you have just admitted guilt. You could see her calculating. It was painful to watch because she knew the reporter was right and trapped her.
Voters
Mr Garcetti was a imbecile as well. I watched a interview on 60 minutes, about homelessness in CA, and he was boasting of 40 sheds, converted into living space for 80. The project cost millions, 20 or 40 million, on dontated land.
He was so ecstatic, and defended it with a straight face.
I worked for a black female symbol-object. Sued her for non payment of wages. She lost. At the "you lost" meeting with the lawyers I looked her in the eye and kept going--it was an abyss of insanity. There was no one there.
They took their leadership training, even the meaning of life itself, from Homer Simpson, who, as he put his arm around Bart’s shoulder after an incident at school, said “Just remember, son, being popular…is the most important thing in the world.”
I, OTOH, was taught to develop my skills to the greatest extent possible.
It is bad enough to have to walk amongst this detritus of humanity (the bishop, not the homeless) and periodically get their 🦮💩 smeared on your shoes, but it’s unacceptable when they’re put in charge and the 🦮💩 becomes a tsunami.
There seems to be a lot of them around.
That one was not alone.
At least the hyper phony Meghan Markle knew to pretend to be sad when she and film crew visited pacific palisades a couple weeks ago…
That smile hides her inner bomb building terrorist training Marxist
I wonder if she banged Castro during her sojourns to Cuba.
If so, she had to stand in line. Castro apparently had an endless, voracious appetite for women, to the point he probably sired Canada's current Prime Minister with noted Rolling Stones groupie Maggie Trudeau.
That’s what I mean, he probably ran out of Cuban girls and had to bring in some fresh meat.
Yeah, that fake, mechanical, rictus-like grin......
.
Definitely gave off Joker vibes.
She's an idiot.
"does she ever stop performing/patronising/pretending?
Uh ... NO.
Oh well.
They are weak. Their bloodline is weak, and history will forget them
There is a simple word that describes this - vacuous. These people are filled, to the brim, with emptiness.
^This!^
Bray at his best. It is this kind of tangential insight from Mr Bray that marks him the top tier here on Substack.
Often, when Chris does this, I’ll have stop and reread to ensure I understood—then it is like a slap on forehead kinda ‘RIGHT!!! EXACTLY!!!’
Well done. They like the fame, the ghoulish fame. AND THE POWER.
So ghoulish this is fodder for a horror writer.
bsn
Very well written and important and overlooked point about Leftist discourse.
One question though. Why does everyone at the "fire department command post" look like they're from the Kamala Harris social media team? Is the Mayor dragging her little gang of Biden Youth around with her?
There's a mix, in that picture, of fire department employees and neighbors who stopped by to drop off supplies for the fire department. Firefighters were soliciting basic supplies from the community, as donations, during a devastating fire, and the mayor was apparently very proud of all that.
Is there a reason why the men in that photo look long-term demoralized? Rhetorical question, probably. Can you imagine being 30 and thinking of nothing but how many years are left until retirement?
Imagine what it does for morale when you see people with seniority and expertise - proven in the field - being passed over for promotion, for something like Bass?
I've seen it real-time in academia and teaching.
I've seen it in corporate.
One could even conjecture that the pervasive "hire someone who checks the appropriate boxes, AND is stupider than yourself' trend has been the 'real' pandemic.
The stupider part is very real. These kind can't stand to have someone competent under them for fear of being shown up. My secret sauce in corporate was to insist every member of my team was smarter than me.
and has a higher mortality rate than Covid19
To quote myself from my time as a student, when refusing "collaborative essays/projects":
"No group can be smarter or produce better results than its least intelligent member"
It raised merry Heck with my tutors at university, if they were female. The men had no problem with my attitude, basically just remarking "Suit yourself". But for the majority of the female professors, tutors et cetera, it was a personal affront apparently, to suggest that you wanted to go it alone as your free choice.
Weird I find it to this day that no-one realised that there's nothing in my objection saying *I'm* not the least intelligent (or knowledgeable or productive or whatever) member in a group.
"suggest that you wanted to go it alone as your free choice."
A moderately cynical observer might note, quietly, that this is yet another example of the tendency of the female of the species to do everything in groups - thereby absolving any one individual of responsibility - for anything.
And a *really* cynical person might connect that proclivity with the societal collapse with which the so-called 'Western Liberal Democracies' seem to be flirting.
Thank you for the explanation.
