The number of guys who have never thought, while sober, that beating people up might be fun is relatively small. IME. Ninety five percent of all action movies targeted at young men are working precisely that nerve. The justification--save the world, etc.--is a McGuffin.
Yeah, but how many of them like the idea enough that they know if they get drunk they'll do it? This guy was kind of off in a bunch of ways -- this story was just one of them.
scaling fire-escapes, various other bits of misbehavior
If this is really the worst you have done...you are a very nice person.
Yeah, but how many of them like the idea enough that they know if they get drunk they'll do it?
I've known plenty of guys who get "feisty" when they get drunk; as a general rule, I think it's more often size or skill that keeps guys from fighting (drunk or not) than any innate sense of what's right.
I had a roommate in college who, while sober, was a Midwestern Christian virginal type, but very outgoing and friendly to everyone. When she started drinking, she said it released her "true nature," which meant she got really quiet, and then very mean, and then face-down on as many fraternity cocks as possible, sometimes with pizza in one hand. She started coming home at 3am after getting beaten up (she claims voluntarily) by guys who passed her around for sex (she claims voluntarily), to throw up and pass out in it on the floor.
Her "true nature" theory, I'm pretty sure, was her way of never facing the fact that she was being serially raped by fraternity psychos.
4: Which part? The movie bit or the claim about beating people up?
6 is very scary. Did she ever get help?
These discussions are reminding me of the oh so pleasant Volokh barbaric execution threads where I just assumed that we all some bloodlust, and so many of you said "nuh uh."
8: I've just never known any guys who never thought that they'd like to beat someone (often someone specific, and often a tormentor) up. Married to the action/24-type genre standbys, it just seem to be true.
I've known some genuinely bad bastards; full-on psychos.
If you've ever met any guys like that, they are a whole other species from the average guy who entertains fantasies of heroically beating up some specific asshole or other, or the person who gets a bit mouthy when drunk.
6: Kind of yes, kind of no. I gave her lots of stern talkings-to, but she was bent on destroying our friendship and there wasn't much I could do. Her department started warning her that they would not recommend her in her field if she didn't make some major behavioral changes in her extra-curricular life. She was forced to go into therapy, which she made fun of. Her drinking abated some, as did the self-destructive behavior, but I couldn't be around her anymore. She kept putting me in the position of being the only thing standing between her and vodka, and I wasn't in an emotional place to play nanny at 20.
Last I heard, she got a job teaching in a high school, where she got fired for having a very public affair with another teacher (involving sex at the school), and has since (rumor has it), managed to hold down another job. It's rather tragic, as she had the makings of a musical genius.
Getting drunk and in a fight is a pasttime with a long pedigree. Back in the days of my youth, it was a sign of manliness.
You can say that doing bad things you are socialized to do makes you a bad person, but that's a bit incomplete. And it's to his credit that he dealt with his tendency to get in fights while drunk.
12: You mean a qualitative difference, or just quantitative?
Qualitative difference.
Violent sociopaths are really not, in my experience, much like other people.
I'm certainly not a typical male, but I haven't *ever* entertained serious thoughts about beating someone up, drunk or sober. I haven't thrown a punch since I was a small child. I do have, unfortunately, moments of scary blinding rage, and have punched and kicked inanimate objects in those moments.
It seems a bit much to assume people need to be absent any violent inclinations in order to be good people. If the guy knows enough to know that he'll get violent when he drinks, and doesn't, that makes him a sight better than large numbers of drunks who know the same thing and don't bother to make the adjustment.
I actually don't buy that alcohol brings out the "true inner nature" of people who drink it. People are defined as much by their habits and inhibitions as anything else; alcohol may demolish those to some degree, but there's no reason to privilege the result of that as more authentic.
11: That's more plausible than the claim I thought you were making, which is that most men want to go whomp on random people for the sheer joy of whomping (or to show dominance, or whatever). Wanting to beat up tormentors isn't something I can really ever remember wanting to do, but at least the impulse is recognizable.
Sociopaths have poor impulse control, right? That would certainly be worsened a lot by alcohol. I think that was the thing about Hannibal Lecter that never rang true to me. He was too self-possessed to be a sociopath.
