Am I a bad person if this bothers me much less than the general who got fired for criticizing the president to the Rolling Stone reporter?
Is Mattis the Colonel ("Godfather") in Generation Kill?
It makes him a bit sympathetic (still wrong, of course) that the reason he condemns them is something that resonates. Obviously he's not sitting down to chat over coffee, to make sure his stereotype checks out, before shooting them. But if he'd invoked a bunch of racist slurs instead of standing up for women, I'd think him more of a crazed monster.
I suspect I'm going to regret this comment. He's still a crazed monster! Still a monster! But, see, the women who are getting slapped around.
4: Huh. "fun to shoot 'em" pretty much takes the gas out of any flame of sympathy I have. Fun?
Whoops; no. He's the Major General over Godfather (Col. Ferrando): http://www.hbo.com/generation-kill/index.html#/generation-kill/cast-and-crew/maj-gen-james-mattis/index.html
More advocating a position I don't quite believe or endorse: Well, sometimes it's fun to flunk a student who I'm really pissed off at, right?
(I can think of one student off-hand, over the years, who this applies to, and it doesn't really apply. What I got real pleasure out of was finding out that when he re-took Linear Algebra with a different instructor, he still failed. See, asshole! I wasn't making the material difficult just to fuck with you! Quit picking fights with me and deal with the material!)
Also the military puts a lot of effort into dehumanizing the enemy and making it possible at all for one person to shoot another person. So in that sense, he's just failed to realize how insane the rest of us find military culture.
Boom, headshot! He's obviously a gamer.
"Sometimes I think maybe I wanna join the army, I mean its basically like fps except better graphics, but what happens if I get lag out there!?! I'm dead!"
The line "You know guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway" takes away any good karma he earned for being mad that women are slapped around. He's still operating in the hyper-macho world that leads to women getting slapped around, even if he condemns the particular practice. Not masculine enough? Get killed!
10: In other words, DS is right! Except about the misogyny. Sorta (11 on preview).
He's still operating in the hyper-macho world that leads to women getting slapped around
Maybe he's redefining masculinity.
11: Yep. Chivalry as an excuse for violence is not a good thing.
Oh god, I read the comments. Why did I read the comments? Never read the comments!
I don't buy the "We're liberating Afghani women! Through murder!" thing. If you think it's fun to murder people, you're a psychopath. If you kill someone in order to protect someone else from harm, no matter how honorable, it's never going to be "fun." It's also a typical anti-Islamic trope among patriarchal Christianist assholes that "we" treat "our" women so good and "they" don't know how to handle "theirs."
I also don't find it fun to flunk students, though, so I may be lacking in Schadenfreude. Getting ALLCAPS emails full of suicide threats, stories about possible expulsion, deportation, or violence from family members is not fun, nor is having to hold a near-stranger while they faint from sobbing. I am not big on holding people.
But watching a jackass attorney go down in flames because he didn't listen when you tried to explain why his course of action was going lead to him going down in flames? Kinda fun. (Unless a client gets hurt in the process. Then it's not fun again. Unless the client was a jackass, too.)
Goddamn, those comments are scary.
I don't buy the "We're liberating Afghani women! Through murder!" thing.
It's the white man's burden to protect the native women.
If you think it's fun to murder people, you're a psychopath.
Unfortunately I'm not sure this is true.
"But Man is thy most awful instrument
In working out a pure intent,
Thou cloth'st the wicked in their dazzling mail,
And for thy righteous purpose they prevail."
-- Wordsworth
Unfortunately I'm not sure this is true.
Really? I'd modulate thusly:
If you think it's fun to murder people, I'm going to feel pretty comfortable calling you a a psychopath despite my lacking a degree in psychiatric medicine.
How's that?
The difference between an ordinary soldier and a psychpath is context. A soldier has been placed in an elaborately developed social context in which the normal inhibitions against killing are deadened. A psychopath, by contrast, never had those inhibitions in the first place.