Looked more like a Covid era nursing staff drill team about to cut some moves!!!!
The mayor is amazing! She seems unaware that the city is burning and that fingers are being pointed in her general direction as having a bit of responsibility.
Bass' smile resembles the Nicholson Joker smile, a chemically induced characature of a smile, that can only reflect the psychosis of the wearer. I am also reminded of people who laugh inappropriately because that's the only way they can handle negative moments in their life.
Thank-you for the Joker reference! I kept thinking her smile was creepy, but didn't get the association. It's exactly like the joker!
Do you think the entities making these things are getting their ideas from popular culture?
Everything is always so dramatic with these people. They always are looking for a chance to wear their flawless virtue on their sleeves. "Hey, look at me! I'm the one and only ________". Their narcissism is evident to all who are awake.
“she’s expressing…nothing. She’s saying nothing, about nothing, while thinking of nothing, for the manipulative purpose of eliciting an emotional state on the basis of an evasion and an empty expression.” Wow Chris you’ve summarized the left perfectly!! Nothing else needed.
Indeed. That "performative narcissism" that Chris referenced just yesterday. On full display.
I’m so, so ready for the era of narcissism to end (although my pessimism makes me skeptical that it will ever end). All the performative bullsh*t, the virtue signaling, the “luxury beliefs”, the humble bragging…it’s been massively tiresome and boring.
I think the era of Narcissism was ushered in when Eve decided the snake was right...she knew better than the Almighty, and to confirm it, Cain snuffed out Able because he was a vegan or something. An early example of Climate Alarmism virtue signaling I suppose. The problem today is that, unlike our forefathers, we've stopped ignoring and suppressing the most malignant of the breed. A true narcissist no longer has to pretend to be humble. As long as they perform the litany word perfect, they are approved and are free to pursue whatever gives the brightest reflection of their image, and worship it openly and in front of God and everybody.
A spiritual journey is supposed to take one away from narcissism but post-modernism has defined such journeys as the exact opposite. Sad that it has infiltrated churches.
It can only be ended by a super majority of voters ready for change. And then only if there is someone on stage smarter and better qualified. The machine has succeeded in ensuring that Option A and Option B are identical twins.
Completely agree - and utterly without any meaningful substance or value.
Is there anything that screams “California” more than branding your fire updates? “One Voice” and don’t you forget it!
“One Voice” is how they think…and as a branding professional I find it ghoulish that they would try to leverage such a disaster into a political message opportunity intended to elevate their derelict “brand” of Dem-Leftist governance.
As Raum said…”Never let a crisis go to waste.”
Kamela made an appearance at the Altadena fire damage the night of Trump’s inauguration. Funny how she shows up when she is out of political office and has no power. After she spouted her usual word salad, something about the community being part of the community, she mugged with her clown husband and some tool firefighters taking PR photos. Ridiculous.
Again - this time it’s Word Salad-Empty Headed Kamala leveraging the horrendous wildfire disaster to elevate her rock bottom profile and “brand” from the bottom of the toilet. God save us from these narcissistic knuckleheads.
Saw that she was here, and just couldn't bear to watch it.
We should not attend any institution (these aren’t churches anymore in any traditional sense) espousing such gibberish. Give them no support, don’t waste your time. Find a real church for these events.
Well said! And nailing something that is hard for normal people to grasp, hard to believe in what is happening when you encounter a person like this. Somebody who says what they say because they think that gets you to do something – as if you're the same as a cell phone or a motorbike only instead of pushing a button to get you to work one smiles a smile or speaks a cliche.
Long story short, I did have a relationship with a woman who damaged my life so that I looked for some understanding of what had happened to me and found Dr Robert Hare's Psychopathy test. From what little she told me and from her actions toward me I found that she scored at least once for almost all the categories of which I could supply any data. One might expect me to hate her. But I can't quite hate her.
She wasn't just a liar,she was ALL performance. These people don't know what the difference between sincerity and performance is. Love is smiling, it's performance and when the performance elicits a mirror performance that's the successful completion of love for them. They have no idea what it feels like to feel. Ask them if they feel something and they sincerely say they do. I cared for this woman, because I was lonely and had a need to care for somebody. I assumed that she was like me, a person with feelings. I had to finally be confronted with the undeniable evidence that she had heartlessly defrauded me. I confronted her, looked into her eyes and saw the frightening void. There was nobody to hate. There's nobody there. A relationship with a psycho is like having an industrial accident.