Of course he may be creepy in other ways. But I agree with 12; any time I've known genuine psychos, there's been something palpably wrong that goes well beyond obnoxious drunkenness.
I think 1 pretty much nailed it. I'm a pretty peaceful guy, and yet, I can indeed imagine that it would be fun to beat the living shit out of someone. Also, morally reprehensible. That's what frontal lobes are for, and why things can get dicey when we turn them off with alcohol. Keeping the lid on and watching revenge movies works out better for everyone.
Having said that, I've always taken a little self-righteous pride from the fact that I'm a nice drunk, especially coming from a family full of nasty ones.
I have the occasional fantasy (still) where I'm in some extremely implausible situation (yet recognizably real-life) in which I'm attacked by some aggressor or another and must fight to defend my life. I think it has something to do with insecurity, and I would figure it would be a very widespread, but not universal thing. But not in a hundred thousand years would I expect that to cause me to start a fight (or not try really hard to defuse one) when drunk.
19: Yes, consider: "if I get really drunk, I'll go looking for someone to beat up"; "if I get really drunk, I'll go home and yell at my kid"; "if I get really drunk, I'll pick someone up at the bar and have unsafe/unpleasant sex"; "if I get really drunk, I'll probably wreck my car"; "if I get really drunk, I'll annoy my spouse when I get home"; "if I get really drunk, I'll end up vomiting all over my clothes".
re: 21
Actually, not all sociopaths have poor impulse control.
There's quite a bit of research on it -- much of which I barely half remember and my reading is far from comprehensive -- but there are a fair number of 'high-functioning' [that's just my clumsy term] sociopaths who get away with it, well, forever.
The guys I am thinking of weren't sociopaths of that coldly calculating type, but rather, people who could carry out and sometimes take pleasure in (or least feel no remorse over) acts of heinous violence.
I should note that my fantasies also include repeated attempts to defuse the situation which all (somewhat implausibly) fail.
26: there are ... 'high-functioning' ... sociopaths who get away with it, well, forever.
*cough*Dubya*cough*
I think getting into fights while drunk belongs in a different category than the lacrosse email or what's getting called "shock humor" on the other thread. (So maybe this belongs there; so sue me.)
I disagree with ogged's assumptions about what the racist/misogynist commentary signifies. It's not about "how far you can go." It's about saying, "we here together are white men." Or conversely, the chumming around about killing whitey is about saying, "we here together are not-white men."
Which is to say there's a bonding function served by bigotry dependent on context. A black friend gives a talk: if I say to him, "Dude, you were so articulate!" we're having a harmless joke, but if I say to a white friend, "Dude, he was so articulate!" it's about putting the black friend outside our little white circle.
Am I saying something just stupidly obvious?
I say it for two reasons. 1, there's a reasonably believable literature on this sort of thing by psychologists and sociologists (I'm thinking right now of The Anatomy of Prejudices) and 2, because I don't look Jewish I have a few times been in the room when an anti-Semitic thing was said in this general way and to this general purpose.
Don't forget lacrosse is a very violent sport, and one in which drinking was a big part of the after game festivities, or it least it was when I was in college. I don't know if the peace corps guy went out looking for people to victimize, or just realized that alchohol impaired his judgement enough to do things he otherwise wouldn't, like get in fistfights with strangers.
My brother-in-law used to get drunk and then get into bar fights. He is running his own start up company now. He seems pretty normal. Getting into bar fights is a crazy bad idea though.
re: 28
Heh, there are those that argue that a significant percentage of business leaders and politicians are precisely that.
I actually don't buy that alcohol brings out the "true inner nature" of people who drink it.
True enough, but there certainly is a sense in which you get to see a part of a person when drunk that you wouldn't otherwise. Alcohol intoxication definitely affects frontal-lobe inhibition of behaviors, so a person's impulses are released from control. Somebody who reliably starts fights when drunk is somebody who's got some anger going on below the surface when sober.
It's about saying, "we here together are white men." Or conversely, the chumming around about killing whitey is about saying, "we here together are not-white men."
What about when my non-white friends and I joke about killing whitey with our white friends, eh? Which is to say, yes, it's about bonding, but not necessarily such that the content of what's said is related in a direct way to its purpose.