Even within the context of the battlefield, and ordinary soldier does not resemble a psychopath. A psychopath is incapable of forming an empathetic connection with anyone or identify with anyone besides himself. A soldier has a strong empathetic connection with his unit. In fact, there is very solid evidence that the bravery of a soldier is dependent on identifying with their unit. Soldiers who do not identify with their unit become what Glenn Gray calls "constitutional cowards," people who see danger everywhere, even where it is not.
Even within the context of the battlefield, and ordinary soldier does not resemble a psychopath.
So, it sounds as if the difference isn't one of context, and that the initial claim that a soldier is a psychopath but for context is highly tendentious and misleading.
I suppose Stanley's point wasn't about an ordinary solider, but about James Mattis. But I don't see any evidence that Mattis was talking from anything other than an ordinary soldier's perspective.
Mattis seems to be speaking of his own perspective.
24: You are right, I should have said that the first difference between an psychopath and an ordinary soldier is that the soldier's ability to kill is bound to a specific context.
I could actually continue to list differences. Psychopaths have a very high threshold of fear, and need to thrust themselves into extreme situations just to feel anything. Many dedicated wife beaters will actually become calmer while committing acts of abuse. This is very different from a soldier high on battle.
Also interesting: Psychopaths don't seem to get PTSD, even though they are likely to have experienced traumatic events.
If you think it's fun to murder people, you're a psychopath.
Romans in the Colosseum, Nanjing, Treblinka blah blah.
Ok, so the Nazis had a hard time finding triggers even in the SS, and their most efficient functionaries were like Eichmann and the drudge at Auschwitz.
My personal opinion is that 10% are natural Jesus, 10% Dahmer, and the rest of us are pretty much dependent on context and social constructions. Creating the right context for sharing all possessions or laughing as the lion eats the children can be exceedingly difficult but never impossible.
Anywise, it's all a continuum and matter of degree. There is no bright line psychopath.
Incidentally, I just now turned off a movie where I laughed as an unarmed man got shot three times in the back.
Smoking Aces, lots of people die funny in that movie.
Next:why laughing at the pratfall is categorically different? Not.
It's all a theatre of cruelty.
I also don't find it fun to flunk students, though, so I may be lacking in Schadenfreude.
Uh, I was playing devil's advocate. I don't actually think this is a party with cupcakes.
Who needs cupcakes when you've got Fs?
Bob covered it well.
The "psychopath" stuff always struck me more as an attempt to draw lines around permissible and impermissible violence rather than a clearly defined abnormality.
Samuel Bowles has been doing great work over the past couple of years on the coevolution of altruism and violence . Explains a lot about human nature when you think about morality/altruism and violent aggression as complementary, not conflicting. This relates to the "identification with your unit" stuff about soldiers that Rob mentioned up in 23.
33: I suggest you read Bob Hare on the subject. What I've been exposed to of his work makes me think psychopathy (or sociopathy or anti-social personality disorder or whatever you want to call it) is a very well defined pathology.
I agree with Rob. Psychopathy as a diagnostic category (as opposed to a colloquial term we all use) seems to be a distinct collection of traits, and not just a synonym for "bad man". I doubt George W. Bush is a psychopath under the clinical definition.
Mattis might be a psychopath who's settled on an excuse that he knows people will accept, but ordinary people find killing as revenge for committed crimes easy to justify -- hence the plot of every action movie ever.
I doubt George W. Bush is a psychopath under the clinical definition.
Cheney, on the other hand...
Eskimos had, um, one word for psychopath (from a brief discussion of the clinical meaning of the term):
In a 1976 study anthropologist Jane M. Murphy, then at Harvard University, found that an isolated group of Yupik-speaking Inuits near the Bering Strait had a term (kunlangeta) they used to describe "a man who ... repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and ... takes sexual advantage of many women--someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment." When Murphy asked an Inuit what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, he replied, "Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking."
It's fun to push some Eskimos off the ice when no one's looking.
Some Eskimos deserve to be pushed off the ice when no one's looking.
Eskimo Pie Bye!
I'll be here all week; try the veal.