And I just do not buy The Gospel of Recovery from Narcissistic Damage, which has as its first tenet the assertion that we must remember that these people were traumatized in early life. I never bought it. The idea always seemed fraudulent, somehow.
I have been grateful to discover some younger doctors who don't believe it, either. Peter Salerno is one. Kerry McAvoy is another.
For decades now, my response to "X does bad thing Y because X suffered Z as a child" has been
"So what? You think he/she is alone in that? You think everyone who suffered Z are like them? You think that makes it better for their victim?"
That usually gets the conversation going. Sometimes, off the rails.
I was a pro actor and a movie lover. I noticed how script writers seldom understand that predators don't always come from trauma. Nichole Kidman's wonderful performance as the psycho Susan Stone in the too-underrated movie "To Die For" is beautifully accurate. It's great movie, I think.
Agreed. One of the few performances of hers I actually liked.
"To Die For" had an intriguing structure which well supported its consistent black comedy tone. Susanne Stone's guilt is made obvious in the opening credits, yet there is a mystery to be solved. The question posed is not "who?" or "how?" but "why?". What motivates the killer? The solution is that she is "a four letter word that starts with C. Cold. Yeah. C-O-L-D, cold." Her crime is a psycho's idea of a joke. It's funny to murder a good and innocent man who thought you loved him. It was easy to construct a perfect and cunning plot that the people around you would be far too dumb to figure out. Or no. Scratch that. They can figure it out if they want but they'll be too stupidly conventional to convict Susanne, she is sure, because Susanne is "from a good home" and the common run of ordinary people in Little Hope, New Hampshire, do not have Susanne's ability to think big. These ordinary, contemptible dots make up the big picture, they aren't capable of seeing it. They are not destined for greatness, not like Susanne. She has had an offer from a big Hollywood producer who wants to ink a lucrative deal. So it's a wrap. Shut off the camera and dump this little town.
Susanne has a vulnerability that she is not capable of even sensing. People have feelings and that's something a psycho like Susanne has no conception of. Susanne has proto-emotions, truncated and unrealized. Most motivational in this instance is her infantile frustration without infantile bonding. "Ordinary" people grow up because they bond with their mothers; they can digest the milk of human-kindness and so become one of human kind. People make babies out of their love, and love is what prevents extinction. Love is deep and strong. Love will have the future at all cost. People will have justice and will have it by violence if the law doesn't deliver it. Life to them is not a joke or a picture. Life is love. And love is not kidding. Love will have revenge.
As an actor, I was impressed the script of "To Die For" and by what I saw as Kidman's technique. I was always a technical actor; I found a character in the lines, working from the outside in, so to say. Getting emotionally inside a psychopathic character, imagining the psycho as "yourself under unusual circumstances", is a great mistake. And script writers write bad scripts about psychos because they too make that mistake. The psycho is not quite human, not like the emotionally empathetic actor and writer. My fellow actors, you should work from the outside in, because the psycho is all outside, nothing "inside" about him. Orson Wells's "Harry Lime" in "The Third Man" is another perfect portrait of a psychopath. Neither Holly Martins nor Anna have a clue who Harry really is because they are real people who love like a human being.
That film resonated with me. I worked in small market TV news around the time of its release. I observed more than a few young female new-hires who pitched stories that consisted of nothing more than heading to the local high school with a mic and camera to “rap” with the teens.
I wonder how they explain Leopold and Loeb, as cosseted and pampered as any two rich boys could ever have been, who in 1924 decided to prove their superiority to us of the common herd by committing the perfect crime, which they deemed to be the murder of a 14 year old boy, Bobby Franks?
I know that Salerno contends that Cluster B types are likelier to have been spoiled rotten than abused.
I don't know whether you know anything at all about the murders of the Clutter family, which is the subject of the Truman Capote masterpiece, “In Cold Blood.” I'd nominate that book for American Book of the 20th century. The two murderers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, had dramatically different childhoods. Smith was traumatized, and later commented that he supposed that all of his life, he'd been carrying a rage around with him, and that it was the Clutters’ misfortune to be in his path when it erupted.
Dick Hickock, in contrast, was an only child, and the family had no great economic suffering during The Great Depression or anything at all to do with World War II. Dick's I.Q. was 130, he was a popular kid, he wanted to study engineering, and his prowess as a high school wide receiver got him a scholarship offer. He turned all of this down to do what he really wanted to do, be a professional criminal.