29: I don't know about that. Usually my buddy and I find that hookers get a kick out of dead hooker humor.
26: Huh. News to me. I remember wikipedia telling me otherwise, but now that I go back it doesn't say that anymore. I don't know whether to blame my memory or the inaccuracies that used to be there.
Cleckley also distinguished between two types of psychopathy: primary and secondary[8]. Primary psychopathy was defined as the root disorder in patients diagnosed with it whereas secondary psychopathy was defined as an aspect of another psychiatric disorder or social circumstances[13]. Today, primary psychopaths are considered to have mostly Factor 1 traits from the PCL-R (arrogance, callousness, manipulativeness, lying) whereas secondary psychopaths have a majority of Factor 2 traits (impulsivity, boredom proneness, irresponsibility, lack of long-term goals) [14].
I guess I just can't see the point of beating somebody up. If he's an asshole, he's still going to be an asshole after I beat him up, and if he's the kind of asshole who likes fighting, he'll soon find some other asshole to get beaten up by if I don't choose to fight. And maybe he's not so much an asshole as just being obnoxious at this particular moment for reasons that he may not deserve to be beaten for. Plus, being a peaceable sort myself, it seems reasonable to assume that anyone who's going to be interested in fighting may very well be better at it than I am, and I'm not going to do much of a job of standing up for truth and righteousness by having him beat me up.
I was once assaulted by drunk on the street, who came up cursing and bodyslamming me, and jabbing at me with an elbow. After some scuffling, I fended him off with a good shove that set him off balance. Once disengaged, I walked away, watching to see if he'd follow. He didn't, but I soon wish that he had, because I was so full of adrenaline that I was insanely angry and wanted an excuse to re-engage, just so I could channel the anger at his noggin.
You could argue that he had it coming, but the truth is that I wanted to fight him not because he deserved it, but because I was looking for release. In my case it's obvious, but in somebody who walks around like that all the time, you wonder what it is that they need release from.
I'm sort of with Idealist. Being afraid to get drunk because you suspect you might go beat someone up probably reveals that you have some (perhaps deeply buried) violent impulses; avoiding situations where you're likely to lose control is commendable.
I think there is one important sense in which your disinihibited self is your "true" self. The emotions, attitudes, perceptural patterns, etc. that determine your uninhibited reactions to things can be very important drivers of your mental state in various situations, even when your inhibited actions would not give any evidence of your mental state. So for instance, people can discover in drink that they really don't have any more passion in their relationship when they've been unable to realize it because of mental blocks about it. I think it can similarly apply to depression and social phobia and maybe other things.
I thought sociopathy was all about empathy/theory-of-mind. As in, ain't got any.
40: Commendable in that it's far better than getting drunk and violent; formal or informal therapy to deal with the impulses might be better still.
...said the guy who's prone to bursts of white hot rage.
avoiding situations where you're likely to lose control is commendable.
Yeah, this seems just obvious to me. I'm a maudlin drunk, but a violent hungry person--I actually have beaten people up over slight provocations when I was hungry, so I go out of my way not to get really hungry (always have food on me, make sure to plan for meals, etc.). Am I a bad person? Maybe. But disapproving of people for thoughts and desires seems pretty authoritarian to me.
I think there is one important sense in which your disinihibited self is your "true" self. The emotions, attitudes, perceptural patterns, etc. that determine your uninhibited reactions to things can be very important drivers of your mental state in various situations, even when your inhibited actions would not give any evidence of your mental state. So for instance, people can discover in drink that they really don't have any more passion in their relationship when they've been unable to realize it because of mental blocks about it. I think it can similarly apply to depression and social phobia and maybe other things.
formal or informal therapy to deal with the impulses might be better still
Why? If it motivates you in other ways, but doesn't lead to reprehensible behavior, it seems fine. As someone's wise shrink used to say, "It's only a problem if it's a problem."
Off to get dinner. Yes, I've been fantasizing about beating the crap out of some of you.
I really, really don't understand mean drunks. When I'm drunk, I spend most of the night telling everybody how much I love them.
Crap. My internet crapped out and I thought I hadn't posted 46 yet.
When I'm drunk, I spend most of the night telling everybody how much I love them.
We're so going to have gay sex if we ever get drunk together.