39: psychopath.
or wait, is the guy you're pushing off the ice the psychopath...IT'S SO CONFUSING!
that eskimo thing is fucking hilarious. maybe I'm a bad person. actually I'm in the weird situation that someone I'm trying to help is repeatedly threatening suicide, even though I've told her it's a shitty, manipulative thing to do to people. I can't freak out every time she does it, but everyone else she contacts is always calling and texting me all the time: "we have to DO something!!!" um, not really. we tried checking her into the psych ward and she got herself out, we can't continually accompany her everywhere, if she wants to call me from the open window of her 22nd story flat so I can hear the wind rushing up the internal passageway I can't stop her, but I can stop losing my shit. the worry of course is that I'll be super-blasé about it the one time she actually jumps and then feel horrible forever. the reason depressive people accurately score other people's impressions of them (as being bad) is because they recognize they're, objectively speaking, huge pains in the ass. needy, manipulative, self-centered. big reminder, everybody: don't suddenly stop taking your anti-depressants because you're fine now/it isn't the real you, whatever. om nom nom prozac. (as a person with depression it's ok for me to talk trash like this under the "make fun of your own group" exception to prejudiced trash-talking.)
I remember reading an article somewhere that claimed that in a hostage crisis it's easier to negotiate with a psychopath than it is with some other kind of person because psychopaths follow certain well-defined behavioral patterns.
That's why police keep a few psychopaths on their S.W.A.T team. "You *know* I don't really care what you do to those people."
and the hilarious thing was that she called me at like 7:30 am from her balcony...to explain that everything was AWESOME and it was such a BEAUTIFUL day, from which I inferred, correctly, that she had had a heaping portion of special k for breakfast.
heaping portion of special k for breakfast
I gather you meant the other kind, but I had no idea there were country-specific versions of the cereal, nor that the Danes have no truck with Kellog's products.
The "psychopath" stuff always struck me more as an attempt to draw lines around permissible and impermissible violence rather than a clearly defined abnormality.
It always struck me as not necessarily being related to violence in any way, and instead being related to lack of empathy.
47: I agree. I thought the tell-tale sign was the inability to empathize with others, like how you would behave in a simulacrum in which you were the only sentient being and everyone else was meat puppets of more or less recalcitrance.
I'm NOT the only sentient being? Shit.
Psychopaths (isn't that now deprecated in favor of sociopath?) are worth distinguishing from generically bad people since there does seem to be some real failure of empathy in them. All psych diagnoses are attempts to delineate real deviance that lies on a continuum between merely odd and absolute insanity, so there's inevitably a lot of sloppiness. Someone like Ted Bundy is clearly a far enough outside the mainstream to warrant a label, but his evil is nonetheless on a continuum with people who merely play cruel pranks.
Isn't this guy just saying he likes his job? Who doesn't want to have fun at work? I'm not sure we want a bunch of Marines unhappy with their profession.
Psychopaths (isn't that now deprecated in favor of sociopath?)
The DSM prefers "Anti-social Personality Disorder." The World Health Organization's ICD10 prefers "Dissocial Personality Disorder." Bob Hare, who developed the primary diagnostic test, still prefers "Psychopath."
I bet psychopaths aren't a group that will grow a group consciousness and declare that the label is being used by the man to hold them back.
It always struck me as not necessarily being related to violence in any way, and instead being related to lack of empathy.
Indeed, most psychopaths are not violent. They are just ordinary assholes.
The last time we had this conversation, and the idea that psychopathy was a spectrum disorder came up, I suggested that "asshole spectrum disorder" should be a diagnostic category, which led to this response from Lizardbreath
I bet psychopaths aren't a group that will grow a group consciousness and declare that the label is being used by the man to hold them back.
!? Isn't libertarianism a sort of Psychopath Pride movement?
Sociopaths are distinguished by their fondness for role-playing games and anime.
DSM IV criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder:
A. There is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three (or more) of the following:
failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrestdeceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure
impulsivity or failure to plan ahead
irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults
reckless disregard for safety of self or others
consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations
lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.