Very interesting! Co-incidentally, I had the great privilege to have been cast as 'The Chaplain' on the execution platform in 2005's movie "Capote". I saw the plot as the story of how Truman Capote made the fatal mistake of empathizing with a psycho who only used Truman's foolish sympathy. In real life the Clutter Case destroyed Truman Capote. He descended into alcoholism and never produced another book.
Wow! I had been looking for an excuse to watch that movie again, and you've given it to me. Did you see the other Capote movie which was made at about the same time, “Infamous?”
The things Capote got away with to write that book! Had you know that the warden of the Kansas State Penitentiary had cut off his access to Smith and Hickock not long after they got to the pen? Capote solved this problem with panache: bribery.
It's still remarkable to me that nobody snitched on him for having tacked on the invented ending of the book. No, it actually didn't happen that a meditative Alvin Dewey decided to make a solitary pilgrimage to the Clutters’ gravesite one day in 1964, where he found another mourner, Nancy's friend, Sue Kidwell, whom he had not seen in several years.
Keep fighting the good fight. These people need treatment with a firing squad for the most part.
As ugly as it is, that's realistic. Dr Robert Hare insisted that psychotherapy to cure the "sufferer" from the "mental illness" of Psychopathy – OOPS! Sorry! "Anti-Social Personality Disorder", that sounds so respectably medical so we scientists prefer it – giving therapy to a psycho only makes him a better, more clever psycho.
I was enraged some years ago by a murder case here in Vancouver. A teenage boy raped and murdered a girl whom he had stalked. He had brought the rope and the metal pipe to the place by the pathway in the woods where he knew she would take to get home from school. He was apprehended and confessed to the murder. Three psychiatrists were court ordered to assess him for the sentencing hearing to decide whether he'd be sentenced as a juvenile and be out free in five years or be sentenced as an adult to 25-years-to-life.
The killer told the doctors that he was shy about girls and having done the murder he was all better now and remorseful and no danger to anybody anymore. One of the doctors was stunningly dense enough to buy this con, lock stock and barrel; he recommended five years in Juvie. The other two had actual brains along with their diplomas and recommended 25 years without possibility of parole for this obviously dangerous predator and the judge, thank God, agreed.
What really got my goat was that the two sensible psychiatrists were forced to say that prison would be better for the killer because unlike in Juvenile Detention, in prison he'd be able to benefit from therapy.
Thus it sadly remains that neither the law nor psychiatry can escape from the disease model. The psycho is "sick", "mentally ill", "Suffering from a Personality Disorder". Psychos are incapable of suffering. The real duty of a conscientious doctor should be the duty to relieve and prevent the real suffering of the real victims of psychopathy, the psycho's human prey.
Instead the modern doctor of "mental illness" sees a man who's just been bitten by a rattlesnake and rushes to attend the suffering of the poor abused rattlesnake.
Which oddly reminds me of what that oh-so-Woke female – yes, "assigned female at birth", that's the new term. As Alice's-Wonderland insane as that is! – firefighter captain said when somebody asked her if she would have the physical strength to bring a man out of a fire like the fires which were – and still are! – raging in Los Angeles now. She said that this hypothetical man got himself into danger and so it wasn't her obligation to get him out. Kind of C-O-L-D cold, isn't it?
Doctors, sociologists, criminologists have commented about the lack of fear in true psychopaths. Inasmuch as it was Dr Hervey Cleckley who was the first to publish anything extensive about psychopathy ( early 1940s ), and I can't imagine that much information about it had gotten into the general population a decade later, it makes it all the most astounding to me that James Agee was onto this weird phenomenon in them by the time he wrote the great horror film/film noir, The Night of the Hunter, which was made in 1955.
If you've seen the movie, you remember that the Robert Mitchum character seems amused as he's being taken off to be hanged.
Sociopaths/malignant narcissists, by contrast, seem quite capable of fearfulness. My mad bomber, as I think of him fondly, was a true psychopath. He’d been a safecracker for organized crime as well as a murderer for God knows how many years. And he'd won The Daily Double of derangement, having been a diagnosed tertiary syphilitic for twenty years before his lunatic apotheosis.
I loved "Night of the Hunter" and got a DVD of it more recently. Mitchum's performance is awesome. Kleckley's book is searing. His story of a psycho who lives a lie for years at a time as a respectable doctor but has to relieve the pressure by periodic "holidays" during which he sneaks off to binge for weeks on an orgy of depravity and crime and possibly even murder. "Beauty, ugliness, joy, sadness,disgust ... these are beyond their experience..."