Wait, ogged beats people up when he's hungry? Damn.
29: Am I saying something just stupidly obvious?
I wouldn't want to say "stupidly" obvious per se, but then I'm a more kind and nurturing person when I'm sober.
Basically I think it's a fair point, if a little incomplete. I think it's possible to joke about killing whitey and not be indulging in bigotry per se; I've been in the presence of people who pulled this off, and people who don't, and the difference is notable. Of course, I'm sure a lot of people I would regard as bigots have the same sort of thoughts about knowing where the line is drawn. There's a point where it all gets rather sticky.
33: True enough, but there certainly is a sense in which you get to see a part of a person when drunk that you wouldn't otherwise.
Oh, I completely agree. It's just I think the person who consciously struggles to control and suppress those issues is more authentic than the drunk version of that same person. At least the first version has a more-or-less fully-functioning brain.
"It's only a problem if it's a problem."
So, a hypothetical: A pedophile who never offends. Problem?
54: Never offends? Not a problem. Hasn't offended yet, but might? Different story.
5:"I think it's more often size or skill that keeps guys from fighting (drunk or not) than any innate sense of what's right."
Dead wrong. As the Duke said in the Shootist, "It ain't the speed or the aim that makes a gunfighter, it's the willin."
Or maybe it was Burt Reynolds:"First you tear off an ear. They come off real easy, and it tends to get their attention."
When you can imagine holding someone's ey in your palm, looking at the grapish gooey object with a warm glow, then you can defend yourself.
54: I mean, if I'm Heaven's Bouncer, and Joe Pedophile comes up and says "look, I know I had those terrible impulses and touched myself thinking about it every single day, but I never ever ever laid a hand on a child" I think it's only fair to say "good on ya" and let him in.
Of course, then we have to think about what Pedophile Heaven looks like.
LB, suppose a woman said to you she didn't like to drink because sometimes when she had a few too many she would smack her kids around. Would you have the same reaction?
As for the guy and his friends, is it your impression that they would go seek out and beat up defenseless strangers or that they would get in drunken brawls with other aggressive drunks? There is quite a bit of difference in my opinion.
Also some guys will exaggerate past bad behavior as a perverse form of bragging. Do you think some of that could have been going on?
The emotions, attitudes, perceptural patterns, etc. that determine your uninhibited reactions to things can be very important drivers of your mental state in various situations, even when your inhibited actions would not give any evidence of your mental state.
OTOH, the ways in which you choose to inhibit your uninhibited reactions can be just as important drivers of your mental state. Purely hypothetical example: suppose I think a friend of mine, whom I otherwise love, can be a maudlin twit with truly awful taste in music and women? Is the "real" me the one who gets hammered and tells him all this to his face, thereby hurting his feelings in ways he'd never willingly admit? Or is the "real" me the one who suppresses that urge in the interests of focussing on the good and accepting the flaws?
Well, there's all those little naked kids with wings in the regular one, right? Maybe dead, non-offending pedophiles get to stay in Heaven gen pop.
60: The real you is the one who decides to get hammered, or decides not to.
62: If he doesn't get to molest the cherubs, that's Pedophile Hell.
45: The Biophysicist is like that. If he lets his blood sugar get too low, he becomes homicidal. It may be the body's way of self-medicating: Get the adrenaline pumping, get the glucagon levels in the blood up.
28: Dubya's a narcissist, with delusions of grandeur.
64: That was downright goatseriffic. I'll be taking a little break now to scrub down my retinas with Boraxo.
apo, I have to bleach my brain now.
Usually when I'm drunk I just sit there being happy, but on occasion I spend all night talking obnoxiously about how smart I am. I'm not sure if that says my true inner self is conceited, or that it has really low standards, or what.
One of my buddies is prone to air-punching strangers on the street when drunk in Vegas. I've never seen any other sort of abherrant behavior from him and have no idea what to think of this. It's happened on most of our trips to Vegas.
I knew someone like that, or at least I was told after the fact that that was where his inclinations lay. I don't know how much that contributed to his being as cut off from the rest of the world as he was; that wasn't his only psychological or social problem. He wasn't a bad person, just a very, very sad one.