B. The individual is at least age 18 years.
C. There is evidence of conduct disorder with onset before age 15 years.
D. The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or a manic episode.
Juvenile delinquent syndrome. Looks like it was written by Officer Krupke.
I swear, every "Lives" column should end with "and then I found five dollars."
Sorry, format screwed up.
Indeed, most psychopaths are not violent. They are just ordinary assholes.
isn't it a bad idea to farm out the definition of ordinary asshole to experts with doctorates? Defining "asshole" is a major reason for human sociability. The permissible bounds of ordinary selfishness, that's the whole ballgame.
That Samuel Bowles stuff on the coevolution of violence and sociability/altruism offers an interesting possibility, that it is natural to link violence to membership in a group and enforcement of some kind of group norm. People who totally disassociate violence from this are dangerous to the group and mentally ill. I once read a criminologist who said that the model murder was undertaken in a state of righteous fury.
59: Groan. (I'm not sure that one even deserves a groan.)
59. I would be in a state of righteous fury. Imagine if the cops had to be called. Hi. No I'm not the parent of the host . No, she decided not to be here. My priors? Etc.
As it was written: Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, etc. Look at me, the competent man. Phooey!
I liked how he bragged about his prior assault arrests. Psychopath chic!
Hard to justify righteous fury if you agreed to be the only adult there.
Is the point of the story supposed to be clear?
All I could think was, "Oh yeah, I remember going to a party like that, a really great party with a bonfire and a band within a wooded backyard with burbling stream, during which, it's true, we slightly older people (17-year-olds) had to take care of, indeed usher home, some incapacitated 15-year-olds, and then I found five dollars I established my theretofore budding romance with the guy to become my first long-term relationship and I went home at dawn." Good times.
la la la. I'd say somebody made the writer edit down the point where he had no point.
42: I work with somebody who is accompanied nearly everywhere by his group home staff because of his suicide risk. He jumped out of a window and nearly died. I don't think he was being manipulative at all.
He is a very shy, skittish man but a talented artist. Hopefully, he will be better once he starts taking some art classes. Right now, his room is on the ground floor.
What story was it? Because a ground floor or basement window exit might just be a cry ford help.
Psychopath is probably not the best term, since all mental illness is generally referred to as pschopathology. Maybe the latter should be changed. Don't know.
69: An upper floor, I'm pretty sure. I met him afterwards, but I'm told that he broke nearly every bone in his body and is lucky to be alive.
Such luck. Remind me never to let you buy lottery tickets.
59 -- it's weird that they don't mention it, but "Nancy" in that article is local celebrity chef Nancy Silver/ton, who owns Pizzeria Mozza, used to run the La Brea bakery, etc.
Weird? Personally, the story would make me less likely to patronize her restaurant, so I'd say it was smart. Although, I sort of took the point of the story to be "my 16 year old stepson is cool enough to have a party that 120 people show up to, my girlfriend is so cool that she let him have it, and I am so cool for how perfectly I handled everything." So maybe other cool people would find that reason to patronize the restaurant.
I don't know about the restaurant, but the story makes me less likely to ever pay any money to the New York Times.
33: Exactly. Also, the docs only get to study the psychopaths who get caught. Not all are stupidly reckless.
And Mattis isn't a problem, the problem belongs to political leaders who aren't using the military intelligently. Marines don't make for good warm and fuzzy camp counselors, that's not why they joined up, that's not what they are.
Commenting live from Yellowstone!
Military go in with the expectation that there's a chance they will have to shoot another human being. Of course those conversations are going to sound nuts.
And holy shit don't me started on the friends of supposedly suicidal people and the freaking out routine. Because when I see that your frantic call for a welfare check is because so and so is off their meds AGAIN and we (the cops) have already done the involuntary transport thing several times, it gets difficult to avoid having very uncharitable thoughts about everyone involved.
76, 77: Marines don't make for good warm and fuzzy camp counselors, that's not why they joined up, that's not what they are. &
Military go in with the expectation that there's a chance they will have to shoot another human being.