Absolutely right. Childhood trauma produces different damage. It's another issue entirely from narcissism/psychopathy. I knew that this woman had had a trauma free upbringing. Robert Hare was informative and so was Martha Stout. And Hervey Kleckly. Psychopathy can manifest in children from normal homes. But a society such as ours provides so much easy prey for psychos that they prosper as they would not have done in more principled ages. Dr Hare's book,"Snakes in Suits" about psychos in business is a good read.
To compound the issue's problems, most are perfectly normal as long as they are in a normal and healthy setting. This would be my semi-professional opinion, based on my teaching career.
In a normal, quiet, well-ordered class room in a quiet normal school, they are rarely a problem since the clearly and explicitly ordered environment teaches them how to fit in and how to achieve without resorting to violence, manipulation and threats.
They may not feel normal emotionality the way they should, but they know how to perform it without sadistic maliciousness and understand that being/acting/making "nice" is a more profitable strategy. While not ideal, at least that means they aren't a great danger to anyone.
But in a chaotic, arbitrary environment, their forte - violence, threats and manipulativeness - come to the fore as their optimal survival strategy, and such an environment (f.e. a Karen Bass-like person being awarded laurels simply for being born a Karen Bass-like person, weighted more than any tangible achievement) also teaches them that society is built on a Great Lie and a collective delusion, and that he/she who ignores the alleged norms of the delusion (or illusion) and instead learns to work it as one would a puzzle-box.
To the detriment of everyone, even themselves in the end.
As we say in German: Ordnung muss Sein. Order must rule.
Very thought provoking! It explains a lot! Specifically it explains a lot about why the instances of psychopathic crimes seems to be tied to social/cultural factors. These crimes seem to be more prevalent in North American society than anywhere else. And as our society descends into decadence and chaos it becomes the psycho's happy hunting ground.
Thinking of it in terms of evolutionary pressure makes it obvious:
A society which curbs, channels, harnesses or obliterates those with undesirable and dangerous traits flourishes.
A society which in the name of rights does nothing of the above, or only gives "smack on the wrist" so to speak, degenerates.
That's not to imply I support eugenics or anything like that, simply that once someone proves themselves a clear danger to others, they are removed from society permanently.
As I asked liberal and progressive colleagues:
"How many children raped is one too many before a pedophile is to be out down? 1? 10? 20? Give me a number!"
That almost led to fisticuffs at times. Academics hate being put on the spot like that, having to make definite statement about anything.
You remind me of what a great teacher and a great person my ex-wife was and still is and why I feel so lucky that she was the one I married and how proud I am to love her still even after we broke apart all those years ago. She was a great teacher and counsellor and still is in retirement now.
Thirty years ago she got her first teaching job in a small private school. She had a mixed class of 15 or so grade 3-4-5s. One of them was a boy who had deformed hands and feet so that the other kids had to help him on stairs so he wouldn't fall. One day a Canadian government person came to lecture the kids about being kind to disabled people. This boy was in the front row. She asked the kids, "Do you think you might know someone who is disabled?" The kids looked at one another in puzzlement. One even asked this boy if he knew a disabled person. No, they all said, we never met a disabled person. That's the kind of class atmosphere my wife created.
I have read Martha Stout's book, but have never felt much need to study psychopaths beyond my own maulings by at least four of them, including, no kidding, a mad bomber.
You were lucky to get away alive then! I feel lucky that the psychos I encountered – including a sexual abusing "free sex" theatre manager I didn't realize was a psycho at the time – happened not to have acquired a taste for violence.
Clicked the "like" because this was one of the best descriptions of low-tier/non-violent (I'm assuming and hoping it was non-violent!) psychopathy.
I sincerely hope you managed to put yourself back together; I've seen first-hand how torn apart people can become from living with the kind of person you describe.
She was not a violent person, thank God. But it goes deep. I still feel it after going on 14 years since I finally broke away. It gives me the willies to remember how deeply enthralled I was. Men are hard wired to care for a woman and a child, protect them, provide for them. She was a childish woman and I was lonely.
"The destructive element seems so small and weak that a man fancies he can dally with it and come to no harm" – I Ching
I think you just tried to have a relationship with a sociopath.
True. The terminological inexactitude of today is infuriating. A great term I got from the comedy film "Easy A".
"She's the abyss".
Priceless...
Borg. Oxygen thieves.