That's it. I'm going to go get a bottle of Scotch and make like I never clicked on that link in 64. Goodbye, cruel thread.
60: I don't think there's any such thing as an *authentic* self, except relative to a person at a given point in time (i.e. whether they're acting or not). So I'm coming from a bit different perspective here. But I don't think your example really illustrates anything. The you who tells your friend her taste sucks and the you who doesn't bring it up are both (well, unless you're *really* hammered) fully aware of everything at both points in time, so I'd say neither is more authentic. I guess the way I'm using "authentic" is "has good self-knowledge", and thus "able to predict one's one future actions and attitudes accurately", and having different personalities at different times isn't inimical to that.
69: Could be because you really are that smart, or just insecure about your intelligence. (I'm that way.)
74. Or that when I'm drunk and with good friends, I'm kindof a dick. Seems most likely.
"I think 1 pretty much nailed it. I'm a pretty peaceful guy, and yet, I can indeed imagine that it would be fun to beat the living shit out of someone. Also, morally reprehensible. That's what frontal lobes are for, and why things can get dicey when we turn them off with alcohol. Keeping the lid on and watching revenge movies works out better for everyone.
Having said that, I've always taken a little self-righteous pride from the fact that I'm a nice drunk, especially coming from a family full of nasty ones."
THis pretty much nails it. Alcohol lets you really focus on one thing at a time, which makes shit really fun when you get into it. ANd probably the biggest reason i drink is that i can completely ignore other people and just go with my personal line of thought, which makes for amazingly funny stuff coming out of my mouth.
Who you are is just what you do; impulses are just mental decoration unless you actual let them out to play.
Uhh, 64 was plastic dolls? Those weren't actual photographs of human beings, were they?
I don't drink. Many here now understand why.
77: Yes, people. That's the realization that sunk like a stone in my stomach.
Heavily photoshopped people, but still.
So do cherubs have agency? Does an omnibenevolent god let Joe Pedophile have his way with them when he gets to heaven?
Photoshopped to the point that I don't know that I'd even say those images are people anymore. Kind of like Gollum /= Andy Serkin.
When I drink, I find it nearly impossible to withhold
a) anecdotes with too many details and not enough climax, b) sexual double entendres, and c) irritation with the way people organize games and events. Apparently, this is not unlike my sober behavior enough that anyone notices, but I'm hyperaware of it.
I have, while on hallucinogens, punched my best friend in the face. I would have ripped the skin off his face had not four people jumped on me and pulled me off. Pot makes me think "You are not funny at all. Stop laughing. Why is everyone laughing? Why are we friends, anyway?" Needless to say, drugs are not really my bag.
I've been wondering lately if I'm too old to try pot. (I tried to try once in college, but I was too drunk to make it work.) But I suppose it would be wrong to borrow from my sil in the cancer patient to satisfy my curiousity.
Pot makes me act stupid, feel stupid, and be hyperconscious of being stupid, so I don't like it much. Alcohol may make me act stupid, but it certainly keeps me from being aware of it.
86: Head wound has nearly healed, just a little at the top still closing up permanently. The thumb is getting a little better, but is still totally purple and necrotic-looking.
Right, I should have also mentioned that drinking apparently makes me ram my face into sharp corners.
Follow-up on the touch-up. The BoingBoing link reveals this as one of the sources of the hideous touchup photog. Don't click unless you're looking for more willies.
Remember, those girls are just as scared of us as we are of them.
if I'm too old to try pot
No, you aren't.
it would be wrong to borrow from my sil in the cancer patient
No, it wouldn't.
As long as she can get more, what's the big deal?
Get some pizza pretzel Combos and Nilla wafers, rent Can't Hardly Wait, and brother, your are good to go.
Ooh! A marihuana thread! Excellent.
your are good to go.
Chopper is already stoned.
We'll see. Alcohol and me generally get along pretty well, but if the right occasion comes along for pakalolo, I'll give it a shot.
We are the bloggers our parents warned us about.
My parents warned me about Kobe.
I've been wondering lately if I'm too old to try pot.
Ditto what apo said, but you might have to fire up more than once to feel anything. Still, it's a safe practice to have some Fig Newtons on hand the first time, just in case.
Beautifully done, apo.