Break, fucking give me. Because those are exactly the misapprehensions all of us out-of-touch peace and loveniks were laboring under.
Gen. Mattis hasn't personally shot anyone for a long time (probably). But it is an "interesting" development that most Afghan combat deaths come from direct fire, i.e. snipers, small arms, machine guns as opposed to WWII where most enemy deaths were caused by indirect fire, i.e. artillery, naval gunfire, strategic bombing. PTSD is way up because the troops are seeing a lot more combat days than in any previous war.
The "warm and fuzzy camp counselors" is fake realism -- the need to make nice with the civilian population emerges from specific developments in peoples war/4th gen warfare/counter-insurgency/whatever you want to call it that have led to the successes guerilla armies have had fighting advanced powers. If those nasty insurgents would just line up for a climactic tank battle then the Marines could do it all just like they did in WWII and the U.S. would be much happier.
I guess you could say that the political stupidity is that we shouldn't be doing long-term military operations in countries that don't want us there at all, which I totally agree with, but there's a standard right-wing sneer about politicians making Marines be fuzzy and nice instead of winning wars, and it just totally misses the point.
Gen Mattis is famous for being a "blunt" speaker. Here is what he told a number of Iraqi sheiks:
"I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all"-Mattis
I believe General Sherman would have approved.
I must say, I wasn't expecting this to be the only search result on Bing for the Mattis quote TLL cites above.
Also, apparently another Mattis saying is "Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."
If those nasty insurgents would just line up for a climactic tank battle then the Marines could do it all just like they did in WWII and the U.S. would be much happier.
This is kind of what they did at the beginning of the Afghan war at Tora Bora, only W didn't supply any tanks. Relying on air power to slowly grind them down forced them to adjust their tactics from Bin Laden's expectation of a confrontational battle to standard insurgency.
there's a standard right-wing sneer about politicians making Marines be fuzzy and nice instead of winning wars
My bookpartner has been talking this talk, or a variant on it, lately, and my radar goes up, yet I don't know quite what to say in response. Yes, the military are trained primarily to win wars, obliterate the enemy, and the 'hearts and minds' thing isn't necessarily in their repertoire, though maybe it should be, if we're going to be waging these kinds of wars in an ongoing way, nu?
That's the extent of my response, which seems inadequate.
the 'hearts and minds' thing isn't necessarily in their repertoire
Tell him to catch up with what is really happening.
http://www.longwarjournal.org/
http://www.mudvillegazette.com/
It looks to me, based on a little Googling, as though the Mattis quote has been taken pretty significantly out of context.
Apparently, he started the speech by saying (years ago, remember, when this was a less popular position) that he wanted the Pentagon to spend money to "diminish the conditions that drive people to sign up for these kinds of insurgencies."
Someone paraphrases the rest of the speech as follows:
None of the widely touted new technologies and weapons systems, he noted, "would have helped me in the last three years [in Iraq and Afghanistan]. But I could have used cultural training [and] language training. I could have used more products from American universities [who] understood the world does not revolve around America and [who] embrace coalitions and allies for all of the strengths that they bring us."
The "it's fun to shoot some people" showed up in a discussion of what he did not think was useful to winning the war. The point of the quote seems to have been something like, "I'm a crazy Marine (ha ha) so I like to shoot badguys, but that's not actually particularly useful to winning the war."
That's still excessively tough-guy talk for my taste, but not exactly the rantings of a monster. He would have been well served by some good litigation advice -- no matter your ultimate point, don't say things that look outrageous when taken out of context.
And holy shit don't me started on the friends of supposedly suicidal people and the freaking out routine. Because when I see that your frantic call for a welfare check is because so and so is off their meds AGAIN and we (the cops) have already done the involuntary transport thing several times, it gets difficult to avoid having very uncharitable thoughts about everyone involved.
[Angry response eschewed.]
The thing is, dealing with seriously mentally ill people can be really damn hard, such that it really is necessary and appropriate to be calling the cops for involuntary transport several times. If it's unpleasant for you, imagine what it's like for the people dealing with it every day.
it's weird that they don't mention it, but "Nancy" in that article is local celebrity chef Nancy Silver/ton, who owns Pizzeria Mozza, used to run the La Brea bakery, etc.