I've never had the urge to beat anyone up while drunk, and I've never had the urge to beat someone up for no reason. Actually, most of my violent daydreams involve someone attacking me and then all of my friends jumping to my rescue. That probably says something about my personality/hangups.
The first time I smoked pot, I ate an entire loaf of (undefrosted) frozen raisin bread.
Hey, I walked away from the computer and everyone got ahold of the wrong end of the stick (other than, oddly, Shearer in 59).
While I may have misunderstood the guy, and it was over ten years ago now, what I understood him to be saying was not that he had a tendency to get in fights when he was drunk, but that when he and his friends got drunk, they would go out and find people to beat up, in the "You hold him down and I'll kick him," sense. He didn't say queer-bashing, but I understood him to be describing that sort of behavior.
And it wasn't a worry that they might do something like this that led them to smoking dope rather than drinking, but the fact that that was what they ended up doing when they did drink -- not a fear, but a pattern.
Getting into fights wouldn't have struck me at all the same way; while I'm viscerally convinced enough of the fact that any attempt I might make to do something violent could only end badly that I can't think of what would make me hit someone if I had any other option, I've certainly thought wistfully about hitting particular people, and had idiotic fantasies about being effective in some emergency that called for violence (like right after 9-11, 'If I'd been on that plane...'). This guy was talking about going out and hurting people for the hell of it, which struck me very differently.
I never imagine beating people up.
And to 3: Sadly, no. Ogged is the one who put the worst things he ever did on display. Me, I'm not telling anyone.
103: My personal low was most of a perfectly stale baguette with about a half stick of butter spread on it. I still feel a combination of shame and nausea when I think about it. But it was fucking fantastic going down.
Not my own tale, but among the worst I've heard of was a case of very little food in the house, and resorting to whole sticks of butter rolled in sugar. Mm!
Horrifying, yet totally believable.
103: I'm imagining you gnawed it?
I've never had any pot. Next time through life I'm definitely rebelling as a teenager, because I would have had more fun, more friends, and probably not ended up in graduate school.
#57 is made funnier by assuming bob meant to type "kidney" in the last sentence, then picturing him squaring off with an ogged who hasn't eaten anything for twelve hours.
110: I recall it being deliciously crunchy. We were also watching MTV, and I remember watching the video for Tool's "Sober," and trying to convince my friends that, no, seriously man, I totally get this video now!
Sociopathy and psychopathy are not synonymous, but I don't think the distinction between them is well codified among professionals either. There are habitually violent people who've learned violence as a social strategy, and these people are more likely to be called sociopaths, and there are habitually violent people who start antisocial behavior really early--like, as a toddler--and have neurological deficits like cortical underarousal, and these people are more likely to be called psychopaths. The way I learned it though--and I think I'm not getting this precisely right, and I can't find the book I'd like to consult--psychopathy is something of a subcategory of the latter category. So on the question of impulse control, you might expect the violence as social strategy types to have normal impulse control, the neurological deficits types to have poor impulse control, but then psychopaths, which is also probably a result of some very early deficit, not learned behavior, would be perfectly capable of behavioral inhibition for the purpose of manipulation, planning etc. Psychopaths are the ones with deficits in empathy and theory of mind that someone mentioned upthread.
i'm voting for "whiskey don't make you do a thing, it just lets you." i reckon there's an equation involving the level of said desire, the acceptability thereof, degree of drunkenness, and genetic mischief. i'd attempt to derive it, if only the section of my brain containing the years when i could do math hadn't been declared a superfund cite.
then again, as i'm from west virginia, YMMV.
re: too old? nah.
113: Wikipedia thinks they're synonymous, and further, that "sociopathy" is not preferred.
"The number of guys who have never thought, while sober, that beating people up might be fun is relatively small. IME."
Huh. Outlier again.
"I've just never known any guys who never thought that they'd like to beat someone (often someone specific, and often a tormentor) up."
Hello.
Wikpedia doesn't think they're synonymous; it thinks there are various ways people draw distinctions; scroll down in the article. In any case, what I said about categories of the habitually antisocial still stands, to the extent that it stood in the first place; it certainly isn't untrue to life that Hannibal Lecter was cunning and manipulative.
Well, at least, it doesn't think "sociopathy" is worth its own entry--it redirects to "psychopathy".
Although I realize this has become highly tangential to the original point, I've learned that the tell for when I have had too much to drink is that I start talking about nuclear weapons. Technical details, as much as an interested amateur with no security clearances can get. Fortunately, since my career is in unrelated fields, this isn't a reason to avoid drinking.
It doesn't solve the psychopath vs. sociopath question, but this Slate article is very good on what a psychopath is.
it certainly isn't untrue to life that Hannibal Lecter was cunning and manipulative
Must. Resist. Urge. To. Rant--tangentially--about how purposeful behavior in service of delusional ends does not demonstrate absence of insanity. Different point, but also one that gets missed routinely when people talk about the Andrea Yateses of the world.
113 is much the way I understood the distinction.
Thirty years ago...never mind. I haven't physically
hurt anyone since I was 12.
Scarey people is the thread? This is a little BBC tv-movie that has stuck with me for decades. Gets an 8.1 at IMDB so other people liked it also.
I'm with 1. Incidentally, that's the point of athletics for many of us, I think. There is something appealing (in a completely and seriously non-sexual way, Ogged) about more or less violent physical collision/contact.
122:Going thru the reviews there isn't enough said, and it is apparently going to be very hard to find.
In the movie, Joanne Whalley plays an escapee from a mental institution who at age 21 or so enjoys a weekend on the town. Sweet and innocent as can be. Near the end, you find out that at age 8 she had murdered her little brother and sister, and been incarcerated ever since because neither she or her doctors can understand why she did it, and so cannot predict that she won't do it again.
I love the whole concept, and her performance is heartbreaking.
Pooh is going to kick all our asses, while cumming in his NFL issued Ray Lewis tights.
re: 124
When I left school I worked, as a summer job, as a domestic in a hospital for the mentally handicapped which included several 'locked' wards. Some of which were locked for the good of the patients who lived in them, and others which were locked for the good of people who might encounter the patients who lived in them.
There were certainly people there who'd done very very bad things but almost entirely for reasons of poor impulse control -- 200lb men with the impulse control of the average 6 year old, etc.
I got moved from one of the locked wards as one of the 'boys' had taken a decidedly unsavoury interest in me and the staff were worried I'd get raped ...
Ok, if we're floating theories about drunk behavior, mine is that people have particular drunken "styles." Ogged is maudlin, I'm a flirt (quel surprise), some people are angry drunks, etc. Doubtless these behaviors get at *some* aspect of one's character: anger issues, whatever.
I'd be bugged if a friend told me he tended to go looking for people to beat the crap out of while drunk. But I wouldn't decide he was a bad person b/c of it. I'd think he was a person that probably needed therapy.
Also, fwiw, I am generally a pleasant drunk, but also a 'repeatedly talking shit' kind of a drunk. I'll bang on about some minor point or repeat the same story more than once because I'm not sure someone who was listening really got it, or I'll waffle inconsequentially about something or other. Then I'll lapse into silence and start feeling sleepy. I don't know what aspect of my character that drunkenness illustrates: bullshitting? Which I think anyone who knows me sober could probably testify to, anyway.
I am, generally, less argumentative drunk than sober -- but I can occasionally be provoked if really needled while only mildly drunk. When very drunk, I'm not argumentative at all.
to cala above: you can do a whole hell of a lot of drugs and end up in graduate school. I can remember being fully on the nod in an aristophanes seminar and since I had come late I was sitting right next to the fucking professor. makes me feel embarassed just thinking about it.
He probably just thought you'd been up all night reading or something.
It's amazing what a super genius can get away with.
107: One of my old roommates used to eat American cheese sandwiches with sugar when he was stoned. Wouldn't touch the same when straight.