Don't you think that was intentional? So that the people who knew who he was talking about could pat themselves on the back for being in the know and thus super cool?* That sort of thing seems to be fairly common in lifestyle articles.
*I know that I wondered to myself, hm. Nancy. Nancy Silverton? But I didn't feel super cool afterward, I felt tricked by his slimy attempts to name drop without name dropping.
That sort of thing seems to be fairly common in lifestyle articles.
Best to avoid Lifestyle articles, in that case. In reality, the identity of the mother is irrelevant, her first name is quite common, and one really doesn't care who she is.
I care who she is! How can I best judge her without knowing her full name?!
A last name is vital to judge someone's genetic stock.
Really, it's vital to judging whether you should patronize their restaurant.
Personally, I also wanted to know her Social Security number, date of birth, and mother's maiden name.
Yes, the military are trained primarily to win wars, obliterate the enemy, and the 'hearts and minds' thing isn't necessarily in their repertoire, though maybe it should be, if we're going to be waging these kinds of wars in an ongoing way, nu?
no it shouldn't be, because we shouldn't be waging these kind of wars. They are all about a foreign army ruling a population without their consent, and I'd just as soon my military did not develop those skills, thanks.
80.2: There really is a good point hidden in the macho strutting behind that line. The mindset needed to be an effective killer is fundamentally incompatible with that needed by someone winning over hearts and minds. There's also a problem with expecting people in the age group from which privates are drawn (18-21, roughly) to have the necessary flexibility of outlook.
If the US is to continue fighting these sorts of wars it needs a dedicated counter insurgency/nation building organization. That won't happen in part because liberals fear being attacked as weak and in part because the resource exploitation megacorporations prefer a little chaos of the sort that encourages people in the US to throw up their hands and support a strongman, because it's much easier to buy off a dictator than it is to buy off a democratic populace. The former can be really quite cheap, whereas the latter tend to be full of funny ideas about sovereignty, self determination, social justice, workplace safety, and the rest.
95: Agreed, more or less. Just that if we are still going to insist on waging these kinds of wars, it might behoove all parties that we become better at it. It's not like the military as it's currently instantiated is going to say: you know what, we suck at that kind of war, so we shouldn't engage in that kind of war, so we won't.
This is without doubt a conversation that should be had.
you know what, we suck at that kind of war, so we shouldn't engage in that kind of war
I believe that the attitude is more "you know what, we suck at that kind of war, so we should learn how not to suck at it" . I doubt any general would ever say "We can't do that". Maybe "We can't do that unless..." more funding, new technology, etc.
a dedicated counter insurgency/nation building organization
this would be an operation devoted to figuring out how to be an effective military dictatorship. The danger to U.S. democracy from such an effort far outweighs any theoretical benefits to our security that come from "nation building", and I don't believe there are such benefits anyway.
Regarding fighting and hearts and minds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Kubi%C5%A1_%28Operation_Anthropoid%29
Until US interventions make political sense, American soldiers will not be especially welcome. Did using military hardware for humanitarian assistance after the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir have much effect? I don't know the answer, but it seems like an empirical question that could be used to assess how deeply the US is hated there. The drone aircraft killings seem like there's a pretty obvious downside-- is there internal debate in the US military about those?
Even in S Korea, there are mixed feelings.
Did using military hardware for humanitarian assistance after the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir have much effect?
Even if Americans are hated for it, it was the right thing to do. I don't know if this story is true but it should be.
it is an "interesting" development that most Afghan combat deaths come from direct fire, i.e. snipers, small arms, machine guns as opposed to WWII where most enemy deaths were caused by indirect fire, i.e. artillery, naval gunfire, strategic bombing.
I don't think this is actually true. Most Afghan combat deaths, AFAIK, are coming from IEDs. It was the case in, say, Helmand 2006, or in the early days of the Iraq war.
103. Afghan deaths, not American. We regret the confusion.