Acid makes one do stranger things; a friend and I managed to make a 7-layer cake when tripping, each layer a different colour and flavour, iced with chocolate frosting and held together with chopsticks jammed down the middle. Except for the green bean flavoured layer, it was pretty good.
also, it's never too late to try pot, though you might want to engineer yourself into a stress-free environment, and it might take a few times to work. it can be too early: I think something happens at puberty, actually, and my brother feels the same way. I smoked pot plenty of times but never really got off and then when I was thirteen I was suddenly like "whaaaaa?"
radley balko the other day said he'd only tried pot once. now I feel like I have a mission to get radley balko stoned. I've gotten plenty of other libertarians stoned, after all.
when really drunk I am sometimes angry, sometimes liable to do crazy shit, but scariest of all I just seem completely normal through hours-long blackouts. "you were drunk?" people ask?
and anyone who ever goes around looking for somebody to beat up on with his friends, drunk or not, is a shithead. to the noble, crazy as fuck drunk bar-fighter, I tip a comradely hat. my stepmother is scrawny but she used to win bar fights because she never stopped trying to gouge peoples eyes out.
Scratch that last link; here's a much better one.
you know what really is totally fucking weird? sex on acid.
125 is true, except I had planned on the Sam Cassell Marble-Shorts rather than tights...
104
I think the group aspect of this should be considered also. People sometimes do bad or stupid things as part of a group not because they personally want to do the thing (in fact they may want not to do it) but because they are too weak or passive to defy the group. So it might be that the guy not only had to be drunk but had to be drunk with the wrong group. In which case he might not actually like beating people up at all but just be susceptible to being pressured into it (especially when drunk). However if this happened repeatedly it would seem likely at least one member of the group really did like beating people up.
73: I don't think there's any such thing as an *authentic* self
Neither do I, come to think of it. That was just the booze talking.
On trying pot: just keep in mind that pot is a lot stronger these days than it was fifteen years ago. I'm not saying "don't do it," I'm saying "plan your evening." At this moment, I speak advisedly.
In the sense that I never was a drinker but was a drugfiend during the seventies, there isn't a day I do not think about pot. I still assess strangers in the park for connection probablities. Neighbours. Bloggers. 25+ years straight now, I forget. But I am a little scared of it at my advanced age, I am told the initial rush from strong sens can kill the middle-aged.
I guess it kinda sucks to have my identity tied up in drugs, but hey. When I go, I wanna go stoned.
My son says that one or two hits does you. It used to be more work.
"Yeah, but how many of them like the idea enough that they know if they get drunk they'll do it? This guy was kind of off in a bunch of ways -- this story was just one of them."
okay... when he walked into a new unknown place did he like to announce: "I don't want to kill anyone, but I will!" because if so I totally used to go out beating up people with that guy.
Couldn't rightly tell you. After that conversation I didn't spend a lot of time with him. If you were beating people up in Staten Island in the early nineties, that might have been the same guy.
I'm very much a happy-I-love-you drunk, but I also get locked into this mode where I think everyone is talking to me and I very quickly stop making sense and seem obnoxious because I start replying to people who in turn think I'm just injecting myself into their personal space for fun when I think we're about to have Meaningful Conversation(tm).
I stopped smoking up when I realized it made me so dumb I couldn't function in a D&D game; like, did I just roll a six or a nine? And what do you call that number right there? Can someone else just watch when I roll a die and tell the DM what I got? Zzzzzzzz. I hate that feeling. It intensifies my natural mental lethargy beyond anything anyone else should ever have to tolerate.
Amusingly, just last night I confessed to Rah that I recognize almost no Beatles lyrics because probably 90% of my exposure occurred under the influence of hallucinogens. I am a walking stereotype.
My only violent fantasies involve defending the people I love or being the one with the clever plan. I recognize these silly bits of half-sleep for what they are and nothing more. In truth, I think the last time I had any violent contact with another human being was an open-handed slap I delivered in 7th grade and the guilt was so terrible I can still feel it twenty years later. I am not a small man and I imagine that I would not hesitate to act to defend Rah, for instance, but I think it would probably leave me an emotional wreck afterwards and besides, what are the odds that would ever happen, anyway?
The first time I smoked pot, I ate an entire loaf of (undefrosted) frozen raisin bread.
I had a rep for gluttony whilst stoned in college. A friend of mine, not liking the licorice that she'd just bought a multi-pound bag of, save the package, open, for multiple months, solely to give to me when high. Apparently I spent the entire night telling her how the licorice wasn't very good, and then continuing to eat.
139: Let me know if you ever want to come to Colorado, Bob, but be prepared to have to spend what I'd regard as a lot of money